Vita Chronicles I
Vita Chronicles I
On Jim Morrison, Tumblr nostalgia, & the passing of time
In 1978, the remaining members of The Doors reunited briefly to record the band’s ninth and final studio album. This album would be an homage to Jim Morrison, rock & roll’s sexy, little Rimbaud, or “a drunken buffoon posing as a poet,” depending on who you ask. Roughly forty minutes long, An American Prayer set Morrisson’s spoken word poetry against original music by Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore. The album was poorly received from a critical standpoint, but it became one of the best-selling spoken word albums of all time.
As a fourteen year-old, I found Morrison’s poetry electrifying. It was esoteric, languid, and illicit. I had no idea what he was waxing about, for the most part. But not “getting it” made it cooler. Morrison was also very hot, so his trivial and conspicuous horniness felt warranted. He read Aldous Huxley and William Blake, which made him an intellectual. Listening to Morrison’s poetry made me, by extension, an intellectual too. As I mined The Doors and Jim Morrison for influence, I felt a burgeoning vocabulary develop, composed by new language, cinema, music, image, and narrative.
When I created my Tumblr page in 2011, I based my custom URL on a Morrison poem, “To Come of Age.” The title of my page was named after a WU LYF song, “Concrete Gold.” The welcome banner on my page read, “maybe we don’t see ourselves the way we really are.” This is something Russell, Stillwater’s lead guitarists in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, tells Jeff Bebe, charismatic frontman, after Rolling Stone’s fact checker sends them a version of their cover story. The article, written by 15 year-old child prodigy turned rock journalist, William Miller, opened with an iconic scene of the rock band suspended thousands of feet in the air as they’re all about to die.
I was one of the thousands of people who returned to their Tumblrs during the spring lockdowns of 2020, as Rebecca Jennings reported then. In her 2020 piece for Vox, Jennings spoke to young adults on TikTok, nostalgia experts, and Tumblr employees to elaborate on the sudden urge to scour the digital graveyard of our past online selves. Jennings reveals, among other things, the redolent power of a digital subculture, which resulted in a “longing for what the music and images and styles evoked, or what it felt like to experience them when they were new.”
About a month ago, I attended Tavi Gevinson’s one-woman show / monologue / powerpoint presentation at a small venue in Brooklyn, where she talked at length about teenagehood, memory, the internet, and “main character energy.” Gevinson, who came of age online and created a digital subculture of its own, discussed the role Tumblr played in forging community. To Gevinson, Tumblr treated fandom as a kind of identity politic.
Gevinson’s take on fandom-as-politic on Tumblr speaks to the platform’s strengths as a locus of shared sensibility, hyper-specific and universally accessible at the same time . As Jennings notes, the culture industry is much different now than it was from 2009-2014. As were fandoms, online communities, and web voyeurism(s). According to Jennings, these “were a hobby you tended to enjoy in enclosed circles, not publicly, and nobody outside of those circles really seemed to care all that much.”
Recently, individuals at Vogue, editors at Dirt, The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka, and other Twitter personalities have discussed the re-emergence of Tumblr as a trend. There’s a sartorial element to consider – flannel, American Apparel tennis skirts, the proverbial tights-underneath. There’s also an element of visual nostalgia – the hipstamatic, Lord-Kelvin-ized Instagram posts that dominated our feeds in 2011. Watershed albums that predicated entire personas, such as Lana del Rey’s Born to Die, are turning 10. Finally, there’s an element of cultural-nostalgia-at-large, illustrated by the resurgence of indie sleaze, an aesthetic that is best captured by the eponymous Instagram account, which features images from the scene back then – Cory Kennedy at a party shot by The Cobra Snake; Regina Spektor wearing a men’s tie and a red skirt handing Julian Casablancas a rose; the cover for a Maison Kitsuné compilation CD, among other ephemera.
For the most part, Tumblr forged itself as a personal digital journal, a platform we used to chronicle our tastes – whether inherent or borrowed – through images, songs, and New York Times article haikus we re-blogged. If we were lucky, an original post would garner many notes. Perhaps you received many inquiries, comments, or a lascivious message via the AMA that was fixed on your page. If Tumblr has become a kind of digital metonym for the aughts, it’s only because the platform became culturally obsolete. People stopped posting, almost freezing pages in time, .gifs of Sky Ferreira convulsing on the screen.
If Tumblr’s an artifact of a bygone era, what marks its aesthetic resurrection? What is Tumblr, as a content platform, personal diary, and digital archive-at-large recalling for us now? In her article, Jennings paraphrases writer Brian Rafferty when she mentions that “in the future, our cultural nostalgia will be less tied to specific artworks or ideas and more about the technologies on which they spread.” This suggests that our collective nostalgia for Tumblr relates to how we interacted with the platform then versus how we interact with it now. But, as we know, cultural artifacts are at the mercy of those who happen upon them, regardless of their kinship to it. Are we collectively longing, as Jennings argues, for “a high-contrast black-and-white photo of Doc Martens in a puddle overlaid with a quote about being too much or feeling too much?”
“A high-contrast black-and-white photo of Doc Martens in a puddle overlaid with a quote about being too much or feeling too much” is a photo I saw in my Tumblr feed in 2012; it is a photo that seems like a jab at an era; it is pathos that will be recreated on TikTok.
Returning to Tumblr in 2020, amid global lockdowns that put time on standstill, is different from returning to the platform in 2022. Time has warped our sense of nostalgia or changed our relationship with it. Several totems of popular culture that had a chokehold over the visual repository of Tumblr are disgraced. Ariel Pink and John Maus stormed the capital. Terry Richardson is irrelevant and gross. Woody Allen is, well, you know. However, Gawker is back, puncturing a hole in dizzying discourse that has reigned the internet for the past five or so years. The podcast How Long Gone, which unsurprisingly launched amid the 2020 lockdowns, just had Lena Dunham on as a guest. Cat Marnell, who wrote a best-selling book in 2017 and recently launched BEAUTYSHAMBLES on Patreon, just called Julia Fox “a Camille Paglia wet-dream.” If it was 2011, I’d probably edit a picture of Fox, overlaid with large text that read “a Camille Paglia wet-dream” and post it on my feed.
I was between the ages of 14-19 during the aughts. I published my last post on Tumblr in 2015, a few months after I moved to the United States from Mexico City. When I scoured my personal page for intimations of self-knowledge in 2020, I saved images to post as lockdown-era Instagram mood boards. When I returned to it in 2021, I screen-grabbed all of my narrative posts, which I found awkward and performatively vulnerable, even though I knew they were sincere. I recovered my login information in December, during a 10-day COVID-induced fever dream. I was comforted to see that the platform was still bursting with ass.
The Tumblr we return to is not so different from the Tumblr of years past. The platform itself is a visual goldmine. Sure, Tumblr feels like a digital product of the 2009-2014 era (though Tumblr was founded in 2007), but much of its appeal was its encyclopedic collection of movies, modernist poetry, close-ups of pre-Raphaelite paintings, relatable stills of Bubbles from the Powerpuff Girls weeping on the floor to a caption that reads “SENSITIVE.” Tumblr was also didactic and informed the cultural lexicon of thousands. Similarly to how my Jim Morrison fandom once turned me on to novel language, cinema, music, image, upon following a few tags, Tumblr and its busy community of creators dispensed cultural wisdom – or quips – instantly.
Upon my return to Tumblr in the past few months, I noticed the platform continues to be quickly responsive to novelty. For instance, I recently followed the # Gerri Kellman tag. A day after its release, a search for The Hand of God already rendered thousands of images, .gifs, quotable bits over images and .gifs. However, as Tumblr continues to absorb artifacts from the larger cultural orb, it feels untethered from time. Time on Tumblr, like the myriad of images, quotes, and videos it churns out, appears stacked and impressionistic. What is it about the evocative power of Tumblr that we ultimately miss? In his poem, “To Come of Age,” Morrison asks if we can “resolve the past – / lurking jaws joints of time.” Perhaps what we long for is not the “high-contrast black-and-white photo of Doc Martens in a puddle overlaid with a quote about being too much or feeling too much,” but rather a feeling that time has passed at all.
These reflections were inspired by an essay I wrote for Ben Tapeworm’s Almanac, which you can read here. I also shamelessly sent it to Tavi Gevinson after her show.
Notes from the mental miscellanea:
Daisy Alioto wrote about the return of indie sleaze and performative celebrity friendships for Dirt.
Fellas, Jim Morrison is IN and hating The Doors is lame. This a delicious piece on Jim by Eve Babitz that appeared on Esquire March 1991.
The aughts were a weird era for music. Pitchfork’s own Ryan Schreiber’s got the goods.
This Tumblr account was formative for me.
Get yourself a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket, an avocado, some tortillas, canned chipotles and have tacos for dinner tonight.