The third edition of John Brady’s This & That. zine reached my mailbox this week. As I read through it, I thought about the slower pace of communication from the past. In the book Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, the residents of a small British town at the turn of the 20th century share a newspaper, each taking shifts throughout the day.

Soon after breakfast Mary Ann brought in the Times. Mr. Carey shared it with two neighbours. He had it from ten till one, when the gardener took it over to Mr. Ellis at the Limes, with whom it remained till seven; then it was taken to Miss Brooks at the Manor House, who, since she got it late, had the advantage of keeping it.

There’s something quaint and romantic about having such little and proscribed access to information. It’s almost the exact opposite of what we have today, with the glut of news and entertainment that we can barely hold off.

Culture: An Owner’s Manual has an edition focused on the significance of Rocky IV as a cultural artifact.

But unlike most bad films made in 1985, Rocky IV remains fascinating nearly forty years later. It has great value to us in 2024 as a relic — an artwork that embodies the unique stylistic choices of a particular point in time. Rocky IV is a time-traveling passport to 1985: the Manichaean Reaganite politics, the sassy robot maid, the soundtrack of power ballads and cold digital synths, the artless action-film editing and over-use of freeze-frame fade-outs, the casual lack of verisimilitude in using Wyoming as a stand-in for the Russian countryside.

My wife was arguing tonight that much of indie music in the 90s still sounds fresh and timeless today. I can see that in some ways, but overall I think the 90s was the last decade to have a real distinctiveness to its culture. You couldn’t make Empire Records or Belly’s “Feed The Tree” today. They just wouldn’t feel right in the current context.

W. David Marx writes on his blog Culture about 10,000 Maniacs and the earnest progressivism of the early alternative music culture.

Certainly 10,000 Maniacs were a bit over-the-top, but they fit seamlessly in the general aesthetic of “alternative” culture. Progressivism was cool in the 1980s. Merchant worked at a health food store, and before joining the band, considered a career in special-needs education. She was the one who pushed REM’s Michael Stipe to lurch towards more political content. These were the Reagan-Bush years, and artists resisted by drawing attention to the social ills that conservatives didn’t care about.

He contrasts that sort of authentic hope for change with today’s music, which has a very cynical live for the moment ethos. “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

Back when our local newspaper, The News & Observer, was more of a going concern, I used to dig following the columns from Craig D. Lindsey. Lindsey, AKA Uncle Crizzle, had a keen eye for culture and finding overlooked treasures. When the paper let him go as part of broader cutbacks, I considered it a real setback to their coverage of the arts.¹

I remember reading on Lindsey’s Tumblr around the time of this dismissal from the newspaper that he was going through a time of real struggle. This was right around the time that the nation was facing a particularly strong sense of outrage about the treatment of minorites by the authorities. He felt a lack of self-worth. The demand for those in his profession was abating (at least in the sense that they could find paying work). Frankly, I was worried about the guy.

One of my all-time favorite films is John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King. I was first introduced to the movie adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling short story from 1888 by my English teacher in my senior year of high school. Kipling’s novel encapsulates some of the folly and hubris of the British adventures in Afghanistan in the 19th century by infusing its characters with the attitudes of empire. In the film, Michael Caine and Sean Connery play British ex-military who dream much and doubt their abilities little. They set their sites on bringing the martial prowess learned in their earlier days to a remote area of Afghanistan known as Kafiristan to form their own kingdom.