I can’t read all of James Lileks’ posts – there’s just too much bloggage for that – but nobody is more rewarding to dip in and out of than he. The man is a miracle of fecundity who has absolutely cracked the way to make the web work for his unique talents. As with Frank Key, we must thank the net for providing the perfect - perhaps the only possible - medium for peculiar geniuses.
My latest dipping-in yielded this piece of Lileksness:
Don’t know what to call it, but there’s something about “1960” that snares the eye and the imagination. It’s a half-century gone. It’s pre-JFK-in-Dallas, the fulcrum on which the post-war era balanced. It’s modern – “1960” sums up jets and rockets and whirring IBM computers and thin lapels, a time of crisp sharp technocrats. I imagine people who enjoyed the 50s, identified with the times, felt a certain trepidation when 1960 rolled around. A new decade clears the decks. I identified with the 80s, and hence the year 1990 felt like the lip of a cliff. You pass thirty, the decade changes, and you know it won’t belong to you the way the old one did. The 90s worked out just fine for me; we got a new medium, and that put a spring in my step. But if I’d been a man of the 50s the 60s would have been a time of ever-growing alienation. Each year put five years between the Now and the Then. You’d find yourself in 1970 wearing a polyester suit with wide collars and a tie whose knot was the size of a baby’s head, looking at a wood-grained plastic dashboard in an ugly car, the radio playing Mungo Jerry, wondering how the hell this happened.
Common problem, clinging to formative decades. I feel I lost the shape of the noughties somewhere near the beginning and god knows how the 10s will end, but we have no choice but to beat on, under the rocks and stones, into silent water, borne along, by events and trends beyond our control, beyond anyone’s control, ceaselessly into the future; though as David Cameron says, quoting High School Musical (which is a typical example of a noughties thing I failed to comprehend), at least we are all, well most of us anyway, and the web when cracked by peculiar talents helps here, in this, boats against the current, together.
8 comments:
I read that post (via your links bar on the right of the page) and had a ponder about that too. Very good stuff that bleat blog, but as you say, heavy on the verbiage
particularly like the stuff about google earth pics of boring places in north dakota
Yes,yes, been fumbling around for a suitable monika for 1960 for decades then out of the monitor via your blog pops a stunner. Bear in mind that I comment this morning thro' a cloud of Icelandic crap so things may be more incoherent than usual.
As for recent times just whisper "stuff" that sums up everything about the past fifteen years..stuff and more stuff, we swim in a sea of stuff, wander among fields of stuff, dream of stuff, wake up with stuff, buy stuff, sell stuff, vote for stuff, watch stuff on the telly, listen to stuff, it permeates our stuff ridden existence.
Stuff stuff!
What about those Icelanders, first their bent thieving bankers dump on us and then they go and hurl clouds of stuff over us, stuff them.
Don't forget the cod, Malty. And Björk.
..and the frozen prawn rings
You should go there Malty, and try lots of new "stuff" the puffin in curry sauce perhaps, or Rams testicles pickled in Whey, or your can go native and try something I think they call Svia? sheep's head that's been burned to remove the wool, cut in two, boiled, and either eaten fresh or pressed into jelly.
Washed down with something called "black death"? My memory stops from that point.
Malty is quite right... the stuff, the stuff....
Volcano erupts, world cut off.
Over here in Romania we have exactly what you describe: polyester suits with wide collars, ties whose knots are the size of babies' heads, and Mungo Jerry is massive. So stuff the stuff.
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