webmama
As below, Haley Barbour’s dreamy nostalgia for pre-civil rights Mississippi is not “false nostalgia,” but it is a rather insidious false memory–the kind of misunderstanding of history that should probably bar one from becoming a serious presidential candidate, but probably won’t. (An editorial in the Times calls it “the faulty memory all too common among [...]
2010: The Year of 90s Nostalgia, possibly, maybe?
At The Awl, Josh Kurp writes about what VH1’s shows “I Love the 80s” and “I Love the 90s” did for our memories of those decades—basically, he argues, they undermined and falsified and replaced the truth of what we actually experienced. Revisiting them recently, he also discovered that the shows had less actual content than [...]
paint’s peeling
Some repairs to the bathroom revealed these cross-sections of the many, many layers of paint that have been applied to the walls over the years. I think they’re kind of beautiful.
(Um, apparently I took the month of November off?)
Jack Shafer looks at how Boomers dominate the media, and when this might shift: “By sheer force of numbers, boomers quickly toppled the martini-drinking, WW II generation and substituted their cultural references. In recent years they’ve repelled the next generations—let’s call them the post-boomers for lack of [...]
at the drive-in
Fall clichés are my favorite kind. Every year, sometime in October, I have to get out of the city for a couple of days and smell the air and hear the crunch of leaves under my feet and get my first shiver and all of that. Lately, on top of the usual seasonal clichés, there’s [...]
My grandmother’s recipes, meticulously filed and organized. I wanted to take better, more careful pictures of them, but I didn’t have my good camera with me and there wasn’t really time anyway, so they went on the carpet by the door to the balcony, and I did what I could.
The new Urban Outfitters catalog came in the mail yesterday, and the self-conscious over-the-top hipster-ness of the whole operation is even more blinding than usual. Typically, the catalogs feature artsy photographs of waifish girls/women wearing a collection of clothing that is about one-third nice and/or interesting, with the remainder being alternately horrendous, deranged and/or laughable. [...]
In this trailer for the forthcoming movie Flipped: 50’s hits, kids on bikes, sage father figures, and a voiceover that says, “Director Rob Reiner takes you back to the most unforgettable time of your life.” Apparently the movie also won “the Heartland Truly Moving Picture Award” (get it?).
Ah, yes, Rob Reiner longs for a sweeter, [...]