I am watching Al Green from Glastonbury now on BBC 4 and I am struck – not for the first time – about how strange the passing of time seems to be.
There is Al introducing songs by saying things like “Now we are going back to 1974…. “.
On the one hand, that doesn’t seem odd to me, even though – as a 10 year old – I wasn’t aware of Al Green at the time. What amazes me is that he is referring to a year that was, in 1999, almost as many years earlier than we are now from that 1999 concert.
I remember at being at school in 1981 and someone bringing in Desire, which seemed to be from a totally different era, but was recorded only 5 years earlier. If I think now about what was recorded 5 years ago, on the one hand it seems like yesterday but on the other hand, I might be pushed to actually identify what was out and about in 2016.
I’m not sure if any of that makes too much sense, but time does seem to have a weird telescoping effect, doesn’t it? Or, maybe I have had one too many beers!
Tell me about it. Me listening to Run DMC’s “King of Rock” album at the beginning of 1988 and thinking, “This is soooo dated”. It was two and and half years old. You say telescope, I say concertina. It’s weird, either way.
I’ve had four too many beers and I think you’re right!
Bought my first record (CD) for a very long time today… it’s obscure… “Three Sitar Pieces” by Pandit Trikha (he appeared on the Free As A Bird promo film, Fabs fans)… recorded at the fag-end of the 60s (October 1970)… See For Miles CD came out in 1997.
That was 24 years ago.
Mind, I am fixated with time – it was my favourite sea in Yellow Submarine.
Our perception of time is strange.
Elvis Presley has been dead for longer than he was alive. John Lennon is close to that if not already past it.
The Berlin Wall has been down for longer than it was in place.
Jesus has been bigger than The Beatles for 2000 years more than they were bigger than him..
(I was watching Al Green too – it’s quite infectious..)
If God is Love, and Al Green is Love, Al Green is God. QED.
I mean listen to this. Celestial bliss. (Oh yes it iss.)
Got to be careful with transitive quality…
All cats have four legs
My dog has four legs
Therefore…err…err…Al Green is a dog?
I think music, art and culture has slowed down massively during my ‘watch’ while technology, climate change and politics have gone fucking mental. Watched some the 1998 Glastonbury and struck me that guitar music hasn’t moved on whatsoever from then – but then Roni Size and Reprazent come on and they’ve got green screen monitors with some text based software running their samples and bits of tape stuck on keyboards to show which samples they need to trigger. Their music sounds the most futuristic but the technology isn’t.
Daniel Barenboim, still going strong, was taught by a man who was taught by a man who was taught by Franz Liszt.
If it comes to that, if you go back from the year of my birth the number of years that I have lived, you get to the year when George Eliot’s Middlemarch was published and Verdi’s Requiem was first performed.
As we get older, the scale of time we are aware of increases as does the scale of distance. Our cot, our room, our house, our street, our town, our shire, our country, our continent, our world. This moment, this morning, today, this week, June, 2021, the twenties, the 21st century, the industrial age, the agricultural era, post-glacial period.
Possibly. Some people live in the same place all their lives. It may be that they develop an intense understanding and feel for their location – the rhythms, the seasons. Some people live in the same cultural time (the sixties, the eighties, whenever they were a teenager.
It can be a gift, it can be a curse, to be knocked out of our core place at the centre, to be first a third rock round the sun, then a speck in a solar system in the Milky Way, then unimaginably small in the universe.
Just try to avoid generational amnesia.
I was a distinguished citizen of the universe when I was at school. It said so on the cover of my exercise books.
Fair point, except back then you were in the equivalent of a computer-generated universe created for your protection, not the genuine Total Perspective Vortex that gradually assembles around us as we get older.
I live the way care home residents still are expected to sing along to run rabbit run and white cliffs of Dover, as if that would be the reference point for them, whereas most spent their youth listening to Elvis and Cliff.
My terror is that when/if I end up in a care home I’ll be subjected to an endless diet of Val Doonican and the Bachelors. That’s why I have a dementia iPod all loaded up and ready to go.
Now, where did I put it…?
Excellent point, Retro.
Before too long (if not already) the oldies will be asking for My Generation, Too drunk to fuck, School’s out and Sex and Drugs and Rock n Roll.
Imagine the scene in Happy Valley Retirement Home as the residents all singalong with Ian Dury’s Plaistow Patricia.
Imagine the horror of being admitted to a ‘civilians’ care home, playing wall to wall Queen, ABBA and ELO…….
Old folks aren’t what they used to be. There are some sheltered flats near me, and every time I pass them I think “Somewhere in there, some old gadgie is listening to The Grateful Dead”
There’s some sheltered accommodation near me called St Peter’s Close.
Rather unfortunately named I think.
What’s wrong with that?
Be even worse if they had pearly gates at the entrance
Skull and roses on the letterhead.
About ten years ago when I was visiting my mother in law in her rest home I heard the unexpected sound of Elvis Presley from a nearby room. I went down the corridor and peeked in the open door. The guy had decorated his room with Elvis posters and record covers.
If he was a childhood Elvis fan he would have been born in the mid 1940s say, so there he was in a rest home in his mid sixties. Too many deep fried peanut butter sandwiches?
Isn’t time all an illusion anyway according to quantum physics – that nice Prof Brian Cox (Things Can Only Get Better hitmaker) explained it all last weekend in his program on BBC2. Something to do with entropy and it only ‘passes’ as entropy increases…. (I’m sure it all made sense when I was watching but I can’t remember any of it now)
Y’ gotta love thermodynamics and entropy and time – especially if you’ve had a few drinks before you watch the show…time is time because an egg is statistically unlikely to spontaneously unscramble…
When you’re at school, music that’s 5 years old seems ancient because it’s a significant percentage of your life ago. As you get older, the same percentage is many more years. That’s how I see it.
I do, too. At the age of a hundred, one year is just 1% of your life. At the age of ten, one year is ten times as long.
My issue is that different events defy my frame of time. It feels as though the pandemic has been with us for almost all of my life but Burial’s last LP was only released last week (2007 in fact).
@Tiggerlion
The key reason why initially horrendous circumstances like the pandemic seem to drag on is the same reason why boring, routine jobs take forever to finish.
It’s our old friend the watched pot syndrome.
If you’re doing something that you love or gives you pleasure, you rarely (if ever) look up to check the time; whereas if you’re bored witless, you’re sure to keep sneaking glances at your watch/the clock on the wall.
As Jackson Browne so neatly put it in The Pretender:
“I’ve been aware of time going by/
They say in the end, it’s the blink of an eye
I was behind a van boasting that their business was established in 1982 yesterday. “So what?” I thought, until I did the maths. There are an increasing number of “We are as far away from ‘X’ as they are from ‘Y’” comparisons to be had these days.
At the risk of sounding poncey, and expecting tumbleweed aplenty, I’d suggest reading TS Eliot’s Four Quartets.
Isn’t that the one that starts “I love to….listen to…Beethoven”
..sorry, I think that was the Eurythmics
‘The’ Eurythmics? Never heard of them.
They dropped the definite article after Syd Barrett left.
(I got that off wikipedia in 2005. )
Yeah – “Only through time time is conquered”…
He wrote some good shit, did Toilets
Personally I think he just took the piss.
I used to know a Faber rep who had been with the company so long that he remembered when Eliot was a director, and the sign on his door read Thomas Stearns. I suggested on Twitter that it used to read TSEliot, until an unfortunate incident with a man under pressure from a full bladder.
An academic, and the editor of Eliot’s published letters if I remember correctly, replied that the sign had been inherited from his grandfather, after whom Eliot was named, and that Eliot enjoyed word games and was fully aware of the anagrams of his name in its usual form.
Just more of the same from me. I’m in the middle of a Toppermost article on Haircut 100 and Nick Heyward. Haircut 100 played their first live gig almost 40 years ago. 40 years before my dad was on a boat to Singapore to step straight off into a POW camp. In 1981 that felt so far away, another lifetime beyond my comprehension. Writing about 1981 now feels like it was only yesterday. Nick Heyward is now 60 by the way…
My favourite cardie is on the bed…
It was 74 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play …
Back when I was twelve it felt like I was buying an ancient artefact when I bought a *single that had dropped out of the top 40*. Sharpe and Newman Change Your Mind since you ask. These days I actually have a Spotify playlist called 2000+, many years and thousands of songs long. It’s all merged into one since 2000 basically.
It’s called getting old. I was born 17 years after the end of World War II, it is now nearly 20 years since 9/11
It IS called getting old. I’ve just turned 56 and a kindly colleague pointed out I’m nearer my 80’s than my 30’s.
Anyone aged 40 is nearer 80 than their 30s , as it is only in one direction we go. A nice light thought to ponder.
You’re not though. Direction of travel apart, you were in your thirties 17 years ago. In another 17 years you’ll be 73. You’ve still got another three and a half years before s/he’s right.
You are nearer 80 than 30, though.
I am 51 and yet still in my late 30s.
I’ve just shaved off my (very white)beard because I was asked the other day if I was retired. I’m 48. I’d like to blame it on being a brit in a village where you wouldn’t normally find a non-retired brit (or any brit actually). But maybe I just looked old…
A lot of guys, and I’m not saying you’re one of them, have grown beards in the last few years and ended up looking about twenty years older as a result – Richard Osman for example. Mine comes out white in places these days so it gets terminated with extreme prejudice.
“Comes out white” – I think you’ll find that’s perfectly healthy, actually..
Get back to work, Santa!
I’m 57. Old photographs show me as having dark hair. I’ve been under a general impression my hair has been dark for years.
I had a haircut earlier in the year and became slightly silently hysterical as i noticed pure white cuttings falling onto my shoulders. White.
I hadn’t properly noticed until then.
A side note – I had a haircut earlier. That’s not an unusual event; I once started a thread about balding in The Old Place after a barber showed me the back of my head in a round mirror, patted my thinning scalp, and said, ‘I didn’t do that bit!’
Anyway, there is a new Turkish barbers near me where I had my first haircut after the most recent lockdown and where I went again. There was one barber having a cig and chatting on his phone outside and two more inside, but no clients. One of the two looked at me curiously as if he was wondering why I was there (the 10’ tall flag reading BARBER outside had given me every confidence that they were actually open). ‘Haircut?’ I said. ‘Yes! Haircut!’ He replied, ushering me to a chair.
He relaxed and got more chatty as the cut progressed and a couple of other customers came in. I do like Turkish barbers. They seem to take more care, and into the bargain you get your eyebrows and nose hairs trimmed, the hairs on your ears singed off with a flaming wad of cotton wool soaked in some kind of spirit, and in this case even a Turkish coffee.
At the end of the cut my barber used some kind of massage device to pummel my shoulders and upper arms, which came as a shock as I wasn’t asked, this has never been a feature of any other haircut I have ever had, and I was taken by surprise as I was effectively blindfolded by the hot towel which was wrapped around my head at the time.
Now, since I had first and second Covid jags, late March and early June, I have had slight pain in my nominated shoulder. The massage machine seems to have sorted it right out and there is no trace of the lingering ache. So there you go lads, if you have nagging post jag symptoms go and get your hair cut.
One of the all-time great pieces by the boy @raymond ….
I get my hair cut by Celine, a lady so French and with such a heavy accent that I swear she must have been one of the cast of ‘Allo ‘Allo. She’s bloody slow, always runs late but is quite entertaining and doesn’t try to burn off the hair in my ear.
Does she blindfold then pummel you? Or would that sort of thing be extra?
I’ve never asked her if she does “extras”.
Is this Turkish barber by any chance in Fleet? Best haircut I ever got was at a Turkish barber in Fleet.
Now I barely have enough hair to justify a trip to a coiffeur.
Chelmsford as it happens, though they are new and fitted out the shop during the last lockdown, so it’s not beyond possibility that they relocated. There must be a dozen Turkish barbers in Chelmsford alone though so the odds are slim.
There were no Turkish barbers in the UK when I still lived there. You get a Turkish Delight in the sweet shop though, so that was OK.
Yes. I “sported” a beard (if one wants to be hip one does not just Wear or Grow a beard) a few years ago until I got fed up of seeing it in the mirror.
When I eventually shaved it off, a friend remarked I looked 10 years younger without it.
To be honest, I only allowed it to grow because I have always hated shaving.
I still occasionally (generally mid-shave) think about restoring my bearded look, but realise that maintaining a beard is even more trouble than shaving.
That’s what I don’t quite get. Few men suit beards so laziness is the best reason to have one, but the maintenance seems to be so much bother (I don’t know first hand) that it would be easier to shave.
Unless you actually intend going Full Hillbilly.
Since I turned 50, and I’m now 54, I will occasionally have to stop and do the mental arithmetic to confirm my age, because it just can’t be right.
I’m 43 and I only mention this because it’s the only context in which saying it makes me feel youthful.
Get back in your booster seat, pint-size.
No, we are not nearly there yet etc.
I had a video call with a contractor my employer hires in Chennai (if anyone needs their database mangling, he comes highly recommended).
I mentioned my daughter was asleep upstairs and is going to university in Septmber. “But you can’t be old enough to have an 18-year-old daughter!” he said.
Yes, my webcam does have Vaseline smeared over the lens and, yes, I am paying him. But it made me happy for the rest of the day.
I put it down to hair (I still have plenty) and Crohn’s (still slim, but only ‘cos my guts don’t work properly).
Very nice chap, I guessed in his mid 20s, sold me a car the other week. Charming, knew his stuff, happy to do business with him etc. As he filled in the paperwork, we got to talking about insurance premiums. His was in the thousands – I raised a quizzical eye.
“Well, I AM nineteen, after all”
I’ve discovered the secret to eternal youth (besides shaving a white beard off). My partner is 5 years older than me and is by a distance the youngest of her extended Spanish family. So every time I meet a sibling or a cousin (and there are many, most of whom are long retired) being 48 draws a comment along the lines of ‘Joder que joven’. So, while I’m not hanging out with the young and trendies, at least I’m the youngest in the room/patio.
I had to google translate that.
Mrs F is half-Spanish (and 3 years older than me).
There’s a jolly greeting the Galician locals use which roughly translates as “F*** off and scratch your b*ll*cks”. The first time an uncle (a fisherman) said it, not realising I started to learn the lingo swear words first, I motioned to scrape my groin – he looked mortified and extended his gnarly ‘welcome to the family’ hand for me to shake.
At which point he turned to Mrs F and said in his roughest Galego dialect: “He has a woman’s soft hands, is he alright*?”
(*) not the exact phrase he used, but we on the AW live in enlightened times.
Time is a strange thing.
With physical space, each dimension is measured in one of two directions. Up or down, back or forward, left or right.
Time can only go in one direction, onward.
No other direction is possible and it cannot stop.
From the personal perspective, it can stop, but it can’t start again afterwards.
In an abstract sense, it can move forwards and backwards (history, time travel), speed up and slow down (relativity) and branch off (multiverses).
You can’t experience movement in any direction of space without the perception of moving through time.
Doesn’t mean time’s moving. All of time might be there already. Somewhere out there is the LaserDisc™️ revival and we’re “travelling” towards it at the speed of light. Hope my funeral was good.
@Sewer-Robot
Just nipped over to Amazon to check for you by ordering your interment on laser disc but they said it’s out of stock
Gets us back into thermodynamics, entropy and the massive improbability of so-called irreversible processes actually reversing…
Forward in all directions!
I had a student housemate, studying Cybernetics (under Prof. Kevin Warwick), called Graham.
“What’s the time, Graham?”
“The time is an abstract conceptual measure of deviation in the fourth dimension”
No need for a clock in our house!
It’s enough to make you fall wanking to the floor.
Possibly not a photo opportunity.
Depends on the state of your oil-cloth…
‘And I said, “Let’s all meet up in the year 2000” which happened 21 and a half years ago.
TV Century 21 comic is now in the recent past.
In other news Mick Jones (Clash) drew his pension yesterday.
Ever since it first came out, when I was still a teenager, I have always thought there’s something really really upsetting about the lyric to Disco 2000.
The way it pairs that youthful disbelief that you’ll ever really get old with the crushing realisation that you have, that lives have not worked out quite as planned, but that maybe there’s still time left for a happy ending. The way it goes from “let’s all meet up in the year 2000, won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown” to “what are you doing Sunday, baby, would you like to come and meet me maybe, you can even bring your baby” – so melancholy.
The melodic lifts from Laura Brannigan’s Gloria add to that melancholy, what with Gloria not doing so well with the passing of time.
The ‘What are you doing Sunday baby’ seems to me a direct nod to Dawn’s early 70s song, er, ‘What Are You Doing Sunday’, the difference being that while Tony Orlando wants the lady in question to marry him, Jarvis’s expectations are rather lower. An unsettling classic indeed.
@Barry-Blue
I thought sunday was the day the song’s narrator
was getting out of prison
@jaygee I had to check the lyrics, having not heard the song since way back when, but no, there’s nowt about chokey in it.
Another TO song was the execrable Tie a Yellow Ribbon which was all about a man getting out of prison where he had presumably spent several years for menacing a woman via her domestic plumbing.
Pipestalking is on the statute book, as well as being a fine single by The Jesus and Mary Chain…. I think.
It’s a great song, and I agree on the point about lives not working out as planned. I’ve always thought that the line “I would be living down here on my own” suggests that it’s the narrator’s life that is not so satisfactory.
I think some of his best songs are when he’s poking at the embers of old romances. Sylvia from the next album is darker than Disco 2000, and I really like Wickerman from the last Pulp album, though in that case the old flame is Sheffield.
@bingo-little This from the absolute bestest blog in the world by Marcello Carlin:
Perhaps the saddest thing about “Disco 2000” is that it’s still being played twenty-one years after its time has passed, but its dance gallop barely conceals a bitter self-realisation of the singer’s unutterable, premature failure as a functioning human being. He never gets to be with Deborah and, decades later, she has become a wife and mother and he seems to have progressed nowhere. The concluding asides (“What are you doing Sunday,” etc.) are ineffably tragic (the real Deborah, who was actually Deborah Bone MBE, became a distinguished NHS worker in the field of mental health, and was amused by the song but said that her house was bigger than Cocker claimed and that it most definitely did not contain woodchip on the wall! Sadly, she died of multiple myeloma aged just fifty-one in December 2014, the day on which her MBE nomination was announced).
https://nobilliards.blogspot.com/2021/06/pulp-different-class.html
I had no idea Mr Carlin had resumed his writing on Then Play Long – thanks for the tip-off, Moose!
An unexpected bonus of the lockdown – and, er, the great man having a near-death experience. Dude should be carried around on a sedan chair for the rest of his days* as far as I’m concerned.
(*with a laptop to hand, natch)
Interesting. I’d always assumed Deborah was a single mother, but reading the lyrics there’s not really anything to support that; it’s possible the narrator is just a creep.
Not sure if that makes the song more or less sad.
Who isn’t a creep when they’re 15-ish? (Apart from you, obviously)
What a life he’s led, in song at least – was that really him in the sister’s wardrobe? And, famously, the woman in Common People ended up with Yanis Varoufakis – so it therefore ends up being less a critique of middle-class snobbery than one of lefties (Venn diagram alert).
The Pulp song that hits me hard is Dishes. Kitchen-sink realism (literally) plus soaring romanticism. He’s become a bit of a bore, like most people who acquire Radio Times National Treasure© status, but by god he’s written some crackin’ songs thy knows.
Boys will be boys?
This Is Hardcore is my favourite Pulp song, by far. There is no better Jarvis moment than “You can’t be a spectator, oh no, you got to take these dreams and make them who-oo-ole, oh this…is…hard….core”.
Elsewhere on that album you have Before you enter the palace of wisdom / you have to decide / Are you ready to rock? which is both a cute line and a comment on his brush with pop fame (as the whole album is).
The age of old music has stopped shocking. The Beatles were over before I was born. I was 5 when Elvis died. Still listen but it’s officially old. It’s the inbetween stuff which gets me. A few examples.
Psychocandy is 36 years old and William Reid is 63.
The House of Love debut is 33 years old. And Guy Chadwick is 65.
Blur released their first record 30 years ago.
The Killers, 20 years and counting.
Even sodding Mumford and Sons have been going 15 years.
An alternative question is why don’t people bloody stop?
It’s worse than that, Mumfords have been going 17 years and will likely get a bump following the news of their
guitaristbanjoist departing – he was on Radio 4 this morning.We can’t picket them for being Nazis, but we can still picket them for being crap.
Is this the strangest music story of recent times? Discuss.
I’d rather we didn’t discuss. I was rather hoping they’d just gone away following their ‘radical new direction’ (playing electric guitars) a few years ago. Still, I’d rather them than Stereophonics… but only just.
You have a point. Plus, this just opens them up to more publicity when they re-form in a few years, probably with a self-titled album (that’s what all bands who run out of ideas release).
Like the Ramones?
Self titled albums that aren’t the first album, sorry, I should have stated that. “This really represents who we are as a band. All of the songs are group compositions and originated in jam sessions.” <— run away now!
I was being facetious. The idea of a band running out of ideas before they’ve even made their first record rather amuses me.
Hey ho! Let’s go.
I preferred the demos.
I didn’t know you were political.
I’ll get me donkey jacket.
@Leffe-Gin
See also
Unfinished Business
Or
The Time was Right
Or, after a quick run through Google Translate
No one Bought our Solo Records
Or
We Need the Fecking Money
Do you mean their success? Yes.
There’s that. But also this.
https://mrwinstonmarshall.medium.com/why-im-leaving-mumford-sons-e6e731bbc255
@Guiri
Hardly.
End of discussion
But a new musical Laurence Fox in the making is surely worth a giggle. I look forward to his common sense approach to the culture wars….
@Guiri
No big fan of M&S, but all this guy has done is post a pretty anodyne comment in favour of a book to its author who is well-known for his “non-woke” views.
As a result, he is hounded out of his band by keyboard warriors whose sole pleasure in life seems to be taking offense on behalf of other people so they can persecute anyone who disagrees with them.
While you’re waiting for a musical (about) Laurence Fox, why not check out the abundance of common sense to be found in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible?
FWIW, here are the words that Marshall posted to author Andy Ago that so upset the twaterrati on social media:
“Congratulations @MrAndyNgo. Finally had the time to read your important book (Unmasked). You’re a brave man”.
Is that seriously what all the fuss is about? Thank goodness I don’t Twit.
Thanks for reminding us of Arthur Miller.
That tale about the Mumford banjo player is a real horror story of our times. From witch hunt to Twithunt. The malevolence and bile out there is cyberspace leaves lost for words.
The Crucible definitely seems more relevant now than ever
@jaygee I was flippant but broadly agree with you and that’s more or less what I meant by the strangest music story of recent times. Unremarkable bloke from unremarkable band feels obliged to stand down for unremarkable comments. Both sides with their screeching extremism are completely unbearable and then us lily-livered lefties wonder why there are more and more people driven to the Laurence Fox standpoint. I’ll continue to use my Twitter account for Listening Parties and no more. The day I actually tweet is probably the day I die.
Wow, I’ve always loved The Crucible but you bringing it up there Jaygee really stopped me in my tracks. I don’t know why, I just haven’t thought about the play in a few years and hadn’t actually connected it to the current “debates” about “woke” culture and all that stuff. Of course, it’s massively relevant, isn’t it?
@Guiri
No worries. Wasn’t trying to have a go at you.
FWIW, the only truly unremarkable aspect of this whole sorry saga it the
worrying regularity with which such houndings are now starting to happen.
Dare to express the slightest variance against – for want of a better word
– “woke” orthodoxy and you’ll quickly find a world of shit raining down on
your head.
Agreed. My still most shared video is Tracey Ullman’s Overley-woke support group. Which has now probably been cancelled. Something uncomfortable and odd is happening.
I know that if you’re writing history, you have to find some way of structuring it, but I’ve never found the idea of eras or generation much like the real experience of time passing. They lose the flow of life, and the variety of experience. I was alive in the sixties, but my sixties, when I was at school, would have been very different to those of my parents or grandparents. Although our opinion of all of those stories of Swinging London would have been the one thing we had in common – we would have all found them nothing to do with our own lives.
I suppose there is also the related cliché of popular history, particularly in documentaries, which is that whatever events were going on at any one time in politics, or popular culture were equally important and are linked together in our memories. So, 1974 was the three day week, Band on the Run, the Godfather part II and Liverpool winning the FA cup. I know they happened but would be hard put to remember that they happened in the same year. (I looked them up as an example.)
Personally, I don’t have a great memory for certain things; there are quite a few events from my own life I struggle to recall with any clarity, and some sections of the past where I feel like events were happening to a different person entirely.
What I do remember though, is how things felt. Not how things occurred, but how they felt. The texture of being 9 or 15, or 30. What it felt like to live in a house with my parents and brothers. How lonely it could be being a teenager. That electric buzz when you first have a bit of money in your pocket and plenty of time ahead of you. How life felt immediately before and immediately after my grandmother died, and the chasm between the two. Like looking at a pair of paintings side by side on the wall; same landscape, but the brush strokes so alien.
I don’t look back with particular nostalgia on events, but it’s those feelings that make me really wistful. I found that lockdown brought quite a few of them back to me; something about the uncertainty of the future perhaps made the past more vivid.
This week I finished reading The House of the Spirits. It’s my mother’s favourite book, which is probably why I’d avoided it until now. I finished the final few pages quite late at night, and I have to admit that after I put it down I had a really good cry. Partly because I saw so much of her in it, but mainly because of the way it articulates the intense melancholy of passing time.
Nostalgia is very often about beforeness – not innocence or even simplicity necessarily. Yet it does make me realise that I don’t really want that much from life and that’s comforting. Jesus, I remember the excitement of when my family got its first VHS -four or five years later than nearly everybody else I knew – or having a Slush Puppie in the indoor market on a Saturday afternoon, or – yes, Mrs May – running through cornfields. Mrs Moose and I went on some country house daytrip a few years ago and my highlight of the day, if not the decade, was lying on the grass.
“Mrs Moose and I went on some country house daytrip a few years ago and my highlight of the day, if not the decade, was lying on the grass”
You have the soul of an artist, Moose…
Cutler cover – respect.
Now do “I’ve Worn My Elbows”
Maybe there’s an idea for a thread – on the use of the whirly tube in popular music…
Viv Stanshall in Urban Spaceman…. mind you, the “list” probably ends there.
Cries of “shame” from both sides of the House…
What about “Blind” by Family?
Though Mr Standstill’s version had a trumpet mouthpiece in kne end and a funnel in the other. A completely different instrument.
The cacophophone (or something like that) it was called.
Ah, there’s such fun to be had with antiquated medical equipment. Here’s footage of me playing “spoons” on a pair of Edwardian specula:
…..*thinks better of it*
Re: La casa de los espíritus / The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende:
The book is really good.
The film (1993) was shite.
Here’s another one: in a new film Cillian Murphy plays a character “at the midpoint of [his] life”.
This is miscasting, as Cillian Murphy is only a child.
Isn’t he?
I’m baring my soul here a bit but I’m convinced I have an acute fear of time passing. Chronophobia, apparently, it’s called. I get debilitatingly nostalgic for better times, sometimes even events of weeks or days ago (like holidays I have just been on) and massively depressed at the thought of wasting time and time running out. The kicker is that when I do have free time to myself, to do whatever I want, I’m stunned into indecision and tend to waste my time even more just worrying about how best to spend my time… (I love the adjective Richard Adams uses in Watership Down for rabbits in a state of indecision and befuddlement… “tharn”… I feel “tharn” a LOT of the time…)
Is it just me or does anyone else get like this??
The idea of debilitating nostalgia rings bells here. I often find myself feeling intense nostalgia for times that I know for a fact I didn’t much care for when I was living through them. It doesn’t help that I’m in a job where everything perpetually gets worse in an unending downward spiral and all the people I like or trust leave one by one (another one this week) leaving me with the dullards and the numpties (or perhaps the other dullards and numpties).
In The Real Frank Zappa Book he talks about civilisation being destroyed not by nuclear catastrophe by by a combination of nostalgia and paperwork – the former illustrated by someone being unable to take a step forward because he’s too nostalgic about the last step. Both of those elements are certainly big, bad presences in my life.
Blinkin’ eck, that resonates with me: “being unable to take a step forward because he’s too nostalgic about the last step”…. Even when I was on a fabulous holiday last week (the best I’ve had for a while) I found myself pondering things like “that’s me halfway through the week now, I mustn’t waste the rest of the week” and “I bet the rest of the week won’t be as good as the first half”. Debilitating nostalgia indeed.
I don’t share your concerns, Art. I’m pretty good at living in the present, as I find the past too boring and the future too scary to think about them much. Like you, I did used to get a bit hung up about wasting time, but then I got to thinking about what is actually a “waste”. Looking back on my life I mostly associate wasted time with work. I’ve long accepted that doing feck all is most definitely not wasting time.
That’s a good way to look at it.
I feel & share your pain.
Being an adult sucks… (I am 65)
Weird, tho’, in’t it, the whole time moving quicker quotient. I have come to terms, somewhat, with the whizz of time, as I now know waiting for something is that much quicker. I choose to block the notion that “the end” is also part of that acceleration, but, on return from a holiday or a week of, the wait for another, eight weeks away, is quite bearable.