Nostalgia for times I never knew: California in the 50’s

I remember redwood trees, bumper cars and wolverines
The ocean’s Trident submarines
Lemons, limes and tangerines
I remember this

I don’t think Michael Stipe was actually around in California in the 1950s, but the more things change, the more they stay the same: the song (from Green, 1988) is redolent of how I imagine the Golden State in the space age: T-birds on the Pacific Highway, redwood forests against the azure sea, the fair on the Santa Monica pier. Impossibly good looking teenagers, the first generation of such, doing innocent, teenagery things.

I remember traffic jams, motor boys and girls with tans
Nearly was and almost rans
I remember this

If I was there then, I’d drive a massive car. Like, really huge, with fins and a bench seat in the front. I’d drive it out of my suburb to the woods (they’d be something like the woods in North By Northwest, perhaps), or to the beach, or to my friends’ parents’ mansion.

I recall that you were there
Golden smile and shining hair
I recall it wasn’t fair, recollect it wasn’t fair
Remembering it wasn’t fair outside

I’d live in blissful ignorance of the threat of nuclear holocaust, with that slightly manic denial of something that’s so awful the mind can’t take it in. I’d go on in that post-war bubble of happiness, ignoring the scary things and the things that make folk worried, and remember only the American dream.

I remember this defense, progress fails pacific sense
All those sweet conspiracies
I remember all these things
I remember traffic jams, motor boys and girls with tans
Nearly was and almost rans
I remember this

Maybe when I grew up I’d go work at a prestigious campus university, one where the camera pans around me as if I were in A Beautiful Mind and I could where my blazer and striped tie and solve massive physics problems that will simultaneously destroy the reds under the bed, and put a man on the American moon. After that I could be recruited by NASA, or stay on as a professor, or better still, be singled out by the CIA to join The Company, and solve all the worlds ills that way.

History is made

History is made to seem unfair

I guess it’s another nostalgia like that of the British Empire or, as Lemmy once commented, the glory days of Nazi Germany. After WW2, America was on top of the world and was the first superpower – Britain had faded, Europe was becoming like Middle Earth: its time was over for the really cool one but when you were in the centre of the dream, it must have been amazing.

R.E.M. – I Remember California

Nostalgia for times I never knew: New York City, 1940s

I sit here on the sofa, in a late Victorian terraced house in Wood Green, a suburb of a very 21st century city. I’m far away from many places, and as I’m sat here listening to Tom Waits on Spotify, I’m far away from a time and a place that he conjures up better than anyone I can think of.

Certainly, I can break out Kind Of Blue and am drawn into a smoky den filled with sharp suited afficionados – and when I’m there I’m always sharpsuited too, perhaps looking like Robert Duvall in The Godfather, waistcoat and all. Or perhaps I’m more like Michael Corleone: understated, yet endlessly elegant in that late 40s way. But that’s not really the point: the point is that everybody (or so I understand it) looked like that; everybody was elegant in those days, whether serenading their long-held loves in deserted restaurants (as per Bobby De Niro in Once Upon A Time In America) or propping up the bar as in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.

Hopper’s scene was inspired by a now-demolished corner diner in Greenwich Village. It was begun amidst the shock, fear and gloom immediately after Pearl Harbour and has become the epitome of that era of Americana: post-Prohibition, post-depression; but pre-McCarthy, pre-Kennedy, pre-rock’n’roll. A city in the thrall of jazz, soaked with refill coffees and fed with pie; drowned with whisky, topped off with a smart trilby. The diner with its gleaming chrome counter and soda-stream and white-coated attendant, or the home with untouched front room and aproned wife, or the bar with golden liquids in tumblers with ice. All slightly melancholy but with that almost English reserve and stature.

This is the world in which Tom Waits slouches at the counter hoping that he doesn’t fall in love with the dame the other end, or depending on his mood, exchanging bittersweet witticisms with Bette Midler. He’d be eating eggs and sausage, with a side of toast; and even late in the night when his words were sloppy and his manner slurred, it wasn’t him drinking: it was the piano.

Of course, I know, these bizarre nostalgias are never the whole picture: after all, this is the New York City of Last Exit To Brooklyn, and I know I’d feel out of place amongst Hubert Selby Jr’s teamsters, trannies and junkies. It’s the US surrounded by a world either at war or dealing with its aftermath, yet strangely isolated from the rest of the planet. Not fitting in, though; I can deal with that, and I can deal with sitting at a diner not really knowing what to do but sit (this is the days before internet messageboards, after all). So I’ll keep my nostalgia, thanks, I’ll run with it – elegantly of course, lest my hat and coat come out of place.

Nostalgia for times I never knew: Montmartre

Enamorados en Paris, by Inti

I fully realise that I’d be a long way from fitting in in late nineteenth century Montmartre. That doesn’t stop me hankering slightly after the romance and decadance of the capital of bohemia, even though I know I’m far to straight-laced to indulge. Even today, visiting the area is full of fascination: I know of no other place quite like it, with it’s winding, village-like streets of cobbles, gables, vineyards et moulins. It’s a faded splendour, of course, but like the rough edges of other places I’ve loved (Istria, Prague, Nice), it’s these things which make it lovely, even today. I know of nowhere quite like Montmartre for its picture-perfect recollections though: no part of London, certainly. retains its ‘period characteristics’ like the martyrs’ mount.

Of course, I’m a child of my time, and in true postmodern fashion, am influenced and can relate to anything and everything that culture throws at me. Thus Moulin Rouge‘s gaudy Luhrmann-ised vision of the era cannot be dissociated from the romance of its location; Claude Lelouch’s panic-inducing C’était un rendez-vous ends up at Sacre-Coeur, wending his way at high velocity through la butte‘s narrow streets; Charles Aznavour’s La Bohême laments the fade of the sleazy glamour in particularly gallic fashion; even a glance at Steinlein’s famous Le Chat Noir poster brings the courtesans and roisterous artistes to mind.

I’ve no doubt I wouldn’t really fit in amongst Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Picasso et al, but that doesn’t stop me wanting to try. Especially seeing as I’ve just started re-teaching myself some français, again, I can’t wait to visit again: I love Paris as a whole, though I know only a little of it; but free from the grandiose sweeps of Hausmann’s grands boulevards or the ravages of Richard Rogers, Montmartre’s poky hills remain my favourite bit of the City of Lights.

Nostalgia for times I never knew: Edwardian London

Lordship Lane

Considering yesterday how I’m for some reason immersing myself in sixteenth/seventeenth century London leads me to reflect how nostalgic I can get for places and times I’ve never been to or been in. I never think wistfully back to my days as a dungaree-clad toddler in the 1980s Hampshire countryside,  and I certainly don’t look fondly on the Britpop years: but then why would I? I was there, I can remember it with all its ups and downs.

No, I tend to go down the route of being dewy-eyed for period of time I’ve never known, well out beyond the realms of possibility. Most recently I’ve been reading up on my local history, and you know when looked good? The late Victorian, Edwardian years.

My house was built c.1905 – its first occupants, as far as we can tell, were the Page family, he an electric tram conductor born in Clerkenwell. It must have been great: a smart uniform, most likely with shiny buttons and a peaked cap; a stroll to walk in the Wood Green garage past the overflowing storefronts of Lordship Lane and Jolly Butchers Hill.

If I was Henry Page I could don my uniform before leaving my house then set off, cap under arm, trilby hat (or similar) on the head. I could doff it to the local ladies, rub the heads of the passing young scamps playing with their hoops and balls. On Lordship Lane, I’d pass shops with proud shopkeepers, and I’d nod to the newsagent, the butcher, the cobbler et al, beaming at me from behind big, well-stocked windows, wearing aprons and with shop boys running errands.

I’d walk to work feeling on top of the world because I am: not only have I a wonderful family but I’m British, and in 1905 there’s nothing better to be than a proud Brit. Close to its grandest, the British Empire spanned continents and ruled over millions of lives with, as I understand it, magnaminity and teaching British virtue.

Of course, I’d walk jauntily, unaware (or perhaps unthinking) of the stench of poverty close at hand (William Booth published In Darkest England & The Way Out in 1890, together with Charles Booth’s extensive surveys of the poverty and character of late Victorian London, it pulled a whole, vast, mostly-ignored subsection of city life into sharp focus for those in the more prosperous suburbs). I’d know nothing of the concentration camps of the Boer war or the suppression of entire races by the occupying British forces, but what would I care? On my tram, conveying the proud residents of London to their places of work, I’d be happy as larry, especially if I got to wear a hat.