Phil Estes An Excerpt from Souther
Bobby tries to forget the nineties. He has had a number of early Gen-X friends, all good ones—again it could be a banging funeral if he doesn’t do anything stupid. Listening to this shit, sometimes, from older friends. “We felt like it was the sixties,” was a mantra he heard either directly or paraphrased—the gist—when he’d go out with some of them. They had long hair and John Lennon glasses. Now they wear polos tucked in khakis and embrace the personal story; what’s your story? “I persevered after I got the allowance cut off.” “I want to have an abortion so I can see how it truly feels.” “The perfect partnership of the public and the private, that’s the future.” “Narrative is back, man.” “How do you think you’ll read tenure-track when you’re so ideological? We’re past that.” Where their memories of the Clintonian are faded polaroids of house parties at Wesleyan or Rice, Bobby’s was something vaguely foreboding. He was born in the shadow of Reagan, sort of in between. That doesn’t make him a unique critic of any generation, just out of place. What he remembers fondly are the late eighties up until 1991, which sit with him like watching old videotapes from that period—you know, the image that is somehow cloudy but sharp, thanks to the inability of beta and VHS to pick up more than four shades of shadow, that cloudiness making blues and reds brighter and dominating, faces pixelated and not analog on a tight zoom. When Bobby worked through his doctorate, he read Caldwell’s take on the televisual image of this period. With the technology so low yet electronic, a maker instead opted for flooding the image with as much as possible in a 4:3 frame, a sort of simple trick to hide depth. But depth, mind you, comes from the flood. Layered in Amiga graphics and a slow moving camera jarred with quick cuts, it all stacks on each other and you have to look at all of it. Sort of abstract expressionism. So when he plays old Cleveland Browns games uploaded to Youtube while he cleans the apartment or sits around, profoundly bullshitting, it’s because of this. To take him back. Bobby has other siblings younger than him, but that doesn’t matter much. During this late eighties to 1991 blur, or whatever, his dad sent him to his grandparents, Joneses, in Farmland every break. Only him there, watching ESPN on an old smoke damaged, but always clean, couch covered by an orange and brown afghan. Grandmother Jones was named after Carmen, the opera. Him and Blanche finally saw a production of it in Bereaveville. A co-worked had season tickets and couldn’t go. That Carmen couldn’t get high enough on any of the notes—even he could see that—and the older donors knew too, but they’d still stand up and clap and bravo in that hollow way that seems distinctly Southern. Carmen Jones never really cared for that one; he listened to the Mikado with her on an old record and she laughed at all the jokes while Bobby tried to laugh to, not being sure of what was funny or not. “You don’t have to laugh if you don’t get it,” she told him. 22