PERUSING THE NATIONAL AND TORONTO MEDIA (who can tell the difference these days?), we might conclude that Canada's music scene has recently suffered two tremendous blows. The first: the closing of seedy Spadina Avenue rock and roll club the El Mocambo (best recognized by the garish palm tree adorning its exterior). The second: the abrupt bankruptcy of the equally garish Sam the Record Man, no longer retail tugboat to a Yonge Street strip forever threatening to hit the reefs and sink.

In truth, neither event really mattered as much as the media made it seem. A lengthy CBC radio report on the El Mo failed to mention that not only is the main floor still open, but the heart and soul of the El Mo--booker Dan Burke--is relocating to a club around the corner. Plus, classic El Mo events like Vazaleen, the monthly glam-queer dance party live on at other downtown venues. Three pages in the Toronto Star on Sam's disappearance neglected to point out the obvious--that specialty stores, online ordering, and MP3 files are all better ways to acquire new music than wandering through the disorganized aisles of Sam's, where customer service amounted to: ``It's over there somewhere.''

So why the feeding frenzy? The answer can be boiled down to one word: Nostalgia.

Like a tapeworm in the colon, nostalgia feeds off our desires. Nostalgia provides a chimera by which we can compare our deflated present to a pumped up past. Nostalgia tells us that things will never again be as good as when the Rolling Stones smelled like teen spirit, not corporate ooze. As the legend goes, long before Jagger et al became the geriatric gentlemen of arena rock, they spontaneously and completely rocked our world by staging a surprise takeover of the vaunted El Mocambo. In the process, they secured the club's status through the ages, despite the horrible sight lines, lack of ventilation and reek of stale beer.

NOSTALGIA REARS ITS UGLY HEAD IN ALMOST every aspect of our cultural discourse, most obviously in our daily media--where non-nostalgic, non-commercial cultural reporting is practically nonexistent. It's also evident in our museums and galleries, and, disturbingly, in the living record of our times--in the paintings, sculptures, mall display windows, videos, zines, music, and writings that make up North American culture.

A lengthy story in the Toronto Star's arts section sports the unbelievable headline ``When Films Mattered.'' Pink Floyd's greatest hits album sells millions, proving we never forget our first experience with bloated pseudo-rebellious art rock. Five out of six of the 2001 Giller Prize nominees are set in the fictionalized past. The most blatant culprit, a novel about two sisters in small town Ontario during the Great Depression, won both the Giller and the Governor General's awards. Echo and the Bunnymen and the Psychedelic Furs revival tour coming soon to an arena near you!

You'll note from this list that no generation is immune to the pernicious parasite of nostalgia. An endless loop of eighties dance nights (playing an endless loop of remixed versions of Soft Cell's ``Tainted Love'') not only give us a place to party, but also a space to reflect on how Gen-X nostalgia now makes baby boomer nostalgia seem as spontaneous and refreshing as a toddler's belief in Santa Claus.

DESPITE NOSTALGIA'S POWER TO OBSCURE the new and meaningful with the regurgitated and overdone, it is possible to reference our storied yesteryear without getting all mushy. A new exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery, for example, brings together works from the city's private collections, organizing the diverse works into a Group of Seven show, an exhibit of contemporary and modern art, and a history of photography from the mid-19th century to the mid-1980s. The combination is fascinating. One moment it's the now unavoidably nostalgic landscapes of, say, good old Lawren Harris, the next, the scribbled irreverence of a Marcel Dzama drawing. Original Rolling Stone album artwork versus a sleepy Algonquin landscape. Nostalgia versus nostalgia in a cage-match battle set to run until the end of time.

Despite the jarring success of these juxtapositions, it was the photographic exhibit that intrigued me most. The VAG avoids sloppy sentiment, and compels me to move from 19th century Edward Curtis daguerreotypes of West Coast tribespeople, to an absolutely riveting picture in which a Nazi collaborator is confronted by the other residents of a displaced persons camp. This is history without the histrionics. Here, we confront the difficulties of objective history at a time when every historical record seems an invitation to belt out refrains of a previous decade's theme song, say, In the Ghetto They Starved Us to Death But We Sang Quaint Yiddish Songs or Rain Dance of the Smallpox-Ridden Great Warrior.

Consider also two recently released works that reflect on the last four decades of cultural production in Canada. Impure, the theory, practice and oral history of `spoken word' in Montreal (Conundrum Press), compiled by Victoria Stanton and Vincent Tinguely, is an absolutely staggering compendium spanning 30 years in this most literary of Canada's cities. Beautifully designed and organized, the book pays homage to history without getting trapped in it. Long time scenesters like Norman Nawrocki and Fortner Anderson discuss how great it was to be on the vanguard and watch the punk scene morph into the spoken word scene. They also speak frankly about the realities of people getting ripped off, burning out or, in the case of the post-punker turned performer Ian Stephens, dying before the spoken word community he helped create could come together and transcend itself.

Inside the Pleasure Dome, Fringe Film In Canada (Coach House Books) by Mike Hoolboom, recently expanded and re-issued, is another largely interview-based oral history of a very specific genre. Though organization here is by artist, the effect is similar. Culture is imbued with history, but not at the expense of its present-day possibilities. I stop to read about how Maritime filmmaker Barbara Sternberg came to make her first film. In one brief section, we get a vision of life in Sackville, New Brunswick in the late 1970s, a sense of an industrial age already drawing to a close, and insight into the mind of a budding filmmaker who would go on to quietly make 10 short experimental films over the next 20 years.

Since these texts consists largely of interviews with those who were--and remain--on hand, a living, breathing culture is depicted with all its warts, glories and on-going challenges. They speak of other eras--even idealize them--but in a way that both recognizes the primacy of our current struggles. They are the antithesis of nostalgia, which slaps a beige coating of caricature and conformity over a cultural event--whether the moment ends in a splash of blood or a happily-ever-after rainbow. Located somewhere between cold hard facts and the soft focus, perpetually re-released hard sell, we find a valid nostalgia that acknowledges the messiness of lived experience without devaluing the lessons--and legends--we might find if we look to the past.

Sam the Record Man is closed and the El Mo--whose bouncer once dragged me down the stairs after I began randomly, drunkenly pulling plugs out of the sound system in the middle of a Jim Caroll reading--is diminished. Familiar lights on familiar garish neon fixtures may be fading or even gone, but new music is hardly dead. In the lengthening shadow, we raise our lighters to the sky till our thumbs sear. Are we celebrating the latest old folks world tour--Rod Stewart, Picasso, Walter Gretzky? Or are we just trying to illuminate the living breathing cultural practices of new generations? In Montreal, the Casa del Popolo hosts the next decade's poets. In Winnipeg, the Mondragon Cafe collective plots revolution. In Vancouver, post-rock semi-jazz quintet the Beans release Crane Wars, in which repetitive off-kilter trumpets, spare percussion and distant voices yearn for a way forward but nod in time to a history we haven't completely given up on. Tiny flames fill the gaps between marquee billboards celebrating yesterday. Will it take a bonfire to get noticed?

Gen-X nostalgia now makes baby boomer nostalgia seem as spontaneous and refreshing as a toddler's belief in Santa Claus.