The late 20th century was a time of contrasts.
I think of my parents as being "hippies" and very definitely children of the 1960s, but, my Mum was 24 when 'Never Mind the Bollocks' came out. Many of the albums I think of as "my" albums came out when I was older than that.
The mind plays tricks on you in terms of personal reference points.
My parents were pre-rock. Elvis wasn't really much younger than my dad, but his pop culture references were from the 40s mostly.
And then in my wanderings through the bighted post-truth landscape of the world I happened upon a professor of mathematics and I spake thusly: "Tell me O Learned One, which is the greater number of days, 14411 or 14528?
And they replied "The former, you aged dolt, you nincompoop." And thus I was enlightened and learned to accept the future fate of my country.
The book in question was City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter which was what I was reading to unsuccessfully distract from the election results. It just was not enough of a page turner to do a good job of that. In part as it was somewhat lyrically written. Am now reading Grossman's The Bright Sword (based on a rec here)which is doing the absorbing story moving along thing somewhat better.
The Pittsburgh airport has two bookstores. And direct flights to almost nowhere.
Found a 'Heritage Booksellers' listed, but then it shows as "permanently closed."
The authorities would like to know precisely what you would want with a book anyway.
I want to buy a book to not read instead of not reading the book I brought or the many books on my phone.
Also admittedly part of my confusion was that Tears for Fears coded as more early '90s for me than the mid-80s. I tend to have a pop culture gap around the time my kids were born.
M and I like to play this terrible game, where when a song we like comes on the radio, we see how old the song is, and then find another song that's that number of years older than the first song.
For example: Shaggy's "Boombastic" came out in 1995. In a month that song will be thirty years old. That means that to kids now, "Boombastic" is as much ancient history to them as Petula Clark's "Downtown" or Roger Miller's "King of the Road" were to us.
Or, TLC's "Baby Baby Baby" came out in 1992. Thirty-three years before 1992 was "Mack the Knife" and "King of the Road." Then we get very depressed. It's a fun game.
13.3 contains an error. It was Santo and Johnny's Sleepwalk that came out in 1959, not King of the Road. King of the Road is obviously a much more current song!
The Bright Sword is kinda sorta on the tbr list. Glad that it's kinda sorta what you're looking for!
If you're not sated with Arthuriana when you're done, By Force Alone by Lavie Tidhar answers the question, What if Arthur, like Uther, was an ambitious thug and the knights of the Round Table were a collection of weirdos and ruffians who say "fuck" a lot?
https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/08/02/by-force-alone-by-lavie-tidhar/
In Sayers' books, set approximately 100 years ago, I recall them talking of people with attitudes set in "the 90s" when we would now use "Victorian."
13: Good game, so like "Boy Named Sue" and "Rite of Spring."
I just read Rachel Khong's Real Americans, and there's a scene that occurs in 2021, where two teenagers are looking through one of their dad's albums, which are all "dad rock." But the albums are Bob Dylan and CCR. Surely in 2021 "dad rock" is Stone Temple Pilots or the Beastie Boys? This seems too bizarre an error to be accidental, but the dad was not otherwise a character at all, so introducing this fact without highlighting it as a quirk was really weird. (The book was a little nonsensical in some other ways. It was fun to read but I don't particularly recommend it.)
15: nice review. I'm sure you know that "No wonder they all flock to Camelot. It is that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the kingdom are irresistibly drained" is a direct lift from chapter 1 of "A Study in Scarlet"?
In Sayers' books, set approximately 100 years ago, I recall them talking of people with attitudes set in "the 90s" when we would now use "Victorian."
That bit didn't throw me too much because I first read the books in the 1990s, but I remember being brought up by a passage in Gaudy Night. Harriet has injured her head and is talking to Peter's irritating nephew:
"'You'll have to be cropped all round to even matters up and Uncle Peter can wear your discarded tresses next his heart.'
'Come, come,' said Harriet. 'He doesn't date back to the seventies.'
'He's ageing rapidly. I should think he's nearly got to the sixties by now. With beautiful, golden side-whiskers...'
Of course, the 1870s and 1860s.
And there's a reference to how incredibly old General Fentiman is: "For him the Crimea is still the War, and the Boer business found him too old to go out." Crimea was 1854 and the Boer war 1899. And, yes, if you said "since the war", or even "since the Great War", in the second half of the 19th century in Britain, people did indeed assume you meant the Crimea.
15, 19: Not to spoiler it, but that review reflects some of the elements of TBS.
I think maybe the plot of "10 Things I Hate About You" is also lifted from Shakespeare.
But the albums are Bob Dylan and CCR. Surely in 2021 "dad rock" is Stone Temple Pilots or the Beastie Boys?
a) That's assuming that "dad rock" means just "the rock that any given generation of dads listen to" rather than a specific and fixed set of bands. Art Nouveau doesn't just mean "new art", it means a specific group of artists, none of whom are now particularly new.
b) Even granted a), do men of that generation still listen to the Beastie Boys, even if they listened to it in their youth?
23b - They were looking through albums. I think it's relatively rare that men (or other people) of that generation and onward listen to any music on physical media, as opposed to on streaming services, so the albums would have been an artifact of an earlier time, when they still purchased CDs or records.
I've gotten used to it now, but in my mid-30s the thing that would make me feel the oldest is seeing a woman who is obviously much younger than me with a child who is kinda old. Like a 28 year old with a 5 year old or whatever. I know the math worked, but it always threw me for a loop, somehow much more than say a woman my age with a teenager.
23b: Yes, if we go by my brothers-in-law.
Related to the OP: I was walking through a group of teenage skateboarders the other day and one of them was wearing a Tower Records t-shirt.
I grinned at him and said "Now THAT is is vintage t-shirt," and he said, quite adorably, "It's my dad's!"
Moby. So many apologies. I specifically have noted in 2022 that the">https://heeblygeebly.wordpress.com/2022/03/13/with-a-fried-egg/">the pebbled walls are gone.
whoops. Oh well, I'm in a car and not fixing that anytime soon.
23- I always got confused by that with art. Modern is actually quite old? There's a postmodern? Contemporary is maybe the same thing but also could be separate from postmodern?
Maybe we can take some of the apologies JPS is sending my way and just route them directly to Moby. Cut out the middleman.
I spent hours looking for them. Or maybe minutes.
31: It's hard when everyone wants to find a synonym for "Right now!" for the latest trend.
I was like, "huh, I guess we're just about ready for post-contemporary art" and indeed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-contemporary
Seeing teens wearing Ramones t shirts, yes not just in NY but in Arrakis too, and I'm the only old fucker around who has actually seen them play live
23: I am now habituated, inured even, to the fact that an almost-contemporary friend of mine has multiple great grandkids. And did when I first got to know her, I dunno, six or seven or ten years ago?
...when our kids would have been just hitting their teens
My students all seem to be wearing Nirvana shirts right now and I have Feelings even though they're probably sick of my stories about listening to Bleach on cassette tape. Then again, I also make them listen to feminist and union folk music (for genuine educational purposes connected to SLOs in addition to my desire to expand their palettes), so I might as well be a senior citizen as far as they're concerned.
5 or 6 years ago, I remember having to explain to a class of honors freshman--the vast majority of whom were engineering majors--that their bickering over something having to do with the invention of digital cameras and scanners was moot because not only did computers in the relevant time period not have enough storage space for any of those files, they also didn't have graphics cards. I regaled them with tales of ascii art, the first time someone on one of my BBS message boards mentioned the internet, and the South FL BBS New Year's Eve 1993 or 1994 Party* where I was introduced as "[my handle], who still has a 2400-baud modem." Then I cried a little, mainly for my colleagues in computer science who are apparently stymied that even compsci majors no longer know what a file tree is (knowledge I could safely assume most of my students lacked at least a decade ago).
*I know everyone's worried about predatory men and social media now, but boy howdy was the 90s BBS scene I participated in as a middle school statutory rape central. All three of us underage girls I can think of had at least one much older boyfriend, and even in retrospect those were mostly the relatively less sketchy dudes. Of course, this was also true of my Catholic youth group, the national speech and debate/forensics circuit, and pretty much every other community I remember in the '90s.
39.1: I did get some smiles when I described a particular recording of "Bread and Roses" as "a banger." (Inaccurately, but I was trying to wake them up.)
I felt so vindicated the other day when lourdes and I were searching for a particular song across various streaming platforms, couldn't find it anywhere, and then it turned out I still had the physical CD of rarities and b-sides and could put it directly on the stereo.
I know there's a whole retro aesthetic, but I remember seeing elementary school peers of my son with T-shirts for video game systems that were obsolete before they were born. (And that I had owned and played). That was a real old-man-shakes-cane moment.
Seems to me that reminders of the personal past and how surprisingly much of that there is, these are a relatively gentle aspect of aging. The real problem is that there's much less future left, that any thoughts oriented towards eventually or maybe this effort will pay off later, those thoughts are echoes and delusions, that whole orientation is no longer relevant, or at least not relevant in the same way.
My students all seem to be wearing Nirvana shirts
My high school senior has one.
Also, I think kids today have much less sense of what's current and what's not, leaving aside massive viral sensations like Taylor Swift, who are sort of transcending that.
My son just grabs anything he hears that he likes and adds it to one of the millions of playlists he has on his phone that he's "curated". It might be something he has heard me or J' listen to, or something on the radio when we are in the car, or a song from a film soundtrack, or from a game. By the standard of most of his friends, he's really into music, and he has wide taste, although he tends to like music that's loud, with the exception of Billie Eilish.
So he has gone through phases when he has been obsessed by AC/DC, Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age, Arctic Monkeys, Beastie Boys, Wolf Alice, Billie Eilish, Bring Me the Horizon, etc. With only really the latter two really even remotely contemporary. The others are at least as likely to be listened to by me.
re: 44
My 11 year old has one.
Wasn't Buddy Holly, 1994, rife with the same kind of nostalgia-for-things-before-one-was-born?
Ha: there was a That 90's Show this year, but it was canceled after two seasons.
There are at least three bookstores in the Pittsburgh Airport.
I did get some smiles when I described a particular recording of "Bread and Roses" as "a banger."
I was trying to remember a version that I liked; but haven't been able to find it. That did lead me to this paper which looks like it could be interesting -- https://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-abstract/17/2/81/164302/Bread-and-Roses-The-Evolution-of-a-Song-Labor
the South FL BBS New Year's Eve 1993 or 1994 Party
I was recently thinking about this song which doesn't perfectly line up with my experiences; but is surprisingly close: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsEimEQcxgs
||
Takeshi Kitano's Kikujiro is just the sweetest road movie I've ever seen. Just hits all the right happy/sad notes and hilarious to boot.
|>
It's weird aging into the point where the students could be my kids without it having been a crisis pregnancy.
The students are now wearing closer to what I wore in college and one little fashion anthropologist was very eagerly asking me if her fit was authentic. It was! The really funny thing is Pebbles, going from little-girl leggings and unicorn tops to swiping her brother's shirts*, cargo pants, and rainbow-stemmed glasses. Kiddo is oozing late 90s and her friends have those little plastic stretchy chokers.
*The Calabat is quite short, and she is average height, and we are hoping he has his next growth spurt before she has hers because he is not going to be OK with being shorter than his baby sister.
swiping her brother's shirts*
I barely get to wear my clothes any more. Apparently dadcore is a thing now?
Modern is actually quite old? There's a postmodern? Contemporary is maybe the same thing but also could be separate from postmodern?
In the tech world, I think I've come across multiple things where, when I looked up their names, there was some historical note about how they originally had "next generation" in the name.
One of my oldest friends and her wife each had kids (in previous marriages) a year or two after graduating from college, which is early for my circles but nothing crazy. Now four of those kids are in college.
19: Thanks! And no, I did not know that about "A Study in Scarlet."