Styrofoam Anniversary

You don't hear anyone referencing the Golden Age of anything anymore.  That's because for many years, nothing's lasted long enough to have had one. 

Whether it's styles, trends, cultural movements, businesses, stores down the block, technologies, gadgets, design or music, no actual period is identifiable anymore.  And what's more, no one seems to be interested in classifying one.

Most folks are inclined, at a certain age, to acknowledge the continuum of their lives by the decades, as in "My twenties were all about finishing school, my thirties were about my career, my forties were about building my business..", etc..   That's the most immediate, visceral form of life measurement, for many.

The ancient Judaic tribes bore no permanent geographic home.  Their recorded history existed largely on the basis of time, unlike more land-founded cultures.  For many whose lives have been mostly nomadic, time provides the main dividing structure as well.   I haven't lived in that many different locations in my own lifetime, but I could sure tell you about my life in the 1970s, or my life in the 1980s.

By the 1990s, well into my late twenties, things had become just a little more settled for me, and I could indulge for the first time in my life properly, in a quiet appreciation of the arts and history.  But typical to my nature, I did not embrace or even care to acknowledge the contemporary media culture surrounding me at the time.  I preferred to honor a recollection and study of those prior eras in which I grew up.  

Decades later, with the harvest of scanned artifacts and genuine video television scraps resurrected on YouTube, the ability to revisit those prior times is richer and more capable than ever.  And there's more than a few trillion of us middle-agers ready to indulge.  But it's not so much dewy-eyed nostalgia (which it certainly to some extent is) as it is a strong identifiability.

Nostalgia is a very intimate, internal, personal engagement.  Almost no one, sometimes not even your most intimate partner can share it.  A spouse often talks of how his or her better half will spend a portion of their time quietly poring over their old keepsake periodicals or books, or photo collections at times, because it nourishes their soul, lifts their spirits, or at least keeps them above sea level.  Those are often the healthiest moments one can have in this world.  With all the rage over the ills of social media, let's not overlook one of it's greatest gifts, the harvest of nostalgia.

Cheers to the administrators of those yesteryear Facebook groups, culling and posting those photos of our boroughs and neighborhoods from 1969.  Let's hear it for those constantly scanning and posting pages of the New York Post and TV Guide from the 1970s.  We need this face time connection with a past we can recognize.  Much in the way those Alzeimer's victims in that experiment years ago came to cogent life when placed in a replica of their childhood culture, a mock layout of a 1930s Coney Island candy store soda shop, our electronic-addled brains in this confused culture of today are grounded and re-balanced by the occasional swig of the past that we remember best.

We can remember it, because it was there.  From age nine until my late teens, the stationery store I frequented, with it's toy section in the back and paperback potboiler rack in the front window was precisely that.  The grocery store and hardware store were foundations as well.  I think the corner pharmacy was founded back in the time of the Marx Brothers, and long outlived them.  When I was a boy of just nine, I was already discovering the adored majesty of what everyone was hailing as the "Golden Age".  The TV show Happy Days fascinated me, while all my peers were busy chasing Star Wars.  I wanted to know what was on our block full of stores fifty years ago, when the town was founded.  I was raptured by those different times and eras.   Everybody was listening to KISS and the Bee Gees.  I was listening to what those artists grew up on:  Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly.  For this small kid, it was hardly nostalgia.  It was instead, a rich appreciation of an oft-discarded history.  Nowadays we honor it with the term "retro".  Back then it was still largely dishonored for being "old".  Only the really hip and underground were getting it.  In all my mop-top, overweight, pre-adolescent, nerd-based splendor, I guess I was one of those.

In 1971, a very curious movement began within the angry, unrested, protesting, irreverent, adult-disrespecting youth of America.  They became literally tired of all the war, inside and out, and discovered their nostalgic love and passion for the era of forced simplicity, in which they first grew up.  They somehow began to recognize the sheer beauty of Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody singing about the alphabet, and the importance of "please" and "thank you".  So much so that the retired Bob Smith was shocked when a team of young people in 1970 located him and pleaded that he return to public appearance with Howdy, which he did to standing-room-only University halls.   The nostalgia craze was on.  And it may have saved America.

A large conjecture now is that the one of the biggest hazards to our youth culture today is that they are without that cultural compass.  There is no significant "era" anymore, and hasn't been since before the millenium.  In today's unrest, what is the unified cultural Stonehenge upon which the newest Alphabet generations can relate..?  To many in the socio-global dispute game of today, this may seem irrelevant at best, but to read such works as How The Left Lost Teen Spirit by Danny Goldberg, it becomes crystallizingly evident that a personal sense of cultural nostalgia to which one can heavily relate on a shared basis is the beginning of common language, allowing us to communicate effectively once more.

More and more, you'll encounter intelligent young people on a quest to embrace those mysterious 1980s or 1970s.  Maybe the sixties, through artifact literature and news footage.  There are conversely plenty who eschew those in history goggles, insisting it's all about "the future", and not about living in the past.

If that's true however, we would not have museums, Renaissance or even Modern Art, music history, history of the Ancient Greek cultures, or for that matter, books about history.  And a concerted movement toward preserving it correctly.  We've got a good many hundred years to go before we can accept someone recalling Gary Cooper saying "here's lookin' at you, kid" in Gaslight.

Noah F.