{"id":1264,"date":"2011-07-11T10:49:52","date_gmt":"2011-07-11T14:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=1264"},"modified":"2012-07-15T19:57:06","modified_gmt":"2012-07-15T23:57:06","slug":"double-take-on-the-times-by-chelsea-hicks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/double-take-on-the-times-by-chelsea-hicks\/","title":{"rendered":"Double Take on the Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If you’ve ever used the word “modern” in conversation and found that your interlocutor isn’t exactly sure of your meaning, you shouldn’t feel bad. The infamous word has been reinvented over and over, from\u00a0Back to the Future<\/em> movies to the Renaissance. Yes, the Renaissance. As your dictionary has it, definition 1: \u201ccharacteristic of a present and recent time,\u201d AND the unlikely definition 3: \u201cof or pertaining to the historical period following the Middle Ages.\u201d Really, the Middle Ages? How modern.<\/p>\n

The guilty word itself (\u201cmoderne!\u201d) has its roots in Middle French <\/em>and is best translated as \u201clately.\u201d But the problem with pinning down lately is that she keeps changing\u2014every, single year.<\/p>\n

The oft-quoted academic\u2019s phrase, \u201cWhat do you mean by modern<\/em>?\u201d gains new light when we stop to ponder all these different meanings of \u201cmodern.\u201d Contemporary is the less ambiguous word choice and possibly preferable: it implies that we\u2019re talking current events and current people whereas modern can refer to anything from the 10s to the 1950s depending on the subject at hand (or, even the Renaissance, apparently).<\/p>\n

Yet for all the ambiguousness of modernity, it\u2019s apparently in vogue: I read in my local newspaper that \u201cmodern\u201d has never been more in fashion than right here, right now. Looking at modern\u2019s recent history (in the grand scheme of things), it seems possible that its popularity is peaking now: there were the somewhat space-like designs of 1950s Cadillacs, then the geometric prints and angled bobs and pixie cuts of the 60s (probably not Eve\u2019s hair back in the Garden of Eden). The 70s, however, had a decidedly nostalgic feel with the button up blouses and traditional, long hair (though how could the 70s not be a bit anti-modern when they were a response to the mood of the two previous decades?[1]<\/a>). The 80s returns to the modernity pattern with more geometric prints, and the additions of neon and \u201cfuture\u201d-themed movies. The 90s receive the Internet and the 00s get Lady Gaga with her decidedly space-age ensembles\u2014and then we are catapulted into the present, where with every sort of electronic apparatus you can imagine, we are somehow even more modern than ever.<\/p>\n

Yet there\u2019s a strange hitch to it all. Something that makes you look twice before you call modern society \u201cmodern\u201d: we\u2019re also a little obsessed with the past.<\/p>\n

Another list is in order, starting with fashion: high-waisted everything, macram\u00e9, lace, feminine prints in; farming\u2014WWOOF and local food taking the country by storm; Vogue Knitting<\/em>, old cars and home-gardens; the widespread popularity of folk music and Americana. We rather make the 1850s potato farmer look like a modern NYC artist.<\/p>\n

Yet the vogue farmer selling peaches, cherries and aragula and playing his banjo in the evenings seems to again fade and obscure when one hears the experts say that farming is no longer financially viable, sustainable, profitable, break-even-able, even. Modern rears her ugly head and the fight ensues between the sentimental, precious notions of local-everything and the profitability trump card of this economy-driven world. The battle yields odd creations such as Whole Foods, which prompts the question: but I thought “organic,” and “local” foods weren’t profitable\u2026?<\/p>\n

We certainly don’t have all the clear-cut simplicity of Modern’s fetishized old-fashioned farming world.<\/p>\n

And in the end there\u2019s no clear winner between Modern and Nostalgia. It seems the only sure thing is that we are in the ever-confusing, and oft unsatisfying present. By way of example, see Woody Allen\u2019s \u201cMidnight in Paris,\u201d where to Owen Wilson, modern-day Paris is a but beauty\u2019s shadow compared to the expat-age of the 20s. Then, suddenly his flapper\/fashion-designer friend Marion Cotillard reveals that the 1920s are quite boring, and the best time to live was “La Belle Epoque.”<\/p>\n

For Marion and Owen and all the rest of us, nostalgia is a short road to nowhere. Despite the film\u2019s commentary on nostalgia\u2019s circularity, Woody Allen\u2019s name alone incites nostalgia. His films aren\u2019t pass\u00e9, certainly are not modern. They\u2019re nostalgic. His attention to the past proves his old-fashioned appeal, and his viewers perpetuate the regime of remembering by buying tickets and basking further in the nostalgia trend.<\/p>\n

The box office numbers (along with our fashion and everything else) show us that we feel modern times to be boring and hope nostalgia will make us happy. That, maybe, if we just try hard enough to make our lives a blast from the past with our movies, clothing and food, we\u2019ll start to feel the simple joy we associate with yesteryear.<\/p>\n

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So were we ever truly into \u201cmodern\u201d? Woody Allen and hipsters everywhere suggest that we always thought the grass was greener on the other side of yesterday, and the rest of the subculture agrees. Amongst said subculture, (or perhaps, less sub and more supra) there are a confusing plethora of types.\u00a0My roommate, as we defined her, \u201can intellectual hippy with doses of irony and an inclusive attitude to less \u2018cool\u2019 persons (\u201cwhatever that means,\u201d as my current roommate says)\u201d is an example of how infinitely different the \u201cdifferent\u201d can be.<\/p>\n

The differentness of the \u201cdifferent,\u201d however, might be the key to a fierce, hidden Modern lurking in Nostalgia\u2019s clothing. That fact that America\u2019s subculture types are so diverse (sending neat categories of \u201chipster and indie\u201d into scategories) implies they are not so old-fashioned. The fact of so much diversity (even among subcultures) living in close proximity suggests a more modern and accepting world\u2014maybe even a truly Modern one.<\/p>\n

But this distinction makes the subculture situation rather paradoxical. While the \u201cdifferents\u201d are so diverse they are also scathingly anti-\u201cmodern.\u201d In other words, they outwardly (on the surface at least) reject the modern notions of materialism, the traditional nine to five career path (evoking the farmers again) and being too plugged in (note lower or absent facebook use).\u201d This definitely sounds like another point for Nostalgia.<\/p>\n

It’s just not clear if American subculture is modern or not. The inconsistency warrants a look at the mainstream youth population, to see how modern fares amongst the culture at large. With the remaining frats, preps and popular kids\u2019, modernity is fresh and fast in terms of materialism. Shiny cars, designer jeans and expensive gadgets are just as in as ever in certain crowds. (Back on the flip side: dare I mention the hipster crowd may appear to be in rags, but often has mom and dad helping to fill out that Brooklyn apartment and not-actually-from-Goodwill wardrobe). But these popular kids seem a bit outdated. For instance,\u00a0even Gossip Girl (as mainstream as it gets) features offbeat clothing and fairly obscure music in every episode, as well as their own resident “hipster” of the Upper West Side, the well-read NYU writer, Dan Humphreys. All the discrepancies and overlaps between shiny\/new and meaningful\/old make us wonder: are we living in an increasingly old-fashioned world or just a nostalgic fa\u00e7ade built in tribute to America’s money god? It’s just hard to tell whether Dan Humphreys really does believe in few possessions and that romanticized struggling artist\u2019s life\u2014or if he’s just pretending to in his Marc Jacobs.<\/p>\n

The one measly argument for explicit Modernity among us remains: we don\u2019t seem to have as much homogeneity as any other time. Or in other words, we don\u2019t have much in common, yet we\u2019ve no Civil Wars\u2014that\u2019s got to be modern, right? The widespread information availability that smart phones and Wifi provide may make us feel that we have a shred of common ground, because it allows us to find other similar subcultures to our own, but in reality, just walking in a public place in a moderately sized town will break down that fourth wall of the internet that prevents us from witnessing the community at large in all it\u2019s hodge-podge collage of diversity.<\/p>\n

What we really are: modern (contemporary) people with nostalgic tendencies (boredom) will probably keep turning our heads. Just like all those other moderns of the Roaring Twenties, La Belle Epoque, The Renaissaince, it goes on<\/p>\n

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  If you’ve ever used the word “modern” in conversation and found that your interlocutor isn’t exactly sure of your meaning, you shouldn’t feel bad. The infamous word has been reinvented over and over, from\u00a0Back to the Future movies to the Renaissance. Yes, the Renaissance. As your dictionary has it, definition 1: \u201ccharacteristic of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1265,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,214],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1264"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3012,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions\/3012"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}