Imaginus

Does anyone else remember the Imaginus poster sale?


http://www.imaginus.ca/


It was a massive travelling print & poster sale that used to visit university campuses. Usually it hit this neck of the woods in early fall, if I remember correctly. They usually set-up business in the student union building or cafeteria and it was huge! They had posters of pretty much anything you could think of: fine art, music, nature, fantasy, celebrities, almost any movie poster you could think of. The selection was amazing and although they usually had everything sorted by category you could easily spend hours flipping through searching for something that fit your obscure tastes -- and you usually found it!


Recently I got thinking about those Imaginus sales and about my love affair with posters. In my youth I was quite a connoisseur of posters and my walls were usually "wallpapered" with them. Even at a very young age I remember having posters in my bedroom. The first I remember having was one of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman that my mother gave me. I don't remember necessarily being interested in that show; in retrospect I suspect it was my mother's way of making a subtle feminist statement (remember, Wonder Woman was on the cover of the first issue of Ms. magazine.) Unfortunately, I was too young to appreciate that and I remember well the fate of that poster: jumping up & down on the bed with a handful of crayons I scribbled all over it. Suffice to say my I got in trouble for that little stunt.



The posters changed with my tastes. Usually they reflected movies and tv shows that I liked at the time: E.T., Return of the Jedi, The Greatest American Hero. I even had a Shaun Cassidy (the cuter of "The Hardy Boys") poster that came with one of his records that was handed-down to me from one of my brother's female friends. One early favourite poster was a Raiders of the Lost Ark poster which showed Indy kicking up the dust with his bullwhip. Later on the posters got more and more about "cute boys" and rock bands. A lot of things on my walls were torn out of magazines but also big, full-sized posters too. I was really "into" The Police at the time (Sting seemed less douchey in the 80s!) so I had a lot of them up there...until they were replaced by punks like The Sex Pistols, who were in turn replaced by my greatest musical love, The Smiths. I had a lot of pin-ups torn out of Smash Hits magazine on my walls. Sometimes I just put things up because I liked the aesthetics of it, and didn't necessarily know who the band or actor was. Later into my teens my tastes got geekier and my walls reflected it: Monty Python, comic characters like Wolverine and The Joker, and of course, Star Trek.




Some of them I wish I still had but most of those posters were destroyed or given away to friends over the years. But I do still own a good number of them. I keep most of them in a triangular cardboard mailing tube. The other day I got thinking about some of those posters so I retrieved the tube from my parents' basement. This morning I looked at what was in there. Some of it was cringe-worthy but some of it is still pretty cool. There's a rather unique looking pastel pencil drawing of David Bowie from 1984 that's pretty sweet. A Jack Nicholson from The Shining ("Here's Johnny!") b/w poster. Several Morrissey and The Smiths posters, including some presumably now rare-ish "tour" posters (one of which, from The Queen Is Dead, I still have framed on my studio wall.) And like a lot of young people, I went through a James Dean phase: I have an extremely large, "colourized", floor-to-ceiling James Dean poster that I got off a friend's sister; a b/w shot of him on a motorcycle; and a classic movie poster from "Rebel Without A Cause" (which looks pretty good; I'm considering putting this one up in the studio too!). Oh, and a ton of classic Star Trek posters. It seems my tastes were pretty bi-polar, running the gamut from cool to nerd.


What were some of the posters you had on your walls?