Oracle of Distraction

I have a lot of WWII era Life Magazines and Saturday Evening Posts. I came across a huge stack of them years ago for just a few bucks and snatched them up. I've gotten so much use out of them over the years--in collages, decoupage projects, and all kinds of stuff. Every now and then, I'll open one and get lost in it.

I love everything about the magazines, the typefaces, illustrations, strange rhetoric, advertisements, the weird wartime propaganda pieces, and even the physical paper itself.

Aside from these things, though, there seems to always be some kind of pertinent and unifying theme to the words in the ads and titles I come across. The other day, when I was tidying up my office I started flipping through one of the Saturday Evening Posts and the oracle quality seemed so significant and quaint enough that I snapped some photos of some things that seemed relevant to me right now.

Tonight I started to edit some photos and found the images. I'm realizing now it's akin to the experience of having some ultra hilarious or revealing sequence of events take place in a dream and at the first twilight state of wakefulness you are certain the profound nature of it all will solve everything or at least there's that feeling that it all just really matters.

I'm realizing I get really pulled into the magazines. A looking glass kind of experience. And that must account for the slightly altered and introspective state I experience. I used to do this as a kid, too. I would focus on images in magazines and books to the point I felt like I was a part of them. It's hard to say exactly why certain images struck me--some were psychologically terrifying, some were an idealized, beautiful interior. I was always all about really strange, magical looking houses. Most of the images were in old and antiquated publications, too. 30-40 years on, I still have so many of those images internalized, and I'm there often.

I've lost a lot of that sense of idealism or fetishism, probably due to a million factors, and it's probably healthy and natural. But images like these from the magazines bring back those feeling of stepping into the scenes.