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what we talk about when we talk about nostalgia
Reviewing Pulino’s, Sam Sifton quotes Richard Price and calls it “Restaurant dressed as theater dressed as nostalgia.”
Liberty Magazine, which ceased publication in 1950, is being revived online—sort of. Robert Whiteman has 1,387 issues worth of Liberty material in his basement, and on a pulpy new website—emblazoned “The Stories Never Die!”—he occasionally highlights old articles that echo current events. “Everything has a beginning, a middle and an end,” Whiteman told the Times. “Liberty’s material is so relevant today it makes me feel, at age 84, that I am at the beginning.” That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but the site explains itself, in part, as “a pop culture time capsule,” which certainly sounds familiar.
As if Asteroids, Battleship, Monopoly, Candyland and the Viewmaster weren’t enough, get ready for Magic 8-Ball: The Movie.
Preserving the world’s disappearing languages is a little like a preemptive strike against nostalgia—if we don’t lose anything, after all, we don’t ever have to be nostalgic for it. This article talks about efforts to preserve endangered languages, and also points out the impossibility of actually preserving everything, and the fact that sometimes (sometimes!) we lose things for a reason.
Weezer pretends that they don’t really like their album that everyone else loves, Pinkerton, but maybe they’re finally confronting the fact that it’s a golden era actually worth revisiting—they’re reissuing it in a “deluxe, expanded edition.”
In the excellent Obit magazine, Kevin Nance’s essay on the closing of a diner that was a Chicago institution starts out as a lovely, if predictable, meditation on losing places that are easy to take for granted, and turns rather heartbreakingly into an obituary of a more personal sort.
How I Met Your Motherboard is the latest memory-obsessed project from Jason Bitner (Found magazine, Cassette From my Ex, which I wrote about here). It collects peoples’ stories from the early days of computing.
Last week, Andrew Potter was on Marketplace talking about his book The Authenticity Hoax. When host Tess Vigeland asked him if there’s ever actually been a time when things were actually pure and authentic, Potter said, “I think not. I think all nostalgia is always nostalgia for the present, so the nostalgia you feel is just simply a projection of your own current unhappiness.” I don’t think nostalgia is always a result of unhappiness, or a projection of it, but it’s worth thinking about instances where that is the case, and the ways the “conspicuous authenticity” Potter talks about in the book (buying organic produce, wearing pre-distressed clothes…) is inspired by some idea of authenticity that never really existed.
And David Hasselhoff misses the old days, when (supposedly) everyone would have thought it was awesome that he was a complete fuck-up. “Back then things were different. Back then every star smoked and drank,” he told The Sun. “Think of Richard Burton or Humphrey Bogart. But nobody scrutinized them. Every kind of consumption was normal.”
on “date night”
A.O. Scott, how I love you:
[T]he word vagina has no intrinsically humorous properties, but it’s uttered here as if believing that it did were sufficient to make it so.
I was just Googling the word “heartbreak” in search of ideas for a headline, and among the sites offering “Heartbroken Quotes, Emo Quotes, Sad Quotes,” “Quotes for Teens on Heartbreak and Breaking Up,” and advice on “How To Mend Your Broken Heart,” there was this little mistranslated gem at iloveindia.com: “How to Sustain Heartbreak.”
Those romantic, never-ending conversations on the phone have stopped abruptly. You seem to have lost a part of you. You just can’t seem to stop thinking about what went wrong between you and your beloved. You are blank and can’t seem to think of anything else, but how to sustain this heartbreak. It has never been easy sustaining heartbreaks especially after a long romantic relation.
The tips the article goes on to offer fall under the heading “Surviving a Heartbreak,” which is kind of a disappointment. I thought for a minute I’d found a online community for people who wanted to prolong their devastating sense of loss.
About halfway through, this Times article about people who take pictures of their food gets all serious:
That some people are keeping photographic food diaries and posting them online does not surprise psychotherapists. “In the unconscious mind, food equals love because food is our deepest and earliest connection with our caretaker,” said Kathryn Zerbe, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders and food fixations at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.
But beware:
Photographing meals becomes pathological…if it interferes with careers or relationships or there’s anxiety associated with not doing it.
I didn’t know before reading this that there are now cameras with special “food” or “cuisine” modes, though I’m not really surprised. Supposedly, they “enable close-up shots with enhanced sharpness and saturation so the food colors and textures really pop.” But it sorta sounds like one of those so-specific-it’s-useless buttons on a microwave. Do you really need a “chicken nuggets” button? Doesn’t it just end up cooking it for two minutes, anyway? And it bugs me when people need to be told exactly what a gadget can be used for, rather than finding an existing (and almost definitely cheaper) one that’s already up to the task. Why do you need a camera that claims to be tailored specifically for your food blogging needs? Just learn how to use your camera right, or if you must, buy a decent macro lens.
Which is not to say that I don’t like the idea of taking pictures of what you eat and drink. This pretty little cocktail (a specialty at Angel’s Share) is called a Tennessee Waltz: whisky, muddled strawberries and toasted thyme. Mmmmm.
Sesame Street is unveiling a new character, and she’s a girly-girl. A fairy, actually. What’s really bothers me (and okay, there are a few things) is that her “pink skin” makes her pretty obviously a white girl, and who needs that?
For all the educational consultants and child psychologists the show could have enlisted, the success of the character seems to rely largely on the one simple quality no other Muppet can claim: she’s very, very pretty. As played by Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, a new Muppeteer, she’s enthusiastic, eager, occasionally bashful but never coy (and certainly never divalike along the lines of Tinker Bell).
…In the past the show has bent over backward to counteract stereotypes, with the tomboyish Zoe or the highly opinionated Elizabeth. “But political correctness hampers creativity,” Ms. Nealon said. “Abby Cadabby owns her own point of view, but she’s also comfortable with the fact that she likes wearing a dress, and as we’d tried to model strong female models, we neglected that piece of being a girl.”
this is what a PR coup looks like
Bitch in the NYT Magazine? Fucking awesome. Deborah Solomon applies her characteristic skepticism to Andi Zeisler. It’s a little annoying/condescending, but Andi holds her own.
DS: Did you and your co-founder, Lisa Jervis, have any magazine experience before you started Bitch?
AZ: We were both interns at Sassy.
DS: As opposed to Savvy.
AZ: Savvy was earlier, right? Maybe there will be a magazine someday for older women called Saggy.
Ashlee Simpson appeared on the July cover of Marie Claire magazine extolling the virtues of appreciating one’s body as it is — then she had a nose job.
Marie Claire readers erupted in fury at what they said was Ms. Simpson’s hypocrisy and the magazine’s “cluelessness.” They wrote 1,000 letters in protest to the magazine, according to Joanna Coles, the new editor of the magazine. And she agreed with them.
In the first issue (due Aug. 15) over which she exercises full editorial control, Ms. Coles gives expanded space in the letters column to readers to vent against Ms. Simpson. Ms. Coles adds in a note: “We’re dazed and confused — and disappointed — by her choice, too!”
I don’t think I’ve ever read Marie Claire, and it’s not like I’m going to start, but this is kinda cool. The first issue under this new editor also has a really hot photo of Maggie Gyllenhaal on the cover. Nice selling point, at least to me…