Sometimes I can't really connect with the fact that I was alive in the seventies. Ok, only for the last couple years. And I was obviously too small to engage with the realities of 1970's America very deeply. But still.
It seems to me that everything was somehow more authentic then. It seems like that was the real America. I mean, we had the method actors, De Niro and Kaitel and Streep, we had Coppola and Scorcese at their peaks. Sure they're all still around, but when I look at Meet the Fockers, hell, when I look at Charlie Sheen... it's hard not to think that those were the good old days.
Vietnam was there, I mean the war, the cause. The dawn of health food in California was a joke for a Woody Allen film. The TV was big and convex. There were woods all around my suburban town, enough for my uncle to have a salt lick for deer in his backyard. The bad economy. The population explosion. Crime-ridden NYC. Lines for gasoline. And big cars! Why does all that sound so great? And not just great, but somehow more durable and tangible than anything I can say about life now?
As for London, I guess London was full of wooden buses and buck teeth, bad plumbing and bad food. Jellied eels and the like. Right? I don't have the references for the UK that I have for America. Obviously. I mean I have a skeletal framework. But basically London didn't exist before 1997 as far as I'm concerned. When I arrived there, on my twentieth birthday, I expected it to be like Ab Fab. That's why I was there darling.
I wonder if my kids will look at old pictures and laugh at my haircuts, as I did. ("That was the style!" my mom insisted.) I wonder if they will be disappointed that I haven't done some of the things or been in some of the "scenes" that they will later come to associate with the nineties and the first decade of the 21st century, just as I never forgave my parents for living in upstate New York in 1969 and not going to Woodstock.
I wonder how long this retrolicious, all the past is for sale, hey remember when, I love 19childhood-memory-of-our-target-market thing will go on? I feel like buying up everything about the seventies before they run out of stock. I feel like connecting with the reality of the decade of my birth- which is clearly impossible, and exactly what some man in a board room came up with, smoking and laughing evilly, circa 1986.
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4 comments:
I've always wanted a salt lick.
Hi, sis. I have always liked the fact that I was born in 1971, so that I can actually recall at least the latter part of the 70s... To understand someone better I often try to figure out what year it was when they were 13. I think that the 13th year of one's life is such a defining year - the coming of age. It can tell you so much about a person. For me, 1984 is the ultimate year that I always think back to. So for you it would be 1990. Think of everything going on in the world that year - it left some sort of imprint on your 13 year old self that is still there, I believe.
A_S: yeah, but 1990. I liked New kids on the Block in 1990. The shame. For me age 15 was really when I came of age and redefined myself. So at least by 1992 there was grunge. Which I do still think is pretty cool.
Zeno: This might be what you're looking for. http://www.vagavalley.co.uk/
bunnysupplies/saltlicks.htm
Don't forget about disco Renee.. the seventies also had that.
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