Hello friends,
I hope this finds you well. December is here and I’m certain my productivity is about to take a dive until February. It’s the escape time of year, and so this month’s essay is a little bit of that. A dose of nostalgia. It’s something that I love about modern literature, particularly modern Australian literature; its ability to evoke a sense of nostalgia. A shared connection with the characters. Things near forgotten that harbour the power to inject jolts of joy at their mere mentioning. And so, this month, let’s place one foot in the past and the other in the future. Enjoy!
Cheers,
Alia
Gramophones. I’ve never heard a gramophone. Seen them in museums and antique stores, watched them online, but I’ve never stood in a room and listened while one crackles and hums the Fox Trot. I’d like to do that, stand in a room while one plays. Such fascinating little contraptions that spin and sing without a volt of electricity. Gramophones are wound using a crank handle. Wound just like we used to wind car windows; like we still wind a Hills Hoist clothesline.
We wound the windows down like that the night my parents took us to the drive-in to see Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Wound the windows down, reached out to the speakers hung from methodically placed white posts and pulled them in on their coily dial-telephone cords then hooked them over the window glass. Sometimes, you could tune the sound to the FM radio, if you had one, but it only worked half the time.
The crack of a choc-top between your teeth.
That particular drive-in closed not long after.
So gramophones. Even records—their electric descendants—were obsolete by the time I entered the world. Households still clung to their vinyl collections for a decade more, but it was all about cassette tapes in the 80s.
I remember my first Walkman. It was black with white lettering and clipped over a belt, or in my case, the waist of my jeans or on my pocket, but I mostly didn’t clip it to anything and listened to it lying on the top bunk of the small room I shared with my sister. The Walkman was a birthday present from my parents; an actual Sony Walkman, not a cheap imitation like I’d expected if I was to get one at all. Being too young to work, my cassette collection was entirely recorded; songs stripped by holding a cassette recorder against Barry Bissell’s Take 40 Australia on my clock radio. I had one full album, a recorded copy of Paul Simon’s Graceland, which I’m sure my parents got from my uncle. Can’t say the other 8-year-olds of the day were into it, but given my limited choice I listened to it more times than I can remember.
I couldn’t type that sentence without stopping to stream it (it is 2025 after all), so it’s now the soundtrack to this story. The A Side starts with The Boy in the Bubble if you’d like to sing along.
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is a long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
I still have my dad’s old Super 8 camera, you know the ones popular in the 70s that recorded moving pictures onto film. We would wait until it was dark, set the projector up on the coffee table, lift the painting off the wall and squish onto the couch, watching the moving pictures flicker on the wall, a little picture hook in the middle, the tick of the projector, the flash of a red line at the end, the sound of the finished film flapping as it spun.
It was about then that they stopped delivering milk to our front doorstep. No more glass bottles with red or gold aluminium foils.
Do you remember, waterbeds were a thing back then?
By the time we were in high school waterbeds were out. In those years we would go up the street to Video Ezy where my best friend’s dad was the store manager and weave our way through shoulder-height walls of VHS tapes to the New Release section to see if the latest blockbuster was in. Often, there’d be a ‘Due Back Soon’ card slipped in the plastic cover, sending us off into the forgotten aisles to stare at films we’d already seen while eying other lurkers suspiciously.
5-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks that were actually floppy
3-and-a-half-inch disks that weren’t
CDs
DVDs
iPods
Beepers
Reverse charge calls
Fags—those little white musk stick lollies with red tips at one end so kids could look like we were smoking. We used to get them in little rectangular boxes at the swimming pool.
My friends and I would go to the cinema a lot when I was a teen. Even into my 20s. Sometimes, we’d drive to Castle Hill and buy tickets from a blonde girl who would shoot us killer deadpan sarcasm through the hole in the pane of the box office window. She’s the only ticket seller I can remember. A Hollywood star now. I guess there’s a reason some people become famous.
But that was half a lifetime ago. It’s been years since I’ve been to the cinema. I, like many, watch most films at home these days. And I’ve got this urgent feeling that I need to go, that I need to take my children now so that they can look back when they’re my age and remember what it felt like; so they know the dramatic sensation of the lights, the surround sound and the darkness, so they remember the bubble-gum pocked carpet and stained seats, the popcorn, the cacklers and coughers and talkers and chip-packet rustlers. So they can feel the texture of the moment, the choc-top crunch between their teeth.
It’s a somewhat irrational overreaction. Cinemas may be closing, but they won’t all disappear overnight; the decline will take years and there will always be those that survive on niche or novelty alone. Plus, kids need somewhere to go without their parents. But my itch to go is a recognition rearing up from the depths of my consciousness that cinemas are a thing of the past. Like the ping of dial-up internet or the annual ‘surprise’ of finding the Yellow Pages on your doorstep, the tables have turned. Films, I’m sure, will remain. We are the storytelling species after all. But from here they’ll largely be made for streaming, and then… well, who knows what innovation will come next.
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry
That’s it from me for 2025. Thank you for your support over the past year—I truly appreciate it. I wish you all a wonderful festive season and I’ll see you back here bright and bubbly in the New Year.
Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. If you enjoyed this essay, please subscribe on Substack or your favourite podcast app, comment, click the ❤️ button, or share it with someone who would appreciate it. I’ll be back in a month. Until then, keep 💪
