i wanna keep my place in this old world
Jun. 5th, 2005 09:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupI haven't posted substantively in a while. I have a longish post somewhere in me musing about the odd connection I feel to midcentury American culture and design styles. Like, I was in the bank getting out my safety deposit box, and I was looking at the design on the gate and the punch-clock, and I realized I was sort of mesmerized by it. There's something hypnotic about the sanserif and metal-brush kind of effect of things circa 1920 to 1960.
It's hard to put into words. I don't consider myself a nostalgia hound or particular expert on the period. The bric a brac in an antique shop usually leaves me cold. It's more the feeling of spotting a crumbling eatery sign along the road.
This leads into a more general musing on the things of midcentury Americana that are lost, that you can see fragments of everywhere, if you look hard. Drive-in movie theaters, diners, floor designs, resorts. It's a period I can't help feeling a little wistful about, being both the zenith and the beginning of the end of American urbanism and the beginning of the Great Nowhere that is this country today. And it coincides with a certain ideal of how I'd like to live my life, and where I'd like to live it, that is just out of reach... just a few years before I was born.
It is hard to imagine that anyone will feel nostalgic for the bland ephemeral culture of today, though I'm sure that's what people thought about the 1950s.
Not unrelated to this is the fact that I've started to work on a history of my synagogue and am digging through the archives, as well as exploring the bowels of the building itself. The edifice is nothing to write home about, but it's definitely rooted in that zeitgeist, and doubly so because the material I'm looking at is so optimistic about the congregation's future in that place and location. So that makes it all very depressing.
And David Brooks (always an irritant) writing recently in the Times about the caution or conservatism of liberals on things like Social Security. Liberals want society to stay "stuck in the past." Well... yeah. I think there's something about the idealism of midcentury and what it accomplished that I find appealing because it's grounded in the idea of a good life and dignity for everyone. I know the things are not really related, but you do realize the time period I'm talking about will someday be written about by historians as the last prolonged moment of sanity and progressive idealism before the descent into Fuck Everyone thinking that we're in today.
But I need to digest all this some more, and my flight is boarding...
It's hard to put into words. I don't consider myself a nostalgia hound or particular expert on the period. The bric a brac in an antique shop usually leaves me cold. It's more the feeling of spotting a crumbling eatery sign along the road.
This leads into a more general musing on the things of midcentury Americana that are lost, that you can see fragments of everywhere, if you look hard. Drive-in movie theaters, diners, floor designs, resorts. It's a period I can't help feeling a little wistful about, being both the zenith and the beginning of the end of American urbanism and the beginning of the Great Nowhere that is this country today. And it coincides with a certain ideal of how I'd like to live my life, and where I'd like to live it, that is just out of reach... just a few years before I was born.
It is hard to imagine that anyone will feel nostalgic for the bland ephemeral culture of today, though I'm sure that's what people thought about the 1950s.
Not unrelated to this is the fact that I've started to work on a history of my synagogue and am digging through the archives, as well as exploring the bowels of the building itself. The edifice is nothing to write home about, but it's definitely rooted in that zeitgeist, and doubly so because the material I'm looking at is so optimistic about the congregation's future in that place and location. So that makes it all very depressing.
And David Brooks (always an irritant) writing recently in the Times about the caution or conservatism of liberals on things like Social Security. Liberals want society to stay "stuck in the past." Well... yeah. I think there's something about the idealism of midcentury and what it accomplished that I find appealing because it's grounded in the idea of a good life and dignity for everyone. I know the things are not really related, but you do realize the time period I'm talking about will someday be written about by historians as the last prolonged moment of sanity and progressive idealism before the descent into Fuck Everyone thinking that we're in today.
But I need to digest all this some more, and my flight is boarding...
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We
Date: 2005-06-05 03:48 pm (UTC)Now this is fine if you are one of the We.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 02:24 am (UTC)Well, as I think you're seeing, sometimes evaluation requires distance. It may also require softening your criteria some; while there were many good things about the 50s, for instance, they also featured McCarthy and the June Cleaver model of women, neither of which was a positive thing from our vantage point now.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 02:38 am (UTC)