Postby BrianSiano » Mon Feb 14, 2005 10:03 am
As time goes by, and younger readers read the story, we always wind up thinking about the good stuff from our pasts which have been cast aside in the present. I certainly did: I read it in 1980, when it was published in Shatterday, and my immediate thought was how stuff I had when I was a kid compared to the radio plays and Secret Decoder Badges from Harlan’s youth. At the time, my own past came up short: crap like “Scooby Doo,” for example. (I tended to think of things like, being able to ride my bike anywhere without parents around—nowadays, kids’d have to wear a tracking tag and have police escort.)
What fascinates me about the story is this: since the story saw print, we’ve actually seen a big revival of many things from our past. The conversion from vinyl to Compact Discs—in itself, one of those eating-the-past issues for audiophiles—prompted a massive revisiting of the past. Suddenly, we could easily obtain boxed sets of prewar bluesmen like Robert Johnson. Record companies dipped into the vaults for obscure, fleeting, and even downright awful stuff, cleaned it up, and made it available… because someone out there wanted to reclaim that part of the past. And this re-mining of the past has extended to television and films as well, what with boxed sets, Criterion remastering, directors’ cuts and the like.
Does this affect the way we read “Jeffty is Five?” I think it does. It means that we shouldn’t read it merely as an elegy for the entertainments of a bygone era. The past Harlan aches for is his past, not ours. But the ache is universal.
Here’s an example of the distinction. Back in the 1970s, I used to attend the Creation Cons. Back then, they were not the massive capitalist deal-fests we have today. Back then, they were small gatherings in hotel basements. Dealers were collectors. Movie paraphernalia was relatively hard to get. A big trade was in the underground comics. Even the mylar bags were a niche market. And when we screened movies, it was usually through 16mm prints projected onto sheets at one end of the dealers’ areas. (That’s where I first saw “A Boy and his Dog,” actually.)
So what’s so bad about today? Really, not much. I have an easier time finding obscure stuff, thanks to the Internet. I can see pristine copies of the films I used to watch from crappy prints. The cons themselves are cleaner, bigger, and with greater variety than ever before. If things are so much better… then why do I keep thinking of the past?
Because it’s not the particulars that make the past. It’s the fact that I was younger then. I had different cares—for one thing, I didn’t worry about mortgage payments or retirement or Al Qaeda. When I was a kid, sitting in my mom’s LTD in a gas line, smelling the residue from her stubbed-out Chesterfield Kings, I didn’t worry about gas prices or crime. And the particulars were new to me then; I don’t get the same buzz from new things I encounter these days. Nostalgia is NOT about the particulars. It is recalling when we were different people. It is recalling a happiness we no longer have without effort.
Yes, nostalgia distorts things. It makes us think that the 1950s were a better time because we didn’t worry about biological warfare, televised sex or Paris Hilton… and helps us forget that during the 1950’s the Civil Rights Act was a fantasy. Or that the 1960s was a decade-long Summer of Love… and not a violent, uncertain time, with great achievements and horrifying depths. Or that the 1970s was a carefree time of sexual freedom and same-sex happiness, catalogued by Armistead Maupin, before the clattering bones of AIDS and Reagan blighted the landscape. And it makes us forget that what we felt in those times was as much due to what we were, as it was to the times themselves.
Right now, I’m at an age when I can be astounded at other peoples’ nostalgia. For example— and this may surprise many of you young’uns-- during the 1970s, we thought that it was a conservative decade. After all, it wasn’t like the 1960s. The Beatles were gone. The Religious Right was rising. Television was still pretty much a corporate wasteland, with crap like “Three’s Company” and “Happy Days” clogging our arteries. Disco was king for a while, and while it’s nice dance music, at the time we heard it as overprogrammed, mechanical garbage. I cannot imagine why anyone would think of stuff like Hanna-Barbera cartoons as “classic,” the cereals were sugar-laden cavity-deliver units, cocaine was the Drug Fashion of Choice, and any art that was worth a damn seemed opposed to the dominant culture. People forget this. And I cannot fathom nostalgia for the 1980s at all.)
So while I love the examples of the past Harlan gives (and Bogie would have been incredible as Parker), and can throw in examples from my own past which seem to have been lost to younger generations (like the Firesign Theater), the story sort of works against itself a little. On the one hand, to convey the sense of a past which had such riches, Harlan (or Donny) has to tell us what those riches were. And he has to show us why they were riches. But if we focus on the details of the riches, we fail to examine ourselves… and what we hold to be riches, and why.
