Salon.com > 1960s

Pick of the week: I was a teenage anarchist!

Thu, 02 May 2013 23:30:00 +0000

“Something in the Air” tells the story of a French teenager caught up in the half-crazy early-‘70s climate of political radicalism and artistic experimentation, an era that can seem so far from our own as to be a science-fiction alternate reality. It’s a terrific film, wonderfully atmospheric and alive, but also a curiously appropriate one to encounter right now, as we deal with the aftermath of a cruel and pointless crime apparently committed in the name of some abstract revolutionary ideal. Writer-director Olivier Assayas (of “Summer Hours” and the terrific terrorist miniseries “Carlos”), one of the leading figures in French cinema, has described this movie as generally autobiographical. While Assayas’ young protagonist and his anarchist pals never come to the point of blowing up civilians, they get pretty close, and indeed avoid committing murder mostly through luck. Is this a true story? I obviously have no idea, but it’s a convincing and disturbing one.

We tried to weaponize the weather

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000

The years between the ﬁrst hydrogen bomb tests and the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963 saw more than just increased anxiety about the eﬀects of nuclear testing on weather. They also saw increased interest in large-scale, purposeful environmental modiﬁcation. Most climate modiﬁcation enthusiasts spoke of increasing global temperatures, in the hopes that this would increase the quantity of cultivated land and make for fairer weather. Some suggested blackening deserts or snowy areas, to increase absorption of radiation. Covering large areas with carbon dust, so the theory went, would raise temperatures. Alternatively, if several hydrogen bombs were exploded underwater, they might evaporate seawater and create an ice cloud that would block the escape of radiation. Meteorologist Harry Wexler had little patience for those who wanted to add weather and climate modiﬁcation to the set of tools in man’s possession. But by 1958 even he acknowledged that serious proposals for massive changes, using nuclear weapons as tools, were inevitable. Like most professional meteorologists, in the past he had dismissed the idea that hydrogen bombs had aﬀected the weather. But with the prospect of determined experiments designed to bring about such changes, he warned of “the unhappy situation of the cure being worse than the ailment.”

“Mad Men” Season 6 poster gives a nod to the 1960s

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:33:00 +0000

Gearing up for season 6 of AMC's "Mad Men," the series took a note from adman Don Draper and commissioned a poster from famed illustrator Brian Sanders, a nod to the 1960s-era setting of the season.

The New York Times reports on the vision:

"Matthew Weiner, inspired by a childhood memory of lush, painterly illustrations on T.W.A. flight menus, decided to turn back the promotional clock. He pored over commercial illustration books from the 1960s and ’70s and sent images to the show’s marketing team, which couldn’t quite recreate the look he was after.

'Finally,' he said, 'they just looked up the person who had done all these drawings that I really loved, and they said: ‘Hey, we’ve got the guy who did them. And he’s still working. His name is Brian Sanders.’ ”

The ballad of John and Yoko — and Paul — continues more than 40 years later

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000

In 2000, a New York-based architect named Cass Calder Smith was helping his father move into a new apartment, when he discovered a tremendous inventory of interview tapes — hundreds of hours of conversations with the biggest rock legends. His journalist father, Howard Smith, had enviable gigs as both a New York City radio personality (for WABC, later WPLJ) and a star columnist at the Village Voice during its heyday, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when every revolution — sexual, anti-war, civil rights, gay liberation— was not only at its height, but converging. Unflappable, immensely knowledgeable, and sharp-witted, he earned the confidence of his subjects — people like Mick Jagger, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda (freshly returned from Cannes, after the premiere of "Easy Rider"), Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, Lou Reed, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Jerry Garcia (though Howard admits to John Lennon in an interview that he's not a fan of the Dead) — who spoke with him, on repeat occasions, often at a crucial juncture in history, or in their lives, and opened up at length and with rare candor. These original reels from the interviews, which were conducted for Howard Smith’s column and radio show, were packed away in boxes, untouched for 40 years, in the back of his West Village loft. Howard Smith, now 76, and fighting cancer, confessed to Ben Sisario in the New York Times in November that he’d kept them around, half-hoping to use them for his memoirs, thinking they would be “a good memory jogger. Things were happening every day that were just incredible.”

Forty years later, Garfunkel is still bitter after all these years

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:15:00 +0000

Art Garfunkel, 71 years old and still reeling decades later from the breakup of the musical act that made him a household name, is now saying that one of the reasons Simon & Garfunkel broke up was because of Mike Nichols' 1970 film adaptation of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." In the late 1960s, he says, the two were cast in the film, and while Garfunkel managed to hold onto his fourth-billing role, Simon ended up on the cutting room floor, reports the Guardian.

Garfunkel was speaking at the Paley Center for Media in New York last Wednesday, as part of a screening of Charles Grodin's 1969 Simon & Garfunkel documentary "Songs of America." According to the Hollywood Reporter, both the singer and Grodin implicated Nichols. Recall that Nichols featured Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" and "Scarborough Fair" in "The Graduate," his now-iconic 1967 film that won him an Oscar for best director.

"That was the beginning of their split-up," said Grodin. "You don't take Simon & Garfunkel and ask them to be in a movie and then drop one of their roles on them."

Out of a newspaper strike dawned a new age in American letters

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:07:00 +0000

Last week, my colleague at Doubleday came by my office with an austere-looking 11-by-15-inch broadsheet. Good God! It was a facsimile edition of the first issue of the New York Review of Books, Feb. 1, 1963. The advertising director and I sat there kvelling over this wondrously manifested printed object from another universe, with its Murderers Row of reviewers weighing in on many books that all these years later still matter, its old-school book ads with their quaint frontal appeals to the reader’s higher cultural aspirations (“Pantheon: Outstanding Books From Abroad”; “The power of Thought is the magic of the Mind.” — the Lord Byron headline for Columbia University Press’s ad), its wittily punning heads (“Albee Damned” for Nicola Chiarmonte’s review of "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf"; “To the Whitehouse” for Dwight Macdonald’s review of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s "The Politics of Hope"). Byron had it right: There was a whole lost world of magical allure contained in those 48 pages of newsprint. So I closed my door, and let’s just say not a whole lot of work got done the rest of the afternoon.

The final defeat of backlash politics

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 19:21:00 +0000

Despite its reinforcement of the status quo and the lack of debate about large issues during the campaign, the election of 2012 will go down in history as the end of the backlash against mid-20th century liberalism. A new, increasingly liberal electorate has ratified the results of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Revolution. Republican conservatives will still be able to win victories, but their hopes of overturning the outcomes of the 1930s and the 1960s have been doomed by cultural and demographic change.

From the 1970s to the present, American politics has been driven by the backlash against the two liberal revolutions of the mid-20th century — the New Deal economic revolution and the Civil Rights Revolution and the attendant wave of cultural liberalization. In 1968, Alabama Gov. George Wallace led many working-class whites upset with racial integration and the '60s cultural revolution out of the Democratic Party. From the 1970s until recently, these working-class white “Reagan Democrats” — socially conservative, pro-military and suspicious of government in the abstract, while fond of government benefits — were the swing voters in national elections for whom Reagan Republicans and Clintonian New Democrats competed.

Ronald Reagan: Informant

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Ronald Reagan would quip that [as an actor] he became the Errol Flynn of the Bs, the low-budget second features on double bills. Through 1943 [when he was in his mid-30s] he would appear in thirty-one films, mostly light romantic or action movies in which he played his preferred role of a traditional hero—cavalryman, football star, government agent. While filming “Brother Rat,” a 1938 comedy set at a military academy, Reagan met the actress Jane Wyman. They were married in 1940, the same year he played his signature role of George Gipp in “Knute Rockne, All American.” Their daughter, Maureen Elizabeth, would be born in 1941, and they would adopt a son, Michael, who was born in 1945. Featured together in several films, Reagan and Wyman became an item in the Hollywood press; one newspaper dubbed them “top candidates for the title of happiest young Hollywood marrieds.”