Radical

I’ve never watched any of Black Mirror, but it’s one of those shows I can’t help but be aware of, because people online talk about it, compare current events to episodes, or post jokey descriptions of the show’s ethos like: “What if phones…. But too much?”

During the break, people were talking about recent episode “U.S.S. Callister,” so I went and looked up the summaries and reviews of that, and then I had to look up “San Junipero,” which sounds lovely (and deliberately atypical for the show) and now I’m thinking about the current ‘eighties-aesthetic revival (I thought there was going to be one in the late ‘90s, but it never really got off the ground except for the music.) I was a kid in the ‘eighties, but I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to pop culture, though I did eventually notice that everyone at the time seemed to be nostalgic for the ‘fifties. Probabaly depended on the circles one moved in, though. In some places, I gather, it was all Patrick Nagel.

So then I googled Nagel, or rather, I googled “prints ‘80s artist Duran Duran album cover.”

Nagel himself is something of an enigma. There don’t seem to be any interviews with him; reminiscences I’ve read suggest he was slightly surprised, though not displeased, by his sudden rise to success in the early ‘eighties, and didn’t particularly want to be famous himself (the one time he did appear as a local celebrity, participating in an ‘aerobathon’ for the American Heart Association, it killed him.) Most descriptions of his work make the connection to Post-Impressionists and to the Japanese woodblock prints that had inspired them, but there’s no word from Nagel confirming this (though it’s hard to imgine him going through art school without encountering either body of work). According to a footnote on Nagel’s wikipedia page, his biographer Rob Frankel* makes the suggestion that the artist, who had been an Army Ranger during the Vietnam War, may have been influenced by the work of mapping terrain.

Anyway, while he still has his die-hard fans, and is also coming back into fashion as the ‘eighties are now old enough to be cool and retro rather than just dated, bring him up and at least one person will sneer about “nail-salon art.” The association of the imagery with “feminine” businesses may be part of what drove his work out of fashion in the 1990s (though anyone so intensely associated with the ‘80s probably couldn’t have remained popular in the decade immediately following – the pendulum swings hard.)

Possible reasons for the popularity of Patrick Nagel-style imagery on salon business signs:

80sautopsy (http://www.80sautopsy.com/2011/08/12/patricknagel/) suggests the dark hair/pale skin/red lips combination may appeal particularly to Asian management/clientele (see above about Japanese prints).

My further suggestions:

Nagel’s minimalist, high-contrast style translates easily to clip art, making it easy for sign companies to produce.

The cool colour palette may allow these signs to hold up to long-term UV exposure better than ones that go for warmer, more naturalistic depictions.

*To date there’s only been one biography, which effectively means there’s only really been one major perspective on the man; I don’t know enough about Frankel to know what biases to look for in his opinions.

RPG forum discussion from 2006: https://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-241170.html

Catching Up on TV, Very Slowly

Different topic – also finally began watching The Lost Room, after hearing about it for years. I’ve only seen the pilot, but I’d like to keep going, because so far the show is something like X-Files meets E. Nesbitt/C. S. Lewis (but just The Magician’s Nephew)/Edward Eager.

It’s about a homicide cop who stumbles into a subculture of people who ruthlessly collect Objects (things that all look like ordinary mid-20th-century items, but which have magical powers); he’s also a single father*, and although it’s not specified, I wonder if his young daughter is a fantasy reader, because not only is she completely unfazed by a key that turns any door into a portal to a motel room which is this show’s Wood Between the Worlds, she very quicly figures out a property of the Room that her Dad missed. This property also leads to her disappearance during an incident later in the pilot, and his quest to get her back is the show’s hook (it was canceleld quickly, so I don’t know if he ever does).

The Objects’ powers are said to vary wildly – the Key’s is pretty obvious, but we hear about the Wristwatch, which hard-boils eggs, and the Umbrella, which makes people think they recognize the bearer from somewhere. The Bus Ticket teleports others to a specific yet seemingly-randomly-chosen stretch of highway in New Mexico, which makes it good for getting rid of attackers or just people who annoy you, but not for much else. IIRC the show’s creator said in an interview somewhere that many of the show’s ideas come from a game he used to play with his friends, in which they tried to come up with the most minor or narrowly-defined superpowers that could still be useful.

*There’s a subplot about her mother suddenly suing for custody three years after walking out on her father. I’m curious to see if this gets explored further or if it was just for extra drama. The protagonist certainly appears to be a perfectly adequate parent, and without having met his ex-wife it’s difficult for me to guess at her possible motives.