Just reposting a couple of things I saw out in the ‘sphere today that resonated with me.

The first is from the always-awesome Wil Wheaton‘s most recent LA Weekly column. The column is actually about the embarrassment of plagiarizing yourself (which I’m sure I probably do all the bloody time), but I related to this paragraph (from the work-that-was-plagiarism):

It was just this weekend that I realized, to my horror, that I’m starting to feel my age. I mean, I’m not old … but I’m aware that things I loved while growing up have been steadily vanishing for years, and will likely be completely extinct before we know it; drive-ins and arcades are just two of the more tactile examples.

Drive-ins, arcades, video stores, record stores, small-town cafes (as opposed to chain fast-food and “casual” dining), movies brought to life by shining bright light through a piece of celluloid, top-40 radio, a shared “monoculture” that ensured everyone was talking about the same shows the next morning… I’ll bet I could out-nostalgia Wil in the “things I loved that are extinct or nearly so” category. It’s funny, given that I was such a science-fiction nerd when I was growing up, but now that I’m grown, I find I really don’t like the future we’re living in very much. I seem to spend more and more of it thinking about the past.

Which leads to this observation from another chronicler of things extinct, James Lileks:

Most of your life is spent trying to recreate the emotions of an imperfectly reconstructed memory of childhood happiness. The other part is spent trying to escape, or at least process and purge, an equally imperfect recollection of childhood unhappiness. Better to be driven by the former rather than the latter, obviously. And the more shapeless the emotion, the less specific the event, the easier it’ll be to recreate it, and the happier you’ll be. I find these artifacts of my very early youth so interesting because I had a happy childhood, and all these musical cues, hues, fabrics, patterns, et cetera, are the furnishings of a place I enjoyed.

For the record, I’m in the “happy childhood” camp. I think a lot of the reason I resist all those remakes and revisions of old TV shows and movies is because they made (and still make) me happy, and I don’t want anything to diminish them. But I suppose that point is probably obvious, isn’t it?

Here’s that tangent I mentioned, another interesting thought from Mr. Lileks, from the same blog entry linked above:

…it seems as if there was an odd decision in the sixties by the cultural elites to eliminate the middle (culture) and accentuate the lower, because the lower was more earthy and authentic and real. Intellectual slumming at its finest. I think the middlebrow spirit had run its course, too. It’s hard to tell people to better themselves when the rest of the culture is telling them they’re already great – or suffering some sort of oppression that can’t be cured by listening to Beethoven. So high culture drifted off into the ether, became formless and irrelevant, and low / pop culture became culture, period.

No arguments there, even if I am a fan of that low/pop culture he’s almost-but-not-quite disparaging. I just wish there was a tad more of the intellectual spirit in our (pop) culture these days. You can be lowbrow and populist without being stupid, you know.

And finally, here’s something unrelated to nostalgia, although I suppose it does have a pop-culture angle. I just thought it was funny. It’s originally from here; I encountered it here.

“Yes, I know Björk,” a professor of finance at the University of Iceland says in reply to my question, in a weary tone. “She can’t sing, and I know her mother from childhood, and they were both crazy. That she is so well known outside of Iceland tells me more about the world than it does about Björk.”