I am a citizen of the 1970s. I have resided in other decades, but I have always felt like a foreigner within them, or have mostly ignored them altogether, an expatriate with no interest in participating in the local customs.
Some of my favorite parts of my native land, which I can visit only in my mind, are the sections out by the decade’s yonder borderline. My personal memories of these early years of the 1970s are scant, narrow, low to the ground and close at hand, the hazy nearsighted glimpses of a toddler. Colored chalk on sidewalk. George of the Jungle and Ultra Man. A wooden giraffe and a soft yellow blanket. Mommy.
But as I got older I found myself being drawn to various ways to return to the early 1970s. I grew to love the movies of that time, recognizing the origins of my own imagination in the bleak, shabby, sprawling realism. I grew to love the music, too, so much so that I see it in its entirety as the highest peak rock ever reached with its strung-out odes to fading joy; its achingly beautiful Back-to-the-Land idylls; its ecstatic improvisational blues; its savage proto-punk freakouts; its nightmarish metallic dirges; and even, if you allow the decade to include some spill-over from 1969, its ass-shaking world-embracing funk. Read the rest of this entry ?
Cardboard Gods 
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