1950s Consumer Panacea
Posted in Discourse on Wed Sep 27, 06 by Kyle under Midcentury Modern and Film-Video.
A couple of posts back I looked at the concept of postalgia, a yearning for the future that never came to pass and presented a futuristic marketing film featuring an idealized panoply of mid-century modern goods and environs. In contemporary times midcentury modern design is often now considered as being emblematic of a clutter-free, pristine, meditative, and elegant era and existence. I have always thought that this was a curious characterization.
In my mind, albeit not having experienced it myself, the 50s was the decade when the tide towards the culture of consumerism and delight in acquisition of “stuff” was at its most eagerly accepted and heartfelt peak…
Continue reading the rest of 1950s Consumer Panacea...
Add your opinion.
Poststalgia for the Future
Posted in Discourse on Sun Sep 10, 06 by Kyle under Midcentury Modern and Industrious Production.
I came across a great new word recently, postalgia. A mashup of the verbal kind crossing nostalgia and the “post” prefix, as in postwar or post-Impressionism. (Notice how I so kindly declined to offer as an example the most abused “post”-ism buzzword of the late 20th century.) Fortunately, unlike some other unmentioned post-words you needn’t a postdoctoral degree to appreciate postalgia. According to the definition submitted to Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary by the neologism’s sci-fi writing creator Mark Shainblum postalgia is:
1. a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for a projected future that never was; i.e. as promised by Disneyland and science fiction of the 1950’s.
2. a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for a future era by a time-traveller in the past.
I couldn’t have defined it better myself. I encountered this new word while listening to a podcast of A Way with Words from KPBS on my ever-so-forward-yearning iPod and couldn’t help but think how appropriate the term is considering the Mid-Century Modern revival that is now sweeping the nation. The glowing idealism and faith in material and scientific progress of that era certainly seems appealing now in a time when things seem so much more complicated, unstable, and tumultuous. Considering it was a decade when there were only five megabyte hard-drives, idyllic four-person families, three major television networks, two genders, and one distant looming enemy threatening the US with nuclear annihilation, the 1950s seems downright stress-free and unambiguous compared with the poly-obbsessed, post-everything present.
So with mawkish utopian enthusiasm, let’s take a look back at some treasured postalgic treats from the 1950s that I’ve dug up for your scopic pleasure…
Continue reading the rest of Poststalgia for the Future...