If ‘The Big Chill’ left you cold, read on ...

Press, 19 April 1989, Page 10

If ‘The Big Chill’ left you cold, read on ...

NZPA-AP Chicago Does “The Big Chill” leave you cold? Tired of hearing “oldies” older than you on television commercials? Three exasperated young upstarts say, “Right on!” The reminder that the calendar says 1989 comes from the National Association for the Advancement of Time (Naftat) — three guys in their 20s who say, “We want to end the 60s in you r lifetime.” “Let’s make nostalgia a thing of the past,” say these fellows who’ve had enough of the baby boom — that huge post-World War II generation whose sheer bulk spurred creation of the retail market for teenagers, divided the United States over Vietnam, and is now taking up spacfe discovering adulthood —marriage, careers and babies destined to grow up hearing stories about Woodstock. An : anti-nostalgia crusader, Eugene Dillenburg, dismisses baby boomers as “50 million teenagers whomever grew up.”

But they won’t go away. “There’s so many of them. If they want to live in their past, that’s fine — but they’re forcing me to live in their past,” gripes Mr Dillenburg, aged 29, of Chicago. He founded Naftat with two friends, Bruce Elliott of Los Angeles, and John Keeney of New York City. Here’s a sampling from Mr 'Dillenburg’s long list of complaints: • Movies — “The Big Chill.” • Theatre — the revival of “Hair.” • Television — “The Wonder Years.” • Print media — Bob Greene’s nationally syndicated “Chicago Tribune” columm. • Books — volumes on the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago — “As insignificant an event as ever happened in this country.” Naftat is part of a natural antiboomer backlash, according to-a Northwestern University sociolo-

gist, Bernard Beck, who says any cultural statement that lasts too long “seems to generate resentment.” By failing to step aside “the way it’s supposed to,” the baby-boom generation has “thrown out of kilter the ordinary succession of generations,” Mr Beck said. “There always has been disdain towards this generation because there’s so .many of us in it,” observed Greene, singled out by Mr Dillenburg as a sort of archboomer. Greene, defends nostalgia, saying readers of all ages respond to his columns about the past. But when Mr Dillenburg and Mr Elliott got together in 1987 and discovered their mutual exasperation with “oldies” radio, they decided it was time to get the Monkees off their backs. Preserve what is worth remembering from the 60s — the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Civil Rights Movement, for example — and scrap the rest, Mr Dillenburg suggests. >