Nostalgia

[livius drusus]

I watched Saturday Night Fever again for the first time in a long time, and it brought me back to my childhood. It's the first movie I consciously remember seeing. I was 6 and looking back on it, it kind of boggles my mind that my parents actually brought me to see that movie, what with the cunts and date rapes and racial slurs. They knew what they were doing, though, because none of that shit stayed with me at all. It was the dancing, music, some of the innocuous dialogue and the Father Frank Jr. stuff that I remembered for years later.

It also reminded me of a ritual that was a major part of my youth. When my parents would go somewhere and leave me in the house by myself, my mother would always strongly emphasize that I was not to open the door for anyone. I would say "Anyone at all?" My mom would reply "Anyone at all." Then my line was "What if it's John Travolta?" and she would say "Okay, but only if it's John Travolta."

So that got me thinking about nostalgia in general, how connected I am to my past, both my own personal history and history in general. I don't ascribe some sentimental "things were great in the good ol' days of Jim Crow and mother's little helper" ideal to the past, but I think I have a genuine emotional bond to worlds that have moved on, sometimes perhaps more than is strictly healthy. I do dwell; I do feel loss sharply.

Do you? Are you one of those live in the now folks I've heard so much about? (:cough: LadyShea :cough:) Or maybe one of those tomorrow belongs to me visionary types?

For your viewing pleasure as you contemplate your responses, please enjoy Don Draper making a highly relevant, and highly awesome, advertising pitch to Kodak.

YouTube - Mad Men - The Carousel (720p HD Version)

[wildernesse]

I think I am pretty balanced between appreciating the past, enjoying today, and anticipating/planning for the future. I used to be much more attached to keeping the past alive, but as I've gotten older, I am able to let the past recede and enjoy today more.

[Sonoma Bear]

I think my attitudes have changed as I get older. The early part of my life was focused more on the past, and once I got clean and sober about 28 years ago, my focus changed to keeping it in the everlasting now. Do I get nostalgic? Yes, from time to time - there are friends who have died that I miss, but they will always be alive in my thoughts. At the same time, I've lived long enough to know what works for me and what doesn't, so when I see someone on a certain path, I can't help but wonder how that's going to work out for them, knowing that it didn't for me.

All this is colored by the fact that I'm happier and more fulfilled in my life than I've ever been. I find it hard to drift off to either the past or future when what I have right here and now is so good. This is colored and informed by all I've been, done and seen.

[Ymir's blood]

Much of my life has been spent dwelling on the past or dreaming of things to make me forget for awhile. These days find me much more grounded in the world around me, but I still think of the past a lot. My demons are kept at bay enough to allow me to remember the good things. The bad things still get recalled, though not to feel the pain again, just to remember the lessons learned.

[curses]

I like my nostalgia, it's like an old friend. I was reading the true crime story of Michael Alig (http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/celebrity/michael_alig) and I went back in time to the 90s for a bit and it was nice. (we considered our group part of the Atlanta club kid scene, but we didn't have the murdery and choppy uppy bits they had in NYC)

That being said living too much in the past has been bad for me, as is dreaming of diversions to make the present disappear for awhile. I've had to learn to limit these two things and try to keep myself rooted in the present.

[mulebear]

Sonoma Bear once told me that I lived in the now more than any person he had met. I don't know if he still believes that, but...

There are things I remember from the past, but, as my memory likes to play tricks on me, they're actually shadows of a reality I once knew. As for the future, I like to think about the possibilities to come, but until I see them happen they remain fantasy.

I really don't have the brain power to recall vivid memories of the past, nor the insight required to make reasonable predictions about the future. But, in a way, I'm not really in the now. I'm more in the minute following the now. This is because I'm always fascinated by what could happen next. I guess you could say that I live in the extremely near future.

What might happen next is so ingrained in me that I find the idea of an end bizarre. I know there will be an end someday, but up until then I'll still be thinking, "What's next?". Even if I became paralyzed and could only stare at the ceiling all day, I would still be thinking about what could happen next. Maybe I'll hear a strange noise. Maybe a bug will crawl across the ceiling. Maybe I'll smell something weird. Who knows? It's all too fascinating.

[Qingdai]

I had a sociology teacher in high school (I went to a horrible public school full of born agains in rural Oregon) say that he didn't believe in some philosopher's comment that life was a grand experiment. He said that without his belief in God, he'd of killed himself. All I could think of was how depressing that must be, to be hating one's life in hopes of a future promise of something-something.

I don't necessarily live in the now, but I sort of agree with mulebear. I want to see what happens next, life is a grand experiment, that you don't personally get to replicate, but what fun!

Also going back to a time when things were more confusing and I had less control over them, doesn't seem fun at all. Sure, I felt invincible being younger and healthier, but I am looking forward to growing old, much like I thought that my complicated pregnancy was interesting.
Who knows what I can stand? Let's find out. Could be a 60 mile week long hike in the back woods, could be banging my head against the US federal prison system, could be fighting a school district to actually help my son learn stuff.

Still I do miss movies theaters, but I blame the antsy child.

Plus I ended up seeing "The Goodbye Girl" instead of "Saturday Night Fever" as a kid, because they wouldn't let me in, the damn ticket seller told my mom I was too young. Even though I was a good two years older than liv.
Scarring!

[Demimonde]

I am not nostalgic about my own past, but I do love old things, antiques, and relics. I am facinated by the lives people have lived: what they did, what they appreciated, how they did it. I enjoy imagining what it must have been like, good, bad and ugly, and how I would live in such times.

I wish I was able to live more in the now. I am a planner. I have schemes I have devised for my future. Some are impossible castles in the air, others are more simple plans for my own life.

[LadyShea]

I get nostalgic all the time, liv! Mostly music does it to me. I listen to the punk/new wave channel on the SatelliteTV music like daily. At Christmas I am totally The Ghost of Christmas Past

And, strangely, Kiddo's skateboarding has given me nostalgic twinges...something about the carefreeness of hanging out, talking shit, listening to music, and watching cute guys do stupid things

Anyway, rather than get sad about it, I dance to that old music, I talk shit with Kiddo and watch the cute kids do stupid things. LOL, Kiddo and I went bowling with the TaeKwonDo academy, and he and I were dancing to every song. The other mothers made comments.

[JoeP]

I kind of like nostalgia. It doesn't get to me as often as it used to, the feeling of something (a quality of life) lost forever, and maybe not valued enough when it was there. I feel it rarely enough that I can enjoy it, in a way.

I spend a lot of time in the future, daydreaming, or in alternative presents. But that's a compartment of my life that is not really connected to how I live.

I don't exactly live in the now - I'm always conscious of and planning around what's happened before and where it could go next. Living in the long now, perhaps?

[SharonDee]

I get nostalgic all the time, liv! Mostly music does it to me. I listen to the punk/new wave channel on the SatelliteTV music like daily.Oh god, yes! Music is the vehicle by which I travel back to the times of my youth.

Before I got into the Old Time Radio channel on XM--the times of my father's youth--I wore out the 70s and 80s channels. I suppose the music of those decades appeal because that's when I developed my own musical tastes away from those of my parents (C&W).

My aunt was telling me she keeps her XM tuned to the 50s and 60s channels, which represents the same slice of her younger days.

[viscousmemories]

I get intensely nostalgic all the time despite never having been content with who or where I was back then. It's weird.

[Kyuss Apollo]

The Greeks had such an intense way of describing experience.

Like Sonoma Bear, there is a chunk of my life (from about 1978 to 1992) that I somehow survived and is very blurry -- I'm grateful I don't miss living like that, though I do miss some of the people that I knew then and lost, and one best friend in particular who didn't make it. But I am not nostalgic about the rest of that period of my life. The time immediately after (the rest of the 90's), is much more accessible to me, that's when I really started living my life. For some reason I get nostalgic watching Spaced because it brings up of a lot of unrelated memories from that time of my life.

Hearing popular music from any past time in my life can bring back feelings of nostalgia, there are always memories there that are deeply embedded in some place and a feeling attached to the memory that makes it real again, and nostalgic. Like Bowie's TVC15...for some reason hearing it puts me back in the kitchen in my childhood home--the radio's playing, its a sunny day outside, everythings clean and bright and big and high up because I'm just a kid...

Particular smells and fragrances are similarly potent triggers for nostalgia, certain books, pictures from any time that is inaccessible now--the smell of white paste or hot anaugahyde in the sun, pictures of my first son when he was a toddler or of my cat when I was twenty.

There is the memory, and the feeling that puts me right back there...

To me simplest way to describe it are the quiet passages in NIN and BOC, they are reminiscent of the evocation of nostalgia.

[Ymir's blood]

Music can trigger more than nostalgia. I more or less brainwashed myself in the 90's trying to be 'normal,' thinking it would bring me happiness or at least some form of peace. It was, of course, an absolute catastrophe and for awhile left me rather hollow inside. Then one day, a new song by an old and very familiar band played on the radio while I was flipping stations. The song had such gloriously sinister undertones of horror and it was as if the veils were torn from my eyes. I remembered the sublime, the horrific and the macabre. There was much rebuilding to be done, but I had returned.

[JoeP]

Are you able to reveal the name of the band and the particular song? Or might that result in the complete destruction of this thread and its replacement with something even more inexplicable?

[Ymir's blood]

Are you able to reveal the name of the band and the particular song? Or might that result in the complete destruction of this thread and its replacement with something even more inexplicable?

YouTube - Blue Oyster Cult: Harvest Moon

[livius drusus]

LOL, Kiddo and I went bowling with the TaeKwonDo academy, and he and I were dancing to every song. The other mothers made comments.
They were just jellis because their kids can't dance anywhere near as awesomely as yours can.

Hearing popular music from any past time in my life can bring back feelings of nostalgia, there are always memories there that are deeply embedded in some place and a feeling attached to the memory that makes it real again, and nostalgic. [...]

Particular smells and fragrances are similarly potent triggers for nostalgia, certain books, pictures from any time that is inaccessible now--the smell of white paste or hot anaugahyde in the sun, pictures of my first son when he was a toddler or of my cat when I was twenty.

There is the memory, and the feeling that puts me right back there...
I love it when that happens, especially when the specific-time-and-place memory being evoked is one I haven't thought of practically since it happened.

A few years ago when I first set up my container herb garden, I got some organic fish and seaweed emulsion to dilute into water as a fertilizer, and as soon as I poured it into the rosemary, thyme and basil it hit me like a frikin tsunami of memory. It was the smell of this Adriatic seaside town we would go to for my dad's work where they had a hatchery and I would spend the days alternating between collecting seashells/interesting beach rocks and sitting in a coop surrounded by hundreds of fluffy little peeping chicks. That dense smell of salty, fishy seashore and poop and Mediterranean herbs...

Music rarely has that same effect on me, although I have a specific connection between Sting's The Dream of the Blue Turtles and Ivanhoe and The Three Musketeers. I played that album over and over again the summer I read those books. Hearing "Fortress Around Your Heart" takes me directly to the siege of La Rochelle.

[lisarea]

I actually don't get nostalgic very often; and I actively dislike a lot of things that remind me of being a kid, because I didn't like being a kid. I had a very stable, happy childhood, really, but I just didn't like being a child and being treated like a child, having to do what other people told me to, stuff like that. As such, my fondest memories of being a kid all involve some kind of transgression. That normally doesn't put me in full on nostalgia mode, though.

It's almost exclusively music (every now and again a movie, but not often) that has that effect on me, but it has to be something I haven't heard in the interim. I recently had that happen with some Brian Eno stuff. For some reason, I had a fair sized collection of Brian Eno albums on 8 track that I never replaced with CDs, and when I was a teenager, I'd often leave them on repeat on my 8 track in my room all night as sleepin' music. So recently, when I went over to YouTube and listened to some of Another Green World, it hit me in the face like a goddamned madeleine. If I listen to the whole albums, I can almost hear the little track-switching hums and clicks. And I decided I'm keeping that that way, because I figure it's sort of like a drug and I don't want to overuse it and lessen its effects.

Oh, and once, when I was a teenager I think, The Flintstones was on, and there was this scene where Fred and Barney are both running around a corner and they crash into each other, and right when they crashed, I got a really sharp pain in my eye; which reminded me that I'd seen that as a kid and poked myself in the eye HARD right at that scene.

[Kyuss Apollo]

Are you able to reveal the name of the band and the particular song? Or might that result in the complete destruction of this thread and its replacement with something even more inexplicable?

YouTube - Blue Oyster Cult: Harvest Moon

Ahh, the other BOC

Glad you are back now Ymir :yup:

[specious_reasons]

It was a bit of a nostalgia weekend for me.

First, an old grade school/high school friend was in town, and several old HS buddies got together for lunch. Then another friend and I went to go see Naked Raygun for the first time, again.

Last time was 1989, and we were all ginned up to see one of our favorite acts, but the 3rd wheel - his girlfriend - panicked at all of the punks in the audience and begged us to go home before the main act. :sadnana: It never worked out to get to see them before they broke up. This time, we were determined.

Well, this past week, in preparation for the show, I was playing my old Naked Raygun albums, and I remembered not only the songs, but most of the lyrics. I've listened to these albums maybe a handful of times in the last 15 years.

Back when I was 18 or so, I had time to sit down with the album cover and study the lyrics as they're playing, and those Raygun albums, after being played so often are pretty firmly set in memory. Kinda makes me wonder what I would have done if I spent more time studying for class...

I am personally prone to dwell on past successes and failures, although I'm getting more and more immune to obsessing, I've sometimes discovered that applying new knowledge to past behaviors can guide me to make better decisions in the future. Sometimes.

[Clutch Munny]

I get intensely nostalgic all the time despite never having been content with who or where I was back then. It's weird.

This.


Tho' like mr pea I did not care for being a kid very much, I sometimes feel a keen longing for some of activities and places of my childhood. Part of that time I lived in relative isolation in real countryside, and I do miss just walking for hours all alone in tall windblown grass letting my imagination run however it would.

And I miss a hundred thousand little children that were my kids over the years. They are wonderful as they now are; and of course it would be very crowded; but I would have everyone one of those littler kids back if I could.

[The Lone Ranger]

So that got me thinking about nostalgia in general, how connected I am to my past, both my own personal history and history in general. I don't ascribe some sentimental "things were great in the good ol' days of Jim Crow and mother's little helper" ideal to the past, but I think I have a genuine emotional bond to worlds that have moved on, sometimes perhaps more than is strictly healthy. I do dwell; I do feel loss sharply.

Do you?

I have no idea what you're talking about ...

http://www.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/lone_ranger_tv_series_01.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Af22yrWLsmk/TA2pjP9oAZI/AAAAAAAAABw/W3QT1GIZUhs/s1600/samurai_warrior.jpg http://wisevishvesh.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/knight-in-shining-armour.jpg

http://www.freethought-forum.com/forum/gallery/files/5/0/Me.jpg



Cheers,

Michael

[Qingdai]

Aha! I thought TLR was going to post about the plasticity of the brain and/or scent and music being differently remembered and processed by the brain and he gets all nostalgic on us!

Keep 'em guessing.

[ITSOZAZ]

i miss watching the snow fall on Mary Tyler Moore's balcony.

[BrotherMan]

...but I think I have a genuine emotional bond to worlds that have moved on, sometimes perhaps more than is strictly healthy. I do dwell; I do feel loss sharply.

This is a fine thrad and I say thankya.

Do you? Are you one of those live in the now folks I've heard so much about? (:cough: LadyShea :cough:) Or maybe one of those tomorrow belongs to me visionary types?


The fastest way to trigger an nostalgia event for me is music. Specifically something that was playing on pop radio in the mid to late 80s. I was enduring a, shall I say, interesting time in my life during those years. Sometimes I have good recollections, sometimes bad and still others are a bit of both - that wistful bittersweet that only nostalgia can pull up.

Music from earlier decade(s) bring up even other memories of the time(s) in my life before then. Those memories are generally more sad or more bitter than sweet. I'll just note that as a young-young lad I was definitely a momma's boy and those sad country songs affected me greatly then never mind what they may bring out in the now.

eta

I forgot to note that I'm not really much of a now person, though the jobs I take mostly force me into it. Otherwise I'm recalling things I've seen or done or fantasising about stuff that I'll do in the near and far future.

[Ymir's blood]

...but I think I have a genuine emotional bond to worlds that have moved on, sometimes perhaps more than is strictly healthy. I do dwell; I do feel loss sharply.

This is a fine thrad and I say thankya.
Simply shameless. :sadno:

[godfry n. glad]

I have a houseful of trinkets collected over a couple of lifetimes and then some.

Nostalgia is a way of life here.

[Gonzo]

I'm also very happy to read this thread.

YouTube - Simon and Garfunkel - Hazy Shade of Winter live in Sydney

Yes, I think nostaglia is built into anything that can provoke old memories and feelings, at least for me most everything does. Music, film, pictures, old gifts, scents, drawings, writing, memorabilia, books... all that good stuff. Most incredibly - I am nostalgic in my dreams, even more in my day dreams when I drift off into thought and conjure stuff up. Incense is one vivid example - the only thing that can make me recall times in which I wouldn't have remembered otherwise. Lyrics and poetry, I think, are usually formatted to make people relate personally on account of the vagueness in details presented. Pictures are perhaps the most tangle evidence of the past, and I love to look through all the adventures I've gone on so far. I love to read/hear about history and heritage, though I don't think I will ever have the mental capacity to grasp it all. See, though, I keep everything that I receive from others and almost everything I create and I hope to do so forever. Things such as letters, receipts, theatre ticket stubs, short notes because any documentation will remind you of a specific time and place you never knew you forgot about. While in part I think this is my own quiet way of holding onto everything and everyone I've ever known or cared for - it mostly makes me grateful. Very rarely do I question how things could have gone differently because I am always glad for the outcome of things as it is now. I love the process of growth and learning and I always look forward to the future and what I plan to do next and with whom and the things I am currently trying to accomplish. The past, though, is infinitely appreciated. I'm just glad to be alive and have met everyone I have, really, all the rest is timeless.

YouTube - The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize? Live @ Berkfest 8.16.03

Sometimes I catch myself just over romanticizing everything. :facepalm: I can pretty god damn pessimistic, too. :giggle: Bitter-sweet is an excellent way to describe it

It is all a part of the human experience, I think, not anything exclusive... and that's what makes it all so beautiful.

[Sonoma Bear]

I had an unexpected experience when I moved here to Georgia. One evening Mulebear came out to find me in the carport watching fireflies - which I'd not seen since I was a kid. He described it as seeing me as the mature man with the sense of childhood wonder imposed on his face. I still get transported by fireflies...