Forty-four years earlier, Plowden’s very first book—1966’s “Farewell to Steam”—was an homage to the machines that had so captured his imagination, a bittersweet “farewell” to them not so very long after they went out of commission. The new book gives Plowden a chance to curate these images with a little more distance, and to use them to tell the story of the steam era.

As he documented the decline of the engines, he also found himself drawn to other powerful symbols of American industry, training his lens on bridges, steam boats, and steel mills—and publishing collections of those images, darkly beautiful tributes to parts of our culture he saw slipping away. Over the years, as there have become fewer and fewer of those things to photograph, Plowden’s attention has shifted to landscapes and structures that have the same sort of melancholy out-of-time sense about them. Along the way, the photographer developed a strong intuition about what will be the next to fall. But he never stopped loving his trains.

While his images are windows on to another time, this new “Requiem” is a noble, thoughtful tribute to the past, not a mournful wish to return to it. At 78, Plowden himself is all too conscious of this tension, and is determined to illuminate what’s gone without being bound by it. We spoke recently about what’s changed—and what hasn’t.

You’ve made a career out of photographing things before they disappear. Where does the drive to do that come from?

I started out photographing trains, steam engines. And when the steam engines went, I realized oh my lord, the steam boats are going. The railroad depots are going. Small towns are going, Main Street is going. I did a book on a steel mill because I realized that the steel industry was changing drastically. It’s a terrible expression, but I’ve been one step ahead of the wrecking ball.

For me, it was important to document places that were important to American history and culture. These things are disappearing, and I can’t stop that. But I can certainly photograph them, and leave a record of things that in a hundred years won’t be here. In my lifetime, many of the things I’ve photographed aren’t here anymore. It happens so quickly.

Do you feel a sense of responsibility to do that kind of documenting?

I felt it was important for another generation to see what we looked like, and also perhaps to make people aware of what they were losing. And to show how very beautiful some of these places were. We have a very beautiful country, and it’s being devoured. Photography provides a souvenir—it’s a way of holding onto these things, and remembering them.

Your very first book, “Farewell to Steam,” was photographs of steam engines. How is that book different from “Requiem for Steam,” which was just published?

I hate to say this, but “Farewell to Steam” was a disaster. It was badly printed, badly designed—it just was terrible. “Requiem to Steam” is really my way of celebrating the locomotive. It’s not just the engines, it’s the era of the steam engine. And so there are stations, pictures of trains and grain elevators and steel mills, the things the steam engine built. It’s a story of my search for where the steam engines are. I rode one of the last ones ever to be in service.

One of the things that’s most different about this book is that it was entirely produced on the computer. I don’t shoot with a digital camera, I shoot film and then scan it. A lot of the [older] negatives were very badly damaged, stained, in terrible condition. They could not have been printed in the darkroom. So—with a very dear friend of mine who is an expert on the computer—I restored a great many of these negatives so they could be used.

Would you ever have imagined that you’d be able to scan your old negatives into a computer, or that you’d want to?

It took me a long time to come to the computer. I’ve been printing in the darkroom since I was 16. I’m 78, so you can do the math. I printed in the darkroom for years; it was second nature to me. I learned the zone system years ago. Shooting on film and printing in the darkroom has been an integral part of my life. Now I just shoot the film in the field and I don’t go in the darkroom anymore, for many, many reasons—one is that I have fearsome arthritis and its very hard for me to stand all day in the darkroom, and also to use my hands to dodge and burn. I have some frozen paper—they don’t make good photographic paper anymore. But it’s very hard to get anyone to work in a darkroom with you. It used to be that people wanted to work in a darkroom, so they came and worked with me and I tried to teach them as much as I could. But they’re not interested in that anymore. So a lot has conspired to keep me out of the darkroom.

Do you miss it?

Not anymore. The smell of hypo still gets the juices flowing. Years ago it used to be said that photography is not an art because you can use a negative to make prints ad infinitum. Yes, but every print you make in the darkroom is different. They may be subtle differences, but when I’m looking at them they’re enormous differences. Every print that you make in the darkroom is a one-off creation; there are no two prints exactly the same. And you created the work yourself; on the computer you don’t. You work with all the devices in Photoshop, which give you infinite control. In fact, it gives you so much control that you can go overboard.

[Digital imaging] is very different, but it’s my salvation because I don’t have the stamina to work in the darkroom anymore. The computer has given me a new lease on life.

Were you initially resistant to it? A lot of people who were really wedded to darkroom work were a little reluctant to shift to digital. Including me, and I’m young enough that I don’t really have an excuse…

I taught for about thirty years, and I was teaching during the time that the computer and Photoshop came in. So I had this whole upheaval going on while I was teaching students. I would tell them: It’s different. Treat it as another medium, and you won’t have to worry about whether it’s better or worse. It is a wonderful thing and it produces wonderful work, but it will not produce silver prints for you.

I wasn’t really against it, because at the time it really came along full blast, I was awfully tired. So it did indeed free me. And at my age, I really think that it saved my career. Medically, and also everything was deteriorating. It was hard to get pieces for my equipment. I was still using the original enlarger that I bought in 1957. I’m not a guy who runs out and buys the latest thing. I kept the best lenses I could find. The equipment is old, but it’s beautiful. I’m very hard on it. I beat my equipment to death, but before I go out on an expedition I pay a huge bill to have it all repaired.

Since you’re photographing things that are vanishing, and you’re working in a medium that’s so in flux, has that changed how you think about what you do?

Well, I’ve been doing it all my life. It’s become a way of life. Most of the things that I love, that I photograph, aren’t here anymore. So my photography today is not photographing things that are disappearing, but photographing the beautiful landscape.

My career is probably winding down, at my age. I don’t expect to be able to photograph forever. But I have photographed so many of the things I felt were important to record and document before they disappeared. And so many of them have, now.

All the things that I photographed were representative of another time, perhaps of a time I found more interesting. And things like the steam locomotive and the old truss bridges were infinitely fascinating in themselves. Moreover, you could understand how they work. I think for most of us, the technology today is so cerebral. How do you photograph a doctor performing a brain operation? How do you photograph what’s going on in Hawking’s mind? You can’t, really. But you can go out and photograph a bridge.

The inside of a computer is fascinating, but the outside is no more interesting than a breadbox. Whereas some of these old machines, you looked at them and could understand how they worked. And they were fascinating. They were dramatic.

When you look at the photographs you took decades ago of things that were vanishing and have maybe since vanished completely, what do you feel?

Well, I have the photograph, so I have the memory. I look at the photograph and remember what things were like. I’ve never forgotten any photograph I’ve made. And I’ve made a hell of a lot of photographs. But every one is an occasion. I do miss these things, but I say to myself, okay, at least I can look at a picture and there is evidence of that place, of that moment. That gives me great satisfaction.

I guess I’m a realist; I guess I know that I’m not going to change the world. But at least I made the record. Yes, I’m sad. I’m terribly sad that things are becoming so dehumanized. We’re a country that insists on sensation; it feeds on it. Everything must be faster and better. I’m not a Luddite; I’m alive because of medicine and I use cell phones and I use the computer and all of these things. But at the same time, I do lament the loss of some of these things that were beautiful and made life more interesting.

Lots of people wrestle with that tension. It’s easy to get lost in the past and never get beyond it.

That’s a very important point. I’m not in any way that person. I embrace the present very much, but I revere the past. We all walk in the footsteps of our forebearers. Sometimes it seems to me that some of the young people of today think that the past doesn’t matter, that we’ve been spring from the head of Zeus complete. But if you hadn’t had the steam engine, you wouldn’t have the computer. They’re connected, and I don’t think you can separate them.

All images by David Plowden. View many more on his website.

1. Great Northern RLY. Extra 3383 East, Kandiyohi , MN 1955 2. Hostler and CNR Locomotive Number 8403 on Turntable, Hamilton, ON 1959 3. Sanding Locomotive – Denver, Rio Grande & Western RR. Chama, NM 1962 4. CPR Number 2816, 1960

The post Evidence of an Era: An Interview with David Plowden appeared first on The Faster Times.

From 2004’s “Cooking for Mr. Latte,” which recounted Hesser’s fledgling relationship with New Yorker writer Tad Friend (now her husband and father of their twins) to “Eat, Memory,” the column she started as editor of the New York Times Magazine’s food section—and to which writers including Colson Whitehead, Yiyun Li and Gary Shteyngart contributed essays (and which became a 2009 book of the same name)—to “Recipe Redux,” the column she’s written for the Magazine since 2006 (in which she challenges a chef to reinvent a classic recipe), Hesser’s work has long revealed her deep interest in the relationship of food to human memory. With her massive new cookbook making its way into kitchens this week, I was eager to talk to her about how cooking puts us in touch with the past while connecting us, deliciously, to the present.

Much of your food writing has been explicitly concerned with memory, I think to a greater extent than many other food writers. Was there a moment when you realized that this approach made sense to you as a part of covering the culinary world?

I’ve always liked documenting things, whether it’s by taking photographs or keeping a diary. Maybe it’s the inner pack rat in me that wants to preserve every moment, and has been born out in my writing. My first book [‘The Cook and the Gardener”] came about when I was living in France, working in this old hotel, and a gardener lived on the property. When you’re new to a culture you’re kind of fascinated by everything in it, and he was living in this way that, as an outsider, I could see really clearly was on its way out in France. He had a lot of traditions in his daily life that his kids were not carrying on. And I felt an urge to preserve that in some way. Once I’d written that book, I headed towards that as a kind of essential part of the writing that I do.

When you became an editor of the food section at the Times Magazine, you certainly brought that sensibility with you. When you conceived of the “Eat, Memory” column, what kind of response did you get from the writers you approached about it?

I was expecting to have to coax them, because I wanted to ask people who didn’t normally write about food—but who were well-known, great writers—to do it. But it turns out that nearly everyone has a great food story, and it wasn’t hard at all to get them excited to go back and revisit an experience, and write an essay about it. Food is just so integral to everyone’s lives, whether they realize it or not, and once they start thinking about it, it flows pretty easily.

From there, I feel like your “Recipe Redux” column was a really natural evolution. When you asked chefs to revamp these classic old recipes, did you get any feedback from them about what role the past usually played in their cooking?

I was definitely trying to make them conscious of this continuum, that new dishes aren’t just created out of thin air, that there are all sorts of influences. Some of them could be from childhood, and some could be from more recently, but that their creative process is about bringing together all these memories and impressions. The column was maybe a little high concept, but when it worked, it worked very well, and someone was able to take an old recipe and use it as a jumping off point. They weren’t necessarily revamping it, they were using the details of the recipe that stood out to them to create something new, and combining it with other techniques and observations and interests they’ve had to come up with an entirely new dish. Sometimes it was very closely related to the old dish, and sometimes it was completely different. And often the ones that were completely different were really great, because there were stories to tell about how they got from the old to the new.

It’s like word association, but ingredient association.

Yeah, exactly. And I wanted them to feel completely free. Boulette’s Larder in San Francisco took this old bread and cheese and tomato soup and turned it into a rice pudding. You would never put the two dishes together or think they had any relationship whatsoever, but they clearly drew a relationship between those two dishes. And that’s what I was trying to do. The evolution of cooking is all about people threading together memories, and reinterpreting them. The new cookbook is really built on the idea that food can be a time machine, that if I bake a cake from my great-grandmother’s recipe, we’re connected because we’re sharing an experience, even if we’re living generations apart. Is there something essential about the act of cooking that makes that experience possible?

The thing with cooking is that you’re engaging so many of your senses, it’s much more powerful than if an experience is merely visual, or merely aural. You literally consume food, so it has a deeper impression than anything else.

There’s so much to laugh at in the 19th-century recipe archive, so much that seems strange and misguided to us now. What were your initial impressions of those old recipes, and did they change at all as you worked with them?

I was really fascinated by the depth of the archive, and the sophistication of some of the recipes. These were home cooks who were writing recipes and sending them to the Times, and there were sweet breads and artichokes—all these things that might be considered sophisticated now, and even maybe a little esoteric, were completely normal back then. Cooking at home was just much more common, and an important part of people’s lives. It was really kind of cool to see the documentation of it.

There were some great surprises that were also reminders: We think that Italian granita was popularized for the first time in the 1980s, but in fact it had been a part of Italian culture for a really long time, and there had been a fantastic granita recipe that appeared in the New York Times in 1898. There were recipes that called for olive oil, and it was a little bit of a shock to my system because I was expecting everything to be made with lard and butter. And then there were recipes for things like shaved artichoke salad, which is something you’d expect to get at an ambitious New York restaurant now. It was more amusing than anything else, because we have a very obsessive and enthusiastic food culture, and when we become interested in something it’s like it has never existed before. We want to explore every iteration possible, and we sort of feel like everything was created during the era that we became obsessed with it.

You mention in the book’s introduction that as you went through the archives and tested recipes, there were a few once-popular things “that felt too dated to include.” How did you develop a sense of what made something too dated?

It was more about accessibility. I did include tripe a la mode de Caen, which was a very common recipe, because I feel like you can still get tripe. I wasn’t going to put in five tripe recipes, but I thought it was important to include one. I sort of drew the line at terrapin, which is turtle—none of the recipes actually seemed that appealing. I love pretty much everything, and I just thought, “It’s okay to leave that out.” It’s not that the New York Times archive is inaccessible to people; you can go and find recipes. I wanted this to be curated, so it really felt like the great early dishes from that 150-year period.

Was it a challenge to balance (in your words) “the ancient with the prescient,” or did one keep speaking louder than the other?

I wanted there to be a mix of a lot of different things: the ancient, the prescient, the pivotal dishes. I’m thinking of Alice Waters’s mesclun salad with baked goat cheese. It was an interesting story that appeared in, because it was written by Craig Claiborne, who was at the end of the arc of his really great career at the Times. Food writers had really changed the food landscape, certainly for Times readers, and he was metaphorically passing the baton to Alice Waters by writing this profile about how she was this really important chef who we should all be paying attention to, and how she was thinking about food differently. Later it became kind of a cliché, but it really got people thinking differently about salad! And so many great, important chefs and food writers and cookbook authors had their work published in the Times, and I wanted to pay homage to the various people who have had a great influence on what we’re eating.

There’s Paul Prudhomme’s gumbo, and there’s cassoulet, and turducken—these are total weekend projects, and they’re totally fantastic, but I also wanted this book to be the thing you turn to everyday when you’re trying to figure out what you’re going to make for dinner, or if you have to bring a cake to a potluck. I wanted it to be an indispensable book that had all these different things in it, because that’s how we all think about food now—it’s not a straightforward matter, it’s a very complicated patchwork quilt. I totally want to embrace the complexity, because I think that’s sort of the fun. Speaking of complexity, what are your feelings about tradition versus convenience? If you’re trying to connect with an old recipe, does it change it to prepare it in less painstaking ways than it was originally?

We can go to the butcher and ask for a certain cut of meat; we don’t have to cut it ourselves. Rather than putting something through a sieve, we have food processors. So there are a lot of things that are a natural part of our kitchens now that make those recipes easier. It’s not that they were especially labor-intensive, it’s just that people didn’t have the means or the tools that we have now. I really didn’t change anything, I felt my job was to unearth the best recipes and translate them—break them down into a recipe form that you and I can understand.

What’s your own “most stained” recipe?

I have two: two cakes. One is called Chocolate Dump-It Cake; it’s a recipe from my mother. It’s a really simple cake, and I make it every year for my husband for his birthday. The other is actually a recipe from his mother, and it’s an almond cake. This is the recipe I’ve probably made more than any other in my life. It’s just a real crowd-pleaser—it’s simple, its delicious, and you can make it ahead. It’s what I call my thank-you cake, because I’ve shipped it everywhere as a thank-you to various people for helping me out with things.

Your newest project, Food52, is also premised on the idea of home-cooked food as a memory-maker. On the website, one of the reasons you [and business partner Merrill Stubbs] give for why people should cook is, “If you cook, people will remember you.” I was really struck by that, because it’s at once so pragmatic and so esoteric. Have your feelings about that deepened since you’ve had kids?

I am just much more aware now that childhood is full of taste memories, and that they’re often not so much about the food, but you have very strong feelings about food because of it. I just feel excited to introduce my kids to as many things as possible. I know it will stay with them forever.

Does time change your feelings about your own work? When you look back at “Cooking for Mr. Latte” now, considering how things turned out, what do you think of it?

I always kept diaries and then never actually wanted to read them again because I was too embarrassed. I had a fear of deep embarrassment at what I thought, or how I wrote it. Honestly, I feel totally glad to have all of these things documented. Because we ended up getting married, there’s something sweet about having this documentation of our courtship. Even if it’s sometimes painful for me to read, it’s a source of happiness for me to have that book on my shelf.

The post Your Kitchen is a Time Machine: An Interview with Amanda Hesser appeared first on The Faster Times.

Her most recent release, “Home Economics: Vintage Advice and Practical Science for the 21st-Century Household,” looks like a particularly lovely, scaled-down Home Ec textbook, the kind of thing Betty Draper might give to her daughter—though sitting on my coffee table in 2010, it’s much less ominous and prescriptive than it would have been for poor Sally. The snippets of advice on everything from removing stains to baking bread, gardening, mending, pickling and party planning resonate with a familiar kind of generalized nostalgia, but Trontz told me that she’s serious about passing on these skills to people who can use them today.

You’ve written lots of books that deal with the past in some way. How did you first start compiling these retro-focused pop culture titles?

Since I didn’t grow up in those times, I can just look at them for how they appear—not what the context was, or what life was like then. I like the alternate reality of things that don’t exist anymore. And when you look at something from a different era, you can kind of escape the one you’re in.

“Home Economics” is a straightforward presentation of vintage advice. Sometimes there’s a pretty fine line between what’s timeless and what’s laughable. What makes the advice in your book timeless?

Everyone—men and women—has to know how to do this kind of stuff. People have to clean their toilets and sweep their floors. It’s valuable information for the most part, and it really hasn’t changed. And I don’t really think it’s political. The tone of some of the stuff directed towards women—about how to look good while you do all this—I think is dated. If there is some of that, I just thought it was funny, and not for people to take seriously.

How did you come across those sources? How wide did you cast your net in tracking this stuff down?

I wanted to find [advice and information] from before the 50’s. At the turn of the century and in the 20′s and 30′s, a lot more people couldn’t afford household help, so they had to learn a lot of these things. The books I looked at don’t stress having the perfect, ideal home; they just give basic information on how to maintain a house: how to feed your family, make money last, how to cook tough cuts of meat if you can’t afford more expensive cuts. That’s valuable information for most working and middle class people.

It’s interesting to look at this book in contrast to some of your earlier ones, like “How to be Popular,” which is also a collection of vintage advice, but is a lot more tongue-in-cheek. This book is full of tips and information that are really practical.

I have a daughter who’s going into ninth grade, and she’s never really learned how to do any of this stuff. I try to teach her, and I wonder about what she’ll be like when she goes off to college: Will she know how to wash clothes? It’s not that I want high schools to going back to teaching home economics, but people do need to have these skills. You don’t really see it stressed in schools anymore, and I thought if I could produce a book that has some of the same information, it could be really interesting and useful.

Still, do you picture people actually using the advice in here, or is it more of a novelty book?

I think people can really use it. Since it’s vintage advice and all the illustrations are older, it looks more interesting than a Martha Stewart book, with all those idealized interiors that people can’t really [replicate].

There’s so much of that glamorous, complicated homemaker stuff out there. Maybe the only way to make the information novel is to go back 60 years?

Yeah, it’s not glamorous to learn how to sweep a floor or make a bed, but it’s basic, valuable information. You don’t need a Dyson vacuum to clean your floors.

There must be a pretty big audience for books like this if you can keep writing them. Who do you think your readers are?

Well, people are returning to growing their own vegetables and doing all these home things that make them feel more secure, like eating locally and using natural products. It’s so cliché, but it’s about returning to simpler times. I’m 40, and I think that has some appeal for younger people. But I’m really totally out of touch with what 20-year-olds like.

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I thought about this while I was reading “First Kiss,” a zine put together by Marisa Meltzer (author of “Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music”) and style writer/blogger Elizabeth Spiridakis. It’s pretty irresistible: a good-natured, high energy, nostalgic-by-definition collection of some fifty stories about the seminal moment when your lips first meet someone else’s, and all of the drama and humiliation and excitement and disappointment it always involves. There’s just something summery about the idea of first kisses! Even though my own actually took place in the winter, I guess my sense of it these many years later has ended up having more to do with long, sweltering nights and a relaxed curfew than with heavy sweaters and sleet.**

But even though “First Kiss” celebrates individual memories and experiences, the zine is really a form of group testimony, full of statements from people who mine their formative years as a kind of creative outlet. (That seems to be a particular subset of journalists/artists/hipsters, by the way, and I’d have to be in deep denial to pretend I’m not among them.) Inevitably, some of the stories here are better told or more memorable than others, but that’s basically beside the point—it’s the massing of them that really matters. Meltzer and Spiridakis put out a simple, alluring request for people to tell their own version of a story everyone has, and pulled them all together in a zine that’s pretty much designed to be read and relished and squealed over en mass. Predictably, they had no shortage of submissions.

Of course, the reality of a first kiss doesn’t have all that much to do with the looming cultural idea of one, culled from movies and songs and endless speculation at sleepovers. There’s what we thought it would be like at the time, versus what it was actually like, and what we want it to feel like in retrospect versus what it turns out to feel like for real. Which makes it sort of wonderfully weird that the zine includes a contribution from Tavi Gevinson, the much buzzed-about 14-year-old fashion blogger, and actually kicks off with a story from her friend Spencer Tweedy (yes, son of Jeff). Tavi’s first kiss was just last year, and, she writes, “I can’t fully REFLECT on it now. It’s too soon, and it’s still too middle-school, and besides, I haven’t had a kiss since so I have nothing to compare it to other than the scenarios in John Hughes movies.” At a reading for the zine, Tavi and Spencer (in absentia) screened a video they made where they slumped next to each other on a porch swing and pretended to be old people reminiscing about their glory days. “Do you remember the days of our youth?” Tavi asks Spencer, trying to speak with her lips pulled over her teeth so it looked like she doesn’t have any (apparently being old also gives you something of a British accent). In character as an old man, Spencer doesn’t have much to say except to express bafflement at Tavi’s fond memories of “web-logs.” Then the two of them reenact their “First Kiss” stories using puppets and plastic figurines.

In general, though, there are patterns to the way the “First Kiss” stories are told: Many of the writers puzzle over what truly counts as their first kiss, sometimes offering more than one anecdote to cover their bases (very first first kiss, first decent kiss, first kiss with someone I actually liked, first kiss with a girl after realizing I wasn’t into boys). More than one writer mentions “Stairway to Heaven,” and the popularity of the urban myth that two people’s braces can get stuck together is repeated several times. Many first kisses took place at summer camp. Almost everyone seems to think they were abnormally old at the time of their first kiss (which means, of course, that they weren’t).

But Tavi and Spencer’s video really says it all. Here are preternaturally mature 14-year-olds pretending to be really old for the purpose of poking fun at the nostalgic tendencies of everyone older than them. But they already know what it’s like to be nostalgic, and half-ironically use kiddie toys to act out a story of something they know is formative, but which just happened. They’re star contributors to a project premised on the nostalgia of people a decade or two older than them (which they are vaguely jealous of; witness Tavi’s fascination with Sassy magazine and other nineties staples), and are so well-versed in the inevitable course of memory that they can anticipate and make light of their own.

** It took place in a closet during a Truth of Dare game when I was fourteen, with a skater boy who proceeded to “ask me out” and “date” me (perhaps on a dare itself, it was never really clear) for the next 12 hours and then unceremoniously dump me before the group of us went on a heavily chaperoned ski weekend, during which time he was very mean to me. (I did not then, nor have I ever skied, nor were we actually the kind of people who went on group ski weekends. Very little about it made sense.)

Photo via.

The post Do You Remember Your First Kiss? (Of Course You Do.) appeared first on The Faster Times.

The fire started in the pizza place next door to the bodega. Along with those two businesses, it took down a beauty salon, the spartan Jackson-Hewitt outpost where I went to have my taxes semi-competently done a month ago, and the still-empty storefront that used to house the video store I rented from almost every day when I first moved here (it closed a year or two ago for fairly obvious reasons). A little further down is a sprawling franchise of the women’s clothing store Rainbow, spilling over with cheap, brightly colored shirts which, now that I think of it, are probably made of incredibly flammable material (as far as I know, they only had smoke damage). Until not too long ago, an old-school hardware store occupied that space (and had, for years), the kind that had everything you could possibly need or imagine, where a man in his late 70′s stood behind the register and counted out tiny screws in his palm when you asked for them. Around the corner, the new bar one door down from the bodega has had at least three other lives in the last six years. Across the street from that, a bar called Drop-off Service took its name from the space’s previous incarnation as a Laundromat (either a tribute to its past life, or a way to avoid prying the lettering saying as much off the front window). It was the first place I washed my clothes when I moved in, right before it closed up shop.

I’ve written before about the particular ways New York produces and processes memories, but there are times when it shows up in starker relief than usual. These few blocks immediately surrounding my apartment have lately seemed to be in near-constant flux; something’s closing or opening every couple of weeks, the storefront grates raised, cleaning supplies lined up on the sidewalk as the new proprietors get it ready for some slightly revised purpose. Everything here exists in layers, and your place in the scheme of things has a lot to do with how aware you are of what you’re standing on top of, and how much you care about seeing old versions of things preserved—or, failing that, at least acknowledged. Your understanding of the recent past shapes your sense of where you fit into the present, like when you start a new job and can’t quite feel at home until some of the people who preceded you leave and are replaced. It’s comforting to know that you’ve witnessed change, even if the changes themselves are unsettling.

A bar being replaced by another bar is one thing, though. Standing across the street from the smoldering ruin of the place where you’ve bought cartons of orange juice and half-and-half (and cat litter and bread and hand-soap and eggs, when you’re too lazy to walk the additional block to the grocery store and deal with the lines…) can make your whole life—or at least these last several years of it—flash before your eyes. After all, the neighborhood convenience store/deli is a pretty intimate place, and we tend to be fiercely loyal to the one we call our own. The guys who kept mine staffed 24 hours a day could tell when I was having a bad day, teased me for always refusing a plastic bag, asked after my boyfriend, smiled and made me change for a twenty even when I wasn’t buying anything. I’m sure they had their own ideas about what their customers’ lives looked like.

The things I bought there over the years are attached to specific memories, and the basic rhythms of everyday: Six-packs of Dogfish Head for only $12, cheaper than anywhere else in the neighborhood. Dark chocolate Reese’s peanut butter cups, when I couldn’t find them anywhere else. The only brand of instant ramen I really like. Drano. The New York Times, when someone swipes our subscription copy. Milano cookies. Overpriced Kraft singles. The hard-to-find flavor of Vitamin Water that I love. Chips. Sugar. Some emergency Immodium, after coming back from Guatemala with food poisoning. Honey. Tissues. Toilet paper. Tulips. Daffodils. Christmas trees being sold on the sidewalk outside, appearing annually in what felt like the definition of dependability. The guy who worked the flower stall outside for awhile and used to throw in a single red rose with whatever else I bought.

And along with the usual stock of things that filled basic needs (however you defined “basic”), they had an amazing inventory of random crap that was there waiting for the right moment. When I was temporarily taking care of a friend’s cat who would not shut up and let me sleep, I went over to the store in sweatpants at 1:30 am, desperate but not really believing they would have the water gun I was hoping to use to squirt water in the yowling animal’s face. Water gun? The guy laughed. They had more than one kind. When I needed boxes to move books into the kitchen while the living room was being re-carpeted, they let me into the back room to check out what they had and let me take as may boxes as I wanted, even tied them up with twine so they’d be easier to get the very short distance home. The store was a constant, a literal cornerstone of an otherwise restless neighborhood.

So last night my boyfriend and I drank two beers from the last six-pack we’ll ever get from the store, and tried to figure out what could—and what will—take its place. There goes the neighborhood.

Photo by Sergey, via EV Grieve

The post Requiem for a Bodega appeared first on The Faster Times.

Still, given these emotional ties, I was a little skeptical of the idea of a musical based on “American Idiot,” an album I hadn’t actually heard until last week. When I finally listened to it, I was pleasantly surprised to find it was catchy as hell. The idea of seeing what kind of theatrical spectacle it could be turned into was intriguing…and my boyfriend already had press tickets. At one time I might have had some kind of personal investment in the success or failure of a show like this, but now, I could just go with an open mind and low expectations. That’s rare, and kind of blissful, even though the experience still had its share of strangeness.

The fact that I found the show pretty exhilarating—really, in the way ads for theater always promise and rarely deliver—gave me kind of a headache, and made my sense of time feel all scrambled. Watching something that was once punk music being performed in the lovely St. James Theatre (where the crappiest seats go for $125), and enjoying it, was surreal. So was seeing the angst of the Bush years being played out on stage, taken as seriously as “Hair” does the ‘60s, but without the same cushion of time (at least when you see it today, just a few blocks south of “American Idiot”; seeing it when it premiered in 1967 was probably a whole different proposition). Adding to the vaguely out-of-body experience was the way “American Idiot” takes a generation I can generally call my own, and uses us to represent and define a time in the (very) recent past. I mean, that’s supposed to be us up there, sort of, right?

It’s a fact that every generation feels envious about something that happened before its time: We always hear, or even just sense, that earlier generations had better reasons to be angry, or captured their rage in better music. There’s at least some truth to some of that. Most honest people (even fans) would admit that Green Day’s more recent output doesn’t compare to the best of the punk catalog, even if it shares—or has inherited—the same brand of disaffection. But the “American Idiot” phenomenon (album, musical, and the inevitable movie version) goes some way towards legitimizing their version, and letting it stand in for ours. It smooths the way for later generations to look on post-9/11 paranoia and malaise with the same kind of jealousy that we have for the ‘60s, and to oversimplify it in the same way, too.

Basically, the way “American Idiot” captures alienation, paired with the way it’s already being canonized, makes Green Day well-positioned for “voice of a generation” honors. From where I’m sitting, that status is debatable, though I guess there are plenty of worse options. But it’s odd to be in a position to even be thinking about the possibility.

Our experience of an album or a band has everything to do with where we were in our lives when we first heard it. Coming out of the theatre, my mind was swimming with time-bound cause-and-effect scenarios: Someone who was fourteen when “American Idiot” came out, and who loved the record, is now twenty years old. Most likely, that person feels a general sense of nostalgia for the particular, pure way they listened to music as a teenager. So does that nostalgia make them excited about the musical? Or does the fact that this record (once the soundtrack to their private teenage angst) is now indisputably public property make them feel sick? And what about that person’s younger sibling, who was, say, ten when she first listened to her older brother’s copy? Now she’s sixteen. Is she psyched about the show, or bored by it? Does she feel vaguely embarrassed about the whole thing? Betrayed? How much does age matter, and where do we draw the generational lines?

* * *

I was genuinely excited when I went to see “Hair” last summer, and I expected to love it. I didn’t, though; for some reason I just couldn’t connect with it. My parents suggested that it might be a generational thing, an idea I dismissed at the time—if anything, I relate too easily to things far removed from my age bracket. But now, having seen “American Idiot,” I’m rethinking that. I didn’t just like this show; I related to it, maybe to an embarrassing degree, and certainly way, way more than I ever could have predicted (or, honestly, wanted).

I blame this on an awkward combination of taste, memories, and vulnerability. There’s also this: When I saw it, “American Idiot” was in previews. The young, impossibly energetic cast was clearly psyched for their big, official Broadway opening. The show may be a high-profile production, but it’s still shiny new, and driven by the kind of heart and sparkle that inevitably drains off a tiny bit with every performance. It’s almost imperceptible: Every note and bit of choreography stays the same, the actors still sweat bullets, and the costumes have the same amount of calculated scrappiness. It sounds cheesy, but I don’t know how else to say it—the feeling just changes. “American Idiot” arrives on Broadway a fully-fledged mainstream spectacle, with an unusual amount of grit. Despite its origins, it’s about as far from a scrappy punk show as you can get, but I liked it anyway. Maybe that’s partly because I knew that in seeing it so early, I was witnessing something fleeting.

“Rent,” of course, retained leagues of ardent devotees all through its twelve-year run—for some people, that’s just the magical power of musicals. But when it first opened in a little East Village theater in 1994, it was raw, and surprising. It seemed almost crazy that it might have a mainstream home, and once it did, audiences were able to take it for granted.

So, predictably, all my old feelings about selling out are rearing their heads in a slightly different context. These days, I worry about it not so much because I don’t want to share (though I won’t deny that’s part of it), but because I know that when the audience for something changes, the thing itself changes, too. And the interwoven layers of nostalgia that result can be tricky to find your way through.

The post “American Idiot” Gave Me a Nostalgia Headache appeared first on The Faster Times.

Slate’s Dana Stevens was much less enamored, which, she writes, leaves her “genuinely saddened.” This makes sense: the movies’ concept (or even just its title) is pretty irresistible, but that doesn’t make it bulletproof. More than many other movies, I think, this is one you love in direct proportion to how much you relate to it — and here, relating to the dudes matters more than relating to the 80’s. Both Stevens and Scott may love John Cusack, but only one of them might as well be him. (I don’t mean to make this a clear-cut gender issue, though I fully admit to appreciating the straight-to-DVD Amy Poehler/Rachel Dratch comedy “Spring Breakdown” — which has a lot in common with “Hot Tub Time Machine,” actually — mostly because it’s stupidity has the novelty of revolving around girls.) Not to nit-pick apostrophe placement, but Scott’s “Critics’ Pick” here is transparently a “Critic’s Pick.” And there’s something sort of adorable about that.

The movie’s much-hyped release inspired a glut of articles commenting on 80’s nostalgia itself, as if it’s a new discovery, or something that’s been in short supply. In a tone that was more fanzine or high school newspaper than Newspaper of Record, the Times’s Dave Itzkoff subjected John Cusack, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry and Clark Duke to probing questions like “In the 1980s what did you think you’d be doing with your life in the year 2010?” “What’s an embarrassing fashion style that you’ll admit to sporting in that era?” “What’s your most vivid memory of Michael Jackson from the 1980s?” and (really) “Tiffany or Debbie Gibson?” There was also with a slideshow, seemingly meant to provide visitors to planet earth with the most basic of 80’s primers: exhibits included “The A Team,” Debbie Gibson, “Dynasty” and of course, John Cusack himself. Meanwhile, the writers of the Washington Post’s Celebritology blog pondered what they would do if a hot tub transported them back to 1986, and Entertainment Weekly asked, “Did ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ Make You Miss the 80’s?”

The answer to that last semi-rhetorical question is simple: No, because everyone has been lusting after the 80’s for years now (or at least pretending to). When it comes down to it, it hardly matters that “Hot Tube Time Mahcine” focuses on that particular decade: the setting is just an excuse to milk regrettable styles for laughs, and it happens to coincide with a period of time when the lead actors could believably have been in their primes. The 80’s kitsch—Legwarmers! Cassettes! Super Mario Brothers!—is a crutch, and nothing pulls people into theaters like the chance to ridicule something they’re vaguely implicated in.

But there’s a sweet sadness underneath the rote homophobia and bodily fluids. Once you’ve gotten past the predictable gross-out laughs, you’re left with a story premised on disappointment and regret, and the assumption that being “grown up” means a life of misery and soul-crushing compromise. This is just the latest in a long line of movies that build a plot around revisiting experiences from one’s younger days, in the hopes of doing things better this time around (see “Never Been Kissed,” “Billy Madison,” and “Spring Breakdown”). That “Hot Tub Time Machine” revisits a time of glory (a winter ski weekend, sex and drugs!) rather than humiliation (perpetual virginity, no date to the prom) only makes the characters’ reality checks more depressing. They don’t get to re-do a mortifying experience, triumphing over it in a way that helps them become stronger, more confident adults. Instead, they look back on what they thought were their glory days, and see a time that wasn’t nearly as awesome as they remember. The dick jokes help ward off despair.

If you get things right in high school, the movie suggests, you could be set for life. But if your future happiness rests on the decisions you make when you’re 19, you’re screwed — there’s basically no way you’ll make good ones when you’re living in that moment. In their second shot at 1986, the guys of “Hot Tub Time Machine” are only able to make better choices because they know how the future turned out, and it terrifies them.

So if you aren’t lucky enough to get this kind of second chance via magical hot tub, here’s some basic advice: It’s generally a good idea to spend time in deep, meaningful conversation with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl reporter from Spin Magazine, instead of the shallow, annoying girlfriend you don’t even like. You’ll be able to tell them apart pretty easily: one has big hair and vacant eyes, and the other looks like someone you might meet in 2010. She’s ahead of her time…and yours.

The post The (Hot Tub) Time (Machine) of Our Lives appeared first on The Faster Times.

“I Love it When You Talk Retro” is a guide to the traces of history that lace our daily conversations, bringing together a vast array of “retroterms” with wildly different meanings and origins. These “verbal fossils”—like “red tape,” “carpetbagger,” “the 800-pound gorilla,” and “ditto”—all have their own stories, which often fall away after they start being regularly used. As we get further from their sources, we become more alienated from what we’re saying.

The past sneaks into our present in unexpected ways, and often we don’t even realize our part in perpetuating it. There’s something poignant about the idea that so much of what we say derives from things that are lost, obsolete, or misunderstood. “I Love it When You Talk Retro” is a dictionary of pseudo-foreign phrases, a bridge between generations, and a serious treat for word nerds. I talked to Keyes about why retroterms matter, why Boomers speak in code, and why we’re all still haunted by high school.

You look at a huge number of terms in this book. How did you choose which ones to explore?

For years I’ve been jotting things down as I heard them. I’d think, “How would my kids know what that means? How would a new immigrant understand the context of that phrase?” Whenever I would hear something that raised that question, I’d make a note of it. Eventually it was a list of thousands.

From there, what was your research process like?

I started out planning to do pop culture: TV shows, song lyrics, old ads. The more I got into it, the more I realized how many words and phrases went a lot further back than that. The book just about killed me. I ended up with a manuscript about three times as long as it was supposed to be.

Many of the phrases I was thinking about were the ones you think everyone knows—like “waiting for the other shoe to drop”—but invariably, you find out they don’t. Or they might know what it means, but they don’t know where it came from. Then I began to see ones I hadn’t heard of myself: Paul Krugman wrote, “There must be a pony in there somewhere,” as a way of referring to unwarranted optimism. I’d never heard of it before, so I looked it up and found a huge number of references to this story: A young boy is confronted by a huge mound of manure, and rather than being put off like most of us, he dives right in. Someone asks him why, and he says, “With this much manure, there must be a pony in there somewhere.”

I’ve been keeping more recent track of Maureen Dowd—I call her the Queen of Retrotalk, because she’s constantly using retroterms. But she’s not unique. Reporters of a certain age are constantly tossing around these Boomer-era allusions as if everyone knows what they refer to.

It’s partly a matter of style: She’s trying to brand herself as a certain kind of writer with a certain kind of knowledge. I guess she assumes that it’s an advantage, but you’re pointing out that it can really be alienating.

I compare it to talking to someone who’s always throwing French or Latin phrases into conversation. It always makes me feel left out and ignorant. I think, in a way, that’s part of the point—when those of my generation make reference to things that we grew up with, we’re as much as saying to people a lot younger than us, “This is a private conversation. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, the heck with you. Haven’t you got some twittering to do?” It becomes a kind of a generational freeze-out, a way of, probably unconsciously, celebrating generational solidarity–especially for Boomers. How important do you think it is for us to know the roots of these expressions? Well, it keeps you in the conversation. I don’t think it’s an imperative. It makes you more cognizant of what’s being discussed around you. And it’s more fun to know what they refer to: we get the gist of a lot of these things, but we don’t necessarily know their origins.

I knew what “gerrymander” meant—to fiddle with the shape of a congressional district to favor one candidate or another—but I had no idea where it came from. It turns out it goes back to the early 19th century, when the governor of Massachusetts, Eldridge Gerry, presided over a redistricting and some very weirdly shaped districts [resulted]. A cartoonist drew a picture of a congressional district shaped like a salamander, and he called it the “Gerry-mander.” It caught on. A lot of these phrases come out of events, and then they’re kind of fun to say, and nothing better comes along to replace them, so we still talk about them.

The Boomers’ frame of reference is very TV-centric, because they spent so much time in front of the television. It raises an interesting question: What will be the retroterms of the Internet generation? My son, who’s 23, spends a lot more time in front of a computer screen than a TV screen. Probably a lot of the phrases he’ll use will confound his grandkids, and will come out of the Internet and computer-ese.

It does seem like a never-ending cycle of misunderstandings.

My kids are seven years apart—one’s 30 and one’s 23—and I think phrases familiar to the older one aren’t necessarily familiar to the younger one. It used to take a generation for terms to become obsolete, but as everything else is accelerating, I think the rate at which terms become obsolete has accelerated.

At the same time, the Internet keeps a more public, centralized record of what things used to mean, which could be helpful.

Yeah, it’s so easy to look things up now. That was one problem I had writing this book. I’ve been writing word or quotation-oriented books for a couple of decades, but twenty years ago it meant a lot of traipsing around the library, making phone calls, reading old magazines and newspapers—which was very demanding, but it was a real detective game. Then, the challenge was to maximize your data. Now you have a whole different challenge, which is to minimize, to put borders on what you’re accessing.

What inspired you to write your book “Is There Life After High School?”

I had all these strong leftover feelings about high school, and my classmates, about what happened to me there, and what I wish had happened. I remember walking down the path to the mailbox and coming back with an envelope that said up in the corner “CHS Class of ’62,” and I opened it up and unfolded this piece of paper and it said, “Reunion Time!” This was ten years after I’d graduated. My hands started trembling, my heart started pounding, my cheeks were flushed. I was struck by how strong my feelings were, my ambivalence about going to a reunion. I mean, for crying out loud, it’s high school, ten years ago—why is my heart racing?

I started talking to friends and reading up on celebrities about their high school experiences. Everyone I talked to had their own memories and resentments and second thoughts and regrets, things they wish they hadn’t said, things they wish they had said, people they wish they could have gone out with, fights they wish they had won…the list is endless. I called up Robert Logue, and said, “Mr. Logue, I hear you’re the guy who beat Richard Nixon for Senior Class president at Whittier High School in the 30’s.” There was a long pause at the other end of the line. He says, “That was student body president.” So we really do remember, and I was really able to unload the weight of my high school memories by writing that book.

Tell me about your toaster collection. Why toasters?

My mother-in-law had this gorgeous, shiny sunbeam toaster from 1938. I always admired it. One day we went to visit her and the toaster wasn’t in the kitchen. I asked where it was, and she said, “Oh, it broke, I threw it down the incinerator.” That turns out to be a common collectors’ syndrome, where something you really wanted got away from you, and you try to replace it. So I kept my eyes open for other toasters. There are serious toaster collectors out there; they have a toaster collectors association, they have a newsletter, they hold conventions. I try to just have fun with it, and I try not to spend too much money on my toasters. As you can see from the pictures, I’ve got, I think, about sixty at this point. I also have hairdryers and blenders and cocktail shakers and waffle irons and stuff like that.

I think I’m a 30’s guy, even though I was born in ‘45. There’s something about that whole pre-war era that fascinates me. Some of the design of the early toasters is phenomenal—they’re just chrome-y and curvy and shiny…I just like them. And I love showing off my toasters to visitors to our house. We go down to the basement, and there’s this reaction like, “what in the world are you collecting toasters for?” But they love to go over there and see, “Oh, we used to have one like this!”

Incidentally, I tried to get a book together called the “Tao of Toasters,” about the role toasters play in our culture. My agent didn’t think she could sell it.

The post “Where Does That Word Come From?”: Ralph Keyes Talks Retro appeared first on The Faster Times.

If you’ve seen the A&E show “Hoarders,” you know why this distinction matters. (If you haven’t, episodes are online.) At the beginning of each episode—which airs following the similarly bleak reality show “Intervention”—a stark black screen informs us that “Compulsive hoarding is a mental disorder marked by an obsessive need to acquire and keep things, even if the items are worthless, hazardous or unsanitary.” From there, we visit the rather terrifying homes of two people, where the evidence of compulsive hoarding is staggering and indisputable—we see room after room piled high with clothes, paper and garbage, literally threatening to bury the people who live there. And the stakes are high: These peoples’ homes are falling apart in tandem with their minds, bodies and relationships.

In a sense, “Hoarders” is one of the many reality shows (from “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” to “Obsessed”) that exposes us to someone’s unsettling personal situation, rationalizes the cameras’ intrusion by trying fix the problem that brought them there in the first place, and then lingers, practically leering, over the shiny new surfaces as redemptive music plays. “Hoarders” is, arguably, educational, but it’s also undeniably exploitative. And though that’s hardly remarkable these days, it cuts closer to the bone than most reality TV. We get to sit on our couches and watch—cringing, riveted—as we fight the sudden urge to go clean out our closets. We get to gawk (however uncomfortably) and pity these people, while reassuring ourselves that our own lives are different, better, more secure. There’s some relief in that simple self-diagnosis: Our habits may come nowhere close to the troubling ones exposed on the show, but many (most?) of us can probably empathize with the tiny seed of an impulse that can lead there, given the right circumstances.

We are all, in some way or another, attached to the things we own and surround ourselves with. And though we understand that “stuff” is, in a sense, just stuff, we also know that stuff has meaning. Our stuff can tell us who we are and where we’ve been, and it can ground us on the way to where we’re going. We can also lose ourselves in it. It’s when the meaning and the memories become inextricable from the physical object that the real problems set in, and where “Hoarders” picks up.

On the show, participants are typically given two days to work with a psychologist, a professional organizer, and a team of disposal experts as they clean out as much of their home as they can manage. Though it does have the benefit of putting pressure on people who probably couldn’t take action without it, two days is a really an insanely short amount of time to accomplish something of this scale. Most of these homes—and the minds that live in them—are much too cluttered to be repaired so quickly.

Of course, the timeframe does make for concise, suspenseful television, but it doesn’t necessarily prioritize what’s best for the damaged individual at the center of it all. And time should really be a serious consideration here, since the perception of it is really central to the act of hoarding, and to the way hoarders understand the world (or fail to). Consciously or not, many hoarders are trying to create a cocoon where everything stays the same and there are no choices to make. When you can’t conceive of a livable future, it makes sense to cling to the detritus of the past. The past is reassuring, because it already happened. You can hold it evidence of it in your hands. It’s as real as you can handle things getting.

Even as the two-day plan can seem like a cruel tease, the well-intentioned professionals on the scene try to instill simple criteria for deciding to keep things or throw them away: Is it currently serving a purpose? Has it been used in the past year? Is it likely to be used in the next year? But for people with compulsive hoarding disorder, it’s not about function, it’s about feeling. No matter how useless it seems, the persons’ stuff gives them a sense of security in a way nothing else in their lives can. When feelings guide the way you accumulate things and place value on them, logic doesn’t have much affect. Regardless of the apparent “aftercare funds” supplied by the network (producers obviously know that it would look really, really bad if they just cleared out after taping), prospects for real progress seem grim.

No matter the details of their personal situation (alcoholism, depression, poverty, the death of a spouse…), and regardless of gender or age, what most of the people featured on the show have in common is a near-fanatical attachment to memories, and a fear of forgetting. To them, it’s simple: if you keep an object, you hold on to the memory associated with it. Without it, the memory is gone. As one hoarder, Linda, is being encouraged (and goaded, by her rightfully angry daughter, who believes her mom is more invested in her stuff than her family) to get rid of things, she begins to crumple. “It’s bringing back too many memories,” she says. The organizing expert by her side firmly but kindly asks her if she’s going to focus on memories of the past, or “focus on creating memories in the future.” It’s supposed to be a rhetorical question, but that’s not how Linda sees it.

When Todd (a youngish guy we’re told is only “chronically disorganized,” with the potential to become a compulsive hoarder) seems reluctant to throw away some of his ruined old clothing, his therapist prompts him, “Maybe that’s something you could work on: the shirt doesn’t hold the memory…the memory is within you.” Gail, whose house is literally in danger of collapsing on top of her (there are cracks in the support beams, and it can’t be fixed unless she clears out), explains, “I’ve always loved history. I’ve always loved to collect things that meant something to me. I feel like I have a responsibility to keep the history alive.” Years ago, she had a serious house fire that cost her some important personal mementos. Guarding herself against a similar loss, her stuff is now basically holding her hostage. There’s no reverent preservation going on in her mountains of things. History isn’t being kept alive. She’s just stockpiling as if she doesn’t know what else to do.

Meanwhile, a man named Jim has been given an ultimatum by his daughter: clean up his house, or he can forget about his baby granddaughter ever coming inside. Among her reasonable concerns is that Jim long ago misplaced a loaded gun somewhere in the house and hasn’t been able to find it. His kitchen cabinets are full of cobwebs and mouse droppings, and his “office” is populated by precarious stacks of paper. “Part of my life is in memories of things,” he explains. “Things are memory triggers for me.” And yet he doesn’t actually seem to need the objects to spark reminiscences. The professional organizer assigned to his case is a little bowled over by how detailed his memories are, and how easily he can summon them. She asks him if he thinks he could still remember without the “things” to act as triggers, and tells him, “Your whole life can’t be a keepsake box.”

The post The Disturbing Relatability of “Hoarders” appeared first on The Faster Times.

If you were to set out to take pictures of things that were slowly but steadily deteriorating, certain objects would call out to you for inclusion—you’d probably pull your car to the side of the road and aim your camera at an old neon sign, a shuttered storefront, a huge statue of a cowboy with paint peeling off it, a faded mural on a brick wall. But the things that would capture your attention, and fall into your definition of “vanishing,” would end up being the things that tugged at you in a way you couldn’t totally explain. You’d know something was vanishing when it whispered to you, take my picture.

Eastman finds evidence of a fading country in old theaters, churches, hotels, all kinds of hangouts, doors and entryways, signs, stores, restaurants, and cars, all studiously devoid of people. In the book, he gives each category it’s own section, prefaced by a short, moody paragraph or two. In his highly romantic introduction, Douglas Brinkley practically pleads with us to see that the things in these pictures are beautiful—he quotes William Carlos Williams, who once said of some shards of broken glass, “These are gems. It’s just a matter of your eyes’ looking at them right.” But that’s no secret—lots of people can see the strange elegance of a crumbling building. The lost-ness of these places and things gives them a kind of magnetism: two opposing poles of time drawn together.

It’s hard to think how these photographs might avoid the mythologizing of small towns, honest work, old-fashioned Americana, and unpeopled and/or abandoned places that seems to be a byproduct of looking at the past. Eastman, and other photographers and artists of his ilk, expect viewers to react to these images with wistfulness, to share his sense of wonder and loss. And the harsh, fleeting beauty of Eastman’s decaying places (or at least, his artful photographs of them) makes a pretty convincing case: Maybe we should feel sad that the shoe repair shop is closed, that the old marquee movie theater is for sale, that juke joints—at least by that name—are out of style. Maybe things really were better back then, when these washed out signs were in full color and business was booming.

Still, Eastman isn’t asking us to intervene in the process of vanishing, to do anything so bold as stop it from happening. He just wants us to witness it. For him, documentary photography is more of a solitary, poetic journey than a cause. And he’s not alone: If Eastman’s book leaves you wanting more, you can turn to “Ruin: Photographs of a Vanishing America” by Brian Vanden Brink, “A Handful of Dust: Disappearing America” by David Plowden, or “Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York” by James T. Murray. Another photographer, Edgar G. Praus, shoots under the auspices of the American Highway Project, a not-for-profit he founded to “[preserve] America’s roadside culture through photographic documentation.” (Tellingly, he’s also the owner of Praus Productions, Inc, the last remaining custom photo lab in Rochester, NY, a city that used to be known for them.) “Traveling back roads by choice, he can’t help but notice that the quaint, vernacular architecture and home-spun roadside attractions that he loves are rapidly disappearing,” Praus’s web site explains, with familiar sentiment.

Looking for more information about Michael Eastman’s process, I googled “Vanishing America” and stumbled on another project with the same name. This one is spearheaded by a photographer named Holt Webb, who drives around the country in a bus powered by vegetable oil; he positions his version of “Vanishing America” as a sort of activist project. Like Eastman, he’s interested in decaying buildings and old signs, but his bigger concern is the real and irrevocable vanishing of the natural environment. And he wants his audience to have more than a knee-jerk emotional response, to do more than just squint and sigh. With a busy, confusing website and a load of sponsors, his documentary project is much less austere, even if its message is ultimately—at least potentially—more sobering.

Webb’s aim, he writes on his site, is to “promote conservation and raise awareness about what we are losing—our culture, our wildlife, and our landscape—in hopes that some of it will still be around for future generations to enjoy.” It sounds like any other conservation project but for that word “culture,” which makes clear that he’s not just interested in photographing forests and wetlands, but in the shape and sensations of small town life, abandoned industry and various kinds of manmade Americana.

For people who care about photography—who see the world through their camera’s viewfinder—those latter subjects are pretty hard to resist, even if what you really care about saving is ancient forests. But it’s a little strange to see them all mixed up together in Webb’s world: swamps and wild horses alongside abandoned factory buildings. Sure, lots of different things stand as unofficial monuments to the past. But these things are hardly all vanishing in the same way, and I’m not sure it makes sense to mourn them in the same breath.

It all reminds me of why I’m uncomfortable with the idea that some part of America is “vanishing” in the first place, even if to some extent it’s undeniable. It’s hard not to hear the ominous political reverberations of that phrase (or others like it), which are so easily used to justify all sorts of terrifyingly regressive ideas. There are things to rescue and preserve, and things to remember. But they’re not necessarily the same things. “If not for Eastman’s dutiful camera, amnesia would surely have engulfed all these haunts,” Douglas Brinkley writes in the introduction to “Vanishing America.” The only reason I can enjoy that book without it breaking my heart is because I know Brinkley is overstating his case.

Photos by Eryn Loeb

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