#cebrapop

Nothing should be spoken of hastily. Again, we have a mannerist, exaggerated, and incomplete reproduction of those years. People didn't dress that normally, and there wasn't such a successful approach to combining design and pop with everything we now remember as milestones and typical of those times. Those who lived through the 1980s and the Stranger Things craze will know what I mean when I tell them that in that series, I find it strange the music people who wouldn't even know it listen to, or how the movie The Thing appears in one scene. They sort of fill in the gaps with things we now remember from that time, like checkpoints.

No se debe hablar apresuradamente de nada. De nuevo, tenemos una reproducción manierista, exagerada e incompleta de esos años. No se vestía así de normal, no se poseía tal acierto en tener de diseño y de pop alrededor todo lo que ahora recordamos hito y típico de esos tiempos. Los que vivieran los ochenta y a la vez la fiebre por Stranger Things sabrán a que me refiero si les digo que en esa serie se me hace raro las músicas que escuchan gente que ni la conocería o como aparece la peli The Thing en una escena. Hacen como una especie de rellenar con cosas que recordamos ahora de entonces a modo de checkpoints.

Why do I say there's no need to rush? Because this isn't new to the century, nor is it hauntology of this one. Culturally and commercially exploited nostalgia has a life cycle of necessity. At the end of the 1970s, Nixon, Vietnam, the oil crisis, and Reagan's harsh economic measures had already made us look back to a more peaceful, prosperous, and mythologized past. Grease, Back to the Future, and, to a certain extent, David Lynch's Blue Velvet share this with many others and are practically all from the 1980s, the decade so remembered at the beginning of this century when things weren't going well then, with 9/11, the second Iraq war, or the country's near-bankruptcy at the end of its first decade. Not everything is hauntology… or not so much, I suppose.

I must be the worst content curator in the world (I don't even consider myself a 'creator'). I recently started a series about analog horror. It was only going to be one post, but it grew, but it fell short (another one I have has 20 posts), and on top of that, this one makes two spin-offs. I'm starting… A follower, whose name I won't mention out of caution, told me in one of the analog horror posts that he has a strange childhood memory of visiting someone else's house when the family's son, older than him, would spend his time watching TV without being on any channel, that strange gray fog that was called 'channel snow' in Spain. He treasures this memory from the last century as something mysterious, because he found it very boring to watch attentively, but he had the impression 'that he was watching something on TV that no one else could see'… Wow! See? From a prosaic, casual, and perhaps distorted by the years, we can practically create a creepypasta. And if we were to tell this through an old home video camera recording, it could perfectly well be a short or episode of one of the analog horror YT series we've talked about so much.

Debo ser la peor curadora de contenidos del mundo (no me creo ni 'creadora'). Empiezo una serie hace poco del terror analógico, iba a ser solo un post y creció, pero me quedó corta (otra que tengo tiene 20 posts) y encima con este son dos spin off a esta. Empiezo… Un seguidor cuyo nombre no menciono por cautela, me comentaba en uno de los posts de terror analógico que tiene un recuerdo infantil extraño de visita en casa ajena cuando el hijo de esa familia, mayor que él, se dedicaba a ver la tele sin estar en ningún canal, esa niebla rara gris que se le llamaba en España 'nieve de canal'. Atesora este recuerdo del siglo pasado como algo misterioso, porque él veía aquello muy aburrido como mirarlo atento pero le daba la impresión 'que veía en la tele algo que ningún otro podía ver'…. WoW! Ven? De un recuerdo prosaico, casual y puede que deformado por los años podemos sacar prácticamente hecha una creepypasta. Y si esto lo contáramos por medio de una vieja grabación de cámara de vídeo doméstica, podría ser perfectamente un corto o episodio de una serie de YT de terror analógico de las que tanto hemos hablado.

The effect it refers to is when you tuned into a channel but there wasn't a broadcast tuned in. The analog era had over-the-air television and radio waves that you had to calibrate the dial to get a good reception. When a channel was free because there weren't enough television stations or the antenna was unplugged, you would see a kind of fog of continuous crackling. I know this was called a 'dead channel' in English because that's what William Gibson called it in his famous novel Neuromancer, in which he compared the cloudy sky of (was it Chiba City?) to that grayish snow. The pop culture doesn't end there. Before Sadako in that Japanese film about curses traveling on magnetic videotape, there is another precedent in the ways of making analog horror that I haven't seen anyone recall. In the 1982 film Poltergeist, the television without a channel seems to be a bridge to the afterlife, taking the 'Dead Channel' literally [in English To Channel is also a verb that translates as 'to channel' and was used in medium slang to describe contacting entities!]. Do you see how curious all this pop that relates horror concepts and old televisions is?

El efecto al que se refiere es cuando ponías un canal pero no había una emisión sintonizada. La era analógica tenía televisión y radio aérea por ondas que tenías que calibrar en dial para captar bien. Cuando un canal estaba libre porque no había bastantes cadenas de televisión o estaba desenchufada la antena, se veía una especie de niebla de chisporroteo continuo. Sé que se le decía q eso en inglés a 'dead channel' porque así lo llamaba William Gibson en su célebre novela Neuromante, en la que comparaba el cielo nublado de ¿Chiba City era? con esa nieve grisácea. El pop con ello no acaba aquí. Antes de Sadako en aquella peli japonesa de las maldiciones viajando en cinta magnética de vídeo, hay otro precedente en las formas de hacerse terror analógico que no he visto recordar a nadie. En el film Poltergeist de 1982 la televisión sin canal puesto parece ser puente con el más allá tomando de forma literal lo de 'Dead Channel' [en inglés puede traducirse también como Canal de los Muertos, y To Channel es a la vez un verbo que se traduce como 'canalizar' y se usaba en el argot de los medium para describir el contactar con entidades!] ¿Ven que curioso todo este pop que relaciona conceptos del terror y viejas televisiones?

There's more. Televisions were REALLY taken seriously as a means of contacting the dead (I do research for these things I write and I'm left dead) and they were used for this without being connected to any antenna, although popular belief on this understood that then your dead (pardon me) would simply appear on TV, the method was much more complicated: the TV without an antenna was made to reproduce what a camera facing the TV captured, creating in image what would be the deforming loop of feedback? that my university musician called 'sound feedback'. This happening with amplifiers was like a kind of sound interference drag, from what I read this was the same but in image and if you filmed the interference to later analyze frame by frame you could obtain supposed images of the afterlife. I've spent almost a week documenting this text. I've seen samples of it, and the grim Lo-Fi landscapes seen in the (supposed) underworld are enough to make a horror series on YouTube… except this was supposed to be real. It stimulates the imagination… and nightmares for anyone who's sleeping, though I don't know much about that.

Todavía hay más. Las televisiones REALMENTE se tomaron en serio como medio para contactar con los muertos (me documento para estas cosas que escribo y me quedo muerta) y se usaban para ello sin conectarlas a antena alguna, aunque la creencia popular sobre esto entendía que entonces tus muertos (con perdón) aparecían sin más por la tele, el método era mucho más complicado: a la tele sin antena se le hacía reproducir lo que captaba una cámara que miraba a la tele, haciéndose en imagen lo que sería el bucle deformador de ¿retroalimentación? que llamaba mi músico de la universidad 'acople de sonido'. Esto pasando con amplis era como una especie de arrastre de interferencia de sonido, por lo que leo esto era igual pero en imagen y si filmabas la interferencia para analizar luego frame a frame podías obtener supuestas imágenes del más allá. He dedicado ratos a documentar este texto durante casi una semana, he visto muestras de aquello y los paisajes Lo Fi tenebrosos que se ven del (supuesto) ultramundo dan para la edición de una serie de terror en Youtube… solo que esto se supone que era de verdad. Estimula la imaginación…y las pesadillas para quien duerma, que yo de eso poco.

Haven't I bored you yet? Well, the TV combined with a home video recorder to record TV broadcasts almost at random would be used in the manner of literary cut-ups, but in audiovisual form. It was being done by artists and postmodern occultists (and both at the same time) who claimed to have been taught or inspired to do so by William Burroughs! Since they used magnetic video and I've found little to read about it, I'll just mention it. But the fact that they took these audiovisual collages with precarious home video editing as a way to achieve trance-like states of mind does interest us, because it was part of an earlier betrayal that (possibly, I only suspect) came from hippies before the existence of home video. They would have had to stare (and probably smoke cannabis or take LSD) at the TV without being tuned into any channel and hope that the crackling snow and the white noise they emitted if you turned up the sound would help them meditate.

¿Todavía no les he aburrido? Pues la tele en combo con video doméstico para grabar casi al azar emisiones de TV sería usada a la manera del cut up literario pero en audiovisual. Se estuvo haciendo entre artistas, ocultistas posmodernos (y ambas cosas a la vez) que decían venir enseñados o inspirados para ello por ¡William Burroughs! Como usaban video magnético y poco he encontrado que leer sobre esto, solo lo menciono. Pero el que tomaran estos collages audiovisuales con precaria edición casera de video como una manera de alcancazar estados mentales de trance sí nos interesa, porque eso era parte de una traición anterior que (posiblemente, solo sospecho) proviene de los hippies desde antes de existir el vídeo doméstico. Estos tendrían que mirar fijamente (y seguramente fumar cannabis o tomar LSD) mirando la tele sin estar en ningún canal y esperar que el chisporroteo de nieve de canal y el ruido blanco que emitían si les subías el sonido les ayudara a meditar.

Do I think the teenager in my childhood memory was a modern occultist, a late-life hippie, or just stoned? No, I don't assume anything. But he could well have discovered a special strangeness for himself if he stared at those fizzing black and white dots for too long. It could also be that our friend is mixing up a very distant childhood memory with the aforementioned 1982 film, or that he was trying to pull my leg with a creepypasta of his own or one he borrowed, but his story is inspiring and at the very least made me think or document things from the past enough to give you this article of curiosities.

¿Creo que el adolescente del recuerdo infantil era un ocultista moderno, un hippie tardío o que estaba fumado? No, no asumo nada. Pero bien podría haber descubierto por si mismo una extrañeza especial si miraba mucho rato esos puntitos blancos y negros que no paraban de burbujear. También puede ser que nuestro amigo mezcle un recuerdo infantil muy lejano con la mentada película del 1982, o bien que me haya querido tomar el pelo con una creepypasta suya o prestada, pero inspirador es su relato y cuanto menos me hizo pensar o documentar cosas pasadas como para darles este artículo de curiosidades.

Si non vero e ben trovato

If you're a veteran of the blog (or at least have been following the August 2024 reposts), you'll have noticed that I've posted or written articles about Bettie Page and the bondage she popularized as a model. It's a long story short, as I'd say, about how that model, whose body isn't standard or canonical but is very charismatic, reminds me of someone, who brings fetishes that were previously very rare and hidden into pop and fashion. It's all about phantasmagoria, curiosity, and the fact that these travel and spread as part of the culture they are, but I don't want to go on too long…

Si sois veteranos al blog (o al menos habéis estado pendientes a los repost de Agosto 2024) os habréis encontrado que he dado o escrito textos sobre Bettie Page y el bondage que popularizó como modelo. Es largo de contar cómo me recuerda a alguien eso de la modelo de cuerpo no estándar o canónico pero sí muy carismática, que pone en el pop y moda fetiches que eran antes muy minoritarios y escondidos. Cosas de las fantasmagorías, la curiosidad y que estas viajan y se contagian como parte de la cultura que son, pero no me quiero alargar…

Page doesn't usher in the era of erotic pin-ups, which we would now find purely endearing and almost cartoonish, and people smarter than me downplay the importance of this as the cause of the fame of their soft bondage and spanking. For these cultural analysts, it was primarily a result of socioeconomic conditions: when men returning from World War II found hardworking, independent women in the United States who had taken their places while they fought Hitler. And that presented them with a new type of determined woman to confront, a type of woman who was anything but docile… Who would inflame their imaginations in revenge, making them wonder what they would do to them if they were left defenseless at their mercy… Phantasmagoria, what more can I say?

Page no abre la era de las pin ups eróticas que ahora nos parecerían de puro suaves entrañables y casi de cartoon, y gente más lista que yo le quita peso a ella como causa de la fama de su bondage y spanking soft. Para estos analistas culturales fue sobre todo resultado de las condiciones económico sociales: cuando los hombres retornados de la segunda guerra mundial encuentran en USA mujeres trabajadoras e independientes que han cubierto sus puestos mientras ellos combatían a Hitler. Y eso les ponía delante a un nuevo tipo de mujer decidida que confrontar, un tipo de mujer nada dócil… Que inflamaría su imaginación en revancha, haciéndoles pensar que les harían si estas quedaran indefensas a su merced… Fantasmagorías ¿Qué más decir?

But why are we talking about this? Well, because before the advent of adult films in the 20th century, stimulating fiction relied on short stories, novels, and a few eye-catching illustrations. Playboy was born during this time and always included a bit of sensual narrative (but not too much, and still very vanilla). Its offerings were added to the already existing supply of moralistic novels, which, the more vulgar and on the editorial fringe, the more risqué and sensationalist they were, even though it was illegal to be explicit. But the demand for stories with photo or drawn references was enormous. The market was expanding in the US, where they once had an entire informal subgenre of cheap novels about wicked lesbians that (almost) forever perverted upright, marriageable girls. I'm not making this stuff up!

Pero ¿Por qué hablamos de esto? Pues porque antes de nacer los filmes para adultos en el siglo, las ficciones estimulantes dependían de relatos, novelas y escasas ilustraciones llamativas. Playboy nace en estos tiempos e incluye siempre un poco de narrativa sensual (pero no demasiado y sí muy vainilla). Se suma su oferta a la ya existente en noveluchas moralistas que cuanto más malas y en la periferia editorial, más subidas de tono y sensacionalistas eran aunque fuera ilegal ser explícitas. Pero la demanda de historias con referentes en foto o dibujados es enorme. El mercado se expande en EEUU, donde llegaron a tener todo un subgénero informal de novelitas baratas de lesbianas malvadas que (casi) pervertían para siempre a chicas rectas y casaderas ¡No me invento estas cosas!

And in these markets, seeking to be more attractive and better distributed to sell more (and avoid jail sentences), men's magazines appeared that didn't have to hide (as much) on the newsstand because they were magazines for seasoned gentlemen, especially war veterans, who, among other content and various articles, found stories from other veterans and fictionalized reconstructions of various exploits. But let me tell it as it was, not as the editors said it was: gentlemen we would call anti-woke today easily found magazines with flashy covers that told made-up stories sold as non-fiction, featuring lots of women tied up and interrogated by the evil. Are you getting it?

Y en estos mercados que buscan más sugerir y poder distribuirse mejor para vender más (y no haber penas de cárcel) aparecen revistas para hombres que no han de esconderse (tanto) en el quiosco porque son revistas para caballeros aguerridos, sobre todo veteranos de guerra, que entre otros contenidos y artículos varios, encontraban narraciones de otros veteranos y reconstrucciones novelizadas de hazañas varias. Pero deja que lo cuente como era y no como decían los editores que era aquello: señores que hoy llamaríamos anti woke encuentran fácil con llamativas portadas revistas que contaban historias inventadas que vendían como no ficción donde había mucha mujer atada e interrogada por los malvados ¿Lo vais pillando?

You can tell me this isn't politically correct at all. But if there were similar fictions that were truly politically incorrect, they were the subgenre that featured Jewish soldiers tied up and whipped by beautiful Nazi women… A hit in Israel at the time! The phantasmagoria of sex knows nothing about politics or correctness. Or maybe they do, but only to make the forbidden or inappropriate interesting. But… I'm getting involved in something too interesting not to have its own article.

Podréis decirme que esto no es nada políticamente correcto. Pero si hubo ficciones parecidas que de verdad fueran políticamente incorrectas, fueron las del subgénero que ponía a soldados judíos atados y azotados por hermosas mujeres nazis… ¡Un éxito entonces en Israel! Las fantasmagoría del sexo no saben de política o corrección de nada. O quizás sí, pero solo para hacer interesante lo prohibido o inadecuado. Pero…estoy metiéndome a contar de algo demasiado interesante como para no tener su propio artículo.

The era of these magazines ended as pornography as we know it today became legal, common, and available. And these magazines, like films about nudist colonies or bathers pursued by a tacky monster, were gradually displaced until they disappeared. But during their years, they left a legacy of absurdly exaggerated images of evil scientists, tortured Nazis, and muscle-bound rescuers of scantily clad women. @Space recently located the book edited on the subject by Adam Parfrey, an entrepreneurial publisher of everything strange about the world and English-speaking pop culture he could find. He passed away relatively recently, and I dedicate this text to him and to the aforementioned blog and book whose cover appears at the top of my text, can be found and downloaded from Archive.org HERE. Thanks to both of you, and look how many things you've made me review while looking for information, it stimulates minds!

La era de estas revistas acabó según fue siendo legal, común y fácil de encontrar la pornografía tal como la conocemos ahora. Y estas revistas como las películas sobre colonias nudistas o bañistas perseguidas por monstruo cutre fueron siendo desplazadas hasta desparecer. Pero durante sus años dejaron un legado en imágenes exageradas hasta el absurdo de científicos malvados, nazis torturados y musculosos rescatadores de damas con poca ropa. @spaceintruderdetector localizó hace un tiempo el libro que editó sobre ello Adam Parfrey, un emprendedor editorial de todo lo extraño del mundo y la cultura pop angloparlante que pudiera encontrar. Fallecido hace relativamente poco, este texto se lo dedico a él y al blog mencionado, ya que AQUÍ podrán encontrar y descargarse de Archive.org el libro mencionado cuya portada encabeza mi texto. Gracias a ambos, y mirad cuantas cosas me habéis hecho repasar buscando info, estimulan mentes!

Note: This is part of a series of posts dedicated to "adult entertainment" in all its forms. HERE'S what we've seen so far from the second season. If you missed the first, click HERE.

After the counterculture of the mid-1960s, glam soon followed, bringing with it a new cultural field, and a few years later, punk arrived with that great explosion of energy. These movements continued to renew themselves every two or three years, but in 1995, instead of a counterculture, Britpop arrived. It wasn't a genuine cultural movement, but rather a resurgence of the British indie groups of the 1960s and 1970s.

Tras la contracultura de mediados de los años 60 vino poco después el glam que trajo consigo un nuevo campo cultural y unos años más tarde llegó el punk con esa gran explosión de energía. Esos movimientos siguieron renovándose cada dos o tres años, pero en 1995 en vez de contracultura llegó el britpop. No era un movimiento cultural genuino, sino que era un resurgimiento de los grupos indie británicos de los años 60 y 70.

Later, when the internet emerged and we began to understand how society was going to change, we realized we had arrived, that we were in the future. It wasn't the future we expected, and we didn't understand it. So, culturally, we decided to stagnate. We decided to reiterate and repeat the culture that was already familiar to us in the 20th century. And since then, there has been no counterculture. In fact, you could say we haven't had any authentic culture from this point on.

Posteriormente, cuando surgió internet y empezamos a entender cómo iba a cambiar la sociedad, nos dimos cuenta de que habíamos llegado, de que estábamos en el futuro. No era el futuro que esperábamos y no lo entendíamos. Así que culturalmente decidimos estancarnos. Decidimos reiterar y repetir la cultura que ya nos era familiar en el siglo 20. Y desde entonces no ha habido contracultura. De hecho, podríamos decir que no hemos tenido ninguna cultura auténtica a partir de este punto.

We need counterculture so that our ordinary culture doesn't stagnate. I have the feeling that the current tsunami of superhero movies is not doing our culture any good. In 2016, the year Britain voted for Brexit and the United States elected what appears to be a Nazi buffoon, six of the 12 highest-grossing films were superhero films.

Necesitamos la contracultura para que nuestra cultura ordinaria no se estanque. Tengo la sensación de que el actual tsunami de las películas de superhéroes no hace bien a nuestra cultura. En 2016, año en que Gran Bretaña votó por el brexit y en el que Estados Unidos eligió a lo que parece ser un bufón nazi, seis de las 12 películas más taquilleras eran de superhéroes.

This is bad news for culture. If we have this infantilization, this refusal to grow up, to accept the responsibilities of the adult world, we live in a complicated world, and that's frightening. We don't want to admit that we are now the generation in charge of the world. So we retreat into these power fantasies, which I've hated since I grew out of childhood and now seem dangerous and toxic to me. I think they're really damaging to human culture and imagination, and I think ultimately, we could describe them as the white supremacy of the dominant race's dreams. - End transcription

Son malas noticias para la cultura, si tenemos esta infantilización, este rechazo a madurar, a las responsabilidades del mundo adulto, vivimos en un mundo complicado y eso asusta. No queremos admitir que ahora somos la generación a cargo del mundo. Así que nos retiramos hacia esas fantasias de poder, que odio desde que salí de la infancia y ahora me parecen peligrosas y tóxicas. Creo que realmente están dañando la cultura y la imaginación humana y creo que a fin de cuentas, podríamos describirlas como la supremacía blanca de los sueños de la raza dominante. -Fin de transcripción.

What's this? Some unprocessed statements, still? From the moment they appear in a source that was a mini-clip from one of these mini-series for the French channel ARTE. I'm offering it to you in English with the French subtitles it came with. As I told you recently, I didn't know what to do with it transcribed. It was meant to emphasize the point about art as a provocateur, but it seems that, knowingly or not, Moore brings up the hauntology we saw a little while ago. And without deciding whether to use it as a quote to develop one topic or another, I end up publishing it as is, and another topic comes up: how someone who is called the best writer of superhero comics criticizes the cultural fixation with superhero movies. And it's not exactly an unsubstantiated rant; you've already read it or seen it enough to agree with me on that.

The so-called Mothman is a cryptozoological being (which is a way of saying that it's a being that is said to be seen in the manner of legendary beings) that became a national hit in the US last century when a book was dedicated to it, apart from the local news about it in West Virginia, which wasn't exactly a busy, prosperous, or news-rich place. UFOs and cattle mutilation are involved, by the way; and today the town where it was seen is a small tourist spot for that reason. It came to light because of the movie that was made.

At the beginning of the century, and for some reason I can't imagine, the rights to the aforementioned book, written by a ufologist and former illusionist (and, I believe, an erotic hypnotist), were purchased. Richard Gere starred in the Mothman´s film and was heavily involved in the production. The fact that he was in the film explains why someone would risk millions of dollars to make it. And only the fact that Gere was personally interested in its supposedly non-fictional original story can explain why he got into this. I've always suspected Gere was my mother's secret crush, so we watched the movie as a family before the end of the 2000s, thinking it was a romantic film. It wasn't, but it had great music, and I became interested in the subject when I was a dark, impressionable goth.

The US almost completely forgot about the Mothman when Watergate hit shortly after, but decades later, the movie resurrected its pop mythic side. If you can touch a pop myth like (hopefully) David Bowie, that's one thing; when it's something like Bigfoot, and they claim to see it, but you never see it or take a good picture of it, we're dealing with a cultural phantasmagoria. However, NOT the kind I study because it's not sexual… in principle.

The pop or phantasmagoria resurrection, of course, leads to new sightings. The last ones, as far as I know (I haven't done much research), are in Washington, DC. But you don't have to see or touch them to build myth and phantasmagoria, as happens with the ones I do study… This century, people are starting to say, without any source I could find, that he was sighted before the nuclear accident in Ukraine in the late 1980s, and YouTubers are spitting from somewhere that he was seen this century before another serious accident in China (if you're going to make something up, if you place it in a place where less information can be obtained, even better). And so the myth of the Mothman as a kind of harbinger of bad news that no one hears, which comes directly from the interpretation given to him in the movie, is further fueled. During the 2000s, he inspired urban legends, fake photos, and certain forms of the first creepypastas. Who knows if his constant presence, so as not to be seen, practically never gave ideas to Slenderman himself. It could end there, but when Amazon's weird erotica with non-human beings starts to develop (I should definitely write an article about that), they run out of dinosaurs to use and increasingly resort to mythological? Cryptozoological? More niche beings. And that's where phantasmagoria seems to have its sexual side (heavens!).