Arts
Salutations and consolations, kiddos! Welcome to the VERY FIRST issue of In Lieu Of! I’m Dixby Karavaggio, your humble nostalgia podcaster, broadcasting from a dilapidated ranch outside of Home, Pennsylvania, here to serve you a heaping helping of my favorite things from the 1980s and 90s (and maybe some stuff from this century, too). We call these musings issues, audio serials, half-comic book and half-news article. I’m interested to see how some of my favorite movies, TV shows, and video games fit in to, inform, or maybe clash with the larger history. These issues may end up being exhaustive or super-focused or some combination of the two. Whether or not you agree with my takes on the material, I definitively want to hear from you, kiddos, in the comments, in the reviews, and in my inbox: dixby@inlieuofpod.com. In today’s issue I look at the US’s culture of cosmetics, beauty, and body transformation in the 1980s. And how Jack Nicholson’s Joker—a psychopath from the 1989 summer blockbuster, Batman—exploited the concerns over what we do to our bodies and the consequences of what we apply to our faces. In lieu of a critical look at our country’s obsession with makeup and plastic surgery at the turn of the 90s… how did we get Tim Burton’s Batman?