Buddies is an American-themed diner chain of 9 restaurants throughout Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire. The one shown here is in Milton Keynes, located at the Old Stratford roundabout on the A5.
The soundtrack inside every Buddies restaurant is non-stop 80’s-90’s pop. Wall-mounted screens loop VHS footage of New York streets. The walls are covered in bumper stickers, superheroes and Simpsons imagery. The first Buddies opened in Northampton in1981 and all of the restaurants use imagery which creates a stubbornly 80’s-90’s aesthetic.
The Milton Keynes Buddies has a wall graphic of the New York skyline
which includes the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, in part
layered over with portraits of Spiderman and Batman. The
part-concealment (Is the concealment consciously intentional?
Unconsciously intentional? Coincidence?) of the towers means you do have
to look harder to see them, but there they are. The appearance of these
ghostly landmarks is the only suggestion that this soothing, nostalgic
bubble can be intruded on by the complexities and traumas of the outside
world.
Buddies evokes a feeling which at once connected and dislocated from history. It is both familiar enough to feel comforting, like watching Back to the Future for the 100th time, and also strange enough to be described as ‘quirky’ in it’s Google listing. As a small regional chain, it exists in a class of its own. It has strong appeal to families, and is not really comparable to more recent established restaurants which take a more-deconstructed, knowing approach to nostalgia. Buddies sells Budweiser and Miller and I hope they never start selling craft beer.
I did consider for the main body of this post expanding more on the link with 9-11 and a general trend in Vaporwave, and I would argue culture in general to retreat into a nostalgic world which is definitively pre-9-11, i.e. an imagined, virtual 1980’s/1990’s free of the complexities of contemporary life. However it seemed a bit weighty to hang arguments about massive historical and social traumas on a enjoyable restaurant that serves burgers and bottomless coffee, so I’ve included some additional thoughts here.
Mark Fisher writes brilliantly in his book, ‘Ghosts of my Life’ about the general contemporary malaise of ‘Hauntology’, in which the culture of the past seems to haunt the present, with a preponderance of nostalgia in contemporary culture, and a general lack of a sense of the new and dynamic.
Vaporwave music artist 猫 シ Corp. has specifically highlighted the trauma of 9-11 as a turning point in culture, saying that some of his music provides
“an image of a (past) world that we love to escape to because our old world died in 2001…when the Twin Towers were hit on that day in September the old world died. It’s like the whole planet suddenly opened up and changed, [and] not for the better. Gone were the peaceful days.”
猫 シ Corp.’s album NEWS AT 11 hauntingly uses samples of morning news programs from the morning of 9-11 to explore the impossibility of assimilating the trauma into ones worldview, and the instinct to deny it-
“If you listen closely you hear the samples being cut off right before they announce the dreadful event. Like it never happened. Yet it did, but your mind cuts away right before the memory.”
#vaporwaveaesthetic #vapor #vaporwave #aesthetic #buddiesdiner #miltonkeynes #stonystratford #americandiner
Buddies evokes a feeling which at once connected and dislocated from history. It is both familiar enough to feel comforting, like watching Back to the Future for the 100th time, and also strange enough to be described as ‘quirky’ in it’s Google listing. As a small regional chain, it exists in a class of its own. It has strong appeal to families, and is not really comparable to more recent established restaurants which take a more-deconstructed, knowing approach to nostalgia. Buddies sells Budweiser and Miller and I hope they never start selling craft beer.
I did consider for the main body of this post expanding more on the link with 9-11 and a general trend in Vaporwave, and I would argue culture in general to retreat into a nostalgic world which is definitively pre-9-11, i.e. an imagined, virtual 1980’s/1990’s free of the complexities of contemporary life. However it seemed a bit weighty to hang arguments about massive historical and social traumas on a enjoyable restaurant that serves burgers and bottomless coffee, so I’ve included some additional thoughts here.
Mark Fisher writes brilliantly in his book, ‘Ghosts of my Life’ about the general contemporary malaise of ‘Hauntology’, in which the culture of the past seems to haunt the present, with a preponderance of nostalgia in contemporary culture, and a general lack of a sense of the new and dynamic.
Vaporwave music artist 猫 シ Corp. has specifically highlighted the trauma of 9-11 as a turning point in culture, saying that some of his music provides
“an image of a (past) world that we love to escape to because our old world died in 2001…when the Twin Towers were hit on that day in September the old world died. It’s like the whole planet suddenly opened up and changed, [and] not for the better. Gone were the peaceful days.”
猫 シ Corp.’s album NEWS AT 11 hauntingly uses samples of morning news programs from the morning of 9-11 to explore the impossibility of assimilating the trauma into ones worldview, and the instinct to deny it-
“If you listen closely you hear the samples being cut off right before they announce the dreadful event. Like it never happened. Yet it did, but your mind cuts away right before the memory.”
#vaporwaveaesthetic #vapor #vaporwave #aesthetic #buddiesdiner #miltonkeynes #stonystratford #americandiner
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