craner
Beast of Burden
Borderline Boomer, probably, in which case the point still stands. Like Sonic Youth as Boomer Gen X icons.
Boomer Nostalgia
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Borderline Boomer, probably, in which case the point still stands. Like Sonic Youth as Boomer Gen X icons.
One current I noticed with my British Boomer dad is a real hostility to unions because of the Three-Day Week. He has a strong sense of people striking as just being greedy and trying to fuck things up for everyone else to get what they want.
pattycakes_
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Pynchon. D&G. Burroughs. The board's haunted by the 60s.
craner
Beast of Burden
I was talking about the Boomer's own story about themselves. The Big Chill is the perfect example and nostalgia is only one part of it (misleading thread title, sorry). There is nostalgia and elegy, but also self-defence, self-recrimination, celebration, critique, etc. Each decade is part of the narrative arc: idealism, disillusion, making it, getting power, misusing power, cashing in, making an exit.
Another example is the depiction of Mark Hunter's parents in Pump up the Volume, which is a Boomer film director painting a miniture portrait of his own generation but filtering it through the eyes of Gen Xers for a Gen X audience.
craner
Beast of Burden
No I haven't.
British Boomers seem to be the generation most strongly committed to the mythology of WWII. The previous generations that actually experienced it don't have quite the same jingoistic relationship to it and the later generations are far enough removed from it not to be fully taken in.
They've a reputation for being the greatest proponents of the "Bootstraps / Stop buying avocado toast / Just hand them your CV in person" mindset too.
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craner
Beast of Burden
This is true, although I think you're being a bit unfair on the Boomers here.
It reminds me of a documentary I watched about Keith Richards around the time his autiobiography came out. The most interesting part of it was the interview they filmed in his library, which has a very large collection of books about WW2. It was practicaly all he read, but he was a serious reader. This bit was completely genuine and surprising and revealed somebody fairly thoughtful and intelligent under his ludicrious blues pirate persona. He had a very vivid recollection of the immediate post-war period because it was his childhood. His imagination was largely shaped by the war and by the world of the Mississppi Delta blues, both tantalisingly close but also out of reach. This was not unusual, as it turned out. The fascination had deep roots.
But there was also an implicit rejection of the war in the Boomer worldview; a political, cultural and psychological repudiation of the War generation that echoed the way the Lost Generation of the 1920s rejected their parents and grandparents and their barbaric war.
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Much of the west has been in retrospective mode for a good few decades now, but it feels like it's losing steam. At one point not so long ago, there was at least some much needed relief to be gleaned from it, "the world may be crumbling/music's gone to shit but at least _____ is still alive and kicking." In the UK its all about the National Treasures™, Stephen Fry, The Beatles, Judi Dench, David Attenborough, The BBC (what it used to represent at least.) Safe institutions that present a good self image in the mirror and to the outside. Still flummoxes me how the anglophile thing got so fkn big. But as that gen start to literally crumble themselves and these legacy revival events and appearances inevitably start to sag, it all begins to lose its lustre.
can you elaborate on that a bit more?
craner
Beast of Burden
There is a strong Boomer mindset that accepted Thatcher/Reagan as "necessary" after the 1970s even if they could only openly vote for a liberal that had accepted the New Right free market revolution and given it a kinder, cooler face. Clinton and Blair as late Boomer politics incarnate.
The flipside of this is the repentant radicals, the ones who got burnt by the excesses of their own generation and chose the political and cultural "antithesis" (which in some ways, wasn't anything of the kind). This is the younger second generation neoconservative tendency breaking off from the New Left. Horowitz and Collier's Destructive Generation is as important here (and to this thread) as The Big Chill.
Thirtysomething anxiety mapping onto the early political Culture Wars.
This is the line my dad takes, says the unions "needed breaking". His dad was in some sort of management position on Salford docks, iirc, and felt similarly, so that's obviously where he got it from.