"Trump on Saturday argued it was 'too late' to have another presidential debate because Americans have begun casting their ballots in the 2024 election...."

"Trump suggested last week that he might be open to participating in a third presidential debate.... 'Maybe if I got in the right mood,' he told reporters during a stop in California, after previously postingon Truth Social, 'THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!'... Harris’ campaign last week dismissed Trump’s announcement that there would not be another debate, with one senior adviser saying the former president 'changes his position every day.'..."

From "Harris accepts CNN debate invitation for October 23, again challenging Trump to another showdown" (CNN).

I assume he's negotiating. But it is getting late. And yet October 23 seems too late because too many people will have already voted. Don't we all need to be reacting to the same information? Maybe not. Why does it seem as though we should? Am I just nostalgic for the days when we all — except the overseas military and the truly housebound — trudged to the polls and waited in line together?

"Chayka, a millennial, is nostalgic for... the images he once shared on Tumblr; an earlier, jankier World Wide Web of illegal file-sharing, blogs and and massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) forums."

"He first heard 'My Favorite Things' not in 'The Sound of Music' but the John Coltrane version, listening to an indie station as he wended his way back from a friend’s house in the suburbs in the early ’00s. Boomers and Gen X, with more years logged algorithm-free, might find 'Filterworld' unduly bleak; Zoomers, hopelessly naïve. Or, as they say on the internet, YMMV."

I'm reading "Can You Escape the Algorithm?/‘Filterworld’ Gives It a Try. An experiment in digital disengagement prompts Kyle Chayka to consider how technology has narrowed our choices and dulled the culture" (free access link to the NYT).

That's a review, from a couple weeks ago, of the book "Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture" by Kyle Chayka (commission-earned link).

I'm reading that this morning after searching the NYT archive for "MMORPGs," a very annoying set of letters that I'd never noticed before, but ran across as an answer in a crossword, clued as "RuneScape and World of Warcraft, for two: Abbr."

My reaction was: If that's the way it's going to be, I'm not doing your crosswords anymore.

Overreaction? My test of whether this is something I should recognize, because it comes up in real life, is whether it's in the NYT archive. This was not the NYT crossword. And, yes, I'm a Boomer.

You can see that the recent appearance of MMORPG was in parentheses, after a spelling-out of what it abbreviates. Before that, it hadn't appeared since 2019. But back in 2013 and in 2005-2006, the annoying letter combo appeared a handful of times. I see the phrase "the wonderfully named MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games)."

I guess I won't boycott that puzzle, but I can see how puzzle publishers risk alienating their audience. Puzzles are full of things that are easy for Boomers like me and that must be very annoying to Millennials and Zoomers. But when I see something like MMORPG, I just think it's a pathetic play to get young people to think this thing is for them. And please don't say YMMV either. 

And yet MMORPGs are among the things the "Filterworld" author is nostalgic for. It's not new. It's old. Mid-level old. Like blogs. I'm nostalgic for blogs too, of course, but I'm still here in mine, and I presume there's this other group of people — who the hell are they? — who are still out there in their MMORPGs.

"It’s more fun to go somewhere physical and look around, versus sitting at home and one person is clicking and another is like ‘No, no’ and it just becomes annoying."

"Here, it’s a hands-on experience, it’s a different environment. You don’t feel like you’re connected to this big, giant internet system. You can just disconnect, put something in and not look at your phone for a while."

Said Jaime Munoz, 39, browsing in a retro video rental store called Whammy!, quoted in "With VHS and video stores, ‘tapeheads’ are fueling an analog revival" (WaPo).

Are you nostalgic for the old-time experience of wandering around a video store and deciding on something you'd commit to watching and would need to rewind and bring back to the store in time to avoid late fees?

"This is not the first midcentury, middle-America food craze to find new life online: Jell-O molds, 1970s-era desserts and 1970s-themed dinner parties..."

"... have all made unexpected comebacks. That’s all 'packaged-food cuisine' born of the hyper-consumerism of the 1950s.... For some, the box mixes and cans — triumphs of postwar prosperity — are a rosy portal to an imagined 'simpler time' of family dinners and easy living. 'That is nostalgia for America,' she said. 'That is our national comfort food.'"

From "Watergate Salad Makes a Comeback/The 1970s-era dish made with pistachio pudding mix, canned pineapple and mini marshmallows has caught the curious eye of the TikTok generation" (NYT).

It's absurd that something embodying nostalgia for a lost culture should bear the name "Watergate." But the nostalgia is felt by young people today, who don't mind mixing the 50s, 60s, and 70s together, not like us Boomers who think the early 60s, mid-60s, and late 60s were distinctly different eras and have long indulged in the deep, mystic belief that the first few years of the 70s were the real 60s.

And maybe there is nostalgia for the Watergate scandal. Maybe it seems poignant and delicate compared to the scandals of today... and even for Nixon. My son Chris — who is reading a biography of each American President — texted me about Nixon recently — somewhat jocosely — "Nixon is underrated. He was liberal!/Got more done for progressive causes than democrats do today." 

Anyway, the nostalgia for lost mid-century America is about far more than food. There's a sense that people lived more rewarding, warm, and loving lives back then. Here's something I saw on TikTok the other day. Let me know how it made you feel or, better yet, if you are not young, show it to someone young and ask them how it makes them feel:

"Can a modern young person ever understand what it was like to simply watch whatever happened to be on television?"

"To explain what life was like in the days of yore, I interviewed a number of people who are (roughly) my age about what it was like being (about) 27 in (around) 2002" (at Slate).

I'll cherry-pick and blend the various interviewees together:

"The cameras of Generation Z’s childhoods, seen as outdated and pointless by those who originally owned them, are in vogue again."

"Young people are reveling in the novelty of an old look, touting digital cameras on TikTok and sharing the photos they produce on Instagram. On TikTok, the hashtag #digitalcamera has 184 million views.... Gen Z-ers... are now in search of a break from their smartphones.... That respite is coming in part through compact point-and-shoot digital cameras, uncovered by Gen Z-ers who are digging through their parents’ junk drawers and shopping secondhand...."

From "The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera/Young people are opting for point-and-shoots and blurry photos" (NYT).

I've curated 8 TikToks for your pleasure tonight. Let me know which one (or ones) you like best.

1. That fish!

2. The dog's delicate care for a plant.

3. Sounds you don't hear anymore.

4. Do you pronounce these words correctly?

5. A designer food experience.

6. How to dress for a work meeting.

7. Her not understanding any critically acclaimed film.

8. The jazz they play in stores in Tokyo. (And here's his "In-Store (Tokyo Jazz)" playlist.)

I've got 9 TikToks for you this evening. Let me know which ones you like best.

1. "Benjamin Franklin or food?"

2. Taking work seriously. 

3. "People always say that kids with Down Syndrome always super happy...."

4. "The great phone books.... why, yes, I remember them well...."

5. Cursing at the neighbor in Italian....

6. "Stay here with me, an old man..."

7. Nick Cave sings the word "bathtub" 10 times — ranked.

8. So you think your kid will feel the magic of the movie that felt like magic to you when you were a kid?

9. Scott!! 

"I walk around the neighborhood that encouraged me for so many decades, and I see the reminders of Harvey and the Rainbow Honor Walk, celebrating famous queer and trans people."

"I just can’t help but think that soon there will be a time when people walking up and down the street will have no clue what this is all about."

Said Cleve Jones, who lived in the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco for 50 years before moving out of the city altogether, to live in a small house with a garden, quoted in "Once a Crucial Refuge, 'Gayborhoods' Lose L.G.B.T.Q. Residents in Major Cities/Many are choosing to live elsewhere in search of cheaper housing and better amenities. They are finding growing acceptance in other communities after decades of political and social changes" (NYT).

It's not just about housing costs:

"So far, the sprawl of haute-suburban restaurants is limited to Manhattan and Brooklyn, and there is some nuance within the genre. They can take the shape of a 'classic American tavern'..."

"... a 'classic neighborhood tavern'... or perhaps a 'classic Midwestern supper club'... sold on the premise that it seems like the kind of no-frills local joints that once dotted the highway exits of Wisconsin.... I invited my friend from Madison to join me at Emmett’s on Grove.... When I asked if the restaurant resembled something from the Badger State in any way, my friend struggled to perceive any similarities, aside from the booths and the overall roominess. Nothing about the décor screamed 'Midwest' to me, but the ability to order a side of ranch with our pizza certainly nodded to the region’s culinary sensibilities. (This is not a criticism.) Our servers were also extremely polite, another midwestern trait, but that could have been our luck. We stayed true to the nostalgic vibe and split a simple pepperoni pizza, plus some arugula salad and — why not? — a baked potato because my friend’s mom eats one every day, and it felt like an authentic thing to do."

From "Haute Suburbia/Why do New York City’s hottest restaurants feel like they’ve been airlifted in from the Midwest?" (NY Magazine).

The headline and the text don't match up too well unless you stress "feel like" and take note of who's doing the feeling. But that's what restaurants do, create an ambience, and they're working with whatever's in the mind of customers who probably lack experience with the place the restaurant is purporting to evoke. 

The writer of the article (Tammie Teclemariam) orders pepperoni pizza and deems it "true" in some sense having to do with her own feeling of nostalgia, which seems attached to absolutely nothing except perhaps her own past experience with pizza-eating. Ironically, pizza is the most iconic New York City food. Then she adds a potato and deems it "authentic," but I've never heard of anyone eating potato with pizza. 

"Tumblr was founded by David Karp and launched in New York City, in February of 2007... It was built to be a simple, social blogging platform..."

"Users could design their own home pages; post text, images, gifs, or videos; and follow a feed of others doing the same.... In 2013, when Tumblr had seventy-three million accounts, Yahoo acquired it for more than a billion dollars. But, in 2016, the company did a writedown of seven hundred and twelve million dollars... [In 2019] Automattic, the commercial arm of the content-management system WordPress, acquired the site for a reported three million dollars. It was easy to assume that Tumblr was dead.... It’s one of the few social networks where users can still publish entries that resemble blog posts. The Tumblr users I spoke to, both new and returning, cited a few unfashionable aspects that keep them using the platform. Tumblr’s main feed doesn’t shuffle posts algorithmically based on what it determines might appeal to a user. It’s 'a good, old chronological river'... 'It’s the periphery of the internet; nothing important is happening there.'... What makes Tumblr obsolete, for the moment, are the same things that lend it an enduring appeal. The fact that it maintains a following should remind us that we use social-media services by choice; no platform or feature is an inevitability. As Karina Tipismana, the student, told me, 'People say stuff like, "I wish we could still use Tumblr." It’s there, it’s there!'"

From "How Tumblr Became Popular for Being Obsolete/The social-media platform’s status as a relic of the Internet has attracted prodigal users as well as new ones" by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker).

Tumblr predates the places that are not obsolete — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. The point here is that the obsoleteness is what's so good. If there's nostalgia for blogs, if there's something inherently appealing in blogs that is lost in these other places, let's remember not only Tumblr, but also Blogger, which has been around since 1999.

I thought I was getting into blogging late when I began this blog 18 years ago. Blogger had already existed for 5 years. I didn't want to miss out on blogging entirely, though part of me thought, it's too late. And I remember when Tumblr was the new thing, 3 years later. I remember all the others — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok — when they were new. But I'm still here with the old, still blogging old school. I don't need to look back to the time when blogging was blogging, like it's something quaint, from simpler times. 

I've stuck to the discipline, daily blogging, absolutely no skipped days in 18 years. I've got to make the announcement every year, and it's that day again, my bloggiversary. I'm not stopping now. And thanks to everyone of you. If you've got this far, you haven't stopped reading.

Remember when the village people — the Village People?! — drank vegetable soup from your cupped hands?

Tala Schlossberg remembers. 

Schlossberg is the daughter of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and yet I am not making fun of her. This video is actually really good! The story and the animation are credited to Scholossberg, and it's a funny journey into nostalgia and what we're really missing from pre-COVID times:

The gooiest ad I've ever seen — with a tinkling piano playing the National Anthem and the hilariously sentimental voice of Sam Elliott.

 

That ad played during the World Series. I'm not watching the World Series. I read about the ad in that WaPo article I linked to in the previous post. According to WaPo: "While Trump on Tuesday appealed in person to his most ardent fans with divisive themes, Joe Biden’s campaign beamed in to the nation’s living rooms during the World Series with a much broader audience in mind." 

Yes, whoever made that ad, sure had the "broader audience in mind." I can picture clever fellows laughing at their own work, comparing it to a "South Park" parody, and joking about how dumb Americans are. 

Watching that ad, a few seconds in, Meade said "Tegridy Farms," and toward the end, I said, "This is for the dumb people" and "Actually, this is very effective." I could feel the emotion they were trying to put over. Joe will bring us together — no reason why and don't you worry your head about what he'll actually do while you're in a hypnotic fog of phony-baloney togetherness.

I'm looking for the right "Tegridy Farms" ad to convey Meade's point. There's this, but as Meade said, "It doesn't have enough of that voice — you know, like that guy... that guy in 'The Big Lebowski.'" I say: "Sam Elliott! You do realize the voice in the Biden ad is Sam Elliott." Meade thought it was just some guy doing his damnedest to sound like Sam Elliott. No, that's actually Sam Elliott. You might think Sam Elliott is such an extreme that he'd be reserved for the comic exaggeration of the voice of a narrator...

  

... but the Biden campaign is using him utterly seriously, to stir our soulfully deep desire for America.

 

Why don't they just give us the marijuana already? Then we could sit back and laugh at all this absurdity. Ah, but then you'd be like me, abstaining.* They need you to vote. You've got to melt into a pool of goo and yet maintain sufficient semblance to a human creature to check a box on a mail-in ballot.

_________________________

* No, I'm not on marijuana. It doesn't even work on me. I'm naturally this way.

"At a time when the pop charts were dominated by cloying songs such as 'A Horse with No Name' and 'Joy to the World' and the playlists of burgeoning FM radio stations were heavy on..."

"... James Taylor; Crosby, Stills & Nash; and the Eagles; Creem respectfully ceded coverage of those artists to Rolling Stone. It championed, instead, proto-punk bands such as the Stooges, the MC5, ? and the Mysterians, and Count Five; mavericks such as Lou Reed, Dr. John, Marc Bolan, and George Clinton; and nascent heavy-metal acts, including Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Alice Cooper. 'Unlike Rolling Stone, which is a bastion of San Francisco counter-culture "rock-as-art" orthodoxy, Creem is committed to a Pop aesthetic,' Ellen Willis wrote in The New Yorker. 'It speaks to fans who consciously value rock as an expression of urban teen-age culture.' The original staffers... saw the magazine as a cross between Mad, the satirical comic book, and Esquire circa the height of New Journalism....  Try as he might, [publisher Barry] Kramer never succeeded in turning Creem into the sort of cash-cow life-style magazine that Rolling Stone became. Its steadiest advertisers included A-200 Pyrinate Liquid ('one shampoo kills lice and nits'), Boone’s Farm wine, and mail-order head shops that hawked pipes, personalized roach clips, and something called the 'grass mask.' ('Shit, what a hit!')"

From "The Overlooked Influence of Creem Magazine/A new documentary makes the case for America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine'" (The New Yorker).

ADDED: I tried to find an image for that item called the "grass mask." First, I turned up a lot of random junk that mostly gave me additional ideas about what it could be. I just wanted an old 70s ad. Then I put "grass mask" and "shit, what a hit" in quotes and that narrowed the hell out of the results to the point where I got to this PDF of a 1974 issue of an alternative newspaper called The Living Daylights....



There are no ads, so it's just somewhere in all that writing. If you readers would divide up the work, it's 28 pages, and maybe 28 of you could each read a page. If you find "grass mask"/"shit, what a hit," please write out the whole sentence and tell us the page number. Thanks! Lately, I've been nostalgic for the 1970s. Something about New York City going to hell has got me thinking about how the hell that was NYC in the 70s (when I lived there) was so much better than the fresh hell that is New York City today. But in any case, The Living Daylights seems to be from Australia. I've got no nostalgia about Australia. What does "the living daylights" refer to anyway?

"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because..."

"... they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are."

Wrote Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet.

Here's a statue of him at a café in Lisbon — seated, with his own table, like another customer.


cc — Nol Aders

A fascinating character!

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views....

"The white man’s path is a rut for the rest of us" — writes a privileged white woman...

.... Jennifer Palmieri, in a newspaper owned by a white man (The Washington Post, owned by mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos).

Where does Palmieri get the identitarian authority to speak for a group called "the rest of us" against "the white man"?

To her credit, she begins by showing her awareness that she really doesn't have the authority:

A few years ago, I would have dismissed as unhelpful the notion that I was a woman struggling to succeed in a man’s world. I thought I was doing great. I was working in Barack Obama’s White House. Hillary Clinton’s election as the first female president seemed to be on the horizon and....

Palmieri was Hillary's communications director.

But I no longer see it as self-defeating to call myself an outsider in a man’s world.

She'd have been an insider if Hillary had become President. But she's not saying she is an outsider, just that it's to her advantage — not "self-defeating" — to call herself an outsider.

Instead, I think the self-preservation of all marginalized people demands it.

All marginalized people need you — extremely privileged white woman — to call yourself an outsider. Their "self-preservation" depends on you claiming to be one of them?

Patiently waiting for things to improve has served only to sustain the very systems that keep women and people of color from obtaining real power.

Systems! You were communications director and your candidate lost. That's why you don't have power — and it would have been immense and real. Because your campaign fell short, you now posit "systems" that are holding you back in the same way they hold back women in general and "people of color." What were the "systems" that held back "people of color" when you were working in Barack Obama’s White House? Or do the "systems" come and go depending on whether Hillary Clinton blabbered about "deplorables" and didn't go to Michigan?

"It’s like with old vinyl, and how everyone wants to have turntables again. We get to a place where something out of date comes back in..."

"... there’s definitely interest in keeping this almost-extinct way of enjoying movies alive."

From "The World’s Last Blockbuster Has No Plans to Close/With the closing of a Blockbuster store in Australia, the one in Bend, Ore., will be the last to survive changes in technology and shopping that reshaped the way people watch movies at home" (NYT).

Bend is in a region that the city’s mayor, Sally Russell, describes as having “huge expanses with really small communities” that often do not have easy access to the high-speed internet necessary for content streaming. Many residents of outlying areas stop at Blockbuster during their weekly trips to town to run errands, drawn in part by the store’s seven-day rental policy, Ms. Russell said, adding that the store’s last-in-the-world status could even give it a lift....

"What’s novel about 'Friends,' or what must seem so to a certain subset of New York teenagers of whom so much is expected, is the absence among the six central characters of any quality of corrosive ambition."

"The show refuses to take professional life or creative aspirations too seriously. What does Chandler Bing actually do? I was never entirely sure. In the series’ ninth season he is an advertising intern. On 'Girls' you have writers who are trying to be Mary Karr; on 'Friends' you have actors who want to be on 'Days of Our Lives.' The dreamscape dimension of 'Friends' lies in the way schedules are freed up for fun and shenanigans and talking and rehashing, always. 'In the back of our minds we know it’s unrealistic,' Maggie Parham, a 15-year-old who lives on the Upper West Side, told me. The characters 'have nice apartments and lots of free time but there is something about that perfect lifestyle that is fun to watch,' she said, adding, 'They all work, but they seem to be able to get out of work easily.'... [A 17-year-old girl said] 'All they do is hang out in a coffee shop or a really nice apartment... It’s the ideal situation.'"

From "‘Friends’ Has New BFFs: New York Teenagers" (NYT). That's from 2015, but I'm reading it today because it's linked in a new article in the Times, "Netflix Will Keep ‘Friends’ Through Next Year in a $100 Million Agreement," which notes that "the show has found an especially receptive audience on Netflix, where it became available in 2015."

And here's a New York Magazine article rom 2016, “Is ‘Friends’ Still the Most Popular Show on TV?”

The world of Friends is ­notable, to modern eyes, for what it encompasses about being young and single and carefree in the city but also for what it doesn’t encompass: social media, smartphones, student debt, the sexual politics of Tinder, moving back in with your parents as a ­matter of course, and a national mood that vacillates between anxiety and defeatism...  Which is why you might expect that Friends, like similar cultural relics of that era, would be safely preserved in the cryogenic chamber of our collective nostalgia. And yet, astonishingly, the show is arguably as popular as it ever was — and it is popular with a cohort of young people who are only now discovering it....

I myself am just watching the show for the first time, going at a rate of about an episode a day, and just getting to the end of Season 3.

"Wealthy individuals... well-funded nonprofits and even corporations like Walmart have begun buying deserted American main streets, hoping to reinvent them with a fresh aesthetic."

"The people behind these ventures frequently install their friends and acquaintances in storefronts, while attempting to preserve (or exploit, depending whom you ask) local history.... In addition to the art gallery [in Mountain Dale, NY], there’s an antiques store specializing in old-timey Americana, a vintage shop run by a breeder of Angora bunnies, a conceptual boutique that also shows art and an apothecary run by a fashion model.... Similar changes are happening in Wardensville, W.Va..... Over the last five years, Paul Yandura and his partner Donald Hitchcock purchased a handful of buildings there.... 'It’s about the nostalgia, the country, being out in fresh air,' Mr. Yandura said. The couple, former L.G.B.T.Q. activists and Democratic operatives, turned an old feed store into a fancy coffee shop and country market called the Lost River Trading Post, keeping many of the original details, like the grain chute. They renovated a ramshackle farmhouse into a bakery and started an organic farm... Many longtime residents still prefer to patronize Wardensville restaurants that either predate Mr. Yandura and Mr. Hitchcock’s activity or that locals have since opened... Mr. Yandura said he gets it: 'We’re creating a sense of place, but a sense of place is a tourist activity.'"

From "Can You Curate a Town?/Even Walmart wants to bring back ye olde Main Street" (NYT).

An amazingly obsolete observation — made by George Carlin 22 years ago.

(Watch out: he says "fucking.")



Speaking of nostalgia, I'm nostalgic for the time when we had that to be irritated about.