ARCADE KID (2)
By:
October 11, 2023
We are pleased to present ARCADE KID, a ’90s “drivethru” written, illustrated, and soundtracked by HILOBROW friend Nikhil Singh. Our readers are urged to check out Nikhil’s dystopian psychedelic-noir novel Club Ded (Luna Press, 2020).
The Witchhouse creative community shared a nostalgia for the 90s. At its peak, even the youngest in the scene had had their childhood there (Unless, of course, they were under the age of ten). Like Twin Peaks, a return was unavoidable. Yet, the 90s was a complicated decade. Preceding decades were strikingly idiosyncratic — from a thematic standpoint. But the 90’s was riddled with chameleonic, cultural micro-shifts. Technological and corporate booms. Multiple era-revivals. Most notably, a kaleidoscopic, media-driven resurgence of the 70s. 1988 marked the emergence of a new epoch. Film production had spiked. Due to an explosion in ‘straight to video’ VHS. Experts estimate that perhaps 40% of the media produced in that era did not graduate to newer formats. It became lost forever, surviving in scraps and pockets. Here and there. Collectors dens. Degrading tape. Memory palaces. Astral cities. Ragged memories of the Vestron Video era. Micro-genres rose and fell in those halcyon days. Supernatural Kung-Fu. Femme-bot assassins. Axe-murderer serials. Hundreds of thousands of tropes. A carefully ordered labyrinth of magnetic tape. By 2008, wandering Soho, I passed by the districts legendary video rental outlet. It was closing down. Gutted by DVD and the rise of the internet. I bought boxes of tape. Some priced at only 10p a cassette. In the end, I had so many, there was nowhere to store them. When we moved, my then girlfriend Carmen Incarnadine, left many behind the screen of the Hampstead Everyman cinema. Perhaps, they are still there. Stacked behind junk. Pickled in another universe. Nostalgia, the richest of shores, Mnemosyne’s own personal dumpster truck, asserting its influence over decades of living memory. I recall three, somehow interlinked childhood obsessions: the collection of Science fiction paperbacks with airbrushed covers, the Greek pantheon and recording music videos off the television. It became a challenge to collect music videos, because, despite the usual Top of The Pops programs, there were often fillers between programs, containing one or two gems. I had a system of leaving a Betamax tape on pause for hours, constantly tapping the button so I could capture at a moment’s notice. The tape stretched, lending the music distortion qualities that imprinted themselves onto the music. I would sing along, incorporating these sonic anomalies. Often, I was shocked to hear untarnished versions playing on the radio, finding them too bleached or glary, preferring instead the fuzzy, dragged-out videotapes hoarded in my boxes. I remember taping something about Jun Togawa and becoming lucidly certain that many of these popstar characters had all somehow escaped from mythology or an alien world. They had entered reality and found some way to possess and exist among humans. Alien gods were among us and I still wasn’t clear whether I wanted to exterminate them or join their ranks. Perhaps I was one? All day, I could hear their synthetic themes, bleeding from all the screens and speakers in the world. Passing like a fugue, leaving glassy, edged imprints, denting things irreparably.
NWA remix by the author:
More NIKHIL SINGH at HILOBROW: DREAMING MEDIA (Q&A) | JOURNEY TO IXTLAN | HASHTAG FASHION POLICE PROBLEMS | ILLUMINATE OR DISSIPATE? | HATE ISLAND. ALSO: HADRON AGE SF (2004–2023) | ORIGINAL FICTION at HILOBROW.