I just bought a Vision Gonz with Indie trucks at Goodwill for 10 dollars. It’s in great shape. Of course, if I need to go to the store for groceries I’ll still use my bike. I don’t think my ‘old school’ deck and outdated tricks are better then the newer puny decks with tiny wheels. In fact, I think it’s pretty smart to take the bus to the skate park—you have more energy to skate when you get there.

I think true maturation in these matters involves focusing less on ‘things’ and more on the social and cultural interactions with those things. For instance, I bet kids at a Justice show in 2008 are having a similar experience to kids at a Kiss show in 1978. In fact, the two experiences may be more similar then we could ever dream.

It’s fascinated me that Genesis P-Orridge, who has made some of the most extreme anti-nostalgia statements imaginable (can’t find them now, but I’m sure people who know him/her know what I mean), has spent much of his career working over the past – especially his fixation with Brian Jones, who he met as a teenager. His description of this encounter is a kind of archetypal instance of that “glow” that we perceive in the culture we’re excited about when we’re young.

But the whole late-’80s “Godstar” project, which he described as an attempt to exorcize the hidden cultural grief for this icon, to bring Jones’ presence to light in order to move culture forward, is an interesting example of productive nostalgia. The sadness is there, but it’s embraced in a spirit of exuberance rather than clinging & wallowing. You have to take it on whole-heartedly without attachment – not easy! Anyway, in P-Orridge’s cosmos, honouring Jones’ lost spirit like this helped him (& collaborators) move forward with their contribution to “the next Big Thing”, which was acid house and rave.

Imaginal psychology writers like James Hillman and Robert Romanyshyn are a great source of perspectives about nostalgia, grief and the past that dodge both denial and wallowing…

Sorry, I saw Napoleon Dynamite but I think I’ve buried the memory! ;-)

But yeah, maybe nostalgia per se isn’t the enemy – nor is futurism, or whatever we want to call the opposite. Is it the clinging that gets us lost in either? We can get lost in the present, too: a zero-attention, amnesiac, visionless wallowing in the here and now…

The day I’m looking back, lamenting the now, is the day I want to cease.

I’m not sure older people looking back is so poisonous. Maybe that’s part of the deal. When 12 year olds aren’t convinced that what’s happening now is the best thing ever, when they are looking back with envy to their parents’ or grandparents’ culture, then maybe we’re in trouble (and there are plenty of those kinds of signs).

Nostalgia is changing because the rate and nature of change is changing. But I often question the unquestioning counter-cultural allegiance to novelty, the (apparent, at least) loathing for looking backwards. Douglas Rushkoff once said luddite tendencies were useful in that they acted as a brake on runaway technological development. Some luddite faction might say they want a total abolition of technology, or a certain form of technology, but they never achieve it. But in the process, even though they’ve not stopped “progress”, they’ve given it pause, maybe stopped it from careening off in inhuman directions. Neither the “pro” nor the “anti” factions achieve their goals in a pristine form; but if the society is a healthy whole, the outcome is generally better for all.

It’s all to do with looking in a Howard Bloom fashion at the sum ecology of the social organism. Maybe the nostalgia of older people acts as a brake, a way of helping society maintain ties to the past even in the face of catastrophic change.

Of course attachment to the past can harden in unhealthy ways; but there’s unhealthy potential in the other direction too. I guess you’re acknowledging some place for nostalgia in saying it’s “not inherently bad” except “when it comes from a sad place”. But again, isn’t that sadness part of the deal? The “algia” bit means pain or sickness, as in neuralgia or whatever… Nostalgia without the sadness is a bit like the 12 year-old’s excitement about current culture without the excitement!