To step inside Viviana Peretti’s camera obscura is to witness the very process by which memory is made. The poetic beauty of the photographs she creates feels unmediated; one after another, these raw and delicate images carry us back into our own deep past. They speak to the earliest days of our own individual experience, a pre-verbal time when knowledge was unformulated, before we had tools like art and language with which to make sense of the world.
But eight years since Reynolds first made his case, much of this freeze-dried nostalgia functions within a transformed media landscape: rock-bottom distribution costs (YouTube + wifi = infinite access), and the concurrent flattening of all media services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu) have created a unique and unforeseeable explosion of content. Call it the single most plentiful moment in consumer history. And don’t downplay the notion that the end user has, for perhaps the first time, a supreme advantage: free music flows at our fingertips, while artists and labels clamor for our attention. This past fall, Apple Records released two deluxe Beatles box sets of material from 1968 and 1971 in a furious pas de deux between the band’s interests (the White Album, hitched to both Paul McCartney’s and Ringo Starr’s neverending oldies tours) and Yoko Ono’s response (John Lennon’s Imagine — The Ultimate Collection, to celebrate its 47th birthday). A gajillion cynics rolled their eyes, as scholars and Fab-heads dug back in.
The “glass-half-full” response to Retromania’s relentless examples might include how durable an aesthetic the 1960s offered us, even as it paraded as gleeful, spontaneous, completely unpredictable, and organic to its particular historical moment. The music itself has not only moored radio for decades but also opened up the style for boomer progeny, inviting everybody to hear gospel and R&B, rockabilly, and country-and-western ancestors with new ears.
Lots of people are joining me out there: this is the state's most traveled piece of rural asphalt, according to the Arizona Department of Transportation. But the state's busiest freeway is also its most reviled, crossing what many consider swaths of unattractive scrublands and cheerless little offramp villages. "At night and with a six pack," is how one historian friend of mine—a great lover of this state—described his only preferred way to travel I-10.
Nobody writes a poem to this section of expressway, completed in the heyday of the optimism of the Kennedy-Johnson New Frontier between 1961-1971. I have lived in both Phoenix and Tucson off and on and have probably traversed this road more than 800 times, looking at the same sunbaked landmarks and thinking the same reliable thoughts: about old friends, old happenings, old mysteries of my life here. How many others mark their I-10 journeys with a mental libretto of musings on the roadside spectacle?
“For the last few years, the only reason this place still existed is because we loved it,” said Sebastian Junger, a co-owner of the Half King, longtime war journalist and author of “The Perfect Storm.” “We wanted to take one last stand against the ‘generification’ of New York City. It finally got to the point that we were actively losing money and we just couldn’t sustain that for very long. I can’t imagine opening another bar, because we’d face the same headwinds that this one is being forced closed by.”
While not the only bar in New York City that caters to the arts — KGB Bar still hosts regular readings and bars like the Arts and Crafts Beer Parlor in Greenwich Village organize art exhibits — it filled a unique niche.
They come two by two, sometimes solo, or in fours, key card in hand, to the small room on the 10th floor of Hotel 3232. Some know what to expect, but others are in for a surprise.
One couple came on their anniversary, a gift from husband to wife, and riding up in the elevator she wondered if he was taking her to a sex party. She was relieved to find that where the bed would normally be was a sushi bar — and behind it the exuberant, wisecracking chef David Bouhadana.
Over the telephone, Wells, who divides his time between Berlin and the Bavarian countryside, described how composing “The End of Loneliness” changed his outlook both as a writer and a human being. In his previous novels he said that he had tended to wield “irony and sarcasm and to look away like most people from loss and loneliness and death.” But that this time he deliberately “wanted to confront death again and again,” to explore how people find the courage to cope with it.
My father would come back in the still dead of the night and eat eggs— one after another— while
my mother watched in silence. What do you say to someone who has been gone for that long?