retro

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.

It__ not a crime to wish for other worlds. You__l get taxed for it but they can__ throw you in jail for creating your own private world_yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. __ou can__ go backward,_ __ou can__ live in the past,_ they tell you. Why not? __ou__e got to put all that behind you and move on to other things,_ they say. Bullshit! These are all expressions of modern disposability. It__ a mediocritizing technique__rying to get rid of what I call __ast orthodoxies._ It__ our past that makes us unique, therefore it__ our past that economic interests want to rob from us, so they can sell us a new, improved future. Society now depends on a disposable world__ut with the old, in with the new, including relationships. But how we weep and wish we could hold onto those cherished moments forever, to those long-whispered dreams, those tortured nights__ow we want to grasp them and stop them from sifting through our fingers. I say, __on__ let it happen. Keep things the way you want them and let the rest of the world be duped.

Every day it__ something worse being predicted. Mearth says that sooner or later copyright on books will be all in the past because they__l all be available electronically. She says that electric cars will replace gasoline-powered cars. She says that something called drones will be used to watch the entire country, she talks a lot about something called nanotechnology, and 3-dimensional printing and cellular phones being implanted into peoples_ minds and all available careers being replaced by robots and human cloning and overpopulation and film becoming obsolete, cellular phones making regular telephones obsolete and LED lighting replacing everything and eventually she says that the planet will collapse and become an apathetic wreck,_ Alecto replied rapidly, his run-on sentence sounding sinister and dangerous. __earth says that eventually people will be able to see inside the minds of everyone.

The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960__ of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother__ hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father__ denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her.

His eyesight was possessed by the colours of trauma, cracking and bubbling like an old Super Eight film to remind him of his near-death drowning some two months ago in that very moment when he needed to act.

You__e innocent until proven guilty,_ Mandy exclaimed, unable to hide her gleeful smile. She missed the way people used to have normal conversations, used to be more caring for each other than themselves, back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, she realized, neighbors kept to themselves, their kids kept to themselves, nobody talked to each other anymore. They went to work, went shopping and shut themselves up at home in front of glowing computer screens and cellphones_ but maybe the nostalgic, better times in her life would stay buried, maybe the world would never be what it was. In the 21st century music was bad, movies were bad, society was failing and there were very few intelligent people left who missed the way things used to be_ maybe though, Mandy could change things. Thinking back to the old home movies in her basement, she recalled what Alecto had told her. __e wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed._ The 1960__ and 1970__ were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad comedy and when people would just walk to a friend__ house for the afternoon instead of texting in bed all day. She missed soda fountains and department stores and non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags, she wished cellphones, bad pop music and LED lights didn__ exist_ she hated how everything had a diagnosis or pill now, how people who didn__ fit in with modern, lazy society were just prescribed medications without a second thought_ she hated how old, reliable cars were replaced with cheap hybrid vehicles_ she hated how everything could be done online, so that people could just ignore each other_ the world was becoming much more convenient, but at the same time, less human, and her teenage life was considered nostalgic history now.Hanging her head low, avoiding the slightly confused stare of the cab driver through the rear view mirror, she started crying uncontrollably, her tears soaking the collar of her coat as the sun blared through the windows in a warm light.

I__e seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly_ they can__ kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I__e seen humans die from smoking them_ if I were you I would stop smoking them.___hy should I? You smoke __m all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes,_ Mandy pointed out.__eah, I started doing that back in the Sixties_ for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes_ but I__ not a person, I__ Pollution, things like that aren__ dangerous to me but they are to you,_ Alecto told her. __t__ not a good idea.

Kodachrome... it gives us those nice, bright colors,gives us the greens of summers,makes ya think all the world's a sunny day,Oh yeah!I've got a Nikon camera, I'd love to take a photograph,so mama don't take...my Kodachrome away...

Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn__ care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn__ just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life__ best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes.

There's no reason that anything should ever become obsolete, whether it be VHS tapes, celluloid film, print books or even the previous versions of a computer operating system, as long as even just one person still wants them around. After all, one thing leads to another, old inventions are the basis for new ones, inventors and designers and scientists and hobbyists worked hard to create all these things, so don't they deserve some respect, enough not to have their ideas buried in the dust by the latest trends and fads?

In the fashion industry, everything goes retro except the prices.

That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)

Should have taken warning it's justPeople mourningRunning, hiding, lostYou can't find, find a place to go, so it'sRed skies at nightRed skies at night, whoa oh, oh oh oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh... red skies at night, red skies at night, whoa oh, oh oh oh...Someone's taking over, and it look like they're aiming right at you...Someone said we'll be dead by morning...Someone cries, leaving... red skies at night, whoa oh-h-h

Be batty, be traditional, and be proud.

Retro is a symptom of a generation that is too lazy to innovate.

I think we ought to find something else to do,_ said Mandy. __ut Alecto my love, you__e the first person to notice my retro diner kitchen. When my parents saw it, they thought I was creating a weird art project.___ like it. It's got that let__-drown-ourselves-in-better-days type ambiance,_ Alecto declared, his gray eyes narrowed.