Time is both the best friend and worst enemy of art. Culture shifts and morphs daily into new language and new modes of expression, and the voice of the past either becomes timeless or unintelligible in tandem. Author David Lindsay was no one in the 1920s while he was still publishing. He was thirty years dead by the time his hallucinatory novel A Voyage to Arcturus was celebrated by academia. Alternatively, Our American Cousin was considered great comedy and great theater a century and a half back. Today, you’d be hard pressed to understand what the damn script even means. Enduring works persist for a number of reasons. They speak to an unchanging facet of human experience (love, loss, etc.) or they stay durable through sheer architectural integrity, perfect examples of their medium (I can find no other reason why people continue to read Melville.) Sometimes, though, art survives as a time capsule, something that takes a place and a time, no matter how insignificant, and preserves it.
Crazy Taxi, in its American Dreamcast release, is the millennial turn preserved in digital amber.
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