Charlie’s Men: The Italian

Chapter:// “Nostalgia”

Yes, I guess I’m old.

Forty-something is the new black and therefor this newly black person likes nostalgia.

I like nostalgia like people like the new Drake. Intensely. Although, when placed under a microscope, completely useless and overrated.

My feelings for nostalgia have somehow rendered me into this hermit kind of person. I don’t necessarily have to go outside to enjoy my nostalgia. Parties and festivals have become so extremely pointless—they’re all the same, attract the same people you meet everywhere and they (face it!) don’t seem to add anything to the pages of history; nostalgia-wise (just like the parties, for that matter)—I find no reason to attend. I find no reason to perform. I find no reason whatsoever.

My friend, companion, pal The Italian is a bit like that too. He craves coffee, but only coffee the way his family—a bunch of secluded, life-loving Italians, strategically situated on an island called Sicily—started making coffee four hundred years ago. He likes Vespa’s, but only the old-timer version of it—not the remakes that seem to terrorize traffic in cities like Rome, Milan and Naples. He enjoys Limoncello, but he prefers the type that comes directly from his family’s citrus-plantation—no economical or logistic interference of any kind, mind you. The Italian is my main-man when it comes to nostalgia.

I know: we’ve been to too many parties in our teens and twenties. The five-party-weekends of Nostalgia-Days-Past have turned us into snobs. We don’t like parties anymore. We witnessed the most legendary parties, with the most legendary performances, the most legendary deaths in bathrooms and the most legendary drug abuse imaginable. Why settle for less?

Well, we don’t.

We hardly go anywhere. But we feast on our memories. And we feed each other memories. Nostalgic memories.

Past summer, while I was hopping around on the Azores—climbing volcanoes, whale watching, enjoying the climate, you name it—he visited Malta.

And even though we were (approximately) 2,214 miles apart from each other, thanks to our cell phones and some wifi, we were still very close.

Sending each other the infamous shower-selfies—why?—updates on whatever it is we, and the families we took along with us, did and—more importantly—ate and drank during our holidays in the sun.

(And then the nostalgia kicked in.)

photo by S.T. Vacirca

One day he send me a photo. Every other person would say: “well, that’s nice. Feet in the water, nice coast-line, great weather.” Some might even say: “You’re my favorite otter,” like some did to me, a few years ago when some of my beach photos were published. And I didn’t even know what an otter was. Now I do. And The Italian is of the same category, I have to add. But that’s not the point. Nor has it anything to do with nostalgia.

I watched the photo The Italian send me, and my attention was immediately drawn to his belly, and more precise to his crotch. And there you had it! The nostalgia-cells in my brain went into overdrive. He had his Walkman lying on his crotch. And not your average, little, lousy-sounding, Apple-run, mp3-playing, destroying-the-sound-of-music-and-sound-overall Walkman. This was a Walkman that played cassette-tapes!

The way a Walkman should be. The way a Walkman should sound. The way why Walkman’s were invented in the first place. The way life makes sense.

Well, first The Italian send me the photo. Few minutes later—while my brain was still overdriving—he send a little message. “I bet you’ve seen it! I’m listening to all my Madonna tapes on a sea-shore rock in Malta.” And I bet that the tapes were the original eighties and nineties tapes; the very ones he store-bought some 25-plus years ago, when going to a record store was a necessity in life.

Still focused on the picture, my overdriving mind send me sound-bites from the eighties. I bet many other people, focusing on the photo, start imagining the heat of the sun on the skin, the sound of the waves crashing on the shore, perhaps even the smells of a 2,000-miles-away-from-me little, Mediterranean island.

But that’s not how my nostalgic brain works. My brain send me “Everybody, come on, dance and sing. Everybody, get up and do your thing.” An song (album) recoded on analogue equipment, in a basement somewhere in New York City. With hiss and buzz and fizz. The way it should be. Not the digitally remastered version that sounds like shite. The version that wasn’t Dolby-ed to death. The version that we store-bought (we had to bike to town, walk the streets till we reached the record-store, browse through boxes full of actual vinyl records, pull out whatever we thought of buying, going over to the counter, asking someone to put the vinyl on the record-player in order to listen to the record before we bought it, listen, listen, share headphones with friends so they could ventilate their opinion as well, ask the person behind the counter if there was a cassette-version available of the very same album—which came in handy for the Walkman—buy the entire set, walk the streets back to the bikes, ride back home—your place or mine?—go upstairs to the bedroom, put vinyl on player, listen, listen, enjoy, enjoy, whoops-gotta-go-it’s-time-for-dinner-see-you-tomorrow! And kids today think they have it hard. Losers!) so many years ago.

Where’s the romance of starting computer, web-surf to music-store, click, listen 30 second, click, buy, either download or wait for the postman to deliver package, press play, listen, Facebook? Well, there is no romance in this scenario. None whatsoever! This life is gluten free. And nostalgia will not be build up in those brains. And when there’s no nostalgia, what’s the point anyway?

When there’s no nostalgia, you look at a picture, send a 👍 for the sake of it, and immediately swipe left or right to see what other—in your twisted opinion, based on loose sand—very important friends are doing and/or posting about. And nostalgia cannot be store-bought. Not even on-line.

The other day—back from our vacation addresses—The Italian asked me to fetch a bottle of Champagne from the fridge. And to my total satisfaction, his fridge is packed with nostalgia.

You see, The Italian has his medieval, Sicilian standards raised so high, it’s only natural he listens to music on cassette-tape Walkman’s. It’s only natural he—as a born and authentic photographer—cannot get a job photographing men and women in designer outfits, since his manner of working—the nostalgic one—is so extremely time consuming, Amanda de Cadenet and her iPhone photos of models wearing haute couture, becomes an in-demand photographer—no offence.

There’s no room for the nostalgic artist anymore. Even Oz Purple has a hard time—and believe me, he is usually very hard around his models; and why wouldn’t he be—to get his own publications published.

Nostalgia is now an emoticon on devices of people who don’t care, don’t understand and frequently very rapidly forget…