Nicstalgia Turns 2 Today!! 🥳
Brain rot, Yummy Magazine, collage art, Gilmore Girls festival, Xtina in Vegas 🎰
I love talking to my friend (and first-ever Nicstalgia guest!) Jenna Barclay about communications, cyclical trends, online & offline identity, and media literacy. She said something the other day that I can’t stop thinking about:
Couldn’t agree more. People say things through a screen that they wouldn’t in-person, deploy or fall for ragebait, use algospeak or constantly reference viral videos in everyday offline conversations, and actively avoid interactions IRL – or worse, provoke IRL confrontations to post them on social media. Jenna’s statement was in the context of aesthetics, and in addition to the context collapse and pervasively antisocial online behavior that makes people on the internet act insane, brain rot is plaguing the nation!!!!
I am unfortunately not exempt from this, although I would like to state officially for the record that I’m not a big scroller. However, I was back on TikTok for ONE DAY to write last week’s newsletter on Pookie, and the line got very blurred between ‘millennial cultural critic who is smart, fashionable, on the pulse of pop culture, and knows what’s going on with the fixture generation of youth culture’ vs. ‘chronically online woman suffering from severe brain rot who needs to touch grass’. It’s simply too much. I recently went to Michaels to get some supplies, and I couldn’t help but aestheticize their merchandise categorizes (even ironically as a joke).
When a commenter on the video linked above asked, “why am I fluent in brainrot”, the creator replied with the tone, cadence, and background music of a big pharma commercial, suggesting a flip phone as the antidote. It is my favorite video I’ve seen recently. I consider it a sharp and fulfilling satire, providing entertainment and humor while we marinate in the discomfort of its truth:
“Hi, I’m Heidi, and I used to be an avid scroller, Scrolling for 10, 11, up to 12 hours per day. I realized I that was disconnecting from reality, and I’d lost my identity to the scroll. I’d fallen prey to the influences of accelerated trend cycles.
One week, I was a Clean Girl. The next week, Balletcore. Now it’s all about Mob Wife, and who am I to be a Mob Wife? My spending was out of control. Every time I scrolled, it was “run, don’t walk”, “you need this”, and it was the promise of a changed life forever and a glow up. But that’s not what reality was. In reality, it was my flop era. Online, they were saying I’m ‘mother’, I’m ‘slaying’, but that’s not the truth. I hit rock bottom when I beat up an 11 year old in Sephora over the last Summer Fridays lip balm and bronzing Drunk Elephant drops.
That’s when I went to my doctor and they prescribed me FlipPhone. After FlipPhone, everything changed. I haven’t scrolled since. I feel like I’m really living in reality. I’ll put a movie and I actually watch it. My friends are talking and I actually listen. I’m so much more productive. So if you’re suffering from scrolling, I recommend you talk to your doctor about FlipPhone now.
If you’re suffering from symptoms of exhaustion, of keeping up with beauty standards, hyper-consumerism, blurry vision from not being able to tell what really matters – you should talk to your doctor. Don’t sell your soul to the scroll.
*Fast voice* Side effects include but are not limited to: disorientation from loss of GPS, feelings of isolation and exclusion from pop culture, DOMO, and phantom scroll. Please consult your doctor if you experience these symptoms. This is brought to you by FlipPhone. Don’t sell your soul to the scroll.
While I can’t save the world from the infinite scroll, (I’m VERY concerned for the younger generations!) I have solutions for combatting my brain rot at a micro level:
Create more of the thought-provoking and deep yet fun content I want to see on the internet. That way, I feel excited and connected online rather than depleted.
Do more offline activities like crafting, sewing, thrifting, browsing bookstores, having cawfee tawk, and walking outside. I’m also going to learn how to use my family’s old camcorder (lol) because I yearn for the friction of the analog experience that separates my day-to-day life from social media.
In this issue:
🍒 2 Years of Nicstalgia!!!!!!!
👄 Yummy Magazine exhibit and collaging workshop
📲 Christina Aguilera in Vogue, inappropriate 90s songs, Bring It On (2000) decentralized, Gilmore Girls festival, Celine Dion documentary
Support Nicstalgia with a paid subscription for less than a flip phone. (This is my sister’s real flip phone from the 2000s! I got rid of mine – hot pink glitter – because I am annoying and had no foresight to anticipate that this would become a critically important historical artifact.)
🍒 2 Years of Nicstalgia!!!!!!!
Happy Anni to the show!!!! 🥳 Yes it’s a triple Aquarius. I’ve met a lot of cool people through Nicstalgia and have had a wide array of fun, interesting guests – nostalgia content creators and influencers, digital artists, Kpop and boy band researchers, pop culture candle company owners, music journalists, former Blockbuster employees, meme queens, pop culture media execs and historians, fellow podcasters, and more.
Thank you Jenna, Liana, Gina, Shakivla, Tatiana, Nikki, Marisa, Vinnie, Jamie, Barbara, Shirin, Perri, Sofia, Perry, Kpop Sociology, Janine, Bridget, Shane, Rachel, Jess, Tom, Kate, Brian, Susanna, Shawn, Danielle P, Jaz, Jackie, Danielle C, Donny, Shaleena, Fabiola, Gremlin, Vivian, Nicole, Andy, Ana, Chris, Adam, Jocelyn, Alaina, Tiffany, Nora, Merel, and Ruby for sharing your stories and memories with me.
Being an indie podcaster and a one-woman-show is hard! Consistently arranging schedules, writing, designing, recording, editing, producing, and promoting is extremely time consuming and a lot of work. I want to share my goals for the show with you – because I am proud of myself for staying true to them – and some lessons I’ve learned along the way:
Be flexible
• Do what’s right for you! This is your show!
• Take a break if you need to.
• Anticipate that you will likely experience some kind of delay, technical difficulty, disruption, etc. Stay calm while you mitigate the frustration.
• If an episode is “supposed to” come out on Tuesday and it comes out on Wednesday, everything will be fine. It’s not a life or death situation.Be organized
• Create your systems, stick to them, and update them when you find a more efficient pathway.
• Take initiative, make friendly offers, and follow through, but don’t push, wrangle, or overextend yourself for potential guests.
• Don’t rush!!!!!! Cutting corners will come back to bite you every time.
• Don’t put your name on something you’re not satisfied with, but understand that your work will keep getting better with time and experience.
• Work smarter, not harder; if you’re doing your best, it’s good enough. Getting caught up in the minutiae will just waste your energy.Be happy
• HAVE FUN!!!!!!
• Release something you’re proud of into the world!!!!! Create!!!! Put it out there!!! Just do it!!!! It will open up EVERY door. It will help you find the right people. It will be what drives you toward your purpose in life. (Dramatic but true.)
• Stay true to yourself! If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it!
• If you feel like you’re being too deep, esoteric, or weird, no one cares. People know you for your voice and your presence. You inherently know what’s on-brand for you, and it’s better to share a strong POV than do nothing at all.
• People will give you unsolicited advice. Be gracious while considering – but also possibly ignoring – said advice LOL. At the same time, always be receptive and willing to learn. You never know how someone’s feedback can inspire you to go somewhere you wouldn’t have thought of before.Don’t do it for money
While I acknowledge the content consumer’s perspective/anti millennial hustle culture sentiment “not everything needs to be monetized”, as a creator, I absolutely believe that everything on the internet should not just be automatically free. I’m not talking about massive, multimillion dollar legacy media corporations with paywalled articles. I’m talking about the fact that content creators and cultural producers are obligated to answer to the Big Tech overlords and their black box algorithms, with little to no financial compensation for their constant production.
We do business through our computers, our phones, and the internet now, but there are still no mainstream systems that make content creation a viable income stream without being completely dependent on these platforms (which can go away or change at any time, for any reason, with no notice). As consumers, social media has trained us to endlessly use and discard with the swipe of a finger. As every single amateur AND professional content creator I know is already aware, it’s not sustainable. If you try to play this game, you will lose.
Plus, after you’ve created hundreds of hours of free content, practically daily, for nearly a decade, don’t feel guilty about having an optional $5/month offering for your newsletter. (Sidebar: I am EXTREMELY grateful to the people who have pledged. I am in awe and very moved that you feel compelled to support my work.)Don’t focus on “growth”
Speaking of sustainability (or rather, lack thereof), my favorite thing anyone has ever said on my show is when Brian Blackmore shared, “An algorithm doesn’t get tired, and I do.” Being focused on metrics, numbers, followers, subscribers, etc. gives me serious anxiety. Can’t making things just like, feel good??? Yes it can! (This is 1000000% easier when you have a full time job btw.)
The podcasting landscape has changed so much in the last two years and it has institutionalized like traditional media (aka. you will not “make it” unless you’re already famous). While the space is democratized so anyone can create a podcast, the overwhelmingly grand majority can’t maintain it. I read a statistic once that 90% of podcasts don’t get past three episodes, and 90% of who’s left after that don’t make it to twenty episodes. Nicstalgia has 52. That’s cool!!!
So finally, in the words of Snoop Dogg (and recently, Niecy Nash), I wanna thank me.
“I wanna thank me.
I wanna thank me for believing in me.
I wanna thank me for doing all this hard work.
I wanna thank me for having no days off.
I wanna thank me for never quitting.
I wanna thank me for always being a giver, and trying to give more than I receive.
I wanna thank me for trying to do more right than wrong.
I wanna thank me for just being me at all times.”
👄 Yummy Magazine
I’m a huge fan of Elizabeth Renstrom’s photography and was really excited to see her solo exhibition, Yummy. The exhibition is centered around Yummy (Teen Edition), a fictional magazine created in collaboration with designer Elena Foraker and writer Coralie Kraft. “The exhibition interrogates our individual and collective relationship with mass media as well as the ways in which media representation shapes identity, for better or for worse.” Wow. Exploring nostalgia x media x identity through a critical lens? SOLD. So up my alley. I’d also connected the dots that I’d seen Elizabeth’s photography before. I was blown away by her work accompanying two articles I loved, one on ‘bad’ taste for Time and another about the Spice Girls for the New York Times.
My main research topic of the year is aesthetic labor x AI, which is exactly what the exhibit addresses:
“Yummy (Teen Edition)’s glossy images and catchy headlines were created entirely through AI—a model trained on a generation’s media consumption and synthesizing an imaginary world set in the realities of the early 2000s. Fashion spreads, photographs of teen heartthrobs, and dogmatic advice columns reflect the value systems promoted through media culture in the early aughts, reproduced perhaps as readily and uncritically by an AI model as they were consumed by young readers at the time.
Brightly colored headlines, advertisements for beauty products, diet and exercise tips, and a homogenous array of teen faces fill magazine covers and interior pages in a context that is both dated and yet still reflective of much of today’s media culture. Targeted specifically to young women, these pages recall and reinforce a shaping of ideas about diet culture, desire, and self-presentation, while also underlining the inherently sexist, fatphobic, and racist themes present throughout.”
I was so impressed seeing the exhibit in person and was super psyched to participate in a collaging workshop led by artist Chelsey Pettyjohn. I’ve made a bunch of aspirational vision boards and chaotic digital pop culture collages, but it was my first time using this medium as a cultural criticism and a reflection of my sociopolitical beliefs. It was therapeutic! While I’m a very creative person, there were some true artists at the workshop. I’m so inspired by people who see the world in this way.
See one of the Yummy issues below alongside the pieces I made. I’m happy to share them, and what they mean to me, with you. Note that these were made from 70s magazines and 00s magazines. I knew the 70s would age poorly, but what was scary is that the 00s ones aged just as badly. Maybe worse. That explains a lot. Also (TW) I explore the topics of gender politics and body politics, which I acknowledge can be sensitive content.
The first picture is the June issue of Yummy, styled with my pink ILYSM keychain and some fun Yummy stickers. These AI-generated images are so uncanny, you could actually Mandela Effect (aka. Berenstain Bears) yourself into thinking Brandon Hayes and Austin Hunter were real 90s teen heartthrobs!
Theme: Aesthetic labor (top picture)
What it depicts: Cutouts of women’s various body parts being shaved, over idyllic color-coordinated kitchens with zany carpeting in 1970s homes, along with coordinating Lip Smackers lip balms
What it represents: The “everything” shower. Having no body hair. Having all your lips look smooth. Compliance with female grooming expectations, spoken and unspoken. Body surveillance in correlation to relationship satisfaction. The overwhelming amount of time, exorbitant amount of money, and the largely invisible effort that women spend to fit the patriarchal beauty ideal.Theme: Age compression (bottom picture)
What it depicts: A headless torso of a girl wearing two layered lace camis, surrounded by a flip phone, pink Lip Smackers lip balm, and red Maybelline Shinylicious lip gloss (I still remember how this smells and I hated it!)
What it represents: The transition from children’s lip balm to young adults’ lip gloss. The loss of innocence, parental supervision, and trust that comes with getting your first cell phone. “Wyd” culture. The attention that girls get when they hit puberty. Fitting in. Trying to act older than you are. Late-stage capitalism: you can buy whatever you want in order to become whoever you want to be. Tweens and teens as an emergent marketing demographic. “Shop to the top!” reflecting the intersection of commerce and attention, improving her desirability ‘rank’ compared to other girls as she shops. The positive correlation between consumption and social standing.Theme: Age Obsolescence
What it depicts: A collage of words – including “It’s all in a woman’s day”, “A certain look”, “Perfect” and “Would your husband like a younger-looking wife?”, “Pick me, pick me!”, “No woman is really beautiful till she’s over 30”, “Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman”, and “Beautiful” seven times – overlaying a white porcelain clock.
What it represents: Female beauty and the passage of time. The clock ticking, counting down toward the loss of beauty and sexuality, eventual obsolescence, and ultimately death, starting as soon as she turns 18. Ageism. Turning back time as a metaphor for anti-aging. Women feeling forgotten, useless, or broken because they are not considered “beautiful” by society, men, other women, or themselves. Patronizing 30 year olds; they’re not old. The devastation of not feeling desired. The biological clock. It being “too late”. Infertility. Menopause. The loss of pretty privilege and external validation for being “beautiful”.Theme: Rites of Passage
What it depicts: Britney Spears surrounded by prom dresses. The word “Fantasy” is going across her forehead.
What it represents: Girls engaging in aesthetic labor as a rite of passage: getting hair and nails done, buying a dress, shoes, accessories, etc. for the biggest social event of their lives to-date. Society’s reinforcement of beautification and being the object of desire as a ‘fantasy’ for girls. Expectations of taking virginity as a ‘fantasy’ for boys. One of the only “normal” things that Britney Spears – someone whose virginity was highly, invasively speculated about for years – ever did in her life was go to prom in high school. (Someone actually bought a lot of her prom pictures for $437.50.) She engaged in this rite of passage and continued to be the embodiment of fantasy for millions; she’s Miss American Dream since she was 17.Theme: Body Politics
What it depicts: A woman holding cigarettes, a woman’s body in two places. Phrases include, “Back in the old days, men didn’t buy appliances. They married them.”, “You’ve come a long way, baby”, “Watch me lose”, “Grand prize; a woman’s body”, “Address all your body issues!”, “Ask the man in your life…”, “Life is full of compromises, your contraceptive doesn’t have to be one of them.”, “125 pounds”, “take that ugly fat off”, “When was the last time he woke you just to hear your voice?”, “The tip”, and “What a marvelous way to serve celery!”
What it represents: Ooooooh boy. Lots to unpack here. “You’ve come a long way, baby” sarcastically, as women legally have less body autonomy and more body surveillance than they did 50 years ago. “Watch me lose” referring literally to weight or figuratively to human rights and struggle with sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy. Cigarettes representing the ultimate loss in this battle: death. Male politicians controlling what’s “in” our skirts. Women upholding existing power structures because they’re distracted by their own body insecurities. Severe, destructive physical, mental, and emotional toll hormonal birth control can take on a woman’s body. Sunflowers as faith and hope, turning toward the sun.
Phew!!!!! The catharsis! That was like letting out a primal scream at The Class. So if you’re in NYC within the next week, make sure to check out the exhibit at 128 Baxter Street in Manhattan.
📲 I’m Just a Simple Girl in a High-Tech Digital World
My fav things from the internet rn:
My friend Hannah wrote an awesome piece for Vogue interviewing Christina Aguilera!!!!! They talk about Xtina’s residency, the scope of her 25-year career, her daughter Summer Rain becoming her ‘daught-ager’, her creative process, and being ahead of her time. Stripped remains one of my fav albums of all time, and I was lucky to see Christina at Jazz Fest in 2014. (Fun fact: At that time, she was 6 months pregnant with her daughter and largely performed on a chaise lounge. Very chic!)
Everything 90s Podcast has a blog!! Host (and Nicstalgia guest!) Shaleena is digging into the important question for an upcoming episode – which songs should be on the "naughty nineties playlist"? Like those songs you didn’t realize at the time were…inappropriate…My personal nomination here is “Too Close” by Next. I did NOT know what those lyrics meant at the time!!! Still a great song though.
I wrote an article, Bigred.eth (lmao), for Crypto Witch Club’s upcoming ‘zine. I explain web3 concepts, like the metaverse, DAOs, DeFi, and NFTs, specifically through the lens of the Bring It On (2000) universe. CWC founder (and Nicstalgia guest!) Shirin is the Elle Woods of Crypto who makes learning so fun, and I very much appreciate that she let me use ‘metaverse’ and ‘front handspring, step out, round-off back handspring step out, round-off back handspring, full twisting layout’ in the same sentence.
I’m on season 5 of GG right now and am from Connecticut, so I’m thrilled to learn that there’s an annual Gilmore Girls festival! It’s pricy, but it looks like it’s a really packed schedule and a valuable experience. (That being said, if Milo Ventimiglia happens to be appearing, I will drop everything to show up. Where he leads, I will follow.)
As you are likely aware, I love Celine Dion. The days I saw her perform (in Las Vegas in September 2015 and in New Jersey the last weekend she toured in March 2020) were among the best days of my life. Unfortunately, Celine has Stiff Persons Syndrome, a rare neurological disease which causes muscle spasms. She is unable to perform, but a documentary is being made about her personal life as she copes with her condition. Despite the circumstance, I’m happy she gets to tell her story. It makes me happy to think that a lot of new people (who discovered her music on TikTok) will see Celine for the first time – that despite the sadness, her humor, zaniness, and true joie de vivre will shine through like always.
🧨 Spice Up Your Life
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Belated happy anniversary!!!