what we talk about when we talk about nostalgia
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 [...]
In a sign that they are perhaps the least self-aware retailer ever, the facade of a new Urban Outfitters store being planned for the Upper West Side will be designed to look like four different storefronts: “a hat store, a hardware store, a neighborhood bar and a bodega.” I’ll just let the designer explain the [...]
In Obit, Matt Katz rues the death of idle time, and Matt Flegenheimer reports on the closing of NYC restaurant Gino’s, a place that stayed “frozen in the ’40s”:
Gino’s eldest loyalists have lived through crippling wars, sea-changing revolutions, 12 presidential administrations — every verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel, whom they’ve [...]
I’m getting obsessed with “View from the Top Floor,” Marc Miller’s carefully curated website that looks back at East Village history as seen from his perch at 98 Bowery. Here, he posts audio clips of answering machine messages that he’s saved, forming “a sound portrait of my life in the 1980’s composed of the voices [...]
housekeeping
I thought I’d posted a link to this interview with Wendy McClure–author of I’m Not the New Me and connoisseur of kitschy recipe cards–who is writing a book about her Laura Ingalls Wilder obsession (which will be out early next year), but I thought I did a lot of things these last couple weeks that [...]
In this article about a Boston University graduation ceremony held 40 years after the fact, Peter Simon (photographer and member of the Class of 1970) points out the all around awesomeness of his generation. “Mr. Simon said that when he speaks about his photography around the country, students frequently say to him, ‘God, I wish [...]
Virginia Heffernan contemplates the lost art of the analog datebook, with this caveat: “As a committed user of the BlackBerry, Kindle, MacBook Pro and World Wide Web, I rarely get nostalgic for print.” Conclusion? “You never know what you’re going to miss.”
The new book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, points out that [...]