Sweet Nostalgia

I yearn for a simpler time.  Get off my lawn!

About a month ago now my friend Juan wrote a post about nostalgia.  I've been wanting to respond to his post for a while now, but it was a topic I wanted to sit and mull over before I wrote about it.  You see, out of seemingly nowhere nostalgia has become the dominant emotion of the past year of my life.  Shit that I haven't thought about in years, like the Tony Hawk games or the Pokemon anime circa the early 2000's, has suddenly become of utmost importance to me.  Over the summer I'd indulge my nostalgic tendencies, spending long nights revisiting everything from my youth that was even remotely worth a second look.  The Internet makes it easy to find artifacts from the past.  I'm not going to lie, there were some empty summer nights that I wasted away gorging my senses on random Youtube  videos that had no value outside the sentimental.  Youtube totally has the nostalgia market covered.  Clips of old TV shows, movie trailers, video game footage, retro commercials, and seemingly every pop song ever recorded are all online and easily retrievable.  Making all that nostalgic crap available to Internet-surfing nerds is a cool and admirable thing, but isn't also a tad irresponsible?  Like a kid in a candy store, it can sometimes be hard for me to peel myself away from the Internet and avoid OD'ing on candy-coated retro pop goodness.  Too much of a good thing?  Sometimes.

Screenshot of Mr. Mosquito, a favored video game from my youth

As long as such nostalgia binges don't overtake my existence and completely stall my intellectual growth though, I'm fine with indulging once in a while.  Most definitions of the world nostalgia involve the word "longing".  And it's true that sometimes that desire to revisit that past can be strong, all-consuming and borderline painful.  I will never be able to revisit the past or entirely satiate that hunger to relive moments of my life.  What I'm trying to say is this: there can be a sharp bitterness to nostalgia that's hard to ignore.  But on the flip side of that I also find that there's a sweetness to the emotion.  Sure I'll never be able to relive my life, but sometimes it's precisely the unattainability of the past that makes it so desirable.  Also, because I can't go back and relive past moments in the flesh, I can continually tell myself tales about how great the past was without coming up against any hard evidence to the contrary.  But perhaps the sweetest part about feeling nostalgia is that it indicates that you've built a past worth feeling nostalgic about.  As Juan put it in his article, "I think the thing about nostalgia which I like so much is that demonstrates to me that I had so much fun at many times in my older years."  Amen, Mr. Lobo.

And like Juan, I too find that I sometimes feel a nostalgic longing for things I never personally experienced in my lifetime.  Sometimes I feel as though I've "borrowed" the nostalgia other people feel for, say, 1980's pop music or 1950's style a la American Graffiti.  Sure I didn't grow up in these decades, but after a lifetime of consuming other people's memories via film, music, and fashion, some of my elders' nostalgic feelings naturally rubbed off on me.  Now, obviously I'm not nostalgic for the real 1980's or the real 1950's, but rather the decades as they've been represented to me by movies and other forms of pop culture.  This is an small but important distinction to make.  Being that I didn't live through these times, I can't really say what my true feelings would have been on them, but that doesn't mean that I don't have strong feelings for some of these decades nonetheless.  Some particular exports from certain decades (ex-1950's monster movies, 1970's zombie movies, 1980's video games, etc.)  hold a nostalgic appeal to me, even if I didn't experience them the first time around.  Now let me be clear, the appeal of most of these cultural artifacts doesn't lie solely in their nostalgic qualities, but I'd be lying if I said that the retro factor wasn't a substantial part of their draw.

Juan, in his post, stated that "pop culture is what gives these memories significance or paints the palette of their context to me."  I couldn't agree with this sentiment more.  Seemingly everything I feel about nostalgia seems to come from pop culture in one way or another.  Whether we're talking about movies or music giving me a context for bygone eras (see the previous paragraph) or me having nostalgia for moments in my own life relating to the media I consumed in the past, pop culture seems to be the metaphorical sun that my nostalgia revolves around. 

In case you couldn't already tell, a lot of what I endeavor to write about on this blog stems from my feelings about nostalgia and pop culture.  I didn't necessarily set out to write this blog with that goal in mind, but looking back on the posts I wrote over the past few months a pattern of nostalgia is fairly apparent.  Don't get me wrong Zombie Baby's not a nostalgia blog, I just like to indulge in the emotion fairly often.

Book Review: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Being a single lady sans child I am not normally the type to pick up a book about parenting.  That being the case I should probably explain how I came to read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother to give you a bit of context.  Well, I first became aware of the title via a phone conversation with my good friend El Lobo.  He recounted to me the tales of a crazed Asian mom who bullied her two young daughters into classical music mastery.  The extremity of these parenting tales peaked my interest and I figured I had to read the entire book to (a) get the full story and (b) have a good laugh at the expense of two kids' wrecked childhoods.  So basically I was motivated by morbid curiosity and the faint promise of some sadistic humor.

With these questionable motives in mind I picked up Tiger Mother as soon as a copy became available at my local library.  I began reading with a single minded intensity, totally eager to scan past shocking descriptions of heinous verbal abuse dealt out by a psycho stage mom.  And you know what?  I didn't get that.  Amy Chua (the author and self-identified "Tiger Mom") has been portrayed by the press as a cruel, unfeeling enemy of all children.  But I didn't get that impression from the book.  On the contrary Chua comes across as a woman concerned with providing her two young dauthers with a strong foundation for adulthood, a healthy dose of self-esteem, and a passion for the arts.  Chua attempts to accomplish these tasks the best she can, but sometimes she screws up majorly.  In other words, she's basically an average parent.  Everybody is doing what they think is right, but mistakes are inevitable.  What particularly endeared me to the author is that she acknowledges where, when, and why she went wrong.

As I read the book I got the impression that the text was written primarily for Chua's closest family and friends.  Yes, the text is perfectly fit for public consumption, but the book focuses almost solely with Chua's personal experience.  The book describes Amy Chua's experiences of raising her kids in the "traditional Chinese immigrant style" (aka, strict, no-nonsense, academically-focused parenting).  With that subject as the premise, Chua has the opportunity to research and explore the differences between traditional Chinese and western style parenting in a broader sociological sense.  But generally she skips over any broader explorations of parenting styles in favor of telling a smaller, more personal story about her own life experiences.  Which is fine.  Chua wrote a breezy, light memoir about her life.  This kind of book totally has its place.  I guess I'm just a little disappointed because when I read through the book I couldn't help thinking that it could be so much more.  Like the Tiger Mother examining a shoddily produced b-day card, when I look at this book I can't help but see so much missed potential.

Don't get me wrong, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is a decent, reasonably entertaining read.  And you can be sure that when Chua does lapse into moments of crazed mothering it is pretty hilarious (see the brief moment when she threatens to burn her daughter's stuffed animals as a punishment for a lapse in musical tenacity...comic gold).  Also it's a pretty slim, quick read so picking up Tiger Mother is not a huge time investment for anybody.  That said, I generally believe that the effort you get out of something is often comparable to the effort you have to put in (a sentiment that the Tiger Mom herself would probably agree with).  So with that in mind, Tiger Mother is an easy read, but it's not a particularly enlightening one.

In conclusion:
Three outta five stars.  A mixed bag.