Is there a word for the nostalgia one feels for a time and place one never experienced? Woody Allen made an entire movie about this — arguably his last good one — with Owen Wilson magically transported to a 1920s Paris in which Marion Cotillard’s character yearns to go back to her vanished Golden Age, the Belle Epoque.
We always mythologize the scenes we arrive too late for. I’ll be writing more about Todd Hayne’s fabulous music documentary “The Velvet Underground,” premiering on Apple TV+ on Friday, but for now I’ll just say that the film offers a deep, deep steeping in my personal belle epoque, New York City from the dawn of the 1960s through the rise of Punk. The Warhol Factory and the droning sounds of the Dream Syndicate coming out of downtown lofts; Edie Sedgwick and Ondine eating kasha in a Russian diner at 2 a.m.; visions by Jack Smith and Marie Menken unspooling on the walls of Jonas Mekas’s Film-Maker’s Cooperative; exploding plastic inevitables and the loneliness of Manhattan canyons at dawn when you’ve been up all night; and off in the corners Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell and Patti Smith plotting their next moves.
I got to New York in 1979 and missed all that. The pioneers of CBGB were playing arenas by then, and Warhol was hanging out at Studio 54. That’s why the era seems legendary to me; if I’d been there, I’d be a lot less romantic about all that amphetamine innocence. But we need dream eras, to root our tastes and timber-frame our personal aesthetic — to gaze backwards as a way of looking ahead.
So what’s yours? Where would you be if you could be anywhere but here? Summer of Love San Francisco? Roaring 20s New York? Bloomsbury? Renaissance Florence? I’m curious to hear the scene you’re sorry you missed.
Lovely topic, Ty. I got to New York City in January, 1974, and one of the few people I knew in the city was managing a now-forgotten band that played CBGB’s and other downtown clubs regularly, so I got to be a B- list participant and witness to what you’ve romanticized as amphetamine innocence. It was exciting but not so innocent...I remember opening the door to the loo at Max’s, taken aback by the guy shooting up on the toilet, and hoping he’d finish soon so I could pee. I remember riding to a gig in Mink DeVille’s manager’s van one arctic night, the equipment sliding across the floor into me when we rounded corners, my breath in big clouds, and thinking, Was this what it was like at the Cavern Club in 1962? And will this thing we’re in turn out to be a big deal, like the British Invasion? The subterranean bathroom at CBGB’s was covered in graffiti, including my still-favorite: Beat me, hurt me, make me write bad checks.
I think I’m a little bit resistant to abandoning myself to romanticism even for eras that intrigue and attract me, but if I had to name two, I’d go with Paris and London between the wars, and Hollywood in its very early days, when the term movies was coined not for the films but the people who made them—by the locals who were bothered by the moving picture people who were so peripatetic. Or even earlier, when the industry and technology were in their infancy and were made all over the country by a director, a cameraman, and a few actors. The intoxicating thrill of all that, of doing something nobody had ever done before, where Agnes de Mille (daughter of William, who was brother to Cecil) described how when they’d finished a movie they’d invite the neighbors over and screen it for them, and how her father said it wasn’t an art yet, but... they were in the intoxicating project of discovery and problem-solving. Women were involved in every stage of production and were writing *half* of all movies in every genre in early Hollywood, when Frances Marion and others were central to the industry, before Wall Street got involved and the women were pushed out (as they always are when said industry becomes too “important” to let women participate in key roles). ...as a subset of this second option, I’d include 1928-1929, as the industry grappled with sound, another period of fierce experimentation and rapid change.
Hi Ty, I kind of regret screwing up the mid to late seventies and into the 80s, getting a mgr. position & getting married changed a lot, missed a lot of stuff…but that’s what a lot of people do, no major brain damage & retirement has somewhat restored me. Ps.don’t tell my wife of 46+ yrs. 😅
La Dolce Vita, baby!!! Would have loved to be in Italy from De Sica in the '40s through late Pasolini and Antonioni and Bertolucci and Wertmuller in the 1970s. Amazing time for cinema in Italy, which affected world cinema. Thanks Ty!!
Paris from the mid 50s through the 60s as post-war social and political changes, and innovations in film including the New Wave, emerged and took hold. I arrived in Ann Arbor as a freshman at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1966. It was a heady time for the arts and political activism. Interest in cinema was at a fever pitch, thanks especially to the student-run Cinema Guild, and I was a sponge for whatever they were showing each week. I was mesmerized especially by films of the Nouvelle Vague directors, and wanted to be living in Paris and immersed in the whole culture. The first time I saw The 400 Blows, when the film ended I couldn’t get out of my seat, my legs wouldn’t work. It took many years before I could make my first trip to Paris, but I’ve never lost my yearning to have been there, hanging out with Truffaut, Godard, Varda, et al.
I would like to live in New York City during the period after World War II when the Broadway and Off-Broadway theater was being shaken up by new playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. I would love to have been able to see Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire." "Next Stop, Greenwich Village" is one of my favorite movies and captures the kind of life I fantasize about having.
Also, I'm one of those baby boomers who bought into the Camelot mythology, so living in DC/New York from the late 1950s to early 1960s has a lot of appeal. I love the Manhattan of "The Apartment" and "The World of Henry Orient."
Also, I would love to have seen "Psycho"' before all its secrets were given away - a friend who was alive at the time said people were literally crawling under their seats in terror, and you kept watching while at the same time hoping the horror would end.
Having been a highly aware adolescent in the Woodstock era, and a all-in participant in the punk rock period, I would have loved to have been in NYC, especially the Village, before the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, when the Beat Generation was swirling and whirling and the jazz/art/hipster scene was blossoming. As a pre-adolescent TV kid, I dug the persona's of Bob Denver's Maynard G Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and Ed Byrnes Kookie on the 77 Sunset Strip, plus perked up any time some cartoonishly caricatured beatnik who should up on a drama like Perry Mason or all sorts of comedies, but I was particularly enthralled when anything beat-like was set in NYC. Thus my admiration for 1976's Next Stop Greenwich Village, 2013 Inside Llewyn Davis, 2013's Kill Your Darlings (set mostly earlier), and of course, 1959's Pull My Daisy, which was among the first "experimental" films I ever saw as a budding young film student and then-vociferous Kerouac reader.
As jazz musician, I would have liked to have been around (well, I was, but too young) from about 1950 to 1965. I could have heard Duke Ellington (at one of the many heights of his career) Charlie Parker, Monk, Mingus (well, I did hear him several times, Ornette Coleman (well, I heard him several times, too) Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and a host of others. I would have also like the late 30's, same reason, or to be in Paris the 20's.
Lovely topic, Ty. I got to New York City in January, 1974, and one of the few people I knew in the city was managing a now-forgotten band that played CBGB’s and other downtown clubs regularly, so I got to be a B- list participant and witness to what you’ve romanticized as amphetamine innocence. It was exciting but not so innocent...I remember opening the door to the loo at Max’s, taken aback by the guy shooting up on the toilet, and hoping he’d finish soon so I could pee. I remember riding to a gig in Mink DeVille’s manager’s van one arctic night, the equipment sliding across the floor into me when we rounded corners, my breath in big clouds, and thinking, Was this what it was like at the Cavern Club in 1962? And will this thing we’re in turn out to be a big deal, like the British Invasion? The subterranean bathroom at CBGB’s was covered in graffiti, including my still-favorite: Beat me, hurt me, make me write bad checks.
I think I’m a little bit resistant to abandoning myself to romanticism even for eras that intrigue and attract me, but if I had to name two, I’d go with Paris and London between the wars, and Hollywood in its very early days, when the term movies was coined not for the films but the people who made them—by the locals who were bothered by the moving picture people who were so peripatetic. Or even earlier, when the industry and technology were in their infancy and were made all over the country by a director, a cameraman, and a few actors. The intoxicating thrill of all that, of doing something nobody had ever done before, where Agnes de Mille (daughter of William, who was brother to Cecil) described how when they’d finished a movie they’d invite the neighbors over and screen it for them, and how her father said it wasn’t an art yet, but... they were in the intoxicating project of discovery and problem-solving. Women were involved in every stage of production and were writing *half* of all movies in every genre in early Hollywood, when Frances Marion and others were central to the industry, before Wall Street got involved and the women were pushed out (as they always are when said industry becomes too “important” to let women participate in key roles). ...as a subset of this second option, I’d include 1928-1929, as the industry grappled with sound, another period of fierce experimentation and rapid change.
Hi Ty, I kind of regret screwing up the mid to late seventies and into the 80s, getting a mgr. position & getting married changed a lot, missed a lot of stuff…but that’s what a lot of people do, no major brain damage & retirement has somewhat restored me. Ps.don’t tell my wife of 46+ yrs. 😅
La Dolce Vita, baby!!! Would have loved to be in Italy from De Sica in the '40s through late Pasolini and Antonioni and Bertolucci and Wertmuller in the 1970s. Amazing time for cinema in Italy, which affected world cinema. Thanks Ty!!
Paris from the mid 50s through the 60s as post-war social and political changes, and innovations in film including the New Wave, emerged and took hold. I arrived in Ann Arbor as a freshman at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1966. It was a heady time for the arts and political activism. Interest in cinema was at a fever pitch, thanks especially to the student-run Cinema Guild, and I was a sponge for whatever they were showing each week. I was mesmerized especially by films of the Nouvelle Vague directors, and wanted to be living in Paris and immersed in the whole culture. The first time I saw The 400 Blows, when the film ended I couldn’t get out of my seat, my legs wouldn’t work. It took many years before I could make my first trip to Paris, but I’ve never lost my yearning to have been there, hanging out with Truffaut, Godard, Varda, et al.
I would like to live in New York City during the period after World War II when the Broadway and Off-Broadway theater was being shaken up by new playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. I would love to have been able to see Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire." "Next Stop, Greenwich Village" is one of my favorite movies and captures the kind of life I fantasize about having.
Also, I'm one of those baby boomers who bought into the Camelot mythology, so living in DC/New York from the late 1950s to early 1960s has a lot of appeal. I love the Manhattan of "The Apartment" and "The World of Henry Orient."
Also, I would love to have seen "Psycho"' before all its secrets were given away - a friend who was alive at the time said people were literally crawling under their seats in terror, and you kept watching while at the same time hoping the horror would end.
Having been a highly aware adolescent in the Woodstock era, and a all-in participant in the punk rock period, I would have loved to have been in NYC, especially the Village, before the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, when the Beat Generation was swirling and whirling and the jazz/art/hipster scene was blossoming. As a pre-adolescent TV kid, I dug the persona's of Bob Denver's Maynard G Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and Ed Byrnes Kookie on the 77 Sunset Strip, plus perked up any time some cartoonishly caricatured beatnik who should up on a drama like Perry Mason or all sorts of comedies, but I was particularly enthralled when anything beat-like was set in NYC. Thus my admiration for 1976's Next Stop Greenwich Village, 2013 Inside Llewyn Davis, 2013's Kill Your Darlings (set mostly earlier), and of course, 1959's Pull My Daisy, which was among the first "experimental" films I ever saw as a budding young film student and then-vociferous Kerouac reader.
As jazz musician, I would have liked to have been around (well, I was, but too young) from about 1950 to 1965. I could have heard Duke Ellington (at one of the many heights of his career) Charlie Parker, Monk, Mingus (well, I did hear him several times, Ornette Coleman (well, I heard him several times, too) Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and a host of others. I would have also like the late 30's, same reason, or to be in Paris the 20's.