I read a story once about Steve Jobs and nostalgia in Wired:
It’s the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, but Steve Jobs’ eyes are dry. At the company headquarters in Silicon Valley, where he was presenting a set of new laptops to the press last October, I mentioned the birthday to him. Jobs recoiled at any suggestion of nostalgia. “I don’t think about that,” he said. “When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”
As a general statement I don’t much pine for the “good old days.” I like things like iPhone’s and the Internet and not worrying about long distance telephone calls. Even though my TV viewing has gone down dramatically since the cutting of cable I can still, more or less, stream any show I want whenever I want it. It is all a far cry from having ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and the upstart FOX. And, for the most part, I think it is change for the better.
However, every once in a while, I do get into a nostalgic mood. And forever whatever reason, whether it be because today is the last day of 2010 or something else, I find myself looking back. I think it actually may have started this morning when I read about the last roll of Kodachrome film being developed.
PARSONS, Kan. — An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color film and still the most beloved.
My dad was a hobbyist photographer when I was growing up. I remember him taking pictures with a Canon AE-1 all the time, from things like birthdays to just regular old daily activity. I also remember going with him to the corner drugstore to get film developed. Sometimes I’d even take film in from the little Pocket Instamatic camera that he had bought me.
In particular I remember anxiously waiting to see if a picture of a cardinal I took out our dining room window would be worthy of sending to National Geographic. Turns out the bird was a tiny red speck. On the bright side at the same corner store you could buy baseball cards so the trip wasn’t a complete waste.
Anymore I take pictures with my iPhone, not because of the quality of the picture but because of the convenience of the device. The results are immediate, it can be shared in a second, and although I haven’t taken a picture of a cardinal with it I would assume that its publication quality is quite a bit higher.
The technology has moved forward and in about every way it is better.
At the same time there is an iPhone app called Instagram which I love because it takes pictures like the ones I took 25 years ago. The first one I took of my son essentially looks like a Kodachrome slide:
What is new, is now old again.
So maybe deep down I am an old sentimental and I just don’t like to admit it. Or maybe since 2010 hasn’t been that great of a year (stupid ACL) like Don Draper says I’m just looking for the occasional time machine. Regardless, here’s to 2010, I won’t miss you. Let’s see what develops in 2011.
Mad Men ´The Carousel´ from Emilio on Vimeo.
