Joshenilia (3)
By:
November 14, 2015
One in a series of posts exhuming the juvenilia and significant objects of HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn.
In the mid-’80s, stickers were a form of currency among skate punks — we scrambled for them at sticker tosses, we swapped them, we decorated our skateboards, jackets, school books, and bedrooms with them. My friend Dan earned universal acclaim, one time, by swiping an entire roll of BONELESS stickers from a Stop & Shop.
I guess that’s why stickers continue to stick to me.
If you grew up in Boston during the mid-1980s, you will remember V66, which was a local music-video channel. MTV had premiered on cable a few years before that, but many of us in Boston didn’t have cable TV! Particularly if you lived in a redlined neighborhood like mine where cable TV didn’t enter until long after it had visited the swankier ’hoods. I have a small stack of these, which I am willing to give away to interested HiLobrow readers who lived in Greater Boston in the mid-’80s…
Suck.com (1995–2000) was one of the very few great periodicals created by members of my generation. Its tagline: “A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun.” Carl Steadman, Tim Cavanaugh, Ana Marie Cox, Nick Gillespie, Josh Ozersky (RIP), and particularly Heather Havrilesky — you created greatness!
In 1994, I produced All Night Long, a vinyl EP — via my short-lived label, Shapely Mind — for the Minneapolis-based punkabilly act Speedway. I’m not sure I still have any copies of the record (which was excellent, by the way), but I still find stickers among my papers from 1994.
READ MORE essays by Joshua Glenn, originally published in: THE BAFFLER | BOSTON GLOBE IDEAS | BRAINIAC | CABINET | FEED | HERMENAUT | HILOBROW | HILOBROW: GENERATIONS | HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION | HILOBROW: SHOCKING BLOCKING | THE IDLER | IO9 | N+1 | NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | SEMIONAUT | SLATE