Klatrymadon

"... simply comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not nostalgic in any culpable way. It is the tendency to falsely overestimate the past that makes nostalgia egregious: but, one of the lessons of Andy Beckett's superb When The Lights Went Out is that, in many ways, we falsely underestimate a period like the 70s (Beckett in effect shows that capitalist realism was built on a myth-monstering of the decade). Conversely, we are induced - by ubiquitous PR, whose blank, joyless positivity has a crushingly depressing effect, even though (or rather precisely because) no-one believes it at the level of content - into falsely overestimating the present. The Caretaker's Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia echoes Jameson's remarks on postmodernity : it is precisely the failure of historical awareness - under pressure from a cyberblitzing blip time that has no long term memory - that leads to the rise of nostalgia. Those who can't remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.

But I say with total confidence that the decade we've just lived through will be recognised - and not in the far distant future, but very soon - as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s: a decadent, despondent dead zone in which conformity was rebranded - in the media's lickspittle jester prattle - as 'light, upbeat, irreverent'."