how do we know how we feel without nostalgia?
or: am I missing everything or feeling everything
I feel like it’s relentless, my writing about juxtapositions. Every time I send a Fax Me Harder I’m lamenting the importance of them, how the world is founded upon them, how they’re the lifeblood of our actual existence - and yet, no matter how many examples in, I never seem to really nail through to the (hot, molten) core of my point. I think I do express why they’re important, and I do describe good examples, but I’m not sure I completely fucking needle though and press the plunger on the syringe to explain that exact feeling of it’s importance, u know. I’m constantly in pursuit of expressing how I feel about juxtapositions, inexorably in pursuit of it. I certainly haven’t nailed that one specific feeling in the way that Griefbacon does - another thing I will never stop lamenting. I just read one of Griefbacon’s newsletters, titled “angel's share and other ghosts”, about a bar in New York that’s just closed down and how that bar was both everything and nothing to the author. The reason that the late Angel’s Share meant so much to them was precisely because it could mean nothing. It was the perfect analogy for the importance of juxtaposition, the way it conjures feeling, and reading it made me think. It made me think about the New York 00s scene, the naughties scene, and how much I’d have given to be there. To hear Fever To Tell for the first time when I was around 21 and to drink in a cocktail bar that’s so good even actually cool people don’t look down on it? To stay up all night to that soundtrack, wearing that leopard print, at that time? And it makes me think about LCD Soundsystem, and in the documentary when James Murphy leaves his (amazing) apartment and is walking round the block in his little blazer, looking both dishevelled and in control like only teenagers really can, and how he seems to walk this walk post-LCD the way he must have walked it in-LCD. “Everything changes, nothing changes at all” in the words of Anthony Bourdain, to whom Angel’s Share and the scene were surely second nature. If anyone sees the scene, it’s Anthony Bourdain, right?
I just listened to Marianne Keys on Adam Buxton (The Adam Buxton Podcast? The Adam Buxton Show?? What is it called? Weird) - I fucking love listening to both Marianne Keys and Adam Buxton talk despite having never consumed any of either of their other, more prevalent forms of media - and they were talking about the 80s (you know, the 1980s. Heard of it?). They were talking about working in restaurants in the 80s in Soho and living in squats and how Richard E Grant went drinking in their bars and how they went to the movies in the 80s and just the absolute SCENE of it, the fact that liking Tears For Fears meant you went to a certain café and getting changed after working late to go out dancing and I wonder if I will recall it all like that, and if so then: when? You know? Will I remember a scene that I don’t know that I know?
What I wonder so relentlessly is: do these people who describe their personal scenes so well know that they’re in it at the time? Or know that they have been? Or is that if you’re in the eye of the needle, u can’t see the hole? I’m inclined to believe that for my specific age of millennialism - 29, xoxo - we almost always miss the scene. At least, that’s how it feels - like we’re not living through the moment, never living through the moment but also always living through the moment. “Within, and without” in the inimitable words of F. Scott Fitzgerald (both in the 1925 novel and the 2013 film). The indies, punk, the club scene, even now, the emo resurgence, even emo then, blitz kids, Peter D, Converse, New York, Twisted Wheel Club. I just missed it all - I saw it, but I missed it. Like the reflection of a car light flashing through the window, and you mistake it for a ghost. I wrote a line down when I was reading that last Griefbacon newsletter: “only ever made out of context.” The scene is solely context, it exists on context, its memories exist on context. I agree with the statement and I disagree, too. Only ever made out of context or else forged out of juxtaposition, I think it should be. Juxtaposition is the antithesis of context - and both need the other to be relevant. As always.
This idea of young millennials skimming the scene makes me think, then, where does nostalgia land for us? What moment are we collectively nostalgic for? Any? And also - you’ve heard of the trend cycle, right? Everything that was once cool becomes cool again in around 20 years. Like raccoon scene hair, or indie sleaze. But what happens when you were just too young to be a part of that fully the first time round, and you’re just too old the second? Are we fully able to process what happened without seeing it happen again in such a statement way? Nostalgia can be a tool; it can be context. While sometimes it can be as painful as white-hot sand on your soft undersole, other times it is the lens that helps us to read the line, the lyric. If I’m feeling nostalgia for something that I wasn’t inside, perhaps it’s actually helping me to understand the inside better. Or perhaps I’m not feeling nostalgia as acutely as I would have had I been inside, and as such I’m not getting directly hit. Like an eclipse, the only time you can look directly at the sun. Is it a blessing or a curse that the nostalgia and/or the memory doesn’t affect us quite the same? Did we dodge a bullet, or get hit? Or: is it both, like it always is?
I really enjoyed reading this, thank you.
I'm lucky enough or maybe unfortunate enough to have lived through a number of 'scenes' if you can call them that. For me I don't think you really recognise them for what they are, until they have passed. You have a vague awareness of something significant happening at the time, but it isn't immediately obvious until you have that juxtaposition to bring it into sharp focus. Perversely, the zeitgeist is only identifiable once it has passed - an irony if there ever was one. I only recently discovered the synth wave scene, which is something that I have really fallen in love with, but it's an ersatz romanticism of an era and a music scene created by a generation that never lived it. However, it resonates with me in a way that it didn't when I was actually living it in the 80's, and it evokes a level of nostalgia beyond what it probably should. I think this is because it hits hard at a part of me that yearns for something that never was - simultaneously dismissive of the feelings it evokes, and fully in love with them too, whatever the truth of the lived experience at the time. With hindsight, age brings a clarity to the vigour and excitement of your younger years, that you took for granted at the time, and an essential part of that is the juxtaposition between your later life experiences and those of your early ones. I think that if I were to show you yourself in twenty years time, you would witness someone who recognised with agonising clarity that the younger you were once part of a scene yourself, something that people half your age would be trying to emulate in the future present, but you just didn't know it at the time. As a stranger looking in, I can say with some confidence that you are indeed in the eye of a scene, but only time will distill it down to it's essential essence, with the crucible of juxtaposition forging the experience into purest nostalgia, to be revealed one day, when the time is right, as a glorious and beautiful retrospective of life lived in brightest technicolour during a scene that you weren't sure was real. Thanks again for taking the time to record your thoughts on life.
Martin