He was totally hanging at that bar at the South Pole before you were, Poser.
I generally find nostalgia to be the most pathetic and sad of all emotions. Certainly, everyone experiences it, but it should be treated as a moral weakness not to be given in to, like the urge to commit infidelity or to curse at someone in the service industry. But instead, there is a large portion of our society that fetishize the condition and holds it dear as some kind of affirmation of self. New York is rife with this behavior and you get used to tolerating it, but now some tragic hack named Jon Vorwald has written an article for the Times that turns public masturbation into an act so self congratulatory and lacking in intellectual honesty that it makes the entire paper stink like the towel a teen age boy keeps next to his computer.
The article is basically a bid for authenticity. And like all such cries, the lady doeth protest too much. He takes the typical and cliched tactic of picking a neighborhood (in this case, the Lower East Side) and declares its glory days past and himself a hold out of its faded status. He is the real thing and these new people are shallow and worthless. Then he decides to speak for Lou Reed. He wraps all of this up by informing us that he has lived in this neighborhood for a grand total of six years. I don’t know the guy, so I will assume that he only sounds like an idiot. Maybe I misread the article and he is trying to be ironic, like the T-shirts that he claims have lost their charm. Would that mean that he actually likes those T-shirts?
But if he is serious, and considering the crap that the Times has published of late, like the article about Hipsters gaining weight as an anti-Obama statement, it is likely that he is, it is not the worst that I have seen. These people who try to buy their bona-fides by pretending to represent some lost and better age are symptomatic of a city whose ability to constantly change and grow lies at the heart of both its ongoing relevance and its constant challenge to a person’s sense of self and place. It is natural that some of the weaker among us would wail about what was lost rather than use this city’s boundless energy to create something new. While Vorwald’s longing for less than a decade ago, otherwise known as The Bush Administration, is ridiculous it does not rise to the offensiveness that people who are wistful for the grim old days of the 70’s and 80’s do. These people talk about how “tough and gritty” this town used to be. What they are actually nostalgic for is a time when other people were becoming statistics of violent crime, when other people were being subjected to murder, rape, and muggings, when other people were falling victim to the AIDS and crack epidemics. But don’t worry, I am sure they were all happy to make the ultimate sacrifice so that you could have an authentic experience.
Strummer thinks you suck, he told me so. Really.
For my part, I intend to keep doing what I do. I intend to keep making something new in New York City. You can catch me at Burlesque shows and storytelling shows and art shows all around this town, sometimes on the Lower East Side (maybe you have seen me at The Delancy or at The Tenement Museum) I intend to keep this ever changing city changing. I intend to wake up to the amazing new thing New York manages to be everyday. And as I head to events at The Nuyorican and I have to step over the people who weep for the missing “Radio Clash” mural when they could be putting up something new, I will do so confident in the knowledge that Joe Strummer would have reacted with more creativity.
But let’s end by hearing from Lou Reed who said, “I don’t like nostalgia unless it’s mine.” I’m sure that goes for you too, Jon.
