Nostalgia II

In the interest of full disclosure, some of my curmudgeonly response to my nephew and the era he is coming of age in was due to my feeling of obsolescence. My nephew doesn’t really know this, but he taught me how to be an uncle. When we first met, I didn’t know what to do with babies or little tykes anymore than I knew how to split an atom (now an infinitive I could split, and still can). So he showed me, crawling up on me when I was hesitant to pick him up, and cornering me and demanding answers to his childhood questions (even when I had pretty bad ones, he didn’t seem to mind). I learned that it wasn’t so hard, really, to care for a kid—you just paid attention, treated them like they mattered, and they responded. Even bloomed. Like flowers that needed just a little water to flourish.

Now, those days are gone. When I come to visit, he doesn’t have a movie already picked out for us to go to. We don’t watch cartoons, and we don’t discuss the important questions anymore, like could Batman beat Superman in a fair fight (one that didn’t involve kryptonite). Once, it seemed we would be addressing the great questions forever, but now he either has figured it all out for himself, or he figures I have been faking it all along and don’t really know more than all those other phony grownups (he once considered me not grown up, not really, and that was a great compliment from a six-year-old).

So I wanted to avoid the bench press question, wanted to get his attention, wanted to feel like my past was worth something, and get a rise out of him, to engage with me about something. I wanted to feel visible to him again (and maybe to all the young world he lives in). I wondered if my brother was feeling the same kind of irrelevance, but I wasn’t going to ask him (we’re Irish, and don’t go in for this soul searching type stuff, at least not with each other).

And then there is my aforementioned sense 2015 really and objectively sucks. Oh, I know you can’t really prove something like that, but I am going to try anyway. Try and show that his generation is inward and narcissistic and immature, that they are complacent and lack a certain amount of guts and creativity and joie de vivre. I think of those long German words when I think of 2015—the zeitgeist (spirit of the times) gives me weltschmertz (world weariness), almost as if this were the end time, the Gotterdammerung (twilight of the Gods).

My biggest gripe about “Modern Times,” of course, is that we have sacrificed our freedom for some elusive and illusive guarantee of security. As if it is only terrorists, and not our own government, that we need freedom from. Benjamin Franklin said that those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither. He also said fart proudly, but he still has a point.

I also hate the way today’s news is often about the news. News outlets, desperate for something to add to the dumbed-down discourse, cover the way other news outlets pander, the way the other ones (but no, not us!) appeal to our lust for the lurid and voyeuristic. As if this faux news about the news was not pandering in and of itself! And reality TV sucks, too, while I’m at it. It is a way to not pay real actors to portray real characters. They are less then real, these “real” people on “reality” television, because when you put a camera on them they are not what they truly are any longer. It’s the Heisenberg principle in action—the observer (the omnipresent camera, on smart phones, on street corners, in the sky, observes our every move, and we respond not naturally but the way we think will look best to our audience) alters the thing observed.

Then there are the politics of victimization—everyone trying to get a leg up on the rest not by being smarter or tougher but by having more handicaps (I know you are not supposed to use that word, which is why I am using it). I couldn’t help being an axe murderer because I have ADHD and was abused as a child, and I am part of a marginalized social class, blah, blah, blah. I understand that everyone has a load to bear, but give me a break—it shouldn’t be a race to the top by racing to the bottom. Case in point—Hope Solo (what kind of name it that?) She immediately got on TV and painted herself as a victim after her arrest, knowing that there was refuge in that status if she could obtain it, like a pity passport. Now that the facts are coming out, it appears she was at least as much assailant as assailed, but even if she had not been, I would have been annoyed at her blatant grab for mercy, to be coddled.

While we are at it, our present attitude towards female sexuality is weird. We sexualize pre-pubescent girls by making them think their worth is based on being a size 5 or less, by looking provocative at an age when they don’t even really know what being provocative means or entails, and then we get our collective panties in a twist when Janet Jackson’s breast goes live on National TV. Or we cluck and tut-tut as we read about the epidemic of anorexia, and then go out and get Halloween costumes for our six-year-old-daughters that make Madonna at her worst look like an Ivory Girl.

Add to the mix the fact that income inequality is the greatest it has been since the Great Depression, and that no one seems to really care, and that we are fiddling while the environment burns, and you can see why I am exercised over the whole era. Millennials, Generation Z, phooey.

To be fair, there are some good things nowadays. BREAKING BAD, THE SOPRANOS, THIRTY ROCK, RAY DONOVAN, SONS OF ANARCHY—all of these are better TV shows than the ones of my generation. Of course, you have to pay for cable to get them, but still—better. I feel nostalgia for THE ROCKFORD FILES and COLUMBO, SOAP and BARNEY MILLER, but are they even in the same league as the current crop? Nope.

Now movies—these were better in the 70s. For one, we didn’t have all these damned sequels, although to be fair, JAWS and STAR WARS were the start of the dreaded block-buster-franchise trend. But now, that is all we have—any movie that is even marginally successful gets spun off and retreaded ad infinitum and ad nauseam. There is no substance, just special effects and body counts, cartoons and computerized special effects. Blech. And don’t tell me that it’s what the people want to see, as they are staying home in droves to watch TV.

Basketball in the mid 70’s was worse, before Larry Bird and Magic saved the game, and passed the torch to Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Lebron James. The ratings were through the floor, and the players all seemed to be taking and dealing drugs. You did have DR J, and Bill Walton and the Trail Blazers had a dream season in 1977, but besides that you had a blasted waste between the Knicks’ last championship in 1973 and Magic’s first championship in 1981. Then again, sports interviews nowadays suck, completely scripted as they are (talk about the observer altering the thing observed). Typical is something like this: “Did your collapsing zone in the second half help you shut down Dwight Howard?”

“Well, Bill, I think our collapsing zone helped shut down Howard in the second half. And remember, we all have ADHD and have had to give a hundred and ten percent to be where we are today. And we didn’t have anyone that has recently died to dedicate our effort to tonight, and we won anyway, which is a testament to our willingness to step up, take it to the next level, draw a line in the sand, to look inside ourselves and pull together.” Oh, and one more thing, as it just stuck in my curmudgeonly craw—in the 70s, we did not have Rush Limbaugh, talk radio, and the worst genre of talk radio there is: sports talk radio.

Still, on the upside, the Catholic Church is presently suffering, which is good, since they have caused so much suffering themselves. The pedophilia scandal is hitting them in the holy pocketbook, and they are also in a bind because they are behind the curve on gay marriage and women priests, especially since the Church is not known to be able to make lightning quick changes in policy. Claiming that you got your policy directly from God makes it hard to do so. Still, they got around that earth-as-the-center-of-the-universe thing, and back stepped on that no-meat-on-Friday thing, so they might get out of these theological and public relations (and, more importantly, economic) jams also.

So, although Hoops is better now, and TV too, and I am happy to see the church get a little of its own medicine (at least in terms of suffering, as I don’t think they are all that capable of guilt), we’ve presently handed over our freedom and jettisoned the environment because we don’t care or we just feel it is too hard and costly to fight for them, especially when Dancing With The Stars is on. We whine about being victims and demand much while contributing little. We turn inward and life becomes one big virtual reality exercise, even as we need to reach out to fight against the haves as they turn more of us into have-nots. And even if the Catholics go by the wayside (and they have shown remarkable staying power so far), people will always be willing to pay someone a little hard cash for a perceived hedge against the harshness of life and the inevitability of death. There are fanatics of all stripes out there, the only difference between them being what kind of stripes they decide to wear. All in all, I still think 2015 sucks.

Wow, that was a rant. I feel a little better. But what about the entertainment industry—movies, books and music--in terms of its quality Now and Then, in terms of how it reflects the society it is imbricated in, of the accuracy of the images it presents, its motivation for choosing the images it does, and the effects those images have on society and vice versa? All that for next time.

Mike Welch

Nostalgia

My nephew Ryan has been feeling his oats lately. And eating them also, as at 15-years-old he is six-feet-tall and weighs 185 pounds, all of it muscle. He wanted to know how much I could bench press so I changed the subject, baiting him about how shallow his 2015 youth culture is compared to mine, circa 1975. Seeing that I wasn’t going to take the bait about bench-pressing, he went back to texting his girlfriend. I tried again. Yes, I told him, your culture is insipid and vapid and unappealing, vulgar and base and lacking in any meaning, or even in any desire for meaning.

He yawned. Still, accustomed to blindly blundering ahead, especially when I could see no alternative, I continued to harangue him on how he was more concerned with buying $200 sneakers than Guantanamo Bay, implying that I had been concerned with Watergate (only when it interfered with prime time programming, I’m afraid to say) forty years ago, and that I was satisfied with the canvas Converse All Star high tops I purchased for $9.95 at a store called THE GREAT OUTDOORS on South Ocean Avenue in Patchogue (I wasn’t, but they were all I could afford).

He sat there texting, and I cringed to think of how base and crude his romancing of his young sweetheart might be, having role models like Fifty Cent and Justin Timberlake (or are they passé already, I wondered), and congratulated myself for never having texted, equating it as I do in my mind with other pointlessly absurd activities like playing hacky sack or Grand Theft Auto, and watching reality TV Shows about bitchy, catty housewives or women who turn into extraordinary shrews as their weddings approach.

I hoped for something trenchant to say that would regain his attention (there was a time when his attention would focus so intensely on his Uncle Mikey that it overjoyed and frightened me all at once). I pointed out that when my brother and I went on vacation with my parents to Vermont for a week of camping in the summertime, it was a twelve hour car ride, and we had no smart phones, or IPADs or lap tops to watch movies on. We might read a book (I always got car sick when I tried, and I don’t know why it never occurred to anyone to give me Dramamine), or we might have to talk to each other. It was torture, twelve hours of hell, and this did command his attention for a second.

But then his girl must have texted something really sweet or funny (or provocative) and I lost him again. I went on about how music today has no lyrics, and all the movies are silly action hero adventures or computer animated dreck that the studios put out so they won’t have to pay any real actors to actually act. Then I started in on how SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE really sucks now, and segued into how “suck” used to be a verboten word, and finally started in on books. In the 70s, you still had some crappy books, sure, but you might also find Philip Roth or Saul Bellow or Kurt Vonnegut or John Irving on the best seller list. Now you get pap like THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN, or tame porn for the masses like 50 SHADES OF GREY, or right wing conservative propaganda like Bill O’Reilly’s KILLING JESUS, wherein he reveals that Jesus was a libertarian tax rebel who was dead set against redistributing wealth to the poor. Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth, but apparently it is actually being left to rabble rousing idiots who manage to appeal to rabble, who nowadays seem to be easily roused. He yawned, and I told him I was going to write about all this in a blog I appeared in called “The Crime Writer’s Chronicle.”

“But it’s not about crime,” he said.

“I know,” I told him, “but my stuff about crime books and movies is getting pretty stale anyway.”

“Do you get paid?” he said, now genuinely interested.

“No.” Lost him again.

Still, I thought, it is a topic that interests me. The word nostalgia was coined in the 17th century by a scholar writing about a yearning for home so intense it could be thought of as pathological. He felt it was suffered by the Swiss particularly badly (who the hell knows why). It is a rendering of the German heimweh (home woe) and is a joining of the Greek algos (pain, grief, distress) and nostos (homecoming).

A lot of people experience grief at never being able to go home again. Of course, for others, the most painful thing is going home. Thomas Wolfe said you can never go home again, and I think he was right, in a way. I can go to the house I grew up in, but I will never be young and growing up in it again, doing for the first thrilling time all those things that have gotten stale to me now, getting hair on my face instead of on my back, looking forward to all the women I was going to meet instead of wondering if I was ever going to meet one again. And there is something golden about youth, even if that is a cliché. You can’t ever be 16 again, Ryan, so don’t waste a day of it (by listening to Justin Timberlake and Beyonce, I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut, knowing that I didn’t listen to anybody over 30 then, and he wasn’t going to listen to me now).

Of course, just as with childbirth, or monster truck pulls, you can forget the pain of the past, and imagine it was better than it was. I remember Bruce Springsteen and Pink Floyd, and have conveniently forgotten Leo Sayer and The Captain and Tenille. So is it only my silly nostalgia that makes me think my teenaged years occurred at a much more interesting and important time than the era Ryan’s are occurring in now? How could I make such a judgment? I decided I would attempt to objectively explore the question by addressing some of the most popular books, movies, music and other examples of pop culture of the two eras. No fool worse than an old fool, as they say, and I didn’t want to remount my attack without some powerful arguments in my arsenal. Then I would show the callow youth something for sure.

I just don’t want to be a silly and irrelevant old fart! I imagine that when my Dad was fifteen in 1951 and Alan Freed coined the term “rock and roll,” there were old farts going on about how Rudy Vallee had these silly teenagers beat seven ways from Sunday. And I can remember how my Dad would kid about how when he was a teen they didn’t slap each other five, but gave each other “some skin.” I thought the notion of giving somebody some skin was terribly quaint and a little silly, kind of like being a beatnik or getting your kicks on Route 66. Kids today, youth is wasted on the young, all those old bromides—and then there is the bromide about how every generation is wrong to think that the one coming along after it has got it all wrong.

I can’t shake the feeling that things are presently really going to hell in a handbasket, and fast, or even that we have already gotten to hell and no one has made the announcement yet (only those of us not busy texting have noticed). My Dad thought that my favorite movie of that long ago era, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, was a poor excuse for entertainment. Not that he minded satire, parody, and lampooning old movie forms (he loved Monty Python and the Holy Grail), but he was disturbed by what he saw as ROCKY HORROR’S shallowness, its banal attempt to lampoon the banality of sci-fi flicks and conventional morality, sexual and otherwise.

I begged to differ. I thought it was pretty sophisticated stuff, in its way, and was funny, (easily as good as KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE and THE GROOVE TUBE), which was just as important. But he just went on about SHOWBOAT and Ava Gardner, and I couldn’t make him see my point. And when I pointed out that THE DEER HUNTER was an important movie, a serious and important movie, like NETWORK and NASHVILLE, he just scoffed, even though he had seen neither one. He did give credit to Jack Nicholson for his performance in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST. Still, he insisted my culture was vapid, banal and insipid, certainly more so than his, even though the 50’s had Ike and THE BLOB (not to be confused with one another).

He also thought that Rocky Marciano would have cleaned Muhammad Ali’s clock, calling Ali a sideshow, a man that was more style than substance, and not even an original, but a poor imitation of the wrestler known as Gorgeous George. This seemed to be a surrendering of reason to emotion on his part, but I didn’t know how to counter his arguments, and I realized that it’s very hard to argue about preferences, or things that can never be tested. How do you defend chocolate against vanilla, or resolve those knotty hypotheticals?

But it is still my strong feeling that 2015 is a much shallower and less interesting and important time than 1975. And I am going to prove it, even if it doesn’t get my nephew’s attention (score one for me—if my uncle had crapped on 1975 I would have come to its defense, even if my girlfriend was on the phone). Next week—popular entertainment Now and Then, and why Ryan’s Now sucks in comparison to my Then, or any Then, for that matter.

© 2015 Mike Welch