I'm Anti-Nostalgia

I'm am. I'm anti-nostalgia.

I'm not against old things, and I'm not against the past, though I am probably less interested in the past than most people. I'm not anti- the nostalgias of others, really. What I'm against is nostalgia in myself.

I say, "anti-" rather than just "I don't like. . . " because my feelings are more complicated than just not liking, and it's my active stance that is, well, anti-nostalgia. I don't want to feel nostalgic; I don't want to engage in activities that indulge desires for nostalgia, and I don't want to encourage in myself any nostalgic participation in art, music, books, and so on.

I'm not totally clear why I have this stance. Part of it has to do with my feeling that nostalgia for me is like a bad drug: it's kind of fun and interesting while it's going on, but when I wake up and look out the window I feel the awful crash of the mood-that-is-no-mood and the feeling of wasted time. I hate that.

Then part of it is also my engagement with the item of nostalgia becomes an engagement with myself, rather than with something else, and this depresses me.

Also, when it comes to culture and its producers, I feel an obligation to support the people around me. I mean, there are people writing books, making music, etc etc etc; if I spend my music dollars on the Rolling Stones what will happen to all that?

Obviously this last couldn't be the whole story on its own, because like I said, I'm not against the past. Many of my favorite things are old things: the novels of Trollope, the music of Mozart and T. Rex, old movies.

The important thing is these are all things I currently engage with for what they are. I don't locate them in any special time and place of my own to which they recall me. So my love of them has nothing to do with nostalgia, and everything to do with just liking.

Other things I try to avoid. When I was young I was obsessed with The Velvet Underground, and the other day in the cafe I go to they had on an album. . . some mix someone had downloaded, as it turned out. The songs were so, so good, and they didn't sound dated at all, they just sounded, you know, awesome.

I briefly considered going out and buying a Velvet Underground CD.

But I gave that plan up. Because I have a rule: no old things that evoke your own past. Old things are OK if they're new to you, or if they transcend the past, but those songs are forever super-glued in my mind to a certain time and place. A certain me. No, the rule says, no, you can't indulge that.

This example makes me remember another reason I'm anti-nostalgia, which is fear at being left behind. The world is moving on; if you're at home listening to your old Velvet Underground CDs you're not going to have anyone to talk to, and you're going to be unhappy and lonely every time there's music you can't understand going on around you. Much better to keep up, keep moving.

So even though I tolerate the old, when it's not nostalgic, I have a preference for the new.

Today I was at the mall, and I was shopping at Express, and they played a song, "I know that you want the candy; I know that you want the candy . . ." da da da da da.

My first thought was, "Oh, it sounds just like the Jesus and Mary Chain, only new!" I was way, way into the Jesus and Mary Chain, like, I don't know, a million years ago. I remembered how much I loved the Jesus and Mary Chain, and I thought, I could go buy one of their records. But then I thought, "Oh, no, no, that's nostalgia, that's no good. Can't do that."

Fortunately, I was right that this song was the Jesus and Mary Chain, only new. I got home and googled it, and discovered it's by the Raveonettes, a current group, and the iTunes review describes their sound as "Phil-Spector-meets-Jesus-and-Mary-Chain."

Since The Jesus and Mary Chain are described on Wikipedia as "reminiscent of Phil Spector" but with a "noisy post-punk treatment," I'd say the comparison is about as apt as it could be.

So, for me, the best of all possible worlds. Tomorrow I'll buy their album, Lust Lust Lust.

I an anti-nostalgia, but I had a powerful wave of it comes by when I read this sentence in the Wikipedia entry on, as they call them, JAMC:

"Playing in front of small audiences, the Mary Chain earned their notoriety by playing very short gigs, some lasting no more than 10 minutes and consisting of a constant wall of feedback and distortion, as well as playing with their backs to the audience and refusing to speak to them."

Ahh, the 80's. Such a kind and gentle era! Wasn't it?

A Sentimental Sinister Music

So I got (as a present, which was tremendous) a cd of the Psychedelic Furs. I had two Psychedelic Furs cds back in high school and listened to them over and over again, and then sometime in college I decided I needed to be cooler in my musical tastes (and I liked the Psychedelic Furs to much to think they were cool, plus nobody else I knew was really listening to them) and so I sold them at Amoeba for a Willie Nelson cd, and have regretted it ever since, although it is hard to regret anything that brings more Willie Nelson into your life.

A quick note about my musical life: I would get super-obsessed with particular bands and cds, and I would listen to the cds over and over again, but this almost never translated into buying more albums or learning more about the band, it just involved complete memorization of and devotion to those songs.

And what I loved about the Psychedelic Furs is that it was mostly sad music, at least according to my 17 year old standards ("and it feels like love, but it don't mean a lot" or whatever -- listen to the lyrics of Pretty in Pink sometime), but it had this sweeping love song feel to it -- it was a valorization, a romanticization, of the failures and boundaries of love and human existence.

Other examples of this feeling: the entire oeuvre of The Fire Inside by Bob Seger, Sleeping With The Television on by Billy Joel, Perfect Skin by Lloyd Cole.

I kind of want to argue that this was a more prevalent mood in the songs of my youth, but then I remembered that I don't know anything about current pop, so I could be totally wrong. Also, it's not like those things actually came out when I was young.

What I do feel is that we're instructed sometimes that only successful, meaningful things should be celebrated, should give rise to sweeping, romantic sounding songs. And there's something about songs that celebrate the weakness of human capabilities for love and affection, but celebrate them in a sweeping romantic way. Not a dry little ditty, but you know, a synthesizer fest. Where it could come on the radio and it takes you a couple minutes and some sustained attention to realize that it's not just a love song.

Because these aren't songs about rejected lovers, which there are lots of. There's the Cure for that. These are songs about not-quite lovers, about the ridiculousness of the search for love. But they make it sound noble, worthy on its own terms. It felt kind of dangerous when I listened to it at 17, and I guess it still kind of does. Deliberate sentimentality in celebration of triviality -- it's a mood that I would like to be able to sustain.

Why Should You Feel Bad?

I was in fifth or sixth grade and I had this girl over to my house. She was blonde with a perm and her parents were Christian and ran a bookstore.

I didn't really have any friends in elementary school; kids generally accept invitations even if they don't like you. I think it's a curiosity thing. I don't know for sure.

So I asked her why I didn't have any friends -- what I was doing wrong. We're running around my backyard; it's been a pretty good time, actually. She says, "I don't know. You seem all right to me."

It's a while later, months, long enough for me to forget the initial question, when she comes up to me with a group of friends. The girl has done research. She tells me exactly why each and every member of our class doesn't like me.

What's surprising is that they all had reasons. I would list them, but they still make me cringe.

The worst part is I had no idea that those things would make people dislike me. None of the things she reeled off for me had crossed my mind as bad things to do.

Mostly, I guess, it's funny in retrospect. They walked away; I stood there cringing in the corner of the playground, my mind spinning. Imagine the end of the Usual Suspects: flashes of anecdotes coming back to me charged with new force and meaning.

I don't raise this just to invite pity for the young Cap'n, although pity is always welcome. I raise it because of the tension it illuminates in my own thinking about embarrassment.

My view, generally, is that you make choices about how to behave, what's acceptable and not as far as you're concerned, and then you refuse to be embarrassed by those choices. Or, at least, the ability to make your choices unfazed, which I pretty much lack, seems like a good thing to have. A kind of Cool Hand Luke quality: this is what I'm going to do for my own reasons and the rest of you can shove it.

But my fifth grade self didn't know that choices were being made, was acting not out of defiance but out of ignorance, and somehow that seems the essence of embarrassment

One example. It was the era of leggings and bike shorts, and I had worn a pair (lime green, Benneton), and you could apparently see a panty line.

I hadn't even heard of the concept.

It's a minefield out there.