As the World Turned

Question: If you could go back in time, which period would you like to go to and why?

Answer: I would have been born in the late 40’s, a kid without a TV, surviving on mail-ordering photographs and autographs and sacred knick-knacks, corresponding with strangers, pen-pals,in a time before the porno digital revolution, when the implication was more obscure, more beautiful, and people talked, in a time when philosophy and strange habits were admired, in a time when things were inky and still poisonous, in a time before the remote control, in a time when the questions were more obscene than the answers, in an age of opinion when people really took sides, in an age of thinkers and good service, in a time when real con men and bank robbers were hard to catch, in a time before sky high security, in a time before marshal law, in a time when one could walk right off the map, in a time when entertainment was artistic, not mathematic, in a time when value was valuable, not obese with emptiness. I probably would have gone to New York in the mid-60’s, left home where my mother was holed up oil painting, my father hot-roding cars, and darted for the city alone. I would have liked to see it all begin, tired of the hippies, plunging into the first of the drug party art galleries, the Warhol dreamscape, watching Edie Sedgwick climbing walls to heaven and slipping over the side with big deer eyes in headlights, still dancing. And the Velvets playing all those weird places doing what nobody wanted but what everyone needed. And watching the darker art punks mingling with the aristos and the street people and the rich artists fucking the poor artists and then everyone changing places, fluxuating and trying each other out and everything out, leaving behind the stiff values that plagued youth yesterday. A time when no one knew what the drugs would do, before worry was born the way it is today, flourishing like a nomadic plague. See Andy and Bridget Berlin sitting in a window of a diner eating hamburgers and drinking chocolate milkshakes in upper Manhattan, admiring transvestites with bad skin walking by like cowboys, because last week they were real cowboys. And to be in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel with Stanley when he was young, witnessing the chaos there when Edie set fire to 105, and/or just the general chaos there, the abrupt art and the abrupt deaths, the calm before the storm, the storm, the blackouts, the hysteria and all the imagination it took to do all that art, those films, those books, those songs, in a time before people knew what to do with them, before the salesman was perfected, when art was an addiction and artists, mysterious, and rarely careerists, and you could still identify with, and fall in love with- the true spirit of lose canons.

-Alison Mosshart

All images from Square America