A Restless Wriggle In Time

Graduating high school in June 1973 meant being a little too early for slacker but not necessarily too late for the Vietnam War – too late to have suffered through the unrest and fervor of the Sixties but not too late to idealize them, to be caught up in their legacy.

Like any other kid born in 1955, the landscape of my national political subconscious was occupied by those mammoth, unpeaceful things seen on the family television: the JFK assassination, the Civil Rights movement, the MLK and RFK assassinations of 1968, the first landing on the moon, Vietnam, the ongoing dissent to it... the humiliating pullout (standing room only helicopters off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in late April 1975). 

Tardy Baby Boomers Wound Up With Nowhere To Go 

It seems like time has largely been standing still since then, relegated to the sidelines. Once, once, it served as the medium for astonishment, outrage, youthful and outlandish folly – of talent and intellect gone astray, run amuck...

Unmerited Expectations

 “Ah, the Sixties. If you remember it you weren't there.   Seems I couldn't even remember it as it was happening.”

Fine for famed photographer Robert Altman. But what happened to us, a few true-blooded bred-in-the-bone Bohemians born just a definite tad too late for the Sixties, artist-dreamers, gifted discontents imbued with the value of idleness, mavericks unwilling or unable to make the leap from the 'idealism of the Seventies' to the 'materialism of the Eighties'?

We were persuaded we were inherently at odds with society and living “in the chaotic whirlwind of the Sixties counterculture.” Regardless of our utopian desires, times had changed and we were actually graduating into its aftermath. We had no sense or taste for progress or destiny. Instead we shared a musical gypsy spirit and sense of pilgrimage derived from Grateful Dead culture, a natty dread of the suburbs that spawned us and some vague knowledge of The Beat Generation (mostly gained via Kerouac's On The Road).