This excerpt is courtesy of our friends at the Journal for Aesthetics and Protest.
You can visit them at http://www.joaap.org/6/

A while back I had a decision to make. It was a Saturday night in Los Angeles. I had a couple of options; one was to go to a party in Laurel Canyon where an enormous dream catcher had just been constructed. So enormous was this dream catcher that the Guinness Book people had come sometime the preceding week to take measurements. As the story goes, this bright cheery intriguing and delightful author opted for an easy night of whisky-gingers at a bar closer to home.

The next day, visions of huge dream catchers danced in my head. I wondered why anyone would make a big dream catcher in an urban area such as Los Angeles. Then I thought about the locale, and suddenly it all made sense. Recently Laurel Canyon has been home to an influx of new occupants, some of who are trying to imitate their musical progenitors by inhabiting the old houses. Laurel Canyon was considered a great place to be in the latter half of the 1960s through the 1970s. This was before things went downhill with events like the Wonderland murders and other such atrocities (drug casualties, commune over-saturation, etc.) spawned from the dark side of the Cultural Revolution’s wistful utopian dreams.[1] Perhaps the current residents are trying to suck some ghosts? Within this context it made sense then that these new inhabitants would try to possess the spirit of the place with a tool that the previous generation used to catch their psychic ghosts.

I conclued that this ginormous dream catcher reeks of an observed phenomenon that has appeared in the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century which I refer to as “Super-Nostalgia. This phenomenon is destroying our culture’s ability to find its own voice. It’s destroying our ability to find our needs and desires.

Read the entire essay here - http://www.joaap.org/6/another/rodriguez.html