Photo Album: Geneva, 1983

Two posts in a row featuring McDonald's!

I accompanied my father on a business trip to Geneva, Paris, and London in 1983, just after graduating from high school. Geneva is really a boring but beautiful city; it's Europe's San Diego, really. The above kiosk advertisement amused me greatly. If anything, it shows how my obsession with corporate marketing is nothing new.

The collage below (click for bigger) is more interesting: posters and graffiti I shot in search of Swiss subculture:

Sonic Youth were nobodies outside New York at this point; this must have been their first European tour. Note also the Bauhaus stencil and humorous "corrected" punk tag. Alors!

Also: remember those awful sticky-pages photo albums? 

The Greatest Sign In The History Of Ever

Click for huge! I'm totally making this my new desktop image at work. Related post.

A-Team Puffy Stickers

Hey, why not click for bigger? 

I purchased these in San Diego at Pic-n-Save in the mid 1980s. My friends and I were obsessed with Pic-n-Sav, a chain of regional discount stores. We even made custom silk-screened t-shirts of their logo! Every single thing at Pic-n-Save was either a reject or a failure, making it a particularly bizarre shopping experience. Every flop trend, every irregular manufacturing error, every misspelled ceramic knickknack... they all ended up there. It was really trashy and really cheap. At the Arizona stores you could even get wine – the worst wine ever, ever made. God, that store was just so good.

Over-manufactured puffy stickers were a constant presence at Pic-n-Save; they had an actual puffy sticker section, but I guess that's the 80s for you. Trends on the wane  (like the A-Team, above, pretty long in the tooth by that time) were a common presence on such merchandise; if you were on a puffy sticker at Pic-n-Save, your career was in trouble.

I remember a friend of mine saying, "Can you imagine publishing a novel and then seeing it at Pic-n-Save a year later for 15¢? Wouldn't that be awful?" Yes, it sure would.

To make a long story short, holy cow did we ever buy some stupid shit at that store! You'll be seeing more of it here.

Comics: 80s Nostalgia

Click for bigger/legible

I've never considered myself a cartoonist: I'm too lazy and not obsessive enough. That never stopped me from drawing comic strips, though, when I was bored or stuck in a place with nothing better to do. I like the one above, drawn in 1985 when I was 19, because it features a tasteless reference to Baby Fae, one of the most unlikely media celebrities of the decade.

The 91X t-shirt is meant to be ironic; I hated that radio station.

Book Shelf: Instapublishing, 1981

This is basically the early-80s version of a Tumblr blog, right? It took three people to write this book! And believe me, it's not because the contents belie genius brainstorming between the authors; they just wanted to get the book printed and on the shelves as quickly as possible, to strike while the fad-iron was hot.

Trust me when I say it isn't worth excerpting.

I was in high school when the Rubik's Cube hit. I wasn't into it. My friends and I loved mocking trendy junk like this; we collected, for instance, terrible/weird ET merchandise. We were, after all, hardened and cynical kids, like most born in the mid 60s. I'm pretty sure I bought this for 10¢ at Pic 'n' Save.