Culture Slut: On Memories, Clearing Space and Sentimentality

Memories
Light the corners of my mind
Misty watercolour memories
Of the way we were

Six months ago I had to start clearing out my studio. It was a spare room in my house that I used as a work space for making art, writing poetry, dressing up, reading and day dreaming. I had been using it for three or four years, and the amount of things I had hoarded in it was staggering. I knew in order to clear the room I’d have to streamline my collection, move what I could into my bedroom, take some of the bigger stuff to a new studio in London I would be sharing with friends, and finally throw out what I couldn’t possibly need any more.  

I’ve always been a collector, a collator, a curator. I love things. I love images. Up until this point I’d kept every single fashion magazine I’d ever purchased, unwilling to part with something that cost me so much to buy and was still so beautiful. I have the first magazine I ever bought, a 2007 copy of Dazed and Confused, when Nicola Formicetti and Mariana Vivanco were my visionary heroes. I have the copy of Gay Times that changed my life in 2006, when I would stand in the shop in my school uniform, ogling it on the shelf, beautiful happy gay men running around in the surf with headlines promising perfect gay beach getaways and asking if internet dating really was the future, or just a passing fad.  

___STEADY_PAYWALL___

I remember agonising about how to buy it. The cover had “18+” on it, because this was when gay magazines had the back quarter dedicated to personal ads, lists of masseurs and escorts, and scores of raunchy sex chat lines. I thought I would be loudly denounced as a degenerate if the bored looking sales clerk realised what I was buying, that I would be banished from the shop forever, and every other newsagents too, so I would never be able to even flick through a gay magazine on the shelf again! Watch out! Gay teenager trying to purchase filth! Avoid at all costs! I imagined dressing in full drag as a middle aged woman so I could go unchallenged. I thought about which of my mother’s coats and shoes would be best suited. A wig? I didn’t have a wig. The day I finally bought it was exhilarating. I walked quickly to the back of the shop, not trying to linger, I picked up copies of Heat and OK so I could sandwich Gay Times between them, so maybe the clerk would just shuffle through the barcodes and not actually look at what I was buying. It worked. 

I found stacks of copies of Gay Times in my studio. And Attitude. And Vogue, mostly Italian, bought from the St James street post office that had a good selection of European fashion magazines. Numero. Teeth. Man About Town. Pop. Love. The Nick Knight black and white portrait edition of i-D. The Tim Walker one from the mid 2010s, when it seemed like all my east London friends were in every editorial in every magazine. I found fashion shoots that inspired the clothes I wore, shoots that inspired my work, models that I had been in love with, pages that I had scanned in at my college library and printed so I could stick them on my walls without damaging the actual magazine. Now that I’ve been on the other side of these magazines, been part of teams that made the work that was printed, and the work that was never printed, it seemed that each page was heavy with the labour of thousands of unseen creatives.

At a time when print publications are closing, is it appropriate to throw out such an archive? But did I need this collection? I hadn't looked at it in years. I needed the space. It felt like throwing out my teenage diaries. I could look at editorials and remember the daydreams I had then, and find new ones now. There was too much. I went through all of them, took pictures on my phone of things that still resonated with me and then tossed them to the side. I threw away all my magazines, but I kept that first Gay Times. I wasn’t ready to lose it yet.  

Scattered pictures
Of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were 

My ex boyfriend is finally visiting his mother in New Zealand. He hasn’t been back in years, and she’s become very old and frail. He tells me he thinks she’s dying. He sends me pictures of her house, the town he grew up in, the beaches he played on as a child. When we were together, we started planning this trip together, but I never had the money to do it, or a job that would give me enough time off. He keeps finding huge unlabelled photo albums, glorious sepia-toned tomes of 80s weddings and community banquets. He finds pictures of his mother as a young woman attending the Bishop’s Ball with her cohort of feminine friends. He tells me that all of them are dead now, except for his mother and one other woman, Kathy, who I met with him in London a couple of times for lunch. 

A few years ago, his mother sent him some baby pictures she found, family snapshots flown across the world in a brown envelope just to settle on an overcrowded coffee table. They were beautiful. A happy baby with the same smile, a myriad of bad haircuts and tragic jumpers. Primary school portraits and birthday candids. A soft looking sweatshirt with koalas on it, fat little hands grasping a ball. My favourite one was of him dressed as a page boy for a cousin’s wedding. A solemn little face in tails and a silk tie, white gloves clasped in front of him. I took pictures of them on my phone so I could always remember him as that fat happy baby, even when we were going through rough times. 

Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we?
Could we? 

My own grandmother is nearing the end. She’s just turned 96 and can’t really hear people on the phone any more. I went and visited her earlier this year and she seemed as strong as ever, just a little more tired, a little more blind, a little more deaf. Her house is a beautiful riot of colour and objets d’arts. She was a professional painter for over forty years and her walls are covered with dramatic oils of rocky Greek landscapes and delicate watercolours of London backstreets. She travelled the world several times over, always bringing back silks and scarves, puppets, necklaces, dresses, shawls. Her mother had also toured Asia as part of a famous theatrical troupe of sisters and so my grandmother has her old oriental trunks and lamps and rugs. Some things are falling to pieces but its all still there. It has always been there and it will always be there. Until its not.

Whenever I visit her, she gives me more and more things to take back with me. I know that it’s things that she can’t see or use any more, like her collections of poetry, or Denton Welch novels, or 70s gay pulp novels about seedy city underworlds (John Rechy and Stuart Lauder), or books on the occult she gathered as teenage goth in the 1930s (Edgar Allen Poe and Aleister Crowley). She gives me some of her beautiful Indian dresses, ones that she wore to my sisters weddings, or robes that she wore to mountain top parties in Mykonos in the 1970s. A fringed shawl from Spain when she visited with her husband in the 1950s and danced with him in the town square, happily taking a seat and watching him dance with every pretty lady when they saw how well he could tango.  

She told me the best thing about the 70s was that you didn’t have to wait to be asked to dance any more, you could do it by yourself. When I’m visiting her, I always take pictures of her rooms on my phone, of the way the pictures collage with each other on her walls, what’s on her dressing table, her book shelves, her mantelpieces. I take pictures of her as she tells me stories, of what we eat, the bottles of ouzo and retsina that we drink, because I love spending time with her, and I know our time is finite. I want to remember everything. 

Memories
May be beautiful and yet
What's too painful to remember
We simply to choose to forget 

A few weeks ago, one of our friends died very suddenly in a freak accident. It hit everyone very hard. I remember getting the train up to London a few hours after being told and feeling that I was going to explode with emotion surrounded by all these normal, dull, grey people travelling between cities. A few days later, as a group we went to Manchester, where she lived, also by train, a pilgrimage of grief. Again, it tested our patience. We were delayed at the station by an hour and a half, and when we finally set off there was no air conditioning. No peace, no chance for a gentle doze or energy recoup, just a long hot boiling tunnel of unresolved feelings and trepidation at what we would encounter at the other end. It seemed crazy that what had happened to us wasn’t affecting everyone else. Some people were just travelling for work, or going to a music festival, or going home to visit family. They didn’t know about us. They didn’t know about her. They didn’t know about loss. 

One night, about a week later, I lay on my bed in the sunshine and I went through the pictures on my phone. I made a folder with my friend’s name and I put in every picture of her that I had taken in the last couple of years. Pictures of us at parties, in bars, at events, getting ready together, putting on make up, hungover, everything. Now when someone asks if I have any pictures from a certain event she was at I can look it up immediately. The emotions were too much. I called up my best friend and we went and drank wine on the beach. After the sun set, we took off our clothes and swam naked in the moonlight. 

So it's the laughter
We will remember
Whenever we remember
The way we were
The way we were 

 The curation of memory is as important as living it the first time. Whether it’s through written words, or pictures, or even just in your own head, keeping records of living is vital. I’m an image hoarder. When I take pictures of things, I feel as if I then own that moment. I frequently peruse my own archives, find memories I didn’t know I had, people I thought I had forgotten. A boy I met in a nightclub. A girl who I danced with at a gig. That cab we got after drinks where you said the funniest thing and we laughed til we cried. I’ll always remember the people I’ve loved and lost because its all we can do. We write our own histories with what we choose to immortalise. One day, when I’m dead and gone, people will be able to tell the story of my life through the things I leave behind. The clothes, the pictures, and the people. Memory may be ephemeral, but loss, and more importantly, love, is forever. 

Words: Misha MN