Living in the past

So, obviously I'm a bit obsessed with the 90s at the moment.  My current read (Everyone Loves Our Town, a history of grunge) is ace; so absorbing that I am almost believing I'm in early-90s Seattle.  It's a disappointment every time I look up and see noughties Leicester around me, I can tell you.  As a result, I've been collecting things to maintain my delusion that I'm a flannel-wearing teenager in America circa 1992 just that bit longer.

In my 'to read' pile I have Girl by Blake Nelson, a novel about a teenager discovering alternative culture in Portland, Oregon in the early 90s.  I read it years ago (having bought it for about 10p in a charity shop in South Africa) and loved it because it reminded me of My So-Called Life.  The recent publication of a sequel, Dream School, has prompted me to do some re-reading.  Also in the stack are the memoir by Throwing Muses' Kristin Hersh, Rat Girl (published as Paradoxical Undressing in the UK), and Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life.

I have also been having a lovely time crafting a Spotify playlist to accompany all this reading: listen here and let me know what I've missed off.

My Band T-Shirt is a great blog where people submit stories related to... well, you can probably guess.  Funny, nostalgia-filled and moving, there are a number of grunge-related tales on there.  The Hole one only served to reaffirm my love for Courtney; the one about The Pixies seeming to follow a theme of band t-shirts leading to marriage.  Hmm, I'm still waiting for my Sonic Youth tee to attract me a mate.

It's embarrassing how much I love Reality Bites (and especially Janeane Garofalo's character, Vickie, who, with her little black book beside the bed, sarcastic wit and red lipstick seemed to me the very apotheosis of womanhood when I was a teen).  Set in Austin in the early 90s, it's a flannel shirt-filled nostalgic delight and will make a good companion piece to Singles in an early 90s film fest that I have planned for next week.