Posts Tagged “History”

Stuck still | John Elledge
http://www.ak13.com/article.php?id=278
“Instead, it has all been endless nostalgia, cultural flashbacks since. Retro fads, I love 1960s, I love 1970s, I love 1980s, music designed by committee rather than those with something to say, reality TV that involves no creativity almost by definition, britpop, boybands, girlbands, remixes, remakes, New Labour, New Democrats, nu-metal ? none of which had much new about them ? and a regression to 1950s paranoia and values in the US. No new tunes, just variations on a theme. This is not the ranting of a middle-aged guy complaining that the great days are behind us […] I was born in 1980. I have spent ten years waiting for my generation’s cultural zeitgeist ? not, admittedly, doing much in the way of creating it myself ? but found nothing but commercialised music and a hundred splintered interest groups with nothing to bind them but the use of the Internet. It says something that one of what passed for the fads of 2004 was for ‘eclectic’ DJs ? they created nothing new, they merely rearranged the old in a more interesting way. “

We Hate the 80’s | Jeff Leeds
http://tinyurl.com/6zr55
“‘The 80’s nostalgia was starting to roll in, and I was like, ‘Wait a minute! Did you people actually listen to the same decade I did? You had eight years of Reagan. There was cocaine everywhere. There were yuppies. We were oppressed by this whole notion of baby boomers trying to cash out.’ At past parties, attended by people wearing parachute pants and Members Only jackets, local bands performed their most hated 80’s memories on Casio keyboards, which they promptly demolished at the end of their set. ‘One year,’ he recalled, ‘a performer called Evil Pappy Twin played Van Halen covers on a classical Renaissance lute.’ In any case, the clock is running out. Whether you love it or hate it, the second coming of the 80’s has already lasted almost as long as the original decade – unheard of in the ever-quickening cycles of cultural nostalgia. Mr. Hirschorn of VH1 admits that ‘the early 80’s are sort of getting long in the tooth.’ Besides which, the 90’s – remember them? – are ready for their retouched close-up. “

Dead Disco | Metric
http://www.lyricsdomain.com/13/metric/dead_disco.html
“Dead disco / Dead funk / Dead rock and roll / Remodel / Everything has been done / La la la la la la la la la la ”

Quake Angel | Duncan Larcombe
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/37579.htm
“‘I think it’s phenomenal that Tilly’s parents and the others on the beach are alive because she studied hard at school,’ said Craig Smith, the American manager of the JW Marriott Hotel where Tilly’s family was staying.”

Name that Decade | Timothy Noah
http://slate.msn.com/id/2111435/
“By not coming up with a name, society has created a serious rhetorical problem that spills over into the social sciences. […] Because there is no name for the present decade, people seeking to describe the spirit of the times often resort to substituting the name of the entire century (or, in extreme cases, the entire millenium). This is pompous and stupid. […] Imagine somebody attempting to define the 20th century in January 1905. He would know nothing about the rise of Soviet communism and German fascism, and therefore nothing about the butchery of Stalin and Hitler. He’d know nothing about mass production of the automobile. He would never have heard of Albert Einstein or his theory of relativity. He might resist having his home wired for electricity, out of the common fear that it was more dangerous than gaslight. He would likely consider the United States to be a lesser world power than Great Britain and France. He’d have no idea that the airplane would soon become an instrument of war and, eventually, a vehicle commonly used for ocean crossings. He would never have listened to a radio, or watched television, or gone to a movie theater and heard the actors speak. If he visited Philadelphia, he’d be dazzled by its wealth and sophistication. He would, in short, have none of the information he needed to describe accurately the coming century.”

Miraculous visions | The Economist
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3518580
“Then, in 1905, a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein found the way forward. In five remarkable papers, he showed that atoms are real (it was still controversial at the time), presented his special theory of relativity, and put quantum theory on its feet. It was a different achievement from Newton’s year, but Einstein’s annus mirabilis was no less remarkable. He did not, like Newton, have to invent entirely new forms of mathematics. However, he had to revise notions of space and time fundamentally. And unlike Newton, who did not publish his results for nearly 20 years, so obsessed was he with secrecy and working out the details, Einstein released his papers one after another, as a fusillade of ideas.”