Wed, 9:31: All this nostalgia for the nineties is strange to me, because we went into the nineties with a picture of that decade as this forward-thrusting threshold into the next millennium: culture was still fixated on "The Year Two Thousand" as this iconic symbol of futurism, even when it was less than a decade away.
I don't think any other decade was ever regarded in quite the same way. As far back as the mid-seventies there was the TV series SPACE: 1999; the "futuristic" movie STRANGE DAYS came out in 1995 and was set on the last two days of 1999. My guess is the 1968 Kubric film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was a huge part of this, with an effect that was surprisingly enduring.
Back *in* the nineties, the nostalgia was for the seventies (then a little bit of eighties nostalgia, by the end of the nineties). This seems to be the cycle: nostalgia for the decade before last. People are already starting to look back at the "old ways" of the early 2000s, and I guess once you get into your forties and later, that shit starts to feel very weird.
I mean . . . anyone born just twenty years ago (that's 2001!) probably has no real clue what, say, the cultural narrative of Y2K was like. In 1999 in particular, the ideas permeating the zeitgeist were full of excitement, promise, and danger. The clock ticked us into the new millennium and it was really more like ... huh. That's it?
Probably the only thing that came even close to how we all envisioned the transition into the new millennium was the explosion of the internet, and it was another decade before even social media began to transform into what it is now. We STILL don't have flying cars and I am very disappointed!
