Tuna Melts, Retro Phones, and Imperialism

Time was. Time was when thoughts of fond remembrance were collected under the name of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a very personal sentiment. What we look back upon with a smile in our heart is something very individual, very specific to each of us. For instance, I do not have any special tenderness for madeleines, although I do have a sweet tooth, but I know that certain people can look at one and find in the small, sweet cake cause for a flood of emotions and memories. My friend Adam knows this too. Passing a donut shop on Sepulveda near Venice, Adam noted with a genuine sigh, “Winchell’s Donuts really bring me back to my youth.”

The cuisine which most readily triggers wonderful memories for me is the tuna melt. The remembrance of tuna melts past transports me back to the Milburn Diner in Milburn, New Jersey where I am seated with my best friend, Jeff George, in a diner booth upholstered in resplendent maroon vinyl surrounded by an ambience that can only be described as Greek Revival Spanish Inquisition. The idea of the tuna melt, served open faced on golden toasted slabs of rye heaped with twin mountains of tuna fish rich with mayonnaise, each slice covered with a thin veil of ochrey American cheese, bubbling and slightly browned, opens up a world of lost youth, of old green train cars with wicker seats rumbling past on the Erie Lackawanna line, of waiting out rainstorms after late night movies, of strawberry-blondes in summer dresses. The Milburn Diner tuna melt is the holy grail of cookery, lost to my history, unattainable in my life since moving west. Every California menu that boasts one as a selection holds out false hope. These tuna melts inevitably appear as an exercise in disappointment, thin, pale, closed-faced, even defiled with a bitter crown of sprouts. But the disjointed and random sense-images that the tuna melt brings to mind is as unique to me as my own DNA. It is my time was.

Not that food alone can be the touchstone for nostalgia. A song – for instance the tune "Oh, What a Night," which is itself an ode to the backwards gaze – brings back good memories of trips to the shore that I’d rather not share. But I’ve noticed something happening in the world of nostalgia lately that gives me a sense of dread. More and more these days I come across false memories. I discover them quite a bit in television and the movies, but most of all I have found them in catalogs and upscale chain stores. They come in the form of assertions that some special thing brings to mind a wonderful past, out of my own consciousness, when in fact no such memory exists.

Before me is the catalog for the Restoration Hardware company, a business that has made much of commodifying the past. Here I can purchase a phone that is similar to those phones I remember so well -- designed by Henry Dreyfuss back in 1937. At least, I think I remember them well until I realize that the phones in my past were mostly plastic, 1960’s contraptions more evocative of a late cold-war era Navy training film than the image of Lauren Bacall reclining on a chaise lounge while chatting. No, my family did not acquire black rotary phones until my brother became self-consciously retro sometime in the 1980’s.

Restoration Hardware also promises that the new phone, so evocative of a past that I have been urged to think was mine, has actually, “been made better, infinitely so.” How so, they do not reveal unless it is the push button mechanism grafted on top of the original design to make it usable in this age of “press nine for customer service.” They want me to believe the past is a grand place, but they wouldn't want me to go so far as to stick my finger in it and give it a twist. Just leave the past to them to make it better, infinitely so.

Another gent is hooking up old telephone handsets to mobile phones.

The philosophy of Restoration Hardware and others with similar tactics is to provide things that are “pleasantly familiar.” But I don’t find these things pleasantly familiar after all. They are creepily familiar. They are only familiar because they are supposed to be familiar--as if there was some Jungian Collective Unconsciousness Catalog. These companies are profiting from our anxieties about the future by marketing to our longing for the past, any past, as long as it’s pleasant. To this end, historians would best be avoided. They keep reminding us just how bad the past was, or how different it was from what we desperately want to believe. What the marketers understand is our desire to find a good place in history, but they can’t provide that place bespoke for each of us. Madeleines and tuna melts won’t work because these are highly individualized triggers of lost time. Nostalgia now is generalized, stretched-out, and commodified for mass-market potential. Mass-past, as it were.

Plundering the Other for treasure is one of the oldest stories of commerce. Merchants have long set off to bring us the rewards of our global imperial project: printed cloth from India, bamboo settees from China, tea-sets from Malaysia, ready-made ethnic art from Africa, and deck chairs from the Dominican Republic. A new phalanx of merchant princes, however, has embarked on a mission of Temporal Imperialism looting the the past for artifacts which are manufactured to engender within us a feeling of so-called pleasant familiarity. Instant nostalgia. McSentiment. We don’t even have to work up for ourselves a taste for madeleines because these products are carefully "pre-selected" to tap into some image of the past we supposedly all share.

To the snob, nostalgia is a personal experience and tradition is not found in those objects in need of the resurrection du jour.