Thanksgiving was friends, not family, as usual this year so the only fight came from the dogs: stress about desiring turkey scraps caused a donnybrook under the table, complete with scary (to those not used to it) high-pitched basenji screams; no blood, no foul, and afterwards, everyone sighed with relief that the traditional Thanksgiving ritual had been accomplished with so little lasting misery. What's Thanksgiving without a family fight? On to the apple pie!
But then talk turned onto a dark track: how much better things were in the olden days. We were a mixed bunch, ranging from 10 to 69: the young end checked out early and went to the playground, but the rest of us fell into that familiar rut -- "when I first came to New York, artists could afford to live here; you could be creative because you didn't have to work all the time to pay the rent; we did so many creative things [fill in the blanks]." Till a 30-something person rebelled and said there was still stuff going on, but maybe those nostalgia-whiners weren't aware of it. It was interesting: some people really couldn't stop talking about what they'd done in their heyday, and how dull things were now; so the room divided, and the 30-somethings sulked a bit, not willing to insist that the oldsters shut up.
I'm coming up on 53, and moved to New York in 1974. I spent my late teens at CBGBs, playing in third-rate bands, never pursuing the scene with full energy and ambition, just hanging out around the edges full of odd ambivalences and the certainty that I could never possibly be cool (an investigation for another time). So I've thought plenty about what the old days were like, and about my reaction to them. I've tried not to do revisionist history: those days weren't wonderful for me -- I was not cool, and not happy, even though I was in the right place at the right time, and saw lots of cool things and people. I heard lots of great music, but I didn't create myself into the vision of the person I thought I could be, and I never felt I fully occupied my own space. So after a while, I changed my life, and went to graduate school, and that's a whole different story.
Now I have a different relationship to nostalgia: when you're older, it's way harder to have the energy to commit yourself to a creative life, and I suspect that's what people really mean when they say things aren't what they used to be -- they displace the disappointment in their own energy levels onto the creative scene itself. But of course it's true that tons of interesting things are going on out there: it's just that younger, more energetic people are doing them. It's also true that there's not much tolerance for older people, and that makes it even harder to feel part of a scene. I've been thinking about feeling old since I turned 50, when a switch seemed to flip and the downward slide began: dying my hair was no longer a choice between mouse and red; the number of annual preventive medical tests that I as a lucky person with good health insurance was told to schedule multiplied exponentially; I got glasses and a hearing aid (all that loud CBGBs music coming home to roost); I often couldn't remember why going to a club was fun -- and I just don't do it anymore. When I do go out, I can't imagine that anyone will care what I look like, and it seems a waste of time to hope that someone will find me attractive: that's a hard one, rarely getting a charm check. In fact, all of this stuff is hard: it's the conjunction of having my body change, and living in a youth culture that doesn't value my body any more anyway, and also of the more subtle issue of re-evaluating my life after 50: stuff I've been doing for years (being an academic) no longer makes much sense to me, and the way I organize my life and allocate my time clearly needs a complete revolution. I feel the lure of easy nostalgia: it would be so great to blame the scene out there rather than blame myself for being unable to maintain a nourishing creativity -- or, even worse, to turn a cold spotlight on my life and realize that what I thought was nourishing was in fact rather empty. Remaking my life in middle age seems like a herculean task, and I really wish it felt satisfying to shift the blame.
Apparently, there's no escape from holiday gloom, even when you've cleverly avoided the obvious misery of family dysfunction.
