Nostalgia

This entry is in response to a book reading I went to (it has been a long while now) at City Lights, for Erik Davis' Nomad Codes.

It's strange being old enough to consider yourself a peer of 40-something writers and professors, and young enough to have participated in a wholly different version of Western culture in my youth. Davis' reading was witty and charming. He has huge amounts of exuberance and thoughtfulness that endeared him to me (and likely the whole audience) very quickly. He read from three sections of his book, focusing on his drugged-out experience as a 14-year-old (and the idea that the use of LSD, etc., was a lifelong reference for him as to the importance of the imagination), a very funny encounter with an in-car emergency response system (and the subsequent moment of the uncanny when he realized the radio was talking to him--a very brief time, he said, when you are aware of how technology is changing our lives without our knowing, when you haven't yet absorbed that technology as a normal part of life and it is still shocking and strange), and his experience following a developing-country-loving band around the Middle East.

All great until the question period, when a few sycophantic individuals asked things like, "You're going to Rice. And you're so creative, so intelligent. What would you say about [dramatic pause, clearing of throat] 'attention span'." (it was not posed as a question) What? A few people got up to leave, demonstrating what the author could not about the modern attention span, if that was, in fact, the question this woman was asking. But the real downward spiral came when a few older men (some of them shockingly young to be thinking this way, quite frankly) started asking questions (following long, rambling intros) about music today. Davis had written about rock bands for 10 years, had been very hip-to-the-moment, as he described it, but didn't really follow it anymore. Someone's question focused on the amazement they experienced as a child, when a new Beatles album came out--this is it!! the only one that will ever be like this! the best album ever!--and the disappointment they feel now--oh, well, just another one. i'm sure there will be something just like it next year. And Davis' response just enforced this way of thinking: Yeah, I always listen to music today and think, man, that sounds just like Band X. But, he noted, this isn't a good thing for him--in fact, it probably meant he was getting old. The last question I sat through was the City Lights host describing, in detail, his experience of listening to a record as a youth. "You know how it is. You buy the record. You carefully peel the plastic off. You put it on the player. You adjust the arm, swivel it over the record. And then there's that crackling noise. When anything is possible. You know? That crackling. When you don't know what's coming. How good it's going to be, how bad...." (yes, it went on.) Sitting there, a modern consumer of both MP3s and LPs, I was amazed by his overwhelming nostalgia for this thing of the past. And not just nostalgia (which can be great), but value-laden nostalgia: this thing of the past, with its cracking and plastic cover, this was the thing, the moment of possibility; this MP3 of today, it is less good, less meaningful. And Davis again affirmed (sort of, though I sensed his discomfort with the value judgment): Yeah, there's an attachment to a physical thing, the record player. A nostalgia attached to that material thing. And that's ok. But today, music feels like data. You listen to notes of music from an MP3 player like data, not like 'that's a bass note'.

When I left, soon after/in the middle of this conversation, it was with a sense that these 40-somethings, 50-somethings, 60-somethings, left their sense of perspective in their 30s. Music is still music today. People still hear the notes the same way. It is not data anymore than the notes embedded on an LP are data--it's just more easily transferable. The "coolness" strata have broken down along different lines. No longer do listeners have to rely on people like Davis to haunt record stores to ferret out the incredibly cool music before writing about it. Today, we can all access bands' websites, YouTube, MySpace, music blogs, and decide for ourselves. And the "crackling when anything was possible" is a complete re-construction of the experience. There is a nostalgia-based value in that crackling. But to say that there is any more of a possibility in that moment than in the moment before you hit Play on your MP3 player is to falsely remember the past. I have no doubt I will do this someday, too, but I left feeling frustrated with this nostalgia--it seemed to have alienated this group of the 40+s from the rest of us. It seemed to mean that they did not value the culture in which we were participating, even though they were participating in it, too. Because they had participated in this earlier, "better" culture, they seemed to think of themselves as somehow outside of the current culture. We all ascribe value to different things in varying ways, but it seems important to reconsider every now and then--to think of what mattered and what matters, and perhaps, the distinction between your appreciation through the lens of nostalgia and through your still-unsettled, undistilled present.

All that said, interesting talk and interesting guy. I appreciated the perspective, but mostly because mine isn't already rooted in the 1960s.