On Nostalgia

On Nostalgia

This, and the other “ONs” are the replacement for the old out-dated print edition of Dynaxiom, as well as the next volume in the Continuation series (Green Edition).

ON

1777. Art is created in the zone between initial idea and vision and its construction in the real world. Sometimes they meet perfectly with no space between them; That's when things are popular. Over time they can move apart, then move back into place; That's when it becomes nostalgia.

1663. All cycles are not created equal: There is a distinct difference in the experience of life between the end of grade school and the beginning of college. The world is your oyster at that moment, and the zeitgeist could go on seemingly forever. Compare that to one double term of a president, which seems to fly by, and leaves a trail of bitter nostalgia in its wake.

1641. Eighty years from now people won't be rewatching films from 2019 with warm feelings of nostalgia as one might watching films from the 1940s. (1/2019)

"Indeed, feeling nostalgic for a time one didn’t actually live through appears to be a common phenomenon if all the chatrooms, Facebook pages and websites dedicated to it are anything to go by. In fact, a new word has been coined to capture this precise variant of nostalgia – anemoia, defined by the Urban Dictionary and the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as ‘nostalgia for a time you’ve never known’.". https://aeon.co/essays/nostalgia-doesnt-need-real-memories-an-imagined-past-works-as-well

1614. Lots of small downtowns in the U.S. have become veritable food courts of chain restaurants. This is a logical continuation of the idea of the "mallifications" in the 1970s, as a revival of the human-scaled town square with no vehicle traffic. Now the traffic is added back for a melange of nostalgias. Nostalgia disappears the more you mess with it. (11/2018) #urbanism

1565. The internet is still in some ways still Silicon Snake Oil, the title of a book that came out in 1995. Even though I love the internet, it still isn't a solid growth engine. If it emerged in 1920, it wouldn't have created suburbia as we know it (even though it has sustained it). The suburbs of the future will be dense cities, with some older abandoned suburbs razed as parking lots for autonomous vehicles ('AVs'), surrounded by a symbiotic 'rurban' ecosystem, specifically designed for them. Cars made suburbia possible in the 1950s. AVs will make more AVs possible, and people will perhaps live in them since they don't have to drive them. When you look at films from the 1950s of vacations with an Airstream in tow, it suggests a future of self-driving RVs that will essentially be suburbia on wheels. If there is a semblance of a suburb as we have known it, they will be provisional 'pop-ups', with 'printed' houses. (As it was expressed in Silicon Snake Oil, "life in the real world is far more interesting, far more important, far richer, than anything you'll ever find on a computer screen".) We still have those nostalgias, but that book will always seem (somewhat) out-of-date, but never completely. (5/2018)

1535. Many memories are still in black and white, but not for long. All generations live with a technology that fades or is 'colorized' in some way. It is ironic that we still love black and white photography as much as we do, and sometimes even more when color is added back. Nostalgia works in both directions.

1330. It's cooler to be good at being cool than the cool that used to come from playing an instrument, even at the simplest levels. That's why nostalgia now prevails because the Cool was a 'readymade.'

1323. TV is almost a fully 'mature' medium, in that a generation has lived and died with it. It will be the 2070s before the internet is fully 'mature.' The internet doesn't have something now that it will have in the future, and TV has what we never imagined. The internet is almost all future at the moment, with some nostalgia and cautionary tales. The future is made up of cautionary tales. (1/2017)

1263. There had been a general abandonment of traditional music education in favor of a DIY ethic, beginning in about 1980, when pop supergroups were splintering off into solo acts. It continues to evolve in interesting ways in parallel with technology. In the haste to move on to whatever is new, we are discarding what has been enriching to us thus far. Nostalgia can revive it somewhat in younger generations, but the original essences are lost, as no one has a direct memory of them, and consequently get subsumed into whatever the new technology is.

1214. If you make things based on miscellaneous bits of nostalgia you run the risk of being remembered for pillaging the more superior talents of other people. Homage can be a tricky thing to prove.

1059. If you remove nostalgia, then the future is only a myopic vision.

0884. Nostalgia for a past that is the future isn't a future at all.

0874. Today's nostalgia is often yesterday's banality.

0847. Our understanding of the world (especially with technology) begins with one invention and ends with another. Understanding through nostalgia is never enough because direct experience is the first thing that dies off--which may be a good reason to 'cybernate' everything you do (as Nam Jun Paik asserted), to give it resonance for the future. (11/2014)

0830. You need modernity to contemplate antiquity. The ancients probably were only concerned about the present and future. There may have not even been a word for 'nostalgia.' (10/2014)

0759. Nostalgia might be an indication that you don't like where you are.

0152(05). Instruments are symbols and containers for music. This is why traditional musical instruments will always persist, even as instruments become increasingly virtual. The same will apply to recordings, which will always enjoy a persistent nostalgia for physical objects, even if it is an album sleeve with art and lyrics. As long as humans have a sense of touch, they will want something they can really hold.

0140. The first thing God created was the journey, then created doubt and nostalgia.

0056. On the 1979 'Disco Demolition' in Chicago: It is interesting that people had such strong opinions about a genre that ultimately exerted a big influence on pop music. You can't really exclude any genre from the American musical pantheon, because over time it becomes embedded, and feelings of nostalgia have a way of bringing it back in--and we become endeared to it again.