Salon.com > Nostalgia

I always dated Tom Waits

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It was my college friend Jon who introduced me to Tom Waits. I was a freshman, and he was a sophomore, and we were hanging out a lot in those days, drinking coffee and Shiner Bock. Mostly I was waiting for Jon to decide he wanted to date me, which he never did, so we burned up hours in his studio apartment near campus arguing about theater and philosophy. On this particular night we had gotten so drunk or it had gotten so late that he made a tidy bed for me on the floor and we stayed up talking to each other across the dark.

His friend Andres was also there. Did I mention that? Well, I admit I didn't want Andres to be there, even though I loved him (but not in that way). Still, Andres did kind of love me in that way, so there we were, a trio of thwarted desire lying in our separate beds, and that's when Jon introduced me to Tom Waits.

It might be more accurate to say he presented me with Tom Waits. There was enough buildup for British royalty. Shhh. Stop moving. Listen to this part. Did you hear that line? I wish I could remember the song, but I suspect it was early lounge singer Tom Waits. Funny and broken and three sheets to the wind.

Adele: The new Kurt Cobain

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:40:00 +0000

With her armload of Grammys, three nominations for tonight's Brit Awards and a stack of platinum albums, England’s Adele reigns over pop music at home and abroad. “Someone Like You,” the closing track of her 17-million-selling album "21," is arguably the past year’s signature song, widely hailed – as is all her music – for its “authenticity.” But beyond its piano-and-voice starkness, it sounds like, well … 1992.

The song’s quiet/loud structure, its nakedly personal lyrics, and Adele’s aggressive, cathartic yawp in the chorus are all hallmarks of grunge-era rock. And authenticity, that elusive concept, is what Kurt Cobain was said to embody 20 years ago. As a resolutely working-class singer who penned songs about psychological pain and refused to conform to a stereotypical pop-star image, he was seen as a beacon of “realness” in an era of manufactured pop. The same could be said of Adele. If her success is any gauge, we’re entering a new era where displays of “authenticity” will be de rigueur. Let’s just hope it doesn’t do away with fun.

Whitney Houston’s lessons in love

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:13:00 +0000

In seventh grade I owned the cassette tape of "Whitney," the second album by Whitney Houston, which was true of pretty much every 12-year-old female in America. I played the hell out of that tape. I used to spend afternoons in my bedroom, lip-syncing those songs to my bedroom wall, because that's the kind of kid I was. Always longing for an imaginary audience. I did not want to be a writer back then, or the president of the United States. I wanted to be a pop star. And in 1987, there wasn't any pop star more elegant or talented than Whitney Houston. Daughter of a gospel singer, cousin of an R&B legend, smashingly beautiful -- she was practically anointed by the gods for greatness.

The song I loved the most on that tape was "Didn't We Almost Have It All." Fourth song, first side. I would perform the song to the wall, then rewind it and perform it again. Play, rewind, repeat. I can still hear the squiggle of the tape in my head as I pressed on the jam-box button just long enough to find the song's opening once more. This is a lost art in the age of the iPod, but back then, knowing how many seconds to rewind a cassette was a sign you truly understood its rhythms. You had literally learned the music backward and forward.

In defense of Ferris Bueller, car salesman

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:47:00 +0000

Honda owes Matthew Broderick a great, big "Danke Schoen."

Thanks to him, the Japanese carmaker can boast that it's got this year’s most buzzed-about Super Bowl ad: a commercial for the Honda CR-V featuring Broderick in an homage to his most well-loved character, Ferris Bueller.

This time around, Broderick isn’t portraying a charming teenage truant who feigns sickness and skips school to drive around Chicago in a Ferrari 250 GT with his best friend and girlfriend, and dance on a parade float while lip syncing Wayne Newton and the Beatles. Rather, Broderick plays a fictionalized version of his actual, off-screen self: a middle-aged guy feigning sickness to take a day off from shooting a movie so that he can tool around Los Angeles in an SUV. The ad, which was directed by Todd Phillips — of “The Hangover” and “Old School” fame -- has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube, is a top trending topic on Twitter -- but has divided fans who aren't sure whether to thrill to the nostalgia or be horrified that the free-spirited Bueller is shilling for an SUV.

Why the Kodak moment will never die

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:30:00 +0000

The death knell for film has been ringing for a long time. But the news this week that Kodak appears close to going belly up stirred a particularly poignant surge. Kodak, after all, isn't simply a business that's been recently downgraded by Moody's, one that's reportedly on the verge of bankruptcy. It's isn't just another humbled corporation that, as one former employee told the Wall Street Journal, once viewed itself as "undefeatable." For almost anyone born before 2000, it's the brand most closely associated with life and memory itself. Kodak is the company that, for decades, made its name synonymous with "moments."

Nostalgic for everything

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000

"Nostalgia is denial -- denial of the painful present," says a philosopher (Michael Sheen) in Woody Allen's surprise hit "Midnight in Paris." "The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking: the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one [that] one's living in. It's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present."

If nostalgia is indeed a flaw, it's one that many 2011 films and TV programs shared. Some of the year's most talked-about movies and shows gave themselves over to some form of nostalgia -- unabashedly reveling in, and idealizing, not just an earlier time, but the artists and artistic styles that we associate with that time, and the rush of emotion that accompanies our fantasies of same. Allen's "Midnight in Paris" -- his top grossing movie ever -- is Exhibit A. It's an immensely likable reworking of his short story "A Twenties Memory" in which an Allen stand-in, screenwriter Gil (Owen Wilson), magically gets to travel back to the time of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. But it's merely the keynote address in a year of budget-busting, production-design-showcasing, time-tripping cinema and television, a year that invited viewers not merely to experience stories from another time but to slip into them with deep pleasure and savor their restorative power.

Is 2011 really just 1991?

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:49:00 +0000

Kurt Andersen has really done it now. His more than three decades spent monitoring the tremolo fluctuations in urban American style, power and class distinctions appear to have ended in defeat, with a single, glum Vanity Fair essay, “You Say You Want a Devolution.” Andersen thinks cultural change has come skidding to a stop. It’s his strangely unironic nod to Francis Fukuyama, who in 1991 proclaimed the end of history, and subsequently became Exhibit A of the dangers of intellectual overreach. But Andersen confidently name-checks Fukuyama as he concludes that the last 20 years have seen culture fizzle out.

The early 2010s, in his analysis, and the early 1990s are effectively indistinguishable. He admits that there may have been minor modifications to the stock American uniform of jeans and T-shirts since the administration of Bush 41 and Desert Storm, but radical change of the sort that we used to demand from art and music has instead become concentrated in the realm of technology. Our computer code is magnificent. Our dress code, and pretty much everything else, is devoid of innovation, he argues.

How could Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore divorce?

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:00:00 +0000

I didn’t react well to the news that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, king and queen of the indie-rock scene, were getting divorced after 27 years of marriage. How could New York’s “underground power couple” call it quits? As if they were mere mortals?

It came up on my Twitter feed Friday, which made the news seem all the worse -- a bit of factual flotsam on my phone. It wasn’t some cocktail party rumor. I felt sick and off-balance, searching for confirmation, vision blurred with tears. I thought, I feel like I’m reading an obituary.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!” I texted my husband.

“Yeah, it’s really sad,” he wrote back, without nearly enough emotion for someone who always wore this ecstatic expression during the infinite groove on “Expressway to Yr Skull.”

“If it can happen to Kim and Thurston, it can happen to anyone,” a friend said morosely. Another asked, “Do you know why they’re splitting up?”

"No,” I snapped, feeling oddly protective of their privacy, “and I don't want to know. That's their business.”

Why would anyone remake “Footloose”?

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:34:00 +0000

It was the year that Wendy’s ads popularized the phrase “Where’s the beef,” the Detroit Tigers were one of the hottest teams in baseball and a dance movie called “Footloose,” starring mostly unknown actors, was released.

The year: 2011.

Of course, all of those events happened for the first time in 1984. But while Clara Peller of the Wendy's ads is long dead and these Tigers' World Series dreams teeter precariously, the “Footloose” remake out today bares a comfortable resemblance to the Kevin Bacon near-classic released 27 years ago — the same year, incidentally, that its star Kenny Wormald, was born.

Wormald plays Ren MacCormack, the character created by Bacon. Ren is a big city boy (Chicago then, Boston now) who finds himself in a small town where dancing and loud music have been outlawed. In the original film, the merriment is prohibited because the town’s reverend (John Lithgow) is a religious fanatic who fears for the teenagers’ souls. He also doesn’t like his foxy daughter (Lori Singer) hanging around with Ren. In the 2011 edition, a tragic car crash in which five teens were killed coming home from a dance is the plot engine which leads to a teen rebellion and the eventual need for Ren to help everybody lose … their blues.

TV’s new nostalgia for sexism

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:20:00 +0000

The fifth season of "Mad Men" may have been delayed until 2012 by contentious negotiations between AMC and series creator Matthew Weiner, but fans desperate for their fixes of fashion, Old Fashioneds and nascent feminism have three new shows set in the late 1950s and early 1960s to tide them over.

This week, NBC's "The Playboy Club" and ABC's "Pan Am" join "The Hour," a stylish look at a British TV news show that premiered in August on BBC America. It’s easy to suggest that these shows are trying to capitalize on "Mad Men’s" popularity -- which has spawned everything from paper dolls to a Banana Republic clothing line -- and it’s certainly true. But it’s more accurate to say that "Mad Men" tapped a vein of gender trouble that no one expected ran so deep. The clothes and the cocktails may be appealing, but they’re a way of setting us up to revisit a moment when women were starting to remake the world, and to take on the knotty questions of where the fight for women’s equality got derailed. The success of "Mad Men’s" imitators will depend on whether they give viewers substance to go with that style, or whether they build a series of arid, period theme parks.

Cameron Crowe revisits “Say Anything”

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:32:00 +0000

For Gen-Xers still under the spell of Lloyd Dobler, the boombox-hoisting, trench coat-wearing antihero played by John Cusack in Cameron Crowe’s 1989 teen romance "Say Anything," it’s been a pretty eventful summer.

While discussing his upcoming films "Pearl Jam Twenty" and "We Bought a Zoo" at the Television Critics Association press conference in July, Crowe said he'd consider a "Say Anything" sequel. But just as fans started getting excited about Dobler Part Deux, they suffered a collective buzz kill Monday when Crowe told IFC that while he thinks about what might have happened to the film's characters, a sequel remains a pipe dream.

How did Rocky and Drago avoid steroid testing?

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:01:00 +0000

Last week, a nation in the throes of '80s nostalgia breathed a collective sigh of relief as a major cinematic mystery was suddenly -- and shockingly -- solved. Finally, after more than a quarter century of speculation, we now know exactly why Marty McFly originally became friends with Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown. The secret was nonchalantly revealed by "Back to the Future" co-writer Bob Gale, who wrote on Mental Floss's blog that it all spawned from Marty's childhood fascination with the town's illustrious weirdo.

"Marty was told that Doc Brown was dangerous, a crackpot, a lunatic," wrote Gale. "So, being a red-blooded American teenage boy, age 13 or 14, he decided to find out just why this guy was so dangerous. Marty snuck into Doc's lab, and was fascinated by all the cool stuff that was there. when Doc found him there, he was delighted to find that Marty thought he was cool and accepted him for what he was... Doc gave Marty a part-time job to help with experiments, tend to the lab, tend to the dog, etc."

Our nostalgia is killing us

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:45:00 +0000

In the last couple weeks, a slew of cultural institutions have celebrated birthdays -- from MTV (now 30) to Nirvana’s "Nevermind" (about to turn 20) to the Strokes’ famously disaffected "Is This It" (soon to be a youthful 10). Other artifacts have been rebooted or revived ("Beavis and Butt-Head," "Clarissa Explains It All"), or combined, Voltron-like, into new-old organisms (the boy-behemoth NKOTBSB, which unites the grown men of New Kids on the Block with the grown men of the Backstreet Boys).