By webmama on March 13, 2011

Does it matter if future generations don’t understand the pop cultural references embedded in today’s TV shows? At Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz ponders the enduring question of timeliness versus timelessness in light of TV’s current mode, “Reference-o-Rama.” Shows like The Simpsons and 30 Rock, he writes, are “footnote shows” (meaning, they’ll need to be accompanied by endless footnotes and explanations when viewed at a distance): “amusing and perhaps hilarious right now, but likely to be dated in five years, quaint in 10, and borderline impenetrable in 20. Or inadvertently poignant. Or chilling.”

The million-plus members of the Facebook group “I Want My 90’s Nickelodeon Back” are beside themselves with joy at this announcement: “TeenNick will dust off old faves like Rugrats, Kenan & Kel, Pete & Pete, The Amanda Show, All That and Clarissa and air them in a new midnight-to-2 a.m. programming block dubbed (appropriately enough) The ’90s Are All That.” And MTV is bringing Beavis and Butthead back for new episodes.

Sarah McLachlan has come to terms with the fact that Lilith Fair is over: “[B]ringing the same thing back last year really didn’t make any sense, in retrospect, without due diligence being done on how women have changed. Because in 12 years, women have changed a lot. Their expectations have changed, the way they view the world has changed, and that was not taken into consideration, which I blame myself for….It lived in a time and place and it probably should have stayed there.”

The Times talks to Andi O’Connor, a Colorado blogger who has had two of her homes burn down–once when she was in eighth grade, once at age 50–about how losing everything gives you a strange and ambivalent kind of clean slate:

I was talking to David Barrett, the architect [of her new home], the other day and I said, “You know, I collect sea glass from beaches, I’ve been collecting it for years. Maybe we could do some of that in the bathroom.” And then I stopped and I remembered. Oh, that’s gone. I don’t have a sea glass collection anymore. It’s been months, and, like my mother said, every day you reach for something that isn’t there. Every day you wake up and you remember something.

Jessica Grose reflects on going through her childhood papers and mementos as her parents prepare to sell the house she grew up in: “In the end, I decided to throw away pretty much everything. It was easier to come to terms with the past when I didn’t have to look at it.“

On the occasion of the release of the Topher Grace-starring 80’s nostalgia movie Take Me Home Tonight, Mary Elizabeth Williams would like the remind you that the 80’s kind of sucked:

[C]ould somebody even try to make an ’80s period piece that doesn’t just whip the entire decade into one Rubik’s cube-shaped blender? The film’s opening scene takes place in a Suncoast video festooned with posters of Madonna’s 1984 “Like a Virgin” album and 1985’s “Back to the Future,” and features a prominent rack of Relax shirts. Relax, for Christ’s sake. Nobody would be caught dead Relaxing in 1988. You might think that sounds nitpicky, but when they make the movie about 2011 and the characters are talking about Friendster and dancing around to “Milkshake,” you’ll care, Millennials. Oh, how you’ll care.

She also points out that of of the most popular movies in 1988 (the year in which Take Me Home Tonight is set) was Dirty Dancing, a movie that was itself awfully (necessarily?) simplistic in its portrayal of 1963 (though it was and remains awesome).

Alden Ford writes about what it’s like to watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High for the first time, in light of a personal high school experience that was not much more than “a benign, slightly uncomfortable blur…sort of pointless to define, let alone romanticize.” For him, that movie (and others like Clueless and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) are obvious fantasies:

I like that these movies exist, because it gives me a vicarious taste of what I never experienced, seen from a perspective that, in the case of Amy Heckerling’s films, has the proper proportion of nostalgia and irony. And Fast Times is a perfect example. Classic rock, muscle cars, cute girls, pot, sex and fast food jobs. I had none of those things in high school (and wouldn’t until literally years later), but it’s entertaining to watch anyway.

Is the loss of the mercury thermometer worth mourning? Sam Kean wonders. On one hand, mercury is a neurotoxin! On the other, “People grew up using mercury thermometers, and damn it, they want to keep using them.”

Apparently this is enough of a thing to merit having something of a name: “Looking into the past” pictures, where a photo of a place is in the past is held up against the backdrop of the same place now, and re-photographed. Buzzfeed collects a bunch, and whatever you call them, they are transfixing.

Sloane Crosley gets a peek at her old apartment just a week after she moved out, opening the door onto a construction zone: stripped walls, missing kitchen appliances, protruding wires and piles of bricks. It was just a coincidence that she had the chance to witness this firsthand, but since she did, she reflects, “Everything in New York seems to merit preserving. If it’s not historical, it’s personal. If it’s not personal, it’s cultural. But you can’t. You can’t save everything. You just have to pack it up in your brain and take it with you when you go.”

Something that I read somewhere pointed me to this book, Dear Angela: Remembering So-Called Television, which is of course an academic anthology about My So-Called Life. I would like to read this.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged what we talk about when we talk about nostalgia