Friday, May 30, 2008

Nostalgia Is A Double-Edged Sword (Warning: Video Intensive)

Am so seriously dossing while at work (hope my bosses don't read this). Was coerced by DonnaW into checking out 80's music videos. HILARIOUS.

Check this one out: Can you pick out BabyFace?


The hair! The shoulder pads! The bad dancing! And how come they were a lot darker then?


And how about this one? Is it me, or is this video so seriously gay?



Gosh. I am so glad I was too young to have a serious interest in music then.


But then I found this:



And such a physical sensation hit me - a tugging somewhere between my sternum and my heart. And memories long forgotten were suddenly and mercilessly pushed to the fore. Not even proper, eventful memories - just flashes of feelings, quick glimpses of perfectly ordinary moments. Days in Coventry. Waiting for SimonD, listening for his heavy tread outside my dorm room. A night in Amsterdam, driving over the Stadhouderskade.

Is it strange that this piece of music unfailingly pulls from me my most bittersweet memories? Or stranger still, that these two cities hold both my happiest and saddest times?

And here it is that I learn an important lesson: it's never the big events that you remember with great clarity. Never the moment my first love proposed to me on a bridge over a bubbling brook. Never the time I just sat and looked with awe at Rembrandt's Night Watch. These things I remember only as a passing scene, sucked dry of all emotion.

The ones that creep up on me and whale me over the head with nostalgia are always the little things: the song in my head while I was in the taxi, the CD I was playing to kill time. Those are real. And those are the ones that hurt the most.