Textualizing the Quiddities
Davis is a through-and-through Californian and his inner weird is downright regional. Altman’s Nashville is center-cut in ’75, San Francisco endured its Zodiac Killer period, bourgeois New Englanders hosted orgiastic key parties, and the death throes of pre-AIDS hedonism roiled across a New York City synonymous with Studio 54, Warhol’s experimental movies, Reggie Jackson’s Yankees, and the Berkowitz “Summer of Sam” rampage. The long, strange trip didn’t begin in 1970 or end in 1979, but this decade was one of aesthetics, of free-range childhoods. The seventies were the sixties’ dirty uncle (Warren Zevon and Tom Waits come to mind) as well as precursor to eighties’ excess and capitalism’s shift toward psychopathic corporatism.
Sean Hooks reviews High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis.
3:AM in Lockdown 44: Anna Aslanyan
What Will Last Longer? By Anna Aslanyan. Today I went on a date. I had a feeling it would be special, and so it was. For the first time ever, we found ourselves completely alone. There was no one within sight or earshot to disturb the intimacy of the moment. This relationship has […]