“I’m going to show you something cool,” I say to my husband while leading him to the back of a room on the bottom level of Central Library. “And, by cool, I mean super dorky.”
I love browsing through old stuff. It’s not a nostalgia thing. I don’t long for the past. I just like to make connections between what was and what is. It’s how my DJ brain works. Like, a significant moment in my evolution as a music nerd came in my late teens, when I stopped thinking of ‘60s soul as my parents’ music and realized it was the basis for most of what I liked. Every song builds on what came before it. DJing is just figuring out how it all fits together.
Movies are similar. Like, the other night I just happened to catch I Want to Live! on TCM. Susan Hayward plays a woman found guilty of murder and sentenced to death in the 1950s. It’s a terrific movie – Hayward won an Oscar for her performance – and, in the midst of it, I thought, OMG, this is Female Trouble! Divine as Dawn Davenport was totally channeling Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham!
This is cultural literacy, something that’s lost when you’re served media via a corporation’s algorithm. You think you’re learning something because your feed is overloaded with variations of the same “How New Order Made ‘Blue Monday’” video, but you aren’t. You’re just parroting AI-generated summaries of Wikipedia entries. If you want to be really culturally literate, you need to get out into the world and figure things out for yourself. That’s why I love thrift stores and record shops, museums and libraries. Particularly, I love Central Library.
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