Davies in the Anxious Interval
Last War in Albion will return next week with the first of ten posts on Doom Patrol.
The music critic and musician Momus formulated a model of nostalgia cycles that hinges on the concept of the anxious interval. It goes something like this: we live in, unsurprisingly, the present—a concept that does not simply entail the here and now, but the last couple of years—any point in the culture that does not feel in some fashion “dated.” Momus suggests that “If you can look at a photo of yourself and not think ‘God, what a strange haircut I had, and what strange sunglasses I was wearing!’ then that photo was probably taken in the present.”
Sitting immediately behind the present, however, is the anxious interval—the awkward period of culture which has started to look dated, but is not yet old enough to reclaim and repurpose. As Momus puts it, “the anxious interval is a place, a style, a set of references we avoid, repress, sublimate, have selective amnesia about, stow away, throw out, deliberately forget”
Past the anxious interval is the goldmine—the points in culture that can be freely reclaimed and repurposed, and indeed from which the present’s sense of “cool” is usually being borrowed. (There’s also a tiny borderzone between them, the battlefront, which is where the cutting edge of tastemakers are currently sorting and writing a variety of “X IS GOOD ACTUALLY” hot takes—the point where the past is actively being contested, basically.)
And then, further back, is the anxious echo—the period that served as the goldmine for the anxious interval, and that is thus being forgotten along with it. Unlike the anxious interval’s forgetting, which exists so that it can be undone later as the goldmine, the anxious echo is being forgotten with some permanence; it will resurface simply as the past, a vast and undifferentiated set of old stuff, some bits perhaps easier to access than others at any given moment, but mostly just old. Crucially, what’s remembered will either be individual things—Dune, for example—or will be remembered within a single history-minded work—Last Night in Soho is certainly about the 1960s, but it’s not the vanguard of any sort of 1960s revivalism—it’s just a period piece. Another wholesale 1960s revival is now about as likely as an 1860s revival.
A few months ago my friend Alex made a mixtape for his Patreon themed around the anxious interval—a collection of music from the current interval that he felt held up and was thus interesting to look at from the vantage point of the present. The years he selected for this exercise were 2005-2009, which you may recognize as a set of dates that also describes the Russell T Davies era. Which is interesting given that the Russell T Davies era is on its way back.
The idea that the anxious interval sits somewhere around the Davies era checks out, at least within television. After all, The Sopranos (1999-2007) just exited its anxious interval into massive celebration—remember five years ago when we were all desperately tired of Troubled Male Antiheroes in prestige television, when HBO embarrassed itself massively with Vinyl?…