what we talk about when we talk about nostalgia
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 [...]
The Times Style section discovers reproduction vintage clothes. “Many devotees of reproduction vintage clothing said ‘Mad Men,’ the AMC television show set in the 1960s, as well as movie classics like ‘Casablanca’ and ‘Rear Window,’ had kindled their interest in fashions of the past. Says Becky Biesiada, 34, a day care provider and student in [...]
André Aciman writes beautifully about anticipating, and sometimes dreading, what he knows will come next in the life of his family:
[My son] liked rituals. I liked rehearsing. Rituals are when we wish to repeat what has already happened, rehearsals when we repeat what we fear might yet occur. Maybe the two are one and the [...]
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 [...]
(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 [...]
Surprise: Philip Roth is not a fan of e-books and “the distracting influences of modern technology, which he feels diminishes the ability to appreciate the beauty and aesthetic experience of reading books on paper.” He says, “I like to read in bed at night and I like to read with a book. I can’t stand [...]
I’m about a month behind, but I loved this article about Peter Knego, who collects decor from post-war cruise ships. It’s a little scary to imagine what his house looks like, but this is coming from someone whose floor has warped so much that her bathroom door cannot even begin to close, so. (And actually, [...]
My favorite recent thing: The Believer’s amazing interview with Robin Nagle, who holds the enviable position of anthropologist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation. “My entry point is through things we decide are no longer worth keeping,” she explains.
Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything. So we are surrounded by ephemera, but [...]
The glut of 90’s-centric fashion has finally led the Times to an obvious source of influence: Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes, wearing all those poufy floral patterned dresses, often paired with jackets and boots. Writer William Van Meter thinks her look incorporated a range of styles, including “early American settler, gypsy, business casual, pious [...]
Jezebel flips through Time Out New York’s sex issue from 1996—a year “when business was booming and ‘hookup culture’ hadn’t been invented yet”—and finds that things were sorta-kinda different then, but not really.
Meanwhile, The Awl takes a pretty ambivalent look back at Kids, on the fifteenth anniversary of that movie’s release.
The Times reports on an [...]