Sunday, April 6, 2008

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

9 comments:

ediot said...

beautiful pictures. i would've gone back to the 60's or 70's because i've always had love for the music/clothes back then

Disneyrollergirl.net said...

Fabulous! Love Alison Mosshart...

thimbles and gingham said...

reading that was brilliant. I would have loved to see the velvets play. I think Edie would have annoyed me a little though. Or maybe thats only because of factory girl...

roxanne said...

oh my.

i've been looking at blogs all day and this is the first post that i can truly call amazing. i've got a vintage spirit as well, and i can't even begin to figure how much time i've spent just willing myself to have been born 40 years earlier.

great writing. awesome, awesome post.

Sister Libby said...

Amen to that! And Square America is excellent.

Annabelle King said...

the pictures are so beautiful! i remember when i was like 8 i wanted to live in the 40's soo bad, but now it would be difficult to chose

sara said...

There are many aspects of the 40's that were nice, though there were probably many that weren't so great, but that's the same for any time period. I would have gone back to the 60's and 70's, I have a dream to be in the midst of a protest, it seems so blood-rushingly exciting!

x sara o

Ronnie Barrows said...

i stumbled upon your blog a couple of days ago and am surprised at how many shared interests we have. i used to be friends of sorts with alison years ago when she was in discount and still have letters and art she used to send me. i will probably post scans of them at some point in time and post them on my blog. we've lost touch since then, but she's still a big inspiration on me.

anyways. terrific tastes and blog.

AlicePleasance said...

Amazingpictures... I would have gone back to late 50s/early 60s. I probably have been an American housewife in a previous life ;-)