Monday, August 07, 2006
In light of Gram Parsons reading below, here's a timely review of the general flavor of the times, of a new publication by historian Andreas Killen: 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America
An "ambitious cross-disciplinary study of the electrifyingly chaotic cultural and political atmosphere of 1973. It was a year in which a number of important socio-cultural movements and trends faded, while other more enduring ones exploded into prominence; that year, according to Killen, a nation's collective '60s-driven neuroses were being explicitly played out in film, literature, architecture, politics, music, television, and gender relations.
Killen positing 1973 as the "end of the '60s" and the beginning of the postmodern era is an original and provocative claim. According to Killen, 1973 is the year when '60s idealism and activism has officially lapsed into widespread paranoia, conspiracy theory, occultism, and obsessive celebrity culture."
(via PopMatters)
(He's probably right. I once casually put the end of the '60s in 1967, because it seemed to me that Mark Kurlansky was right, that 1968 being the lousiest year in modern history marked the end of the era, with the remainder of the decade twisting and thrashing about in the prolonged shudders of its death throes.
(It's a teenage nervous breakdown, it's a nervous teenage breakdown
a teenage nervous, nervous teenage, teenage nervous teenage
cha cha cha cha wa wa wa yeah [version updated 1972) ¶ 8/07/2006 06:34:00 AM
An "ambitious cross-disciplinary study of the electrifyingly chaotic cultural and political atmosphere of 1973. It was a year in which a number of important socio-cultural movements and trends faded, while other more enduring ones exploded into prominence; that year, according to Killen, a nation's collective '60s-driven neuroses were being explicitly played out in film, literature, architecture, politics, music, television, and gender relations.
Killen positing 1973 as the "end of the '60s" and the beginning of the postmodern era is an original and provocative claim. According to Killen, 1973 is the year when '60s idealism and activism has officially lapsed into widespread paranoia, conspiracy theory, occultism, and obsessive celebrity culture."
(via PopMatters)
(He's probably right. I once casually put the end of the '60s in 1967, because it seemed to me that Mark Kurlansky was right, that 1968 being the lousiest year in modern history marked the end of the era, with the remainder of the decade twisting and thrashing about in the prolonged shudders of its death throes.
(It's a teenage nervous breakdown, it's a nervous teenage breakdown
a teenage nervous, nervous teenage, teenage nervous teenage
cha cha cha cha wa wa wa yeah [version updated 1972) ¶ 8/07/2006 06:34:00 AM
