Sean Äaberg
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THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 105
🕑 Added 2024-10-08 17:10:57 +0000 UTCWhen I was a kid there was still a lot of stuff left over from the 60s & 70s floating around. The shadow of the past was heavy on the present. Stuff as old as Vaudeville was actively being dredged up in Looney Tunes & being kept alive on the Muppet Show. Hannah Barbera cartoons used the vocal styles of lots of classic radio & Vaudeville stars for their characters & even though these cartoons were already old, they lived on in reruns & then the reruns lived on further with early cable. The best dimestores had stock from decades passed & would bring their stuff out to shine on Halloween & Christmas. I can remember how stoked I was to find a Mr. Bones candy at the Guy’s Drugs near my house. Getting candy bones you could assemble into a skeleton in a bright plastic coffin was a cultural remnant of the 70s but you could find it if you were lucky. I had to look for these things, they weren’t pervasive but they tickled me. When we moved into our first house in East Oakland off of 35th Avenue my room was an old basement that had been converted into a bar. The room was still decorated with classic old sick humor & alcoholic humor from the golden age of drinking. I probably absorbed a lot of that just from living in that room. I loved that culture, even though it had alcohol sweat, was yellowed by cigarette smoke & was made nearly obsolete by the clean, modern, angular, cocaine fueled 80s. Despite the endless churning of time, there were very real, physical reasons for the retention of the old.
