ribs recordings

It is February 2025, a month after the Bob Dylan film starring Timothee Chalamet was released, and every shop and cafe I walk into is playing Bob Dylan. The only place I can recall hearing him prior to this is through my grandmother’s car speakers in the summer I was ten. I listen to the harmonica, played by the man for whom my sole association was – until January this year – the favourite singer of my estranged great uncle in Australia (the owner of 10 shirts all carrying the same slogan, washed and worn in rotation: I still buy records). 

(This is one of the few things I know about him)

Now, I find myself soaked in a strange pseudo-nostalgia for Dylan’s New York of the 1970’s, as commercially reproduced in the film. Unrelated, I speak to my boyfriend who believes that he missed the peak of the city he’s from – Amsterdam. I ask him when he thinks this peak occurred. “Before the 2000’s”, he says. He feels a strange sense of jealousy towards those who got to live it, a sense of having been cheated. I say: “We must be one of the first generations to feel such a sense of nostalgia for times we did not live through”. 

It is the skewed evolution of the sentiment ‘back in my day…’, but with the possessive pronoun retracted. 

Back in ___ day

Back in 

Back

It is felt without the underlying smugness of those who lived through the moment they mourn for, who equate the peak of society with the peak of their own lives; instead it carries the muted downtrodden-ness of a person who understands they have no claim over the shining worlds reproduced for them through all the culture they consume, that its nostalgia is not theirs to feel. It is a place, I suppose, of reminiscence divorced from its content. It is not the loss of a person, but the second-hand loss of a life never lived but relentlessly approximated.