If you’re talking to me, I wasn’t ‘bitching’, as certain posters seem to have taken it. It’s just that it seems so odd to all of a sudden be meeting adults who have little to no idea of people and things that have been around all your life.
You’ll experience it yourself one day if you’re lucky enough to live that long.
Which brings me to another reason you would be wrong to think of it as bitching: I view these generation-gap disconnects as simply the inevitable result of being lucky enough to grow older. Lots of people don’t get the chance to experience these kinds of things, and as long as I do, I’ll consider myself lucky to be doing so.
::aims shotgun:: And now, get the hell off my lawn before I blast ya one!
See, the problem I have with this (it’s especially prevelant on this board) is that a lot of boomers feel the need to lament a youngin’s lack of knowledge of a piece of pop culture that usually disappeared before they were born.
You’re tsk tsking this woman for not knowing who Nancy Sinatra was even though the last time she did anything of note was 15 years before this woman was born. Hell, even Frank Sinatra was little more than “that guy who sings a bunch of songs my parents and grandparents like” at that point in time.
If you really have the type of mentality to think that sort of thing up on the spur of the moment like this, you need to leave the frozen tundra and go to Hollywood where aging hippies can sometimes find lucrative work writing jokes and movies.
So I’m gonna pretend to believe that you just came up with that right now instead of pulling it out of some dusty closet in your memory and say…
Er, why, exactly? All I know about Frank Sinatra is that he sings a lot of boring music that my dad likes, and while I know the name “Cary Grant” and that he was an actor, I couldn’t tell you what he looked like or a single movie he was in. Who cares, really?
Apparently you do not have an interest in classic movies. A lot of people do and like to contrast old movies with newer ones. They think it broadens their understanding.
But that’s the point, if you’re not a film buff, “classic movies” are just old movies. That’s no reason to avoid them, but that’s no reason to seek them out either.
Those that do (and I count myself among them, a classic is a classic for a reason) obviously get something out of them, but not knowing about the career of someone who was dead before you were born does not make you deficient in some way.
I mean, I know more about old comic books, comic strips, and cartoons than most people four times my age; it isn’t as though I can’t appreciate old shit.
The point is that thirty years from now it would be silly of me to go around being flabbergasted that the youth of 2040 don’t know who Clay Aiken is. Why on Earth should they care?
Hell, I come across this type of thing right now when I frequent video game forums. There are kids now who started gaming with the PS2 and have no idea what I’m going on about when I get all excited about Castlevania 3, but I can’t fault them for not having played a game that came out ten years before they were born.
Oh, and I spent last night watching Thing From Another World and Jason and the Argonauts, which I DVRed from TCM.
