No seriously, sometimes I pretend it's Athena. It could happen.

Do you think nostalgia is a handy tool or a bane on artistic expression or option C because people usually list three things?

First of all, fair warning. I recently discovered I am allergic to all over the counter pain medications, and I got a killer headache today, so I self medicated with a large amount of Irish coffee. This did not make my headache go away, but it did form the magical trifecta which is 1.drunk 2.in pain 3.overly caffeinated. Also I may or may not be in the throes of a new relationship (answer: I am), so add nostalgia into the mix and I think we're gonna get a Crazy Cake. Crazy Brownies at the very least. Mmmm, brownies...

My first thought when I read this question was "isn't all artistic expression a form of memory, and therefore wouldn't nostalgia be a potent ingredient in that?" But I understand where you're coming from. You're posing that perhaps the predisposition we have to gild the past taints our ability to appreciate the present? And by gild, I actually mean positively and negatively, even though I know gild is supposed to be a good word right? Gold, precious, pretty ect. Maybe the right word is simplify. We simplify our past into easily defined images. Hippies. WWII. Hair Bands. Pioneers. Abraham Lincoln. Mad Men.

I think the easiest example of this is musical. Musicians and listeners can easily fall into the trap of being in love with a past style and giving it precedence over anything modern. I think some of us actively fight aging by trying to be the opposite, to be as with it as possible. But the other army, the army of vinyl classic, definitely exists.

Whatever. My answer is that every form of artistic expression draws from your memory, and nostalgia is your relationship with the past. It can be a bad relationship, or the one that got away, but until you make peace with it, you can't utilize it properly. If you ignore it, you will make the same mistakes. If you spend too much time thinking about it, you will freeze yourself in time.

I recently saw two movies that relate. The first one was Book of Eli, that apocalyptic Denzel vehicle that was, hello, secretly about God. I say secretly, because there was no clue in the trailer that this was a Christians Are Awesome movie. Otherwise, I probably would have waited until it was on DVD. So this is a End of the World movie, which means it was basically all about nostalgia. Look how great everything was before we fucked it up, and we didn't even realize it, and now we have to rebuild it by treasuring everything from our past. Here is an example of nostalgia (because what is religion except nostalgia for the time when we knew God?) gone wrong. The message of the movie was that the Bible was integral to rebuilding civilization and common decency. What the movie was advocating was a return to the appreciation of the old things, and their necessity. But I think people had the right idea to burn the book that caused the Wars, and I kind of liked the ending for the obscurity it implied. But I won't tell you more. Cause I think that would be a legitimate spoiler. As if I haven't already. Point it, too much nostalgia blinds you to the opportunities of the present.

Second was Inglorious Basterds. This was an example of nostalgia being taken lightly and fucked with as wished. Various dopes who actually believed the storyline was real aside, this movie was as playful an act of fiction as you could make it. And that's the role I think nostalgia should play for artists. It should be an inspiration, but not a dictation.

I'm sorry. It's hard to be clear when you have monster trucks fighting inside your skull. It might be Athena struggling against my bone, but usually headaches are real creative killers.

What is the Wasteland?

The Wasteland is the epitome of nostalgia, but also abandonment of all structural and societal decency.

Ask me anything