![]() ![]() Assuming the translation doesn’t play me false, it wasn’t all “arak-drinking” and “card-playing” back then this “fancy living, excess of splurging, exploded vanity” was smothering the city she loved. Yasmine Hamdan more explicitly eschews such idealising sentimentality in her gorgeous hymn to a bygone Beirut. ![]() Treasured keepsakes call to our storyteller’s mind a lover with eyes of “desert sands”, but then he catches himself: “That’s not her! That’s just the light …” So nostalgia involves invention, a smoothing-off of history’s rough edges, as the Triffids confess. But he, too, acknowledges an idealisation in his spinning of memory strands into gilded nostalgia: “The future’s made of coal, the past is made of gold.” In reality, that mid-70s past – of miners’ industrial action and three-day weeks – was very much one of coal. It is the music of his childhood that transports the Auteurs’ Rubettes-referencing Luke Haines back. In Disney Girls (1957) they rhapsodise about escaping reality. He informs us that: “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” The Beach Boyssummon up “summer days on old Cape Cod” but rhapsodise, “Oh reality, it’s not for me.” Madeleine-munching Marcel Proust would doubtless empathise. For Laura Cantrell, it’s sound – of bees “humming by flowered vine” – while Organized Konfusion are sent back in time by the taste of momma’s home-cooking. But does nostalgia always require suffering? Stevie’s pretty upbeat, and Iron and Wine & Calexico sound more affectionate than angst-ridden as they recall the “autumn-time lullaby” that “sang our newborn love to sleep” in 16 Maybe Less.īut if nostalgia doesn’t stem from narrative memory, then what? The senses seem to play a part. So nostalgia, then, is feeling more than memory. Stevie Wonder certainly wishes – fruitlessly of course – that his childhood days “could come back once more”. Maybe the novelist Milan Kundera is right to describe nostalgia as “the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return”. ![]()
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