David Meir Grossman

popcornnoises:

jakec:

A funny thing is the kinda-adage about folks thinking the best bands of all time coincided with the final stages of their formative years and yet if you listen to like 90% of the new music I’ve heard lately it seems they really think the best bands of all time were those behind the 80s pop hits we heard on the radio and saw on TV growing up in the early 90s.

Another thing is how growing up, 60s and 70s rock just seemed like the sound of music but listening to it now it all takes on an almost cinematic quality, I guess because it used to be the records your parents listened to whereas now it’s the records made cool by the nostalgic swamp of mid-late 20th century romanticism we’ve (I’ve) been bathing in since our (my) aforementioned formative years. I don’t think we’re stupid enough to really want to live then but it’s fun to pretend.

“This dream is drugging us all. Spiced-up, quick-cut docu-dramas like 24 Hour Party People and The Filth and the Fury reduce years—decades—of Friday nights at home, missed trains, bad drugs, breakups, bullshit bands, “State of the Nation”, the Professionals, Chequered Past, Revenge, Yes Please!, and eight-hundred thousand other hideous, embarrassing, myth-busting fuck-ups into one grand story, replete with an aching, dolorous sigh when it’s all over.”

- Chris Ott, “On Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette”

Not that any of this music is really about nostalgia, but I think about this passage a lot.

“I don’t think we’re stupid enough to really want to live then but it’s fun to pretend.”

The past is a costume, y’know? Party fodder. That’s why most people don’t worry about all the ways we get it wrong—a huge Ott Topic—or lose much sleep over the downsides of the obsession (poor Simon Reynolds…). As the song implies, you can’t be nostalgic for an unremembered 80s. That’s not nostalgia, it’s costumery, and only people who lived through it the first time mistake it for anything else. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with costumes, neither. Part of the fun of dressing up is getting to let the outfit change your demeanor, to unveil your secret wishes to be the kind of person who looks this way. Sure, one of the reasons I resent Mad Men or any sort of Gatsby/flapper-20s stuff is the pretending gets out of hand and people forget what they’re really glorifying. At some point, you just lose track of all your ‘normal’ clothes and then all you’ve got left to wear are costumes and bathing suits. It’s a lot harder to dig down to the historical truth in music, though, so shouldn’t we just delete every ‘Year’ tag from our mp3s and say everything’s fair game? Or did I miss the memo and everyone else has already done that?

1. Ott is right. Entertainment, by definition, can’t capture the lives of regular people, because often our lives aren’t very entertaining. A film like Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles can do it, sure, but that’s not trying to capture any particular sub-culture or historical moment. For Saturday Night Fever to be really accurate, it’d be like 30 hours long, most of them featuring Tony working in Bay Ridge, a couple messed-up Saturday nights. You know how maps draw everything to scale? Entertaining version of history are like that.

2. The past is a costume, I agree. Where it gets problematic is who’s choosing the outfits. Not to get too basic PC liberal, but a book like The People’s History of the United States is a powerful corrective. Zinn talks a bit about F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s essay “Echoes of a Jazz Age”, which features bits that probably don’t make it into Baz’s new Gatsby:

“By 1927 a widespread neurosis began to be evident, faintly signalled, like a nervous beating of the feet, by the popularity of crossword puzzles. I remember a fellow expatriate opening a letter from a mutual friend of ours, urging him to come home and be revitalized by the hardy, bracing qualities of the native soil. It was a strong letter and it affected us both deeply, until we noticed that it was headed from a nerve sanatorium in Pennsylvania.

By this time contemporaries of mine had begun to disappear into the dark maw of violence. A classmate killed his wife and himself on Long Island, another tumbled ‘accidently’ from a skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper in New York. One was killed in a speak-easy in Chicago; another was beaten to death in a speak-easy in New York and crawled home to the Princeton Club to die; still another had his skull crushed by a maniac’s axe in an insane asylum where he was confined. These are not catastrophes that I went out of my way to look for - these were my friends; moreover, these things happened not during the depression but during the boom.”

2. I think Mad Men does a pretty good job of capturing its moment in history. It doesn’t try to capture every single social issue, which would be impossible. (slight spoilers) Surely, we’d see IRL Pete Campbell talking to Trudy more about MLK, for example, or signing a petition on the street, but we hold off on the reveal that he’s a cool dude Civil Rights-wise because it’s a moment of shock, and ultimately it is Don’s story. 

But one of my favorite episodes of the show has to be the (spoiler, I guess) one where JFK is shot (sorry if I spoiled JFK getting shot for you).  So much of the episode is people just watching TV, crying, being helpless. It’s a horrifying calm, and really that that’s how things felt. If entertainment can capture a certain feel of a historical moment, then it’s doing its job. The problem comes when we go to the same well again, again, and again. 

barthel:

Though it’s not surprising how quickly Twitter became subsumed into the established rhythms of political news, it’s a little disheartening. Here was a chance for our elected officials to interact directly with their constituents and to debate publicly with their peers, all while allowing us to see a more human side of these frequently caricatured public figures. Instead, we got retweeted compliments from supporters, bland updates sent out by a social media intern, and the occasional scandal. It doesn’t have to be this way. Some politicians are able to use social media in the way the rest of us are, which is to say they put out a staggering galumph of barely-considered text that gives us a pretty accurate picture of their train of thought and gives them cover from the occasional misstep. For all the scorn we throw at Sarah Palin’s Facebook presence (and not that Sarah Palin has been a politician for three years now, technically), her posts read exactly like what other people of Sarah Palin’s age and interests post on Facebook. Someone perusing her ramblings sans context could just as easily assume they came from your retired math teacher Mr. Goodwin as from the former governor of Alaska. That’s almost endearing; certainly you don’t leave asking “I wonder what Sarah Palin really thinks?”

I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s Twitter account and apparently endorsed Sarah Palin’s Facebook page?

This is so on point.