Can you hear them chickens?
Dan Clowes, In the Future (1990)
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. Nope: it's much better now.
If you ask a physicist "What time is it?" he will have to admit it somewhat depends on where you start, and how fast you're travelling.
To see what I mean, take a look at this popular but not-quite-right Flickr set of classic albums reworked as slightly foxed Pelican books. While there are some cute choices (hmm.. good to see that Wedding Present sleeve again... and the FUSE one... see how this nostalgia thing works?) you'd have to say in all honesty that this well-received and only slightly forced design project is just another indicator that we're now living in The Golden Age of Let's Pretend.
You realise further that what we've gained by living in the future is the delicious ability to visit and recreate the past.
Having zippy, modern computers is a double joy for pasticheurs: firstly, we get to make and consume ever-more accurate parodies, see the papergrain, inkspots and historically accidental marks thereon, and rather like hearing the chickens clucking in the background in archival blues recordings, staged mistakes are the unmistakable sign... of truthiness.
Secondly, connecting all those computers into one big, friendly, loving internet has made it a lot easier for eager retrovores (me) to get hold of accurate, detailed, varied and previously inaccessible or obscure (do you remember inaccessible or obscure?) reference materials.
But: formal pleasures aside, is nobody else getting just a bit bored of inch-perfect visual or sonic parodies? Where, in short, is the why?
Adland, with proper pop instincts, is at the forefront of modern yesterdayism, viz, say the Stella Riviera posters which, while offering mild nerd joy to the likes of me, have the vaguely self-destructive, apostate effect of reminding the viewer that pre-Bernbach advertising, free from the clanky, mechanical and not-always-useful theology of 'Big Ideas' can be much more delightful, engaging and desirable (let's just sit the brand next to something beautiful) than the laborious, overmessaged, true-but-dull kind we have now.
Taking it up another notch into properly perfected visual pasts, designer Julian House (whose work is pointlessly reworked here) has long been mining the previously unlovable, old physics and economic textbook covers to great effect, a move entirely in sympathy with client act Stereolab and their diligent record-collector, curatorial schtick.
House's Ghost Box label embraces Pelicanism as an element of mildly eerie jumble-sale retroscopy, doing what visually what associated acts like Belbury Poly do sonically. So to see this work returned to its own source, as Little Pixel does, is doubly redundant. We're now in a technical arms race explicitly dedicated to making it harder than ever to determine origin or intent just by surface moves, to create a seamless everywhen to make old post-modernists weep.
There's an important line, I suppose, between The Good Guys: genuine evangelists, enthusiasts, curators, uncovererers and renewers, and the Other Ones: mannerists with a copy of Photoshop or the sonic equivalents thereof, cultural middle-managers, vultures and pilfererists of all kinds. Those who like their nostalgia thick, or those who prefer it thin.
Either way, who knew the future would be quite so smitten by the past?
