Entry 19:

Good morning.

Wesley, if the '80s are hip again in 2001, they definitely didn't become stale overnight. The New York Times piece you mentioned late yesterday presents a pretty comprehensive overview of the artifacts and people and trends that have resurfaced, but I disagree that we have a "romance with the 80's" as Michiko Kakutani  writes. Instead, I think this resurgence, if there really is one, is just indicative of the cyclical nature of everything from culture to politics. Is that born out of our collective tendency to forget the lessons of the past (George Bush, ahem)? Or is it because we're lazy and it's easier to massage and rework things of the past than to create new things of today? I'm not sure. Maybe we're really progressing just fine, but a few lingering remnants of years past cling and make us think we're revisiting the past.

Then again, I often realize that despite apparent progress, we haven't moved that quickly over the last few decades. My best friend currently lives in a rural Southern town where (like many other places, I'm sure) de facto segregation still exists.

Even reality TV isn't new; this wave essentially began in 1973, four years before I was born, with PBS' An American Family. That's a not-so-subtle way for me to bring up Survivor, which we can't go four days without mentioning. There's one more week to go, and although I'm not exactly sure why, I can't quite wrap myself around this season as much as I did the first one. I'm watching, of course, but that spark just isn't there. Maybe it's my awareness of Mark Burnett's manipulative editing style, or maybe it's the accuracy of the spoilers that I try to not look at but generally do, or maybe it's because I don't feel as connected to this cast. I was much more captivated by Memento.

I was desperately searching for some good news to discuss this morning, but instead I found this: "'Hard-to-peg' generation leaves marketers struggling," Michigan State University's paper reported yesterday. It's nothing new, of course, but the piece illustrates in a disturbing way just how truly pervasive and deep marketing is in our culture, especially since it starts off with a 9-year-old talking about not knowing quite how to define her generation. Why is there a struggle to market to and capitalize upon something that hasn't congealed yet? It's like the desire to use political polls as news, reporting on who's ahead before anyone has even entered a voting boothit doesn't accomplish anything except to give a false sense of completion for a very incomplete situation.

Off to breathe in the spring air and bus fumes.

Andy