On a favorite podcast of mine, one of the hosts recently talked about how futile it is to chase relevance. The minute you do, he said, you’re done. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why you won’t find me watching videos from Instagram “influencers.” I don’t want to know about the latest “scandal” that has everyone on the internet clutching their collective pearls. I don’t care who’s getting kudos or who’s being cancelled. All of this “relevance” ain’t actually relevant at all. It’s garbage negativity, the fuel of modern society. I just want to live in my little corner of the world, enjoying what’s directly in front of me—family, friends, a stunning sunset, a hauntingly beautiful full moon, the changing of the seasons, you know, the simple life.
That’s why most of what you read here is about movies and pop culture from back before the internet ruined everything. I still find new gems that speak to me, of course—recent examples being the movie Sinners and the TV series The Bear—but overall I thoroughly love living in a past where technology hadn’t yet ruined everything. I’m able to type up some of this post on my smartphone while I’m watching TV and daydreaming about a vintage pinup girl grilling up a juicy steak for me and serving it with a nice, ice cold pint of beer. Is that a good thing, though? I mean, the daydream is very good, but doing everything all at once on these pocket computers and feeling unable to detach from them is not so good, in my humble opinion. It’s actually pretty bad.
Note how the daydream was about a vintage pinup girl. Vintage, retro, and nostalgia: those three words define my interests most of the time. This year I lost myself in a fantastic book about Major League Baseball in the wildest decade in sports history, the 1970s. I was positively basking in the warm afterglow of comforting nostalgia while reading it. That’s also what I do when rereading Batman comics from the early 1980s, when I first started collecting. Basking in that afterglow is what I’m chasing when I watch comfort films starring Michelle Pfeiffer, like Into the Night or Married to the Mob.
It’s more than just loving art from my youth and before I was even born, though. It’s really about what the main character in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity means when he says, “I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.” As we age, there’s this feeling of being left behind that grows more acute with each passing hour we’re alive. The world around us right now is telling us we only really matter if we have a million followers, or our movies only matter if they’re filled with morally perfect characters who won’t offend young people on Reddit. I don’t care about any of that, so I’m clearly part of the problem, right? The world is moving on, the present makes very little sense to me, and frankly I’m fine with that. I have a library of books and movies that span decades—centuries, even—to remind me, any time I’m feeling lost in the present, that we used to understand moral ambiguity; not only that, we prized it in our literature and our cinema. It was the ingredient that flavored all the best art ever made, yet today younger generations dismissively and summarily condemn this art as “problematic.” If the characters in Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough film Mean Streets never made mistakes, never fucked up, then where’s the narrative or emotional urgency in that?? I guarantee you if someone remade that film today, chances are high they’d ruin it by “modernizing” those characters.
So if being “relevant” today means engaging with art that spoon feeds me what’s right and wrong, without a single ounce of nuance involved, then I’ll gladly remain irrelevant, thank you very much. Thanks to bullying mobs of internet scolds trying to ignore or even destroy humanity’s innate complexities, something has been lost with this wholesale movement towards sanitizing every last inch of our pop culture and, beyond that, our society. Certainly, violent crime and obscenely inappropriate behavior probably shouldn’t be anyone’s life goal, but if you wipe all of that human frailty out of your pop culture, all you’re left with is a society of idiots who can’t think critically about art, and thus can’t think critically about anything even remotely challenging in life. That’s why I don’t understand the present. We had come so far as a society, intellectually and artistically, and now we’re seeing so much of that progress halted, and in some cases reversed.
Maybe people’s hearts were in the right place when all of this started, but it’s very clear now, two-plus decades into social media and full-blown online addiction, that this experiment has been a massive failure. What is an aging Gen Xer to do when faced with this epic disaster? Retreat. Retreat into the books and movies and music and people who spoke truths that might’ve hurt to hear, but were never anything short of revelatory. To me, that is what’s relevant. That’s always relevant. The sad reality is that the masses don’t seem to agree. I don’t have the energy or even the desire to fight them on this. I’m just going to continue doing my thing. Living locally while remaining globally cognizant, cherishing and supporting what matters in life, and enjoying movies and books that speak to all of our complex, complicated, beautifully fucked up souls.
Hopefully you can find something to relate to here. Ironically, in order to share these thoughts I typed them all out in this stupid app on my stupid phone, thereby continuing to make myself part of the stupid internet problem I complained about earlier. Sometimes, though, you have to use the tools of your oppressors to stick it to them, so that’s what I’m telling myself. Now let’s just enjoy this awesome retro pinup and get back to living in the past, pronto.
The Starfire Lounge 