Place Underpins This Space
An Updated Introduction
I’ve been thinking a lot about what Nostalgia Kills is supposed to be. What my writing is about. There have been a lot of new subscribers lately (like a quarter of my subs came in October alone) and I’ve been looking at what y’all come across to learn about this publication. The main spots are probably the About page or maybe my very first post here, which was a “Welcome” post. Both of these feel like outdated representations of what I’m doing here now, though. Earlier this year, this publication underwent a name change and although I did a little post about that, I never dug into why. So with all of this in mind, consider this a re-introduction for long-time viewers and a proper introduction for the new readers.
So, first of all, what’s up with the name? Nostalgia Kills (NK) came about as a response to my desire to log off from Instagram but still have somewhere to put my photos. I created a second Substack for that and realized that the name I had here, All Geographies are Memories, fit better for the theme of my photos. But also that the name was a bit clunky and so it got reworked into Memories of Geography (MoG). This all meant I needed a new name for here.
I eventually came up with Nostalgia Kills after listening to the Goody Grace EP of the same name. The name resonated more than the music did, striking me so viscerally as if the words bled into my soul in some incomprehensible way. I know, dramatic. I’m a deeply, tragically nostalgic person, to the extent that it sometimes feels like nostalgia’s eating me alive. I’ve heard many people describe nostalgia as a good feeling, like it may have a twinge of sadness, but also a happiness in the recollection of the past and its comforts. But nostalgia, for me, is pure melancholy, as I dwell more in the impossibility of touching the past, despite my longing, more than just being happy to recall it and maybe pay homage to it. If anything, it just furthers my hatred of the present.
I also think about how our culture has become overly nostalgic and not necessarily for good reason. Constantly rehashes of the past leave us without any future, without anything new, and maintains the status quo. It kills progress. Or the way it’s been used can. There are beneficial aspects to nostalgia, but our culture isn’t focused on that.
When I first started this blog, 2.5 years ago, in the thick of covid, I had a totally different idea for this speck of the Internet. I wanted to write scathing leftist critiques of various injustices, like the articles I saw tossed around Twitter. The audience I coveted was the kind that read The Narhwal or Briarpatch. If I’m being honest, there was an attempt at righteousness with this kind of writing, but I also wanted to use writing as a way to push myself to be more informed while gaining better awareness of my politics. But this kind of writing wasn’t me, or at least not fully. It was more aspirational, if anything. Not because I didn’t believe in it, but because the way I utilized it in writing didn’t fit me deeply, so it sometimes felt like a slog to write something.
A decade and a bit ago, I developed very pretentious, Pitchfork-y tastes in music. Wouldn’t listen to anything released after 2000. Mirrored the cool indie rock acts of the ‘90s, eschewing both hair and nu metal. My music library was a cacophony of surface-level critically acclaimed acts of the ‘70s through ‘90s. Pavement, Dinosaur Jr, Smashing Pumpkins, The Smiths, The Clash, Sonic Youth, Slint, Alice in Chains, Hole, Pixies, Joy Division, and on and on. Occasionally, electronic music crept in, like Daft Punk and Autechre.
I slowly broke out of this. First with acclaimed 21st-century rock acts, then (gasp) more danceable music. Now I listen to a lot of pop music, like I did before that era of pretenses. Much to the chagrin of my 20-year-old self, I’m sure. But I feel more myself in my musical tastes. I don’t force myself to listen to anything in order to “get it” like I used to.
That’s where I feel with my writing. I wasn’t really a writer before this Substack, but it feels like I’m coming into my own, even if it doesn’t meet somebody else’s standard (or my own invented one). The thing is, that pretentious era of music left a mark on me regardless, and I still do enjoy many of those acts, just in much smaller doses now. Except Hole’s Live Through This (1994) — that one really hits. I sometimes try new things, not because it’s who I am, but because it’s who I aspire to be. And, in time, these things find ways to mesh with the real me, which is never so completely that thing I’m aspiring to, and it just synthesizes in a way that feels more natural.
Regarding the content of my writing, I still find a lot of those injustices I wanted to write about before important (and therefore worth discussing). I usually find that there are far better voices out there to discuss them, but often the politics of those critiques I’d see online still creep into my writing, because that kind of analysis is a part of me. So those ideas and learning to write with them got synthesized into something less-head on, more personalized. This is how my Postmodernism and Vaporwave essay came to be. I’d like to think it flows less academically and more from an emotional place within me, which is a departure from Apocalypse, my first essay. I find cultural criticism comes much more naturally anyway, as I can more easily weave it into myself.
The overarching shift I’ve made since I started what’s now NK is one towards myself. From Apocalypse to Atomized Utopia to A Nostalgic Fever Dream to Stuck in Place there is a slow shift towards the personal until it becomes the thesis itself. I find it more inspiring to write this way. Others prefer writing from a more objective, informative, or academic perspective, but that just isn’t me. That kind of writing is great, but it comes less naturally and doesn’t compel me to write as much. I want to write about what moves me but also to tell you why it moves me and how that relates to my life. And that often comes with a political analysis, but woven in a less professional and more personal way, because I am so over academia. Academic writing is stilted and dense and jargon-y and I just want to have a conversation, which incorporates my humour, my vernacular, and who I am as a person in a way that academic writing cannot.
I recently had two social encounters that made me see what I’m doing here much more clearly. What underpins the way I interact in the world and how that translates here and beyond. It came on the heels of my Places are Languages post. A friend of mine, whose thoughts often guide me through rough patches and challenge me to go further in my endeavours, came to me with a review. It felt scathing, but it really wasn’t.
This friend has a knack for cutting through bullshit and seeing things as they are. He noticed that my preceding posts danced around an idea that I wasn’t really connecting in my brain as I was writing. What he realized as I was boring him with the minutiae of Germanic languages was that, in the subtext, I “so badly want people who love this shit like [I] do so [I] can get that passion back to [me].” To him, Places are Languages wasn’t about random musings on language but about “how deeply isolating it is to be so wildly passionate about ridiculously detailed things, deep things, like geography and place, and having no one to share that excitement with.” Oof.
He’s right. I mean, I did write that article genuinely as my recent thoughts on language via a rabbit hole I went down after coming to the epiphany that, well, places are, indeed, languages or exhibit qualities of them. Not everything needs to get to the bottom of things, but I really value this insight. And even when I don’t feel like getting into fundamentals, they still creep up, anyway, it seems like.
I’m now realizing that I tend to become clever and esoteric as a coping mechanism for my alienation. I think this goes back to junior high and the intense bullying I suffered from back then. I’ve brought this up before, but I’ve long thought about my junior high to high school to early adulthood trajectory of thinking as being one where I thought: “if I can’t be well-liked and popular, I will just be cool.” But that’s not what was really going on. More precisely, it’s “if I can’t be well-liked and understood, then I’m just going to be better than everybody else.” And my way of doing that was being clever and esoteric. I’m recognizing now how this has become a pattern of mine that continues to this day. Places are Languages is just the latest incarnation. I saved about a grand on therapy with that realization.
The next day, on the bus, I had another epiphany. I figured out what the guiding principle of NK is. It synthesized my friend’s thoughts with my sense of self. I realized everything I do boils down to place. In some way or shape. I’ve thought about how most people view cities as a means to an end and aren’t lovers of the urban like I am. It gives them access to jobs and shows and modern conveniences and friends. But the natural and pastoral moves them. However, I like cities as an end unto themselves and I love understanding them. But I think this is just a proxy for place. The places I tend to gravitate towards just so happen to be the urban, because I’ve got a very firmly rooted love of the urban that I don’t totally get, even after decades. But cities are places, nevertheless. I’ve spent a decade and a half photographing as a means to the end of understanding and relating to place. Now I do the same via writing.
To be clear, I mean place in a multitude of ways. Most obviously, it refers to a specific geography of some sort. Usually the urban, but not always. Sometimes real and sometimes imaginary. But always a deep passion of mine.
It also refers to time. A place in history, the timeline, whatever you want to call it. I probably have a proper treatise on time in me somewhere, but instead, I dance around it with my nostalgiacore tendencies. Time freaks me out and is behind much of my deep melancholy. This guides my emotions in many ways and spurs a lot of my creativity.
But place also relates to my friend’s insight. In the sense of my place in this world and how it feels like I don’t have a spot. I don’t have people who share my passions, only the occasional person who’ll indulge me. I don’t have a community that I feel connected to, where I feel safe and comfortable being myself fully. I have people who talk over me, who seem bored by me, and who make me uncomfortable. Any ersatz version of community that existed before covid has been long extinguished. This is a lonesome existence. In planning courses, we were taught about the importance of creating a sense of place — whether it’s a street, neighbourhood, or city. This creates an identity that people can tether to and engage with, and feel a sense of belonging or at least interest. I may have a sense of myself, but I lack a sense of place. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. But a lot of my emotions are about relating to finding a place and my attempts at doing so.
Half of my battle with Edmonton isn’t even with Edmonton itself. It’s my place within it, both geographically and personally. Yes, the city sucks in a lot of ways, but my circumstance exacerbates things. I don’t live somewhere walkable and it takes too goddamn long to get into the central city that it often feels not worth going out. I don’t have the patience for ETS that I did in 2019. I’m fairly sure that, provided the living conditions were good, if I lived somewhere central, maybe near an LRT station, my impression of Edmonton would be much better. Then there’s the aforementioned lack of a strong tether to community. If I had people to share my passions with or feel myself in some way that I could see regularly, I know my mental health would improve significantly. I just haven’t found my niche in Edmonton’s social scene, so going out feels like interacting with the graveyard of my previous attempts at finding one.
If you asked me a few months ago what kind of writer I want to be, I would’ve said that I want to write about cities the way Susan Sontag wrote about photography. I still think this is broadly true, as cities are a massive passion of mine. But I’ve also noticed lately how cathartic and eye-opening it can be to dig into more personal stuff. Almost like taking myself to therapy. But I can do both, can’t I? And the thing tying it all together is a place, whether in a personal or analytic way. What a place means, what my place is, what a place in time is about.
After I got off the bus, I went for a walk, letting this epiphany marinate a bit. Then, I met a new friend for dinner. He has a completely different opinion of Edmonton than I do. This is someone who’s quite optimistic about the city, content to be here, and hopeful for its future. It was honestly refreshing, weirdly enough. This was also the day that Edmonton delivered the one-two slay of updating its zoning bylaw to be among the most progressive in Canada and finally gave an opening date for the much-delayed Valley Line. Truth be told, even I was feeling a bit optimistic that day.
Including this new friend, there are a couple of other folks I befriended here in Edmonton earlier this year. When I met every single one of these people for the first time, I felt jolted alive. Like I’d awoken from a coma. It was like 2019 again, but better. The baggage of the last few years temporarily slipped away. It felt like, when conversing with each new person, I saw a glimmer of what I’ve always wanted: to have a place in this world where I can connect and geek out over shared passions with others. With people my own age, no less. I should probably hang out with these people more often than I have. But I know that I tend to get excited about new people in my life and maybe wind up a little too eager because I just need something beyond the emotional aloofness and never available I’m used to. With every new person, there’s this potential that maybe I’ll finally have people who can have space for me in a real way. That’s the excitement and the hope. I haven’t had that hope in a long time, because of covid, but it’s nice to have. I’ve been having too hard a time figuring out how to be a person again, post-pandemic (but that’s a topic for another time).
All of this is to say, where I go from here on NK will, most likely, in some way or shape, relate to place. I don’t want to say that it always will, because I don’t want to paint myself into a box, but it’ll be the most common theme I have. Sometimes that may connect to my other creative expression, photography, and sometimes something completely random, like language. Certain pieces will tug more on a version of place than others, whether that’s a geographic place, place within time, or my place in this world. Place is the only consistency I can see for NK, the veneer of each post will vary as wildly as my emotions will allow, but it’ll guide these posts whether directly or not. I hope, especially for all the new folks here, this sounds interesting to you.
And with that, I welcome you to this new chapter of Nostalgia Kills that’s been brewing for some time. Also, I’ve updated my About page, finally!