Left to my own devices

The last decade or so in pop culture has really been a nostalgia treat for folks around my age. Our sentimentality for intellectual properties such as Batman, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Transformers,The Conners, Will & Grace, etc. has been indulged to the nth degree. That's a positive, I suppose, though there is a downside: what will the youth of today have to look back on 20-30 years from now for their own nostalgia? The mining of past content to satiate the appetites of people longing to look back really does create a vacuum.

Recently, I felt a pull of '90s nostalgia, and decided to watch some music videos from that era (as you do). One of them was for Ondina's Into the Night , a fairly obscure Eurodance gem that was featured on one of those dance music compilations that proliferated throughout much of the decade. Reading the comments section of the video, I was initially nodding my head at a lot of the positive comments being made about the music and the decade, that is until I read one that said, "It was a simpler time." Reading that created the equivalent of a record scratch in my head. I was in my teens and early twenties during the 1990s. It was a fun decade, to be sure, though I am not as certain that it was because it was the '90s, so much as the age I was at the time. Indeed, we tend to romanticize our younger years, and that's okay. What we should be wary of is using nostalgia to cloud our objective view of the past, using it to look askance at the present. My lat...

Two recent conversations -- one public, one private -- both about seemingly disparate topics, have ushered forth to my mind their conflation in one general regard: We tend to value most, the time of our life when we were young. Sometimes, the sense of nostalgia can be warm and fuzzy. Other times, melancholy. On certain other occasions, it can be crippling. But it all seems to center around the time of our lives when we were young. Consider a situation in my town where a few older houses might be torn down to make way for an expansion of one of the local high schools. The vote to approve this passed handily a year ago, however, a preservationist group has officially protested the demolition of the houses. It has created quite an interesting public conversation in the community about looking ahead, vs. what is worth saving from our past. The dialogue, thus far, has been both fascinating and frustrating. While we've learned more about our city's past, we've also seen t...

Having brunch at a local restaurant recently, I took notice of the music being piped-in through the discreetly positioned speakers while we dined. The songs were predominantly from the 1950s and '60s. Oldies, if you will. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, though it reinforced an opinion I have about modern society, that we are, for better or worse, wrapped-up in nostalgia. "If we were sitting in a restaurant in the 1960s, do you think they would have been playing music from 1910?" I asked my brunch companion. Ashley responded that it would have been less likely, though he countered with the fact that the curation of things (not just music) in recent decades has led to easy access to older material. It simply wouldn't have been as easy during the 1960s to have access to a recording from 1910. Perhaps accessibility is the driving force behind the lingering presence of what is, frankly, old culture? If so, is that a good, bad, or neutral set of ci...

Nostalgia is a funny thing. It can devour you, if you're not careful. One can lose oneself in it. Nostalgia can be a useful tool for remembrance, but it can also be deceptive. We can learn to love a past that perhaps doesn't always deserve the affection. This is especially true if it's a past we didn't experience. But even our own past can play tricks on us. Best, then, to take only small dips in the nostalgia pool, eh? The aforementioned thoughts regarding nostalgia are what developed from a simple airing of the 1985 classic movie Back to the Future on TV over the weekend. For the uninitiated, the film features teenager Marty McFly going back in time thirty years, to 1955, and trying to make sure his parents get together so that the family he knows and loves will be there when gets back to 1985. It's a great bit of cinema, and I clearly remember seeing it at the old Thunderbird Theater with my mom back when it came out.

Roger Ebert's recent blog post (worth a read, by the way) about becoming an "old fart" in an ever-changing world has inspired me to be write about my own view of the changes I've seen happen, and how I've tried to adapt to them. Sometimes, adaptation has occurred without a moment's thought, and sometimes it has been a struggle. I'm still not sure what exactly precipitates one reaction vs. another.