i would really like to get better about avoiding nostalgia bias while not discarding like 'past wisdom' or whatever, either as a creator or an audience. i want to be able to like, distill lost essences i come across and put them into my own taste and work but really understand like, what got passed over by the march of time instead of just dipping into this well of comfort/familiarity over and over again.
i go back to old things i have loved and sometimes they suck, but sometimes they are really good. and part of me is like... well. that's nostalgia. obviously i dont want to be hypervigilant about it to my detriment but you see enough examples of people whose tastes crystalize and then never develop further and i'd hate for that to be me. it's boring and like, i don't know, you can see how it informs a lot of peoples' worldview - everything was better when i was a coddled ignorant child unaware of the world's problems.
on the other hand every now and then i'll play an old game i never played before and there's often something special about it. or like, idk, i played super metroid for the first time a few years ago and it's good. like wow. well loved SNES game is good i guess. but also: some of this is surely just a general nostalgia for a time period or a vibe that i enjoyed and am now drilling into.....
i wouldn't say it's a crippling compulsion, but it's often in the back of my mind. i guess it's a similar impulse to wanting to avoid popular things so that you can seek out things that are less explored. it can be good, but then also, your values can start getting a bit warped, seeking novelty over actually taking time to understand things ...
it all feels a bit stupid. i value being precious about this sort of thing but then i also feel like maybe i'd just be better off otherwise lol. i don't ever want to have too big an ego about this stuff, but, but...
pic unrelated
i had a friend challenge me recently when i brought up that all the stories i write stemmed from nostalgia. i also (maybe clumsily) framed most of art fundamentally being about returning to a state that was less complicated. she pushed back pretty hard - saying that nostalgia isn't really interesting and that it's kind of a trap. i don't think i fully understood what she meant until i read your post.
i don't know, maybe i haven't had enough full experiences as an adult to draw from. i've had to confront this feeling a lot more recently - that the things i grew up with really were not better, and i was kind of stupid for holding on to that because i robbed myself of new things
what helped for me was to realize i could decouple the feeling of nostalgia from the object its directed at. whether its a childhood favourite that sucks or a childhood favourite that rules, i find more value in holding onto my experience and memories of the thing rather than the thing itself. i mean, art is such a mercurial phenomenon. it feels like every time i return to something i enjoyed before, whether it was 10 days or 10 years ago, it's a completely new experience. and more often than not, my opinion is especially coloured by the context i experienced it in (example: i feel little nostalgia for SimCity Creator on the Wii, but lots of nostalgia for playing it in my mom's old living room).
idk. i get the fear of falling into the trap of comfy insularity too, but i don't see a reason to be afraid of your taste crystallizing unless you're really just dedicated to passive consumption and hostile to any alternative. in truth, we all gotta find our own middle path between permanent novelty and permanent familiarity. the best thing to me isn't just to have lots and lots of new experiences, or a bunch of old experiences frozen in time, but to have a unique set of experiences built over a lifetime. of well-trodden classics and newer boundary-pushing works and even all the awkward outdated memories that still linger. it's cultivating that shameless eclecticism that counts the most i think.
i dunno if this makes sense or if i'm just rambling bcuz it's late and i'm high, but this is how i like to think about it at least.
pic related (game i loved as a kid that still whips ass to this day)
>>3mscqqxtdiu22
all this has really shifted for me as i've gotten older. i don't know exactly when but i feel like i understand art and stories so much more than i did 10 years ago
>>3msd6jyudb226
yeah it is about the path i guess right? like you're building a unique experience as a human and there are lots of ways to do that
Brands and media companies appeal to nostalgia for nostalgia's sake... I'm as sick as anyone of "remember this movie? what if we remade it?". But at the individual level, looking back on old books/games/movies, I'd rather think of it as thoughtful retrospection; I find that meeting with old favorites becomes an interesting exercise when you consider that something – yourself – has changed since the last time you met. It's splitting hairs... but I feel like nostalgia is to drag old things into the present unchanged whereas retrospection is to bring yourself back to those old things and see in them something new. The market pandering to nostalgia builds a lot of cynicism in me but I don't want to apply that same cynicism to my own interaction with past works.
Italo Calvino: "For the fact is that the reading we do when young can often be of little value because we are impatient, cannot concentrate, lack expertise in how to read, or because we lack experience of life. This youthful reading can be (perhaps at the same time) literally formative in that it gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from. There is a particular potency in the work which can be forgotten in itself but which leaves its seed behind in us... For this reason there ought to be a time in one’s adult life which is dedicated to rediscovering the most important readings of our youth. Even if the books remain the same (though they too change, in the light of an altered historical perspective), we certainly have changed, and this later encounter is therefore completely new."
I do like your idea of trying to find out what it is about past art that gave it a certain feel, rather than just believing that it was inherently better. Putting actual thought and dissecting your favorite books, movies, albums, etc. could help you put words to your tastes and as a result help you find more new things that you'd like too.
That's something that I think separates people who are stuck in the past, versus people who just like to visit it for the experience. People who tend to be obsessed with nostalgia only ever talk about how things were better back then, and suck now without diving into why any further than "it had soul." They're usually just passive consumers who are put off from trying anything new, simply because it's unfamiliar to them. Once you start to find out the parts you do like from past media, you can easily find artists/authors who are inspired by them or replicate a certain feel without it being a direct rip-off of the original.
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