An Essay on Nostalgia

I was walking around the Rose Bowl flea market the other day, and to browse around the place is to overstimulate your synapses to such a degree that you yearn to spend your down time as a Japanese businessmen might, floating in a sensory-deprivation tank so the circuits in your don't brain overheat and melt onto the motherboard. It is held on the second Sunday of every month and amasses an entire parking lot full of vendors, hawkers, and bargain-sniffing crap hounds. The stadium itself has a huge capacity and a parking lot built accordingly, which means there are a lot of smelly camper vans with bedraggled owners who've spread their wares on card tables, blankets and carpet remnants solely for your perusal. And a stressful perusal it is. Between the heat, the lack of shade, and the breadth of the landscape, you feel less like grazing and more like walking with mindful determination that you'll conserve time by leaving hidden treasure buried. Alas, as wise a choice as you feel this is, you pass station after station of useless, fetching bric-a-brac and tote the dull irritation that you're missing a good deal on something great that you don't need.

However, I needed what I was looking for. I wanted a chair to replace the pieces of crud acting as placeholders in my new work space. I don't know what kind of shopping experience I was expecting, but I guess I evisioned aisles in the parking lot that one would simply pace up and down until he found his Platonic ideal of a secondhand chair, something worn but stable, comfy but smallish, and of a quality that made its low, low price criminal. My mind's eye anticipated an orderly consumer exchange but it got an utterly ramshackle situation.

I never found my chair. I wasted a good chunk of my time at a vendor's table looking over (and ultimately purchasing) vintage fruit crate labels. I left sunburnt and irate. Why was I drawn to the fruit crate labels? I suppose the glib explanation is that I like old shit. The longer, more honest explanation ties in to why I didn't I get my chair. It isn't that I didn't find enough chairs - there were a taxing variety of choices. I couldn't locate my lounger because I was tricked by my own nostalgia.

I imagine that others who shop flea markets, and for that matter Pottery Barn, Lucky Jeans, Restoration Hardware, and any number of similar such outfits, share this gravitatioonal pull toward old shit. I look around my apartment with its calendar of sepiatone New York photos, its framed postcards of vintage mexican movie posters, its faux shaker furniture, its mock Arts and Crafts lamps, etc., and I'm confronted by the notion that what I find in all of these things is a not just the obvious signifier of my (inexplicable) association with a bygone era, but a conscious and pointed disassociation from the present, a tacit agreement that what was manufactured before my time (or made to look so) is worthy and honest while what is currently being manufactured, in every sense of the word, is questionable, unproven, or phony. What chairs I saw at the flea market were not old enough, honest enough, or pure enough.

The vendor that occupied most of my time had a table full of seafaring equipment caked with rust, plus Jim Crow fetish items, antiquated knives, door handles, church keys, sabers, badges, plaques, plates, and one rather flimsy-looking medieval chastity belt. In this man's trove of detritus I had found my home, a smorgasbord of items with no practical purpose in the modern world but which described a straight line from their past to my present -- which I now realize is an appropriation of them in the quest for some perverse fantasy of truthfulness. The items were genuine and unaffected, handmade and authentic, useful at some earlier time and now merely beautiful; they were "useful" as nothing more than a totem to progress's rapacious appetite. Spread across the hawker's table and hot to the touch from the sun's rays, I envisioned them displayed on a shelf or on top of a desk saying to whomever should come across them (or just me in my private moments) that here was someone who understood - valued - the honesty of the past and the authenticity of the implement and time from which it came. Of course the implicit statement made by exhibiting these things is that times were better back then, which is as much a bromide as genuinely referring to The Good Old Days.

For a long moment I stood there considering purchasing a water fountain placard from the segregated south. I was amazed that such a thing was "real" and could be picked up with my own two hands. It was real, all right, but what did it mean? What did it mean that it was for sale? And what would it mean hanging in my office, or more provocatively over the sink?

To me it means perpetuating an illusion. The search for authenticity is the search for an illusion, and it's an ultimately futile one. Pictures in my kitchen of apple vendors on Delancey Street snare me in an illusion more "real" than the walls on which they hang, and gathering signifiers such as any of the ones I've mentioned do nothing more than relieve me of living fully in the present.

I believe the act of writing does the same. I look at a photos of Old New York or Hollywood, or snapshots of anonymous, now-dead black folks posing on a bright St. Louis morning 65 years ago (purchased at a previous flea market) and lose myself in another world. It is not a better or worse world, just a world not my own. When you write novels or screenplays or the like (stories, if you will) you enter another world, and if you're any kind of craftsman you totally immerse yourself in that world in search of the truth. Both immersions (in the bric-a-brac, in the mind) divorce you from reality. You occupy a sphere that obviates the present - the "moment," the acting coaches like to say - out of the desire or belief that your dreamed-up universe is better, simpler, more perfect, or more orderly that the one outside the front door. You control it, after all.

Living in manufactured reality certainly relates to our current president and his cronies -- almost as much as it relates to Hollywood. The business of entertainment has always been the business of manufactured reality, or more simply dreams. Dreams get projected onto a screen and we slip into a narcosis that carries us out of the grinding sameness of everday life and into a more humoruous, adventurous, simplified world. The more familiar these dreams are, i.e. the more sequels, remakes, and adaptations of familiar "franchises" that get made, the more easily our sleep-like state is accessed. When we go to see the umpteenth revisitation of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl Back Again, the bell clangs and set our salivary glands to work. We watch movies of what we imagine movies are supposed to look like, just as we hear press conferences of what we imagine press conferences should sound like, just as we desire the "vintage" toaster from Williams Sonoma that triggers some dream version of domesticity: "Now that's what a toaster looks like."

Let me be clear that I'm not above any of this. I'm in it as hip-deep as anyone else. I like old dive bars and Craftsman homes and fuzzy pieces of glass I find on the beach. I like New Orleans, and I like stores that display tin children's toys but won't sell them because they are the owner's own, and I like restaurants that have unsmiling old men as waiters. I adore Tom Waits, who seems to be a walking example of creating one's own reality out of the dross of bygone days.

It's the stories, of course, the forgotten things that fall back behind the nooks of those refurbished dressers and midcentury modern sofas. As a storyteller I can't help but feel drawn to them. That said, I feel the need to embrace modern life more, to engage as a consumer (since that is how so much of my/our existence is spent in a capitalist society) in such a way as to not reject the times I live in but find a way to navigate them in the present. The faux nostalgia shopkeepers pawn off when they hang signs in quaint fonts that read "Established 1998" hijacks my participation in the modern world even as it, itself, resides in the modern world. Nostalgia is a fact of modern life but I choose to see it for what it is, a marketing tool, and no longer be inculcated by it. I want to belong fully to the era in which I live, or short of that belong to the edge of the era that looks from this moment onward, not from this moment backward. And even though the old timey signs and rusty tools and crumbling photos of negroes on porches whisper in my ear, I believe that it is time to be as alive to what is happening this very moment as I can possibly be.

Gigi Chair, I'm clearing a spot for you right now.