I SOMETIMES LIKE TO SAY I used to laugh at people stuck in the ’60s, until I started meeting people stuck in the ’80s.
Sometimes I worry I might become one of the latter.
I spent a recent night remiscing with some pals about the good old days of 1978-86 or so, when Seattle had several intersecting underground scenes of hedonism and revelry.
Beneath the city’s then-acceptable faces of entertainment (white blues bands, fancy restaurants, middlebrow art galleries) was a social labyrinth of drag queens, women who took style lessons from drag queens, swingers, tantric sex-cult members, new age hookers, hardcore punk-rock crusters, LSD and MDA takers, disco-ers, performance artists, metal sculptors, bicycle messengers, down-and-out poets, eastern-spirituality seekers, tattoo artists, cartoonists, urban vagabonds, and a few anarchists.
We had different goals and paths, but were more or less united in and by our shared contempt for upscale bourgeois squareness–the state religion of Seattle in that era, when the thoroughly domesticated ex-hippie was the official role-model archetype.
One of my chatting companions on this particular recent evening said she missed those days, and felt the city had gotten far too tame since. (Though she admitted that she herself had aged beyond such shenanigans, so she might not know whether anything like that’s still going on.)
I tried to assure her that yes, there were indeed folks still doing wild things. Mostly different people, and often very different wild things, but still something.
But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I was of my own statement.
Sure there are kids having sex, but it’s hard to create a “rebellious” stance out of sex in our age of porn superstore chains, beer-sponsored gay-pride parades, weekly-paper escort ads, and suburban swing clubs.
Sure there are kids doing drugs, but a lot of the drugs they use are the drugs of social withdrawal and/or self-destruction.
Sure there are kids playing rock n’ roll, but certain self-styled tastemakers insist rock n’ roll’s passe in a modern age of electronica and avant-improv and hiphop.
Sure there are kids having rowdy times and “rebelling” against ordinariness, but dot-com fratboys and Libertarian libertines do that all the time these days too.
Young adults are indeed doing the wacky-n’-wild things young adults tend to do. But, far as I can discern, they’re not doing them with the sense of mission or community we had back in the pre-Nirvana days.
What this is all leading up to is a lesson for You Kids These Days.
I want to see you doing all the outrageous things your youthful energy and/or ignorance lets you do (well, maybe not the worst of the drug parts, and the sex parts oughta be done with certain protections).
But I want you to do these things with a purpose.
Yes, you’re sowing the proverbial wild oats, making memories with which to brighten your lives when you’re old and annoy kids when you’re middle-aged.
But if you do it right, you’ll be doing more.
You’ll be finding, through trial and error, the precise points where today’s mainstream society (as opposed to yesterday’s) gets uncomfortable; the points where progress starts. I don’t know where those points are; you’ll have to find them. God knows somebody has to.
TOMORROW: An anthology of would-be “edgy” writings.
IN OTHER NEWS: Women are now the majority of Net-users in the U.S. That probably won’t stop them from being condescendingly marketed to as a “niche.”
ELSEWHERE:
