I love Ellen Lupton’s piece on the Times website today about heirlooms and legacies. (Ever wondered what an heirloom chicken wing might look like? Go find out.)
Also in the realm of fading/obsolete/nostalgic, the Times recently took a look at cigarette machines, along with the dwindling number of small old movie houses that are apparently “little changed from the days when itinerant projectionists packed their automobile trunks with reels of film and hit the road,” and are often volunteer-staffed by Boomers, “the last picture show generation on the plains.”
On the occasion of a new exhibit of Norman Rockwell’s work (weirdly, from the collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg), Deborah Solomon finds that Rockwell’s “cheerful America has lately acquired a startling relevance both inside and outside the art world, in part because it symbolizes an era when connectivity did not require a USB cable.” Ah yes, also “a world where Americans convene in old-fashioned drugstores and barbershops, conducting themselves with a sense of integrity and fair play, with gumption and whimsy.” Those were the days! Rockwell illustrated “America before the fall, or at least before searing divisions in our government and general population shattered any semblance of national solidarity.”
Similarly interested in myth-making (though with even less of a grasp on reality) is Fortune editor at large Patricia Sellers, who is just shocked to discover that members of generation Y don’t care about having careers, prioritizing “fun, innovation, social responsibility, and time off” instead of Boomer values like “pay, benefits, stability and prestige.” The commenters pretty much handed her patronizing ass back to her, as did Maria Bustillos at The Awl.
After going to see Tuscadero, a band she last saw when she well before she could drink, Emily Gould offers her “very brief and Internet-friendly explanation for the ongoing explosion of 90s nostalgia, and why people have such complicated responses to blog posts that seem, at first glance, to say nothing more than ‘remember when?’”:
It’s hard to tell whether we feel more or less old than people in their late 20s have felt in previous eras. We keep hearing that we’ve lived through the profoundest cultural paradigm shift w/r/t how information and art are disseminated since the invention of the printing press, but also a lot of stuff is the same as it was when we were teenagers…. It’s hard not to be nostalgic for the world as it was 15 years ago, especially because at first glance today’s world seems so similar, and because it is so different. Underneath, everything is different. The biggest difference is that the sources of underlying difference — everything underlying everything, really, information itself — seems more available now. All veneers seem easily peel-back-able in a way they didn’t, in 1995. Are they, really, though? Or are we just more willing to accept the first result, the easiest answer?
In his smart, lovely piece about searching for the real diner depicted in Edward Hopper’s famous “Nighthawks” painting, Jeremiah Moss (of Vanishing New York) concludes:
Over the past years, I’ve watched bakeries, luncheonettes, cobbler shops and much more come tumbling down at an alarming rate, making space for condos and office towers. Now the discovery that the “Nighthawks” diner never existed, except as a collage inside Hopper’s imagination, feels like yet another terrible demolition, though no bricks have fallen.
It seems the longer you live in New York, the more you love a city that has vanished. For those of us well versed in the art of loving what is lost, it’s an easy leap to missing something that was never really there.
Flavorwire looks at hipster America’s ten favorite movies (or some of them, anyway), many of them nostalgia-reliant, and suggests we get over them–not the worst linkbait I’ve ever seen, but still annoying.
In related news, A.O. Scott recently revisited a beloved movie that didn’t make that list, but easily could have: Dazed and Confused. “The film doesn’t have overt historical references,” he says in the Critics’ Pick video, “which just makes it feel that much more real.”
And at Slate, Dana Stevens finds herself a fan of the Grease sing-along. “In a summer of sequels and remakes and all manner of pop-culture pillage, you have to give Paramount respect: Rather than trying to ‘reboot’ Grease for the new millennium, the company has simply dusted off the top-grossing musical of all time, slapped some words under the songs, and sent it back out on the market to reap whatever profit it can.” She also notes that “Thirty-two years after its original release, Grease has multiple layers of nostalgia to strip away in order to win over a generation that (like every new generation) is mercilessly un-nostalgic,” especially considering that this is “a musical about the mythical 1950s as filtered through the idealizing lens of the 1970s.”
Meanwhile, the Vintage Ads blog is asking readers to choose which of five old ads is the most sexist. It’s a tough decision.