“I Love it When You Talk Retro” is a guide to the traces of history that lace our daily conversations, bringing together a vast array of “retroterms” with wildly different meanings and origins. These “verbal fossils”—like “red tape,” “carpetbagger,” “the 800-pound gorilla,” and “ditto”—all have their own stories, which often fall away after they start being regularly used. As we get further from their sources, we become more alienated from what we’re saying.

The past sneaks into our present in unexpected ways, and often we don’t even realize our part in perpetuating it. There’s something poignant about the idea that so much of what we say derives from things that are lost, obsolete, or misunderstood. “I Love it When You Talk Retro” is a dictionary of pseudo-foreign phrases, a bridge between generations, and a serious treat for word nerds. I talked to Keyes about why retroterms matter, why Boomers speak in code, and why we’re all still haunted by high school.

You look at a huge number of terms in this book. How did you choose which ones to explore?

For years I’ve been jotting things down as I heard them. I’d think, “How would my kids know what that means? How would a new immigrant understand the context of that phrase?” Whenever I would hear something that raised that question, I’d make a note of it. Eventually it was a list of thousands.

From there, what was your research process like?

I started out planning to do pop culture: TV shows, song lyrics, old ads. The more I got into it, the more I realized how many words and phrases went a lot further back than that. The book just about killed me. I ended up with a manuscript about three times as long as it was supposed to be.

Many of the phrases I was thinking about were the ones you think everyone knows—like “waiting for the other shoe to drop”—but invariably, you find out they don’t. Or they might know what it means, but they don’t know where it came from. Then I began to see ones I hadn’t heard of myself: Paul Krugman wrote, “There must be a pony in there somewhere,” as a way of referring to unwarranted optimism. I’d never heard of it before, so I looked it up and found a huge number of references to this story: A young boy is confronted by a huge mound of manure, and rather than being put off like most of us, he dives right in. Someone asks him why, and he says, “With this much manure, there must be a pony in there somewhere.”

I’ve been keeping more recent track of Maureen Dowd—I call her the Queen of Retrotalk, because she’s constantly using retroterms. But she’s not unique. Reporters of a certain age are constantly tossing around these Boomer-era allusions as if everyone knows what they refer to.

It’s partly a matter of style: She’s trying to brand herself as a certain kind of writer with a certain kind of knowledge. I guess she assumes that it’s an advantage, but you’re pointing out that it can really be alienating.

I compare it to talking to someone who’s always throwing French or Latin phrases into conversation. It always makes me feel left out and ignorant. I think, in a way, that’s part of the point—when those of my generation make reference to things that we grew up with, we’re as much as saying to people a lot younger than us, “This is a private conversation. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, the heck with you. Haven’t you got some twittering to do?” It becomes a kind of a generational freeze-out, a way of, probably unconsciously, celebrating generational solidarity–especially for Boomers.

How important do you think it is for us to know the roots of these expressions?

Well, it keeps you in the conversation. I don’t think it’s an imperative. It makes you more cognizant of what’s being discussed around you. And it’s more fun to know what they refer to: we get the gist of a lot of these things, but we don’t necessarily know their origins.

I knew what “gerrymander” meant—to fiddle with the shape of a congressional district to favor one candidate or another—but I had no idea where it came from. It turns out it goes back to the early 19th century, when the governor of Massachusetts, Eldridge Gerry, presided over a redistricting and some very weirdly shaped districts [resulted]. A cartoonist drew a picture of a congressional district shaped like a salamander, and he called it the “Gerry-mander.” It caught on. A lot of these phrases come out of events, and then they’re kind of fun to say, and nothing better comes along to replace them, so we still talk about them.

The Boomers’ frame of reference is very TV-centric, because they spent so much time in front of the television. It raises an interesting question: What will be the retroterms of the Internet generation? My son, who’s 23, spends a lot more time in front of a computer screen than a TV screen. Probably a lot of the phrases he’ll use will confound his grandkids, and will come out of the Internet and computer-ese.

It does seem like a never-ending cycle of misunderstandings.

My kids are seven years apart—one’s 30 and one’s 23—and I think phrases familiar to the older one aren’t necessarily familiar to the younger one. It used to take a generation for terms to become obsolete, but as everything else is accelerating, I think the rate at which terms become obsolete has accelerated.

At the same time, the Internet keeps a more public, centralized record of what things used to mean, which could be helpful.

Yeah, it’s so easy to look things up now. That was one problem I had writing this book. I’ve been writing word or quotation-oriented books for a couple of decades, but twenty years ago it meant a lot of traipsing around the library, making phone calls, reading old magazines and newspapers—which was very demanding, but it was a real detective game. Then, the challenge was to maximize your data. Now you have a whole different challenge, which is to minimize, to put borders on what you’re accessing.

What inspired you to write your book “Is There Life After High School?”

I had all these strong leftover feelings about high school, and my classmates, about what happened to me there, and what I wish had happened. I remember walking down the path to the mailbox and coming back with an envelope that said up in the corner “CHS Class of ’62,” and I opened it up and unfolded this piece of paper and it said, “Reunion Time!” This was ten years after I’d graduated. My hands started trembling, my heart started pounding, my cheeks were flushed. I was struck by how strong my feelings were, my ambivalence about going to a reunion. I mean, for crying out loud, it’s high school, ten years ago—why is my heart racing?

I started talking to friends and reading up on celebrities about their high school experiences. Everyone I talked to had their own memories and resentments and second thoughts and regrets, things they wish they hadn’t said, things they wish they had said, people they wish they could have gone out with, fights they wish they had won…the list is endless. I called up Robert Logue, and said, “Mr. Logue, I hear you’re the guy who beat Richard Nixon for Senior Class president at Whittier High School in the 30’s.” There was a long pause at the other end of the line. He says, “That was student body president.” So we really do remember, and I was really able to unload the weight of my high school memories by writing that book.

Tell me about your toaster collection. Why toasters?

My mother-in-law had this gorgeous, shiny sunbeam toaster from 1938. I always admired it. One day we went to visit her and the toaster wasn’t in the kitchen. I asked where it was, and she said, “Oh, it broke, I threw it down the incinerator.” That turns out to be a common collectors’ syndrome, where something you really wanted got away from you, and you try to replace it. So I kept my eyes open for other toasters. There are serious toaster collectors out there; they have a toaster collectors association, they have a newsletter, they hold conventions. I try to just have fun with it, and I try not to spend too much money on my toasters. As you can see from the pictures, I’ve got, I think, about sixty at this point. I also have hairdryers and blenders and cocktail shakers and waffle irons and stuff like that.

I think I’m a 30’s guy, even though I was born in ‘45. There’s something about that whole pre-war era that fascinates me. Some of the design of the early toasters is phenomenal—they’re just chrome-y and curvy and shiny…I just like them. And I love showing off my toasters to visitors to our house. We go down to the basement, and there’s this reaction like, “what in the world are you collecting toasters for?” But they love to go over there and see, “Oh, we used to have one like this!”

Incidentally, I tried to get a book together called the “Tao of Toasters,” about the role toasters play in our culture. My agent didn’t think she could sell it.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/nostalgia/2010/02/25/%e2%80%9cwhere-does-that-word-come-from%e2%80%9d-ralph-keyes-talks-retro/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/nostalgia/2010/02/04/the-disturbing-relatability-of-hoarders/ http://thefastertimes.com/nostalgia/2010/02/04/the-disturbing-relatability-of-hoarders/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:08:25 +0000 Eryn Loeb http://thefastertimes.com/nostalgia/?p=449 The other day, I found an accidental time capsule: a plastic folder I used to take back and forth to my former job, where I last worked almost a year ago. It had been sitting on a shelf, unnoticed, since then. The folder was filled with receipts for expenses that were reimbursed a long time ago, an outdated resume, year-old birthday cards, a flier advertising a sublet that was available beginning in December of 2008, and an Amtrak confirmation from last Christmas. I certainly do get attached to things—evidence of trips taken, movies seen, experiences had—but there’s definitely a line between what I care about keeping and what I can easily toss out. It was sort of cool to find all these papers hanging out together, and to see them form a picture of a particular time, but they don’t hold any kind of deep, essential meaning for me. Basically, I can get rid of them without losing what they represent.

If you’ve seen the A&E show “Hoarders,” you know why this distinction matters. (If you haven’t, episodes are online.) At the beginning of each episode—which airs following the similarly bleak reality show “Intervention”—a stark black screen informs us that “Compulsive hoarding is a mental disorder marked by an obsessive need to acquire and keep things, even if the items are worthless, hazardous or unsanitary.” From there, we visit the rather terrifying homes of two people, where the evidence of compulsive hoarding is staggering and indisputable—we see room after room piled high with clothes, paper and garbage, literally threatening to bury the people who live there. And the stakes are high: These peoples’ homes are falling apart in tandem with their minds, bodies and relationships.

In a sense, “Hoarders” is one of the many reality shows (from “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” to “Obsessed”) that exposes us to someone’s unsettling personal situation, rationalizes the cameras’ intrusion by trying fix the problem that brought them there in the first place, and then lingers, practically leering, over the shiny new surfaces as redemptive music plays. “Hoarders” is, arguably, educational, but it’s also undeniably exploitative. And though that’s hardly remarkable these days, it cuts closer to the bone than most reality TV. We get to sit on our couches and watch—cringing, riveted—as we fight the sudden urge to go clean out our closets. We get to gawk (however uncomfortably) and pity these people, while reassuring ourselves that our own lives are different, better, more secure. There’s some relief in that simple self-diagnosis: Our habits may come nowhere close to the troubling ones exposed on the show, but many (most?) of us can probably empathize with the tiny seed of an impulse that can lead there, given the right circumstances.

We are all, in some way or another, attached to the things we own and surround ourselves with. And though we understand that “stuff” is, in a sense, just stuff, we also know that stuff has meaning. Our stuff can tell us who we are and where we’ve been, and it can ground us on the way to where we’re going. We can also lose ourselves in it. It’s when the meaning and the memories become inextricable from the physical object that the real problems set in, and where “Hoarders” picks up.

On the show, participants are typically given two days to work with a psychologist, a professional organizer, and a team of disposal experts as they clean out as much of their home as they can manage. Though it does have the benefit of putting pressure on people who probably couldn’t take action without it, two days is a really an insanely short amount of time to accomplish something of this scale. Most of these homes—and the minds that live in them—are much too cluttered to be repaired so quickly.

Of course, the timeframe does make for concise, suspenseful television, but it doesn’t necessarily prioritize what’s best for the damaged individual at the center of it all. And time should really be a serious consideration here, since the perception of it is really central to the act of hoarding, and to the way hoarders understand the world (or fail to). Consciously or not, many hoarders are trying to create a cocoon where everything stays the same and there are no choices to make. When you can’t conceive of a livable future, it makes sense to cling to the detritus of the past. The past is reassuring, because it already happened. You can hold it evidence of it in your hands. It’s as real as you can handle things getting.

Even as the two-day plan can seem like a cruel tease, the well-intentioned professionals on the scene try to instill simple criteria for deciding to keep things or throw them away: Is it currently serving a purpose? Has it been used in the past year? Is it likely to be used in the next year? But for people with compulsive hoarding disorder, it’s not about function, it’s about feeling. No matter how useless it seems, the persons’ stuff gives them a sense of security in a way nothing else in their lives can. When feelings guide the way you accumulate things and place value on them, logic doesn’t have much affect. Regardless of the apparent “aftercare funds” supplied by the network (producers obviously know that it would look really, really bad if they just cleared out after taping), prospects for real progress seem grim.

No matter the details of their personal situation (alcoholism, depression, poverty, the death of a spouse…), and regardless of gender or age, what most of the people featured on the show have in common is a near-fanatical attachment to memories, and a fear of forgetting. To them, it’s simple: if you keep an object, you hold on to the memory associated with it. Without it, the memory is gone. As one hoarder, Linda, is being encouraged (and goaded, by her rightfully angry daughter, who believes her mom is more invested in her stuff than her family) to get rid of things, she begins to crumple. “It’s bringing back too many memories,” she says. The organizing expert by her side firmly but kindly asks her if she’s going to focus on memories of the past, or “focus on creating memories in the future.” It’s supposed to be a rhetorical question, but that’s not how Linda sees it.

When Todd (a youngish guy we’re told is only “chronically disorganized,” with the potential to become a compulsive hoarder) seems reluctant to throw away some of his ruined old clothing, his therapist prompts him, “Maybe that’s something you could work on: the shirt doesn’t hold the memory…the memory is within you.” Gail, whose house is literally in danger of collapsing on top of her (there are cracks in the support beams, and it can’t be fixed unless she clears out), explains, “I’ve always loved history. I’ve always loved to collect things that meant something to me. I feel like I have a responsibility to keep the history alive.” Years ago, she had a serious house fire that cost her some important personal mementos. Guarding herself against a similar loss, her stuff is now basically holding her hostage. There’s no reverent preservation going on in her mountains of things. History isn’t being kept alive. She’s just stockpiling as if she doesn’t know what else to do.

Meanwhile, a man named Jim has been given an ultimatum by his daughter: clean up his house, or he can forget about his baby granddaughter ever coming inside. Among her reasonable concerns is that Jim long ago misplaced a loaded gun somewhere in the house and hasn’t been able to find it. His kitchen cabinets are full of cobwebs and mouse droppings, and his “office” is populated by precarious stacks of paper. “Part of my life is in memories of things,” he explains. “Things are memory triggers for me.” And yet he doesn’t actually seem to need the objects to spark reminiscences. The professional organizer assigned to his case is a little bowled over by how detailed his memories are, and how easily he can summon them. She asks him if he thinks he could still remember without the “things” to act as triggers, and tells him, “Your whole life can’t be a keepsake box.”

If you were to set out to take pictures of things that were slowly but steadily deteriorating, certain objects would call out to you for inclusion—you’d probably pull your car to the side of the road and aim your camera at an old neon sign, a shuttered storefront, a huge statue of a cowboy with paint peeling off it, a faded mural on a brick wall. But the things that would capture your attention, and fall into your definition of “vanishing,” would end up being the things that tugged at you in a way you couldn’t totally explain. You’d know something was vanishing when it whispered to you, take my picture.

Eastman finds evidence of a fading country in old theaters, churches, hotels, all kinds of hangouts, doors and entryways, signs, stores, restaurants, and cars, all studiously devoid of people. In the book, he gives each category it’s own section, prefaced by a short, moody paragraph or two. In his highly romantic introduction, Douglas Brinkley practically pleads with us to see that the things in these pictures are beautiful—he quotes William Carlos Williams, who once said of some shards of broken glass, “These are gems. It’s just a matter of your eyes’ looking at them right.” But that’s no secret—lots of people can see the strange elegance of a crumbling building. The lost-ness of these places and things gives them a kind of magnetism: two opposing poles of time drawn together.

It’s hard to think how these photographs might avoid the mythologizing of small towns, honest work, old-fashioned Americana, and unpeopled and/or abandoned places that seems to be a byproduct of looking at the past. Eastman, and other photographers and artists of his ilk, expect viewers to react to these images with wistfulness, to share his sense of wonder and loss. And the harsh, fleeting beauty of Eastman’s decaying places (or at least, his artful photographs of them) makes a pretty convincing case: Maybe we should feel sad that the shoe repair shop is closed, that the old marquee movie theater is for sale, that juke joints—at least by that name—are out of style. Maybe things really were better back then, when these washed out signs were in full color and business was booming.

Still, Eastman isn’t asking us to intervene in the process of vanishing, to do anything so bold as stop it from happening. He just wants us to witness it. For him, documentary photography is more of a solitary, poetic journey than a cause. And he’s not alone: If Eastman’s book leaves you wanting more, you can turn to “Ruin: Photographs of a Vanishing America” by Brian Vanden Brink, “A Handful of Dust: Disappearing America” by David Plowden, or “Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York” by James T. Murray. Another photographer, Edgar G. Praus, shoots under the auspices of the American Highway Project, a not-for-profit he founded to “[preserve] America’s roadside culture through photographic documentation.” (Tellingly, he’s also the owner of Praus Productions, Inc, the last remaining custom photo lab in Rochester, NY, a city that used to be known for them.) “Traveling back roads by choice, he can’t help but notice that the quaint, vernacular architecture and home-spun roadside attractions that he loves are rapidly disappearing,” Praus’s web site explains, with familiar sentiment.

Looking for more information about Michael Eastman’s process, I googled “Vanishing America” and stumbled on another project with the same name. This one is spearheaded by a photographer named Holt Webb, who drives around the country in a bus powered by vegetable oil; he positions his version of “Vanishing America” as a sort of activist project. Like Eastman, he’s interested in decaying buildings and old signs, but his bigger concern is the real and irrevocable vanishing of the natural environment. And he wants his audience to have more than a knee-jerk emotional response, to do more than just squint and sigh. With a busy, confusing website and a load of sponsors, his documentary project is much less austere, even if its message is ultimately—at least potentially—more sobering.

Webb’s aim, he writes on his site, is to “promote conservation and raise awareness about what we are losing—our culture, our wildlife, and our landscape—in hopes that some of it will still be around for future generations to enjoy.” It sounds like any other conservation project but for that word “culture,” which makes clear that he’s not just interested in photographing forests and wetlands, but in the shape and sensations of small town life, abandoned industry and various kinds of manmade Americana.

For people who care about photography—who see the world through their camera’s viewfinder—those latter subjects are pretty hard to resist, even if what you really care about saving is ancient forests. But it’s a little strange to see them all mixed up together in Webb’s world: swamps and wild horses alongside abandoned factory buildings. Sure, lots of different things stand as unofficial monuments to the past. But these things are hardly all vanishing in the same way, and I’m not sure it makes sense to mourn them in the same breath.

It all reminds me of why I’m uncomfortable with the idea that some part of America is “vanishing” in the first place, even if to some extent it’s undeniable. It’s hard not to hear the ominous political reverberations of that phrase (or others like it), which are so easily used to justify all sorts of terrifyingly regressive ideas. There are things to rescue and preserve, and things to remember. But they’re not necessarily the same things. “If not for Eastman’s dutiful camera, amnesia would surely have engulfed all these haunts,” Douglas Brinkley writes in the introduction to “Vanishing America.” The only reason I can enjoy that book without it breaking my heart is because I know Brinkley is overstating his case.

Photos by Eryn Loeb

“Some of us loved it. Some of us hated it. But none of us will ever forget it,” goes one of the show’s many taglines/sound-bites, repeating the usual pop cultural ambivalence about high school. (More perceptively, there’s also “It takes guts to go back.”) Ads for the show have been plastered all over the subway lately, showing the cast of classmates as they look today, along with their poufy-haired black-and-white yearbook photos.

The show’s trademark is to reduce each cast member to a high school stereotype; each person appears in the credits (and in one-on-one interviews throughout each episode) identified by their name and a convenient label: “The Homecoming Queen,” “The Loner,” “The Class Clown,” “The Skate Punk,” “The Jock,” “The Wannabe,” “The Pregnant Girl” (the list goes on). In their interactions with their former classmates, each cast member seems intent on confirming or disproving that label, though the show is edited to suggest that this is nearly impossible—that we are all, always, our high school selves.

The dynamics and relationships on most reality shows already feel a lot like high school. With long lost friends, old grudges, old crushes, and broken hearts (in TV Land’s first two seasons, there was even a real live divorced couple), “High School Reunion” is just more literal about it, and that’s something of a relief. Petty and staged as some of it may feel, these aren’t strangers thrown together in a big, beautiful house—these people have real history, giving them plenty of existing material to obsess over (though it still all unfolds in the requisite big, beautiful house). There’s something surreal about seeing real life butt up against reality show conventions—these people don’t really need production help to encourage their reminiscing and reckoning. That would have happened all by itself, just by bringing together competing personalities (and lots of baggage) after a twenty-year gap.

But the producers supply tricks and devices anyway, and, of course, encourage the airing of any and all dirty laundry. The cast is regularly presented with both “Detention” slips—which direct them to a location where an unknown classmate will confront them about some long-ago cruelty or slight—and “Hall Passes,” which allow them to pick a classmate to spend more time with (this usually means a “romantic” dinner or some calculated ogling of the lush scenery). The resulting awkward moments are much more unnerving than the postured courting we’ve come to take for granted on shows like “The Bachelor,” because there’s more behind them.

In the first episode of Season Two, starring Arizona’s Chandler High School Class of ‘88, Jenny (“The Cheerleader”—that’s her on the right) confronts Scott (“The Skate Punk”), who was apparently one of many guys who used to make fun of her for “developing big boobs early on”—and, she suggests, may have once touched her inappropriately. As she tries to tell him what the issue is, she’s tearing up, hesitating, visibly upset and uncomfortable. Once she finally explains her grudge to a baffled and uneasy-looking Scott, he apologizes, takes her by the hand, and they go back to the “Reunion Estate” where Liz (“The Wannabe”) is not happy to see Jenny. Jenny, you see, “absolutely tortured me…[and] made high school a living hell.” Ah, how the tables turn! When Liz tries to talk to her about it, Jenny is standoffish. She says she doesn’t remember being mean, and she can’t understand why Liz is still upset over something that happened so long ago. It’s only when they both get detention slips and are forced to camp overnight and “cooperate” by catching their own dinner that they do the inevitable bonding thing, and come to an understanding about putting the past behind them.

High school is the perfect microcosm of human drama, and revisiting it in this show is a shrewd programming move. Of course, the producers want to enable as many rekindlings, romances and blow-ups as possible (the show is particularly big on “surprises” and “secrets,” and for obvious reasons, the cast seems to be made up mostly of single people), so that all the big life decisions and understandings work themselves out on the high school stage. But the casting director also worked hard to get some stock reality TV types on board, and to make sure all cliques are represented. In Season Two, Jessica (“The Ugly Ducking” turned plastic-y hot—not to mention undermining and unhinged) loses her shit and screams at everyone that her (former) best friend Maricela (“The Outcast”), who is getting along quite nicely with everyone, is a prostitute. Season Three promises a pair known as “The Summer Girls,” who look like scary Barbies and are still mean to everyone.

It’s awkward to watch these stock types next to someone like Kara (“The Homecoming Queen”), who used to be married to Tom (“The Jock”). It’s clearly, and understandably, rough for the two of them to both be at the reunion. Their struggle to play nice is raw and unglamorous, and Kara can’t hide her discomfort as the crazy “Ugly Duckling” drapes herself all over her ex-husband. The shorthand is easy to interpret: Jessica has fake Angelina Jolie lips and long, overdone hair; despite being the original Homecoming Queen, Kara has a real person’s face and a mom haircut. They’re both defined by their labels, but only one of them has to prove she’s transcended hers.

Certainly, no one here can claim ignorance of reality TV rules, or pretend they were suckered into a situation they couldn’t have foreseen. But there’s a lot more sincerity here than on other comparable reality shows, because while the drama may be staged by the network, it’s based on things that happened long before “reality” TV became a way to tell stories about people’s lives. The goals here are a lot more authentic and understandable than winning an engagement ring from a dull, handsome man: Aside from 15 minutes of semi-fame, the castmates mostly seem eager to reconnect with people from their past, settle old scores,  and correct stubborn misperceptions.

There are many tears and much learning of lessons, and in the big season finale, there’s a prom. (Because what would be the point of a high school reunion that didn’t try to recreate the experience of being a teenager?) That the show manipulates both the cast and its viewers is a given, but it’s also strangely cathartic. I do wonder, though, about the classmates who weren’t cast in the televised reunion. At home on their couches, their experiences of watching what might have been their reunion—but isn’t, quite—could be the most revealing thing of all.

Photos from “High School Reunion” Season Two via Yahoo TV

Glenn Beck, for one, “has mythologized his childhood so much, he’s completely lost touch with reality,” Oliver notes with mock awe, having shown a clip of Beck choking up as he rants, “If a politician told you right now that he could make that happen again, that you could go back to those simpler times, when people were together, you’d do it in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you? But the truth is, no politician can take you there, they can only take you farther from there.” To illustrate the values of this supposedly golden age, Beck plays a Coke commercial from the 1970’s (yes, a time we all know was characterized by the values Beck holds dear).

Even knowing what Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity are capable of (and I’m really amazed every time I see a clip), it’s sort of jaw-dropping to watch the lengths they go to twist the past so that it suits their purposes. What’s amazing is that no one seems to call them out on it, much less identify the embarrassing, telling reasoning behind their longing for these imaginary glory days.

Except The Daily Show, of course. Near the end of the segment, after interviewing people who lived through the 1940’s,  50’s, 60’s, and 70’s — and acting all horrified when each one tells him that none of these times was really so great — Oliver is struck by a revelation. The years Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity miss so much? “They were all fucking children!” Oliver shouts. “It was a better, simpler time because they were all six years old.”

It’s a basic, overlooked point. For all their yelling about how great things were back when they were kids, all theses guys are really saying is that they had happy childhoods — that life was good back when they didn’t know anything about the world, and had no responsibilities. That’s what childhood (if we’re lucky) is. The world was certainly no less complicated or frightening, and there were no fewer causes for those looking for a fight. Kids, practically by definition, are just too young to understand, or even really pay attention. Everyone accepts that childhood is a source of nostalgia, most just know enough not to use their early innocence as the basis for a political argument.

With all this emphasis on the early years of their lives, though — those wonderful years before their pure sense of the world was ruined — you’d think Beck et al would have retained some elementary lessons about sharing, playing fair, and cleaning up their own messes. But I guess memory loss is a part of their strategy, too.

This whittling down of what matters is hardly a new ritual. It’s a longstanding tradition to summarize a set period of time, condense it into a highlight reel. Some things about the resulting lists are predictable: certain items are widely championed, others controversially left out; there are lists that seem designed to confirm the status quo along with those that relish being contrary. And the backlash always appears right on cue.

At least people have started having a little more fun with it in recent years. Tired of simply declaring the best of inevitable categories like movies, books, and TV (though those aren’t going anywhere), they’ve branched out into best cover songs, best “casual games” (whatever that means) and a whole host of analogous “worsts,” like Rotten Tomatoes’ compendium of worst reviewed movies and the Chicago Tribune’s worst dining trends. The result has been, in some respects, a less reductive attitude to the time we’re leaving behind, but also one that’s just more muddied, with everyone weighing in about tiny details and events. Like if they don’t do it now, the chance is gone forever.

Sure, these lists provide a sort of service: the pile of stuff is just so overwhelming, and we have an interest in knowing what’s worth pulling out and paying attention to. At their best—instead of aiming at some kind cultural consensus, or just burnishing egos—they’re an opportunity to point people in the direction of books, movies, and music they might otherwise have missed. This can be true whether it’s something already widely acknowledged to be great, or something less hyped. But the glut of lists is also numbing.

This year has been even more extreme, since we have not just a single year to account for, but an entire decade. (And yes, technically the decade doesn’t end till a year from now, but all anyone cares about is having a nice round number, and the more important thing is really to bookend the hysteria that we last faced ten years ago on the eve of 2000.) The task started early: Pitchfork launched its music retrospective over the summer, while The Millions started considering the millennium’s best books as early as September.

New York magazine’s “Best of the 00’s” issue was a standout, with thoughtful essays (and illustrations of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” and a Kindle set on a pedestal, behind glass) capped by “The Stick List,” which the editors defined as “the television programs, books, movies, art, architecture, plays, and pop albums that we’ll still be talking about in ten years” (a more practical rationale than many). The issue also featured a pretty amazing decade-spanning essay by Michael Hirschorn and, dear to my heart, a gallery of things made obsolete in this decade.

The annual countdown—and the unnervingly enthusiastic not-quite-post-mortem for the decade—seems to be a way of giving ourselves permission to move on, offering the assurance of having tied things up with a nice tidy bow (or really, multiple bows). I’m ambivalent about it: I like looking back and remembering the highs and lows, and it’s fun to be reminded of certain things that unfolded in the past ten years. But I’m a little wary of our compulsion to get everything in place, to be decisive before we move onto the next set of events and questions.

Trying to name the 00’s last month (another recent, widespread preoccupation), David Segal wrote, “We lack the critical distance that only time affords to sort through the lasting significance of the recent past.” He went on to paraphrase former poet laureate Billy Collins (not-so-coincidentally, author of a poem titled “Nostalgia”), who told Segal that “it will take many years to name the ’00s because it will take many years to figure out what we feel that we lost during that period, and therefore what to feel sentimental or wistful about.” I’m not sure it’s that simple. Sure, we know that distance matters. We expect that time will change things. But increasingly, we want to circumvent it. We want instant memories, quick judgments, the equivalent of a digital snapshot to keep and take for granted. We don’t need much time or distance at all before the wistfulness first kicks in; nostalgia starts to percolate seconds after the end of the moment in question.Whether accurately or not, we’re anxious to decide how important something was right after it happens.

And so these lists can seem like attempts to preempt the way time adjusts our perspective, a way to claim ultimate authority in the moment and deny that our opinions and understandings will change in any meaningful way. But there’s no point pretending that lists are anything but time capsules. We may congratulate ourselves if our top picks end up having real staying power, but no matter what we do, it’ll all look different a few years from now.

Aside from all of this, though, the lists are just a welcome distraction. They fill the end-of-year news hole, give us something entertaining to read alongside the latest grim economic news and the infuriating health care “debate.” Those things are harder to squeeze into a top ten. “[T]he first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era,” Andy Serwer wrote in Time Magazine’s cover story declaring this  “The Decade From Hell.” “Call it whatever you want—just give thanks that it is nearly over.” If only.

Rob Sheffield is often credited with being a sort of godfather when it comes to mixtape devotion, having movingly capitalized on it with his 2007 memoir “Love is a Mix Tape.” The mixes he described in that book were organic features of a larger life story, and a smart way to structure a tragedy: Sheffield’s wife Renée died suddenly when she was 31, and in the book, he’s working through the pain in a way that comes naturally to the music critic that he is (as well as being true to his relationship). Achingly specific, his story (along with the burgeoning cult of novelty cassette products, and the 2005 Thurston Moore-edited book “Mix-Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture”) opened the floodgates for the masses to gaze back on their own lives through the prism of a tarnished plastic cassette shell.

A new book, “Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves,” takes this tape-obsession in a logical, earnest direction. Instead of (or at least in addition to) drooling over a gold-plated cassette belt buckle, editor Jason Bitner (a co-creator of Found Magazine and a proponent of “confessional culture,” a la PostSecret and the “Mortified” books and reading series) has compiled short personal essays from some sixty writers, all testifying to their love of the mixtape in general, and more specifically of a person who gave them a memorable one, long ago.

The “Ex” in the title establishes right off that this looking back will have a decidedly wistful quality, the product of a certain kind of distance. It also means we know how all of these stories will end. Amid the particularity of the voices, there are common refrains, a shared pensive tone. “It was 1985,” writes Joe Levy in the first essay. “There was so much good music then…” Observes Starlee Kine, “[W]hen you are young almost everything you do is a first in your life and thus equally meaningful and exciting…” Annie Tomlin writes, “If I listened to Ben’s mixtape long after I should have moved on, it’s only because listening to it resuscitated a sliver of teenage joy….I’m not sure I’ll ever recapture the rush of pressing his lips to mine for the first time.” And Larry Smith writes, “Our songs are a time capsule of who we were…”

Here’s Abby Mims, writing about a tape she got from a guy she dated in her early twenties (who later died in a military plane crash, having apparently grown into the sort of loving family man that she doesn’t recognize as anyone she ever knew): “What I did want then was that tape, so I could’ve played it and remembered more clearly who it was that I had loved for those few moments in time, along with all the things that were and weren’t between us.” Leah Dieterich’s entry recalls a tape made for her by her childhood best friend in 1994, when they were in eighth grade. Proving again that no one’s too young for nostalgia, even then the tape was a way of looking backwards, titled “Childhood, Now and the Future.” Of the tape-maker, Dieterich explains, “Hers was the childhood of someone born outside of time, outside of a generation and an era.”

Rick Moody lost the mixtape he wanted to write about, and in its absence he started to envision it as “the Platonic ideal of the mixtape.” His contribution to the book—by far its lengthiest—is a collaboration with the tape’s maker, Stacey Richter (with whom he’s remained friends), in the form of letters they wrote to each other in an attempt to reconstruct the contents of the tape and the events that led to its making. “I know that that was the last moment in my life when I liked music,” Richter writes, a little shockingly. “Now I find music annoying, but it used to make me feel like I was in a movie and that something magical was about to happen to me.” The piece is one of the most honest reckonings with memory I’ve read (that it takes the form of correspondence—though I doubt they were using snail mail here—already gives it an old-fashioned flavor), and the directness with which the two parties confront one another about their recollections is refreshing among so many soliloquies. That doesn’t mean they don’t attempt to be relatable. Writes Moody, “These were the moments of being young when everything in life seemed to be changing, you know, hurtling forward into some unknown realm of adulthood, and maybe that’s why these were all such good songs, because they were all peculiar and memorable at such an important moment.” He tries to wrap things up on a sweet, sentimental note—but Richter unexpectedly gets the last word, when she realizes that the whole time she’d been picturing another tape she made for a different guy. Oh well: “The nineties were not only a time of hurtling change but also of mild sluttiness.”

Each story is faithfully accompanied by whatever visuals from the original mixtape are available (not surprisingly, the people excited to share these stories are the sort of people who held on to their tapes as precious tokens of young love and/or lost times, and so the tape in question was available for inspection and design purposes), and a reproduced track list. Reading the contents of each tape, it’s easy to look back and position yourself vis-à-vis someone else’s time line—When did I discover Sonic Youth? When did I compulsively listen to that Fiona Apple song? Oh my god, I was exactly the same kind of dork in 9th grade!—and reflect on tapes from your own past, whether they’re stashed for safekeeping in a shoebox in your parents’ attic, displayed prominently in your adult(ish) apartment, reconstructed via the magic of iTunes, or exist only in memory.

Photos by supernative, Penningtron, cassettes

This is really starting to grate. As is becoming routine in these trend pieces, there’s at least one subject on hand to testify to the authenticity of it all. In this case it’s Eric Brewer, gallery owner and founder of a group called Dandies and Quaintrelles, which has organized “Tweed Rides, informal gatherings of spiffily dressed ladies and gents cycling leisurely through town and disdaining finish lines.” He explains: “There are all kinds of societies that are about dressing up in period costume and then going back to your oversize jeans the next day….This is about style as a way of being.” Earlier, the article’s author, David Coleman, somehow gets away with this line: “the clothes relate not to the runways or the estates of Europe, but to America’s heartland in ways that few fashions do.” These are Real Men, who go “deer hunting with old-fashioned muzzleloaded rifles”!

Coleman notes upfront that it’s tricky to draw a line between “polish and pretension,” and goes on to try to pinpoint the places where the former outweighs the latter. Turns out “three-piece suits once favored by mustachioed Gilded Age bankers; the military greatcoats and boots of Union officers; and the henley undershirts, suspenders, plaid flannel shirts and stout drill trousers worn by plain, honest farmers” are styles that seem “more sincere” in establishments that match them, like antique shops and certain Brooklyn eateries. You don’t say! I guess this means if you want to wear a t-shirt to dinner at, say, Marlow & Sons, you should be prepared to feel like an outsider among character actors at some kind of theme park.

In case you don’t quite get it, the article is accompanied by admittedly beautiful tin-type photography (the actual slideshow is titled “The New Victorians,” oh-so-different from “The New Antiquarians”), blurring whatever line remains between what these styles looked like in their prime, and what they look like now, in a new context. Might it not be more interesting to juxtapose these dapper gentlemen with the laptops and iPhones that their commitment to 19th century style “as a way of being” most certainly does not preclude?

And of course: These dudes might look all old-timey, but that dark gray felt overcoat with shearling collar, black wool-mohair tuxedo jacket with grosgrain shawl collar with trousers, and silk-cotton faille waistcoat cost $6,020, $4,640, $990 respectively. Should you prefer a more rugged look (what was traditionally worn by those aforementioned “plain, honest farmers”), there’s the gray and black plaid wool coat for $2,750 at Bottega Veneta; a charcoal glen plaid quilted wool jacket for $495 at Odin; and ye olde plaid flannel shirt for just $222.

So where is this mythical line between polish and pretension? Does it matter if we can identify it? Probably not, which is good, because the effort gives me a headache. Ultimately, I’m a lot less bothered by these styles than by the Times’ incessant gushing about them. Whether what’s “new” are antiquarians or Victorians, home décor or fashion, and whether it’s being practiced by men or women, these stories are the same. They offer publicity to the same shortlist of businesses, while doing little to really consider why hordes of hipsters—the indicator species for nostalgic trends—embrace this stuff. Of course, this is yet another fluffy Styles piece, and that is not its job. That, I suppose, is to promote expensive shit in the guise of authenticity. Maybe the line I’m looking for lies somewhere between a $10 vintage shirt and a $570 gray cross-country ski cap.

Photo: anyjazz65

Readers of this essay tend to understand it in very personal terms, though it’s influence has a lot to do with when one first comes to it. If you come to it early, it might spark anticipation for a time in your life like the one Didion describes, make you look forward to the world-weariness that looks wonderfully romantic from a distance. If you come to it when you’re already a New York writer-type encountering various professional roadblocks and stressing about the future, the world Didion presents looks both eerily familiar and enviably exotic—a much mythologized time in journalism, but one that feels very far away.

“Goodbye to All That” is about time passing, the accumulation of memories. It’s about figuring out who you are in a particular place, realizing that you’re in a fleeting moment and feeling alternately grateful for and desperate about it. It’s about a certain kind of growing up, and so of course, it’s an object of nostalgia itself. Originally the title of a World War I memoir by Robert Graves, since Didion made it her own, “Goodbye To All That” has been recycled as the titles of (to name but a few): a 1970 essay by Robin Morgan about the women’s movement, Representative Cynthia McKinney’s remarks at a 2002 reception for the Congressional Black Caucus, Andrew Sullivan’s 2007 cover story in The Atlantic explaining “Why Obama Matters,” an article by Steve Wasserman in the Columbia Journalism Review about declining book review coverage, a piece in the American Prospect about why liberals should avoid looking to the 1960’s for inspiration, an Entertainment Weekly blog post about the end of two characters’ storylines on Days of Our Lives, articles by Tony Judt in both The New York Review of Books (a book review) and The Nation (about anti-Semitism), a 1997 Christopher Hitchens piece in the NYRB about Che Guevara’s writings, Jonah Goldberg’s 2005 National Review piece pondering the end of “compassionate conservativism” as well as the subtitle of his 2001 explanation to readers of the same magazine about for why the Review dropped Ann Coulter’s column, and a blog post by Anthony Bourdain. Phew.

So, big surprise: regardless of religion, political affiliation, temperament, or seriousness of situation, everyone has something they’re ready to move past in a decisive, symbolic way. This particular title—resolved yet blasé—is the perfect way to mark that kind of moving on. Susan Dominus used it as a lynchpin for her recent article bemoaning the fading world of journalism as she knows it, harkening back to Didion’s essay more than directly than most of those other writers.

The title of Didion’s “famous elegy for the passing of youth…has been reverberating through my mind on a regular basis,” Dominus wrote. For her, it’s a sort of refrain to (or running commentary on) this recession’s endless media layoffs, which themselves signal an end to what it looked like and meant to be a journalist in Didion’s New York, and for awhile, in Dominus’s. “Ms. Didion tired of the same faces at the same parties, the gossip about book advances, the uneasy courtship of press and publicists, the endless cycle of aspiration and pretense,” Dominus wrote. “She eventually learned ‘that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair,’ as she wrote in one defining line. Everyone outgrows the scene eventually, but it was nice to know it was there.”

I bet it was. “Nice to know it was there” isn’t something writers of my generation can take for granted, because increasingly, it’s just not there—every browser refresh brings more depressing news. Forget fancy lunches, valuable mentorship, dreaming big, choosing from a range of available jobs in your field; there are no jobs, period, and no one can even afford to eat lunch out. Goodbye to all that, indeed.

But can you really say “goodbye” to a time you only knew in a mythic sense? My grad school friends and I are in a strange position, with a very clear idea of journalism’s past, a hazy sense of what might be its future, and a secure foothold in neither. Many of us grew up dreaming about working at the publications that are laying people off, slashing their freelance budgets, or folding altogether. And if we didn’t grow up aspiring to them, we certainly did as grad students two short years ago, when—incredibly—things were a lot different. Or at least different enough: Many of the publications our professors told us to pitch to don’t exist anymore, or have limited their contributors to an ever-shrinking staff. The landscape has changed so drastically in such a short time that we often wonder what professors in journalism programs can possibly be telling their students about their prospects—students in programs that have seen, if anything, increased enrollment. We imagine those classrooms as dark, depressing places, and in general, we’re glad to have gotten out of while the going was (relatively) good.

Journalism is locked in a very public, self-conscious struggle with what it was and what it may become. It’s a situation that’s both exciting and confounding to those of us working in the middle. Sure, lots of professions are struggling to come to grips with new realities, economic and otherwise. But journalism’s experience of these changes has, I think, been particularly sticky, all tied up with denial and hopelessness and unfounded optimism and promising innovation. The changes confronting the business are huge and seemingly sudden; they affect not just how we do our jobs or even just the jobs themselves, but every detail of how the job is defined—both what we’re writing about and how we’re writing about it. That’s created new divisions and hierarchies and resentments, many of them stratified along generational lines. It’s impossible to work in journalism today without being reminded of what once was, what we missed, what we came to the game too late to appreciate. Every generation  and occupation has it’s own myths, but journalists seem particularly steeped in them, even as doing the job well requires that we not to get too lost in what came earlier.

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends,” Didion’s essay begins. “I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my  finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.” For better or worse, the circumstances around the next “goodbye” seem largely out of our hands. Sometimes I envy the time when disenchantment was a choice—a specific stage rather than the general state of things. But maybe it just looks that way now because it’s gone.

Photo by johnbmwflora

“Dramas about everyday life are as few and far between in the start of this century as they were at the end of the last one,” said David Bianculli on Fresh Air. And here’s Ari Karpel, writing in the New York Times in advance of the DVD release: “Revisiting ‘Thirtysomething’ now means rediscovering a level of intimacy and sustained emotion (or self-involvement, in the less charitable view of critics) rare on television at the time.” Okay, so: rare then, and rare now. “What we thought of as esoteric, which meant specific and honest–specific to a group of people and honest about their lives–ended up having a universal appeal that we absolutely did not foresee,” co-creator Marshall Herskovitz told the LA Times in April.

It seems pretty pointless to wonder if a decidedly 80’s show could be embraced today, nearly twenty years later, in a very different context, but predictably, people are doing just that. “When ‘Thirtysomething’ appeared, it was thought to have inaugurated, along with a handful of other network series, a new golden age of television,” Ginia Bellafante wrote, under the headline “A Series That Shows its Age” (in one of at least four pieces the Times ran pegged to the DVD release). “That age would not actually come until the late ’90s and the HBO revolution, and it seems unfair to watch the show against the backdrop of all that has evolved since.” And yet it seems impossible to watch it any other way. Less then two weeks after Bellafante’s piece ran (a stretch which also saw a “Thirtysomething”-related Op-Ed), Michelle Slatella wrote her “Wife/Mother/Worker/Spy” column about initiating a family screening of the show she remembered so fondly, telling her daughters, “Think of yourselves as archaeologists…This is going to explain a lot about what your father and I had to live through when we were young.”

Did it really explain much? Could it? I’ve sat through much-hyped viewings of other people’s cultural touchstones plenty of times before—growing up, my dad’s love of old movies meant sharing indisputably excellent classics, as well as some more questionable choices. Obviously, the things that resonate for one person (or, more to the point, one generation) don’t always translate for others, though it can be fun to try and see what happens. And that’s fine: the specific personal appeal of a TV show (or movie or book or album…) can’t always be shared, and that’s part of what makes it special.

With so much buzz about “Thirtysomething” as a baby boomer touchstone, its nostalgia quotient has become the most important thing about it, not so unusual for a resuscitation. But time has also given it a sort of nostalgic residue, one that can rub off on you even if you don’t really know anything specific about the show itself. If I watched it (having not yet read all these reviews and misty-eyed testimonials), would I be experiencing someone else’s nostalgia?

I decided to find out, and was a little surprised to love the show so easily and immediately. The clothes were predictably scary, though some more than others: Melissa’s single girl style can be seen skulking around Brooklyn and Gary’s professorial shlubiness is sort of ageless (though his hair is not). Hope’s hair bows, though, are mystifying, as are her husband Michael’s ever-present suspenders and skinny ties. But somehow, these details don’t pull me out of what’s going on, which feels completely current: talky obsessiveness about everyday things, general messiness, the ongoing, irresolvable crises that come from realizing that you’re objectively an adult. It feels familiar—both because I recognize in it a sensibility I came to know in later shows that “Thirtysomething” influenced, and because the style of nostalgia itself is familiar, and unmistakable.

More and more, it seems to me that nostalgia isn’t tied to specific memories. It’s becoming not so much a specific longing as a general feeling we inherit. I don’t have nostalgia for “Thirtysomething,” but when I watch it, I get a decided whiff of someone else’s. There are just some things that manage to embody nostalgia, maybe partly by being so incredibly, accurately of the moment when they first appear.

The Times latched on to this early. In 1991, it asked the cast to speculate how their characters might fare after the show’s ending, as if they were real people. And in 1996, with Ken Olin (Michael) and Mel Harris (Hope) about to star in new series, the paper asked the cast to look back on a show that “now seems both of its time and timeless.” Mostly in their 40’s, it found that the stars “continue to remember their old show as a transformational four years that created them professionally, changed them personally and, much like college, can never happen again.” The sense that “Thirtysomething” was super special, absolutely tied to the moment, and could never be recreated was already established: “Probably the show was possible only in its four short years, a period when millions of baby boomers in their 30’s struggled with buying houses, raising children and the sense that they, at least, didn’t feel especially upwardly mobile in the go-go 1980’s.” And then two years ago, People magazine got the four lead women to “dish about growing older and looking great” at “fiftysomething,” a feature the magazine had probably been anticipating for years.

“Thirtysomething” feels familiar now partly because it once seemed so very distinctive. Really, in capturing a particular time so perfectly, it ensured it’s own eventual obsolescence. These days, it also gets to enjoy the kind of renaissance that comes with repackaging.