Whenever I think of people who are wrong about the '70s, I inevitably think of Jimbo Lileks, who is wrong about every single part of it, from the music to New York City.
Jimbo couldn't wait for the 1970s to turn into the 1980s, when the high-pressure crooks he ran with would melt down all the Johnstowns and Charlestowns into venture capital scrap. Then he would be a dork no longer, but a padded-shoulder master of the universe! (Spoiler: He remained a dork.)
Sorry, I don't see Roy as the sort who would marry an administrator (unless you moonlight as a punk bass player with attitude, or an off-center film critic, or both).
Goodness, I just chose this handle about a half-hour ago, thinking it pretty neutral-sounding. I guess I got the connotations wrong - it makes me sound like a cop?
I was surprised the other day to find out The Gallery of Regrettable Food and his collection of abandoned corporate mascots are still up. I have to confess I was very amused by those, back before James went all brainwormy.
Slap Shot is a great movie! I saw it at the big theatre in the mall. It was the weekend. Crowded- everybody laughed hard the way you do when you are in a group and everybody laughs.
I have just been exposed to Ophuls the last year or two and I think Lola Montez is one of the best films ever.
Great essay. I had a lot of fun in the seventies. Way more than in the eighties.
I can't help but speculate that the rise of Reagan and conservatives is why things got worse, and in this case specifically how The Party of Fear dragged us from the don't give a fuck 70s to the present where you're somehow irresponsible if you're not afraid at all times.
ACKSHUALY the love American conservatives have for fear and hatred goes all the way back to the fucking 18th Century, when the line was Catholics were infiltrating the colonies to (stop me if this sounds familiar) put the fledgling US under the theocratic control of The Church and Pope.
I was too young to have real fun in the seventies, was old enough to know what I was missing though, old enough in the eighties, but it really was a suck decade.
I was (barely) old enough but missed it anyway. Thought we'd def reached the end times when Ronnie was re-elected in nineteen-eighty-fucking-four, which just goes to show you how much I know.
Followed by the beginning of the end of the end times. But then you just subdivide *that* into a beginning and an end, and Zeno's paradox will have us living to a ripe old age.
Really, the last chance for civilization was for Mondale to defeat Reagan in the 1984 election. In the movies, when you need a savior, that's the savior you get; in real life, the savior you get may only be 60 or 70 percent of the one you need.
The '70s were a glorious time. I've never seen Slapshot, but I'll take your word for it that it somehow captures at least a bit of the zeitgeist. My own experience of the decade was that of growing up--I was 10 in 1970, so grade school to college through the decade. And like every codger since the first humanoid yelled "Get off my lawn!", I think MY decade of youth was the absolute best. The sex was better, the drugs were better, people's overall outlook on things was better even as we faced down Nixon, the war, the oil embargo, stagflation, and disco.
And NYC in the '70s was a blast. I worked nights at WPIX in 42nd Street. I loved every crazy minute of being in the city. New York was (and I hope still is) one of the only cities on Earth that can take you in and completely suffuse your being. And I know Roy knows exactly what I mean.
Joe Bolton retired the year before I started. And working nights as an engineer kept my contact with the on-air people to a blessed minimum. I did get to talk with Bob Harris, the weather guy who was later canned because it turned out he did not have a degree in meteorology. At the time, I was taking graduate-level courses in meteorology, and I can tell you that Bob Harris definitely knew his stuff when it came to weather.
Christie Ferrar was one of the newscasters, and also one of those odd cases where someone who looks okay on air is actually drop-dead knock-out stunningly gorgeous in real life.
It was fun, and I accumulated a lifetime worth of workplace stories in just five years of working there.
I still think of the 70s (my high school days) as a coin with two sides. Same coin, different faces. On one side is the Slap Shot/Bad News Bears, bunch of crass mooks not giving a shit, but with a slightly rotted (by others, by their circumstances) heart just trying to make good, and on the other, The Sting, all slick production, clever "sticking it to the man and getting away with it" veneer over modest roots. By the end of the decade, pop culture decided to abandon the crass mooks, their towns were all mostly dead anyway, and instead go with the slick side, which led to disco, 80s aerobic and spandex culture, cocaine and "greed is good," thus forgetting the underlying heart. We chose to admire the Man rather than look to his downfall.
I never saw the 2005 remake of Bad News Bears, but it might be an interesting lens through which to compare the two decades. Hmmm.
The handclaps go through the WHOLE SONG. The wikipedia entry for the song is pretty funny. Seems like Maxine hated that, along with a lot of other aspects of the song. They convinced her to take royalty rather than a flat fee for the song, so they were right about that part.
Man, I miss Paul Newman. Great actor, great guy. I get choked up at the sight of his mug on the Light Balsamic vinegar salad dressing. And I haven’t seen Lindsey Crouse in anything except House of Games. Guess I’ll be watching Netflix tonight. Thanks, Roy! Also, I enjoyed the 70’s the first time and I’m enjoying them again. Sex,
[different] drugs, and rock n roll! Next, do Blue Collar.
Watched it recently too, first time since I was a kid. It's a shambolic and likable movie. Dee Wallace! But man the scene with the female team owner doesn't wear well.
Yeaaaah the thing about her kid was kind of awful. Especially since he was cool about Hanrahan's wife having sex with girls.
Weird how it whipsaws from a relatively enlightened perspective to homophobic cringe when Newman gets mad. I prefer his comeback when McCracken says he sucks cock: "All I can get."
Yeah, the part with him snarling that shit about her kid *really* made me cringe, but then I remember hearing shit like that between guys all the damn time when I was in high school mid-seventies. It was the times, unfortunately, and I guess you could say they didn't sugar coat it. Still, ugh.
Otherwise, it's a really fun movie. Newman is great as a low-level scheming opportunist. My partner always likes to read up on movies we watch, and she discovered that the scene where the team is in the locker room and Newman is trying to rev the team up was as chaotic as it looked. The Hanson's stuff and their delivery was more or less off the cuff, and the incredulous looks from Newman and company were perfect because it was real. Newman is barely able to contain himself. "We got a lot of losses..." "YEAH, WE GOT A LOT OF 'EM!"
We had watched "Slap Shot" a few weeks ago, so it was cool to see Newman again as a schemer in "Hudsucker Proxy" this weekend.
Guys have some fun seeing how far they can catapult a pumpkin across a field
It becomes a contest
Guys, as they tend to do, start workin' the technology, medieval-style trebuchets are replaced with air cannon
Now the pumpkins are goin' over a mile, Punkin Chunkin' becomes a reality TV show, every team has a corporate sponsor
It's a process of Professionalization, Commercialization and at the root of it, Optimization (efficiency, maximization of results, high-performance, etc.)
Don't know why I thought of that, but it seems kinda like what turned the 70's into the 80's.
My crazy right wing Wisconsin relatives built a trebuchet. They lived in a small town in the Fox River Valley. When the trebuchet was complete they invited everyone in town out to their place. They parked a car, an old Chevy Vega out at the end of field. They cranked business end of the trebuchet down and loaded up their ammunition, a 5 gallon drum with filled gravel.
The crowd counted down - 3-2-1 Fire! They cut the rope holding the arm down with an ax , thinking that was a good medieval solution to the process. The Trebuchet cut loose and the bucket soared Up Up Up Up - way to the right of the Vega. With what was described to me as an indescribable sound, the bucket crashed through the wall of a neighbors house, into the dining room where it destroyed a large Buffet. The homeowners were in the crowd. Everyone was quiet then burst into cheering and applause because the shot may not have gone where they expected it to but it didn't matter. Everyone agreed it was the coolest thing that anybody had ever seen.
They showed me the neighbors house and the mismatched vinyl of the repair.
This story captures the essence of my hometown in a nutshell—only with more ambition. Nobody there ever built a trebuchet. High school kids just hotwired a school bus and raced it down Main Street. And our superintendent’s pickup sat outside the bar running until the automatic choke gave it enough gas to jump the curb and ram the building, which for decades had a mismatched steel siding replacement.
Yeah, that's WAAAY more ambition than any of the rednecks in my hometown would ever display. Once you got past "Get drunk on a boat and then vomit over the side" they were straight outta ideas.
My uncle owned a gun shop. Him or one of his buddies owned a bazooka. Every year they would tow an old car or boat up north where they went deer hunting. They would commemorate the start of deer season by blowing up the car or boat with the bazooka.
Man, the most we did was to hide the guy's convertible who was skipping track practice by putting it on its side behind a tree at Memorial Park. A couple year's before me, the distance runners mooned a group a Girl Scouts. They did get in trouble for that but were not ID'd as sex criminals.
Nice essay, Roy. And that Erik Davis guy has a helluva gig. I’ll take my love of Hawkwind, Nurse With Wound, and acid, add some UFO paranoia and create an academic discipline. Wish I’d thought of it.
A good thing about the seventies is that those of us who lived through them got a grandfather clause to continue acting that way. I recall driving up to Maine and back with some colleagues and how the totally freaked out when I stopped to get a beer for the drive home. One guy was from Texas even, which brought back to mind a popular seventies term “fucking wussies.”
Should add here that a bunch of us loosely connected folks met at SeaTac for a trip to the Olympic peninsula. Several had not met before. Last in the van was our Texas friend. Her first words were "Please tell me you got plenty beer in this rig, and pop me one before we roll." She coulda held her own with Molly.
i'm here to say: i had to look her up, and now i know the same person edited three of my absolute pantheon movies (the Hustler, Bonnie and Clyde, and Dog Day Afternoon)? Dede Allen, bless you and thank you for your service, RIP
This was also a time before mass homelessness appeared and worked its disciplinary magic, threatening anyone with a spirit of resistance with winter in the cold.
The Vietnam War had a tremendous, undeniable impact on films of the 1970s - grisly scenes of real war were being beamed into living rooms for the first time in real time on the news - so of course everything became more gritty, intense and visceral. As a race of beings we were becoming more desensitized and horrified simultaneously (paradoxical in concept perhaps, but here we are), same as after WWI and WW2 but wildly amplified. All those gratuitously violent and psychologically shocking horror films of the age are proof perfect of this.
Anyway I love Slap Shot and had no idea it was on Netflix - THANK YOU :)
One might view Tarantino's critical examination of (mostly) 1970s genre films, Cinema Speculation, as the Super 70s Sports of movies. It's much in the same spirit.
Super 70s Sports is one of those accounts that made Twitter fun and interesting, along with stuff like Rob Delaney's absurdities (in the old days) and Elizabeth Nelson's pithy remarks about songs, albums, and music in general. Strange how few of those accounts show up in my timeline anymore.
Whenever I think of people who are wrong about the '70s, I inevitably think of Jimbo Lileks, who is wrong about every single part of it, from the music to New York City.
Jimbo couldn't wait for the 1970s to turn into the 1980s, when the high-pressure crooks he ran with would melt down all the Johnstowns and Charlestowns into venture capital scrap. Then he would be a dork no longer, but a padded-shoulder master of the universe! (Spoiler: He remained a dork.)
I will often wonder what's become of "Gnat," Lileks' daughter.
Munching rug at Smith, no doubt.
Ha!
Crude but effective.
Marry me now.
Sorry, I don't see Roy as the sort who would marry an administrator (unless you moonlight as a punk bass player with attitude, or an off-center film critic, or both).
Goodness, I just chose this handle about a half-hour ago, thinking it pretty neutral-sounding. I guess I got the connotations wrong - it makes me sound like a cop?
Precisely the time a certain Queens real estate scion decided to take his bullshittery national.
I was surprised the other day to find out The Gallery of Regrettable Food and his collection of abandoned corporate mascots are still up. I have to confess I was very amused by those, back before James went all brainwormy.
Same here… then 9/11 happened. As they Germans say, „Er ist vollig ausgeflippt“
Kinda same.
Isn't there a Lileks.com? I'll have to go look but use the browser's Porn Mode.
After 9/11 I often thought of Jimbo doing a cover of Living for the City:
New York!
Just like I pictured it!
Terrifying!
(INVOLUNTARY FLOOD OF URINE HITS THE HOT PAVEMENT WITH A HISS)
Slap Shot is a great movie! I saw it at the big theatre in the mall. It was the weekend. Crowded- everybody laughed hard the way you do when you are in a group and everybody laughs.
I have just been exposed to Ophuls the last year or two and I think Lola Montez is one of the best films ever.
Great essay. I had a lot of fun in the seventies. Way more than in the eighties.
The eighties sucked.
The 80s were Reagan and I started law school, of course it sucked.
I can't help but speculate that the rise of Reagan and conservatives is why things got worse, and in this case specifically how The Party of Fear dragged us from the don't give a fuck 70s to the present where you're somehow irresponsible if you're not afraid at all times.
Nixon started the fear just before the 70s started
ACKSHUALY the love American conservatives have for fear and hatred goes all the way back to the fucking 18th Century, when the line was Catholics were infiltrating the colonies to (stop me if this sounds familiar) put the fledgling US under the theocratic control of The Church and Pope.
I was too young to have real fun in the seventies, was old enough to know what I was missing though, old enough in the eighties, but it really was a suck decade.
I was (barely) old enough but missed it anyway. Thought we'd def reached the end times when Ronnie was re-elected in nineteen-eighty-fucking-four, which just goes to show you how much I know.
We did reach the end times.
True, I just never thought they'd go on for so long.
well it was the end of the beginning of the end times
Followed by the beginning of the end of the end times. But then you just subdivide *that* into a beginning and an end, and Zeno's paradox will have us living to a ripe old age.
Really, the last chance for civilization was for Mondale to defeat Reagan in the 1984 election. In the movies, when you need a savior, that's the savior you get; in real life, the savior you get may only be 60 or 70 percent of the one you need.
Slap Shot is mostly a guys movie. I liked the 80s better, but then I graduated HS in 1980
The '70s were a glorious time. I've never seen Slapshot, but I'll take your word for it that it somehow captures at least a bit of the zeitgeist. My own experience of the decade was that of growing up--I was 10 in 1970, so grade school to college through the decade. And like every codger since the first humanoid yelled "Get off my lawn!", I think MY decade of youth was the absolute best. The sex was better, the drugs were better, people's overall outlook on things was better even as we faced down Nixon, the war, the oil embargo, stagflation, and disco.
And NYC in the '70s was a blast. I worked nights at WPIX in 42nd Street. I loved every crazy minute of being in the city. New York was (and I hope still is) one of the only cities on Earth that can take you in and completely suffuse your being. And I know Roy knows exactly what I mean.
You worked at WPIX? Then you knew Meg Griffin! Tell me... oh, you mean the TV station. Well, did you know Officer Joe Bolton?
Joe Bolton retired the year before I started. And working nights as an engineer kept my contact with the on-air people to a blessed minimum. I did get to talk with Bob Harris, the weather guy who was later canned because it turned out he did not have a degree in meteorology. At the time, I was taking graduate-level courses in meteorology, and I can tell you that Bob Harris definitely knew his stuff when it came to weather.
Christie Ferrar was one of the newscasters, and also one of those odd cases where someone who looks okay on air is actually drop-dead knock-out stunningly gorgeous in real life.
It was fun, and I accumulated a lifetime worth of workplace stories in just five years of working there.
"The camera mehs her."
"I have to say, I felt seen."
I hear ya!
I still think of the 70s (my high school days) as a coin with two sides. Same coin, different faces. On one side is the Slap Shot/Bad News Bears, bunch of crass mooks not giving a shit, but with a slightly rotted (by others, by their circumstances) heart just trying to make good, and on the other, The Sting, all slick production, clever "sticking it to the man and getting away with it" veneer over modest roots. By the end of the decade, pop culture decided to abandon the crass mooks, their towns were all mostly dead anyway, and instead go with the slick side, which led to disco, 80s aerobic and spandex culture, cocaine and "greed is good," thus forgetting the underlying heart. We chose to admire the Man rather than look to his downfall.
I never saw the 2005 remake of Bad News Bears, but it might be an interesting lens through which to compare the two decades. Hmmm.
I once saw Loser’s Lounge open up a set with Maxine Nightingale’s “Right Back Where We Started From”. What a great song!
Man it feels so good in the movie. And what a brilliant idea to put the handclaps on EVERY BEAT of the chorus! That's producin'.
The handclaps go through the WHOLE SONG. The wikipedia entry for the song is pretty funny. Seems like Maxine hated that, along with a lot of other aspects of the song. They convinced her to take royalty rather than a flat fee for the song, so they were right about that part.
Man, I miss Paul Newman. Great actor, great guy. I get choked up at the sight of his mug on the Light Balsamic vinegar salad dressing. And I haven’t seen Lindsey Crouse in anything except House of Games. Guess I’ll be watching Netflix tonight. Thanks, Roy! Also, I enjoyed the 70’s the first time and I’m enjoying them again. Sex,
[different] drugs, and rock n roll! Next, do Blue Collar.
There's a New Yorker cartoon, "Three generations of Paul Newman"
Older woman: "Incredibly hot young actor?"
Middle-aged woman: "Incredibly handsome and distinguished older actor?"
Young woman: "The salad-dressing guy?"
Kid: Doc Hudson in Cars
Oh man, Blue Collar! That was some tough shit.
From the days when cabs were Checkers and workers had unions!
She was good in The Verdict, which also had that Newman guy.
I remember Newman in that. Guess I wasn’t paying attention to who else. Have to watch again!
I first saw Lindsay Crouse in season 4 of Buffy, as Dr Walsh.
I made it into season three before I lost interest.
Watched it recently too, first time since I was a kid. It's a shambolic and likable movie. Dee Wallace! But man the scene with the female team owner doesn't wear well.
Yeaaaah the thing about her kid was kind of awful. Especially since he was cool about Hanrahan's wife having sex with girls.
Weird how it whipsaws from a relatively enlightened perspective to homophobic cringe when Newman gets mad. I prefer his comeback when McCracken says he sucks cock: "All I can get."
Yeah, the part with him snarling that shit about her kid *really* made me cringe, but then I remember hearing shit like that between guys all the damn time when I was in high school mid-seventies. It was the times, unfortunately, and I guess you could say they didn't sugar coat it. Still, ugh.
Otherwise, it's a really fun movie. Newman is great as a low-level scheming opportunist. My partner always likes to read up on movies we watch, and she discovered that the scene where the team is in the locker room and Newman is trying to rev the team up was as chaotic as it looked. The Hanson's stuff and their delivery was more or less off the cuff, and the incredulous looks from Newman and company were perfect because it was real. Newman is barely able to contain himself. "We got a lot of losses..." "YEAH, WE GOT A LOT OF 'EM!"
We had watched "Slap Shot" a few weeks ago, so it was cool to see Newman again as a schemer in "Hudsucker Proxy" this weekend.
There's a thing that happens:
Guys have some fun seeing how far they can catapult a pumpkin across a field
It becomes a contest
Guys, as they tend to do, start workin' the technology, medieval-style trebuchets are replaced with air cannon
Now the pumpkins are goin' over a mile, Punkin Chunkin' becomes a reality TV show, every team has a corporate sponsor
It's a process of Professionalization, Commercialization and at the root of it, Optimization (efficiency, maximization of results, high-performance, etc.)
Don't know why I thought of that, but it seems kinda like what turned the 70's into the 80's.
Writer I occasionally read sez turning every human endeavor into a contest is an Australian thing.
My crazy right wing Wisconsin relatives built a trebuchet. They lived in a small town in the Fox River Valley. When the trebuchet was complete they invited everyone in town out to their place. They parked a car, an old Chevy Vega out at the end of field. They cranked business end of the trebuchet down and loaded up their ammunition, a 5 gallon drum with filled gravel.
The crowd counted down - 3-2-1 Fire! They cut the rope holding the arm down with an ax , thinking that was a good medieval solution to the process. The Trebuchet cut loose and the bucket soared Up Up Up Up - way to the right of the Vega. With what was described to me as an indescribable sound, the bucket crashed through the wall of a neighbors house, into the dining room where it destroyed a large Buffet. The homeowners were in the crowd. Everyone was quiet then burst into cheering and applause because the shot may not have gone where they expected it to but it didn't matter. Everyone agreed it was the coolest thing that anybody had ever seen.
They showed me the neighbors house and the mismatched vinyl of the repair.
This story captures the essence of my hometown in a nutshell—only with more ambition. Nobody there ever built a trebuchet. High school kids just hotwired a school bus and raced it down Main Street. And our superintendent’s pickup sat outside the bar running until the automatic choke gave it enough gas to jump the curb and ram the building, which for decades had a mismatched steel siding replacement.
Yeah, that's WAAAY more ambition than any of the rednecks in my hometown would ever display. Once you got past "Get drunk on a boat and then vomit over the side" they were straight outta ideas.
My uncle owned a gun shop. Him or one of his buddies owned a bazooka. Every year they would tow an old car or boat up north where they went deer hunting. They would commemorate the start of deer season by blowing up the car or boat with the bazooka.
Those people were a whole lot of fun!
Man, the most we did was to hide the guy's convertible who was skipping track practice by putting it on its side behind a tree at Memorial Park. A couple year's before me, the distance runners mooned a group a Girl Scouts. They did get in trouble for that but were not ID'd as sex criminals.
Nice essay, Roy. And that Erik Davis guy has a helluva gig. I’ll take my love of Hawkwind, Nurse With Wound, and acid, add some UFO paranoia and create an academic discipline. Wish I’d thought of it.
A good thing about the seventies is that those of us who lived through them got a grandfather clause to continue acting that way. I recall driving up to Maine and back with some colleagues and how the totally freaked out when I stopped to get a beer for the drive home. One guy was from Texas even, which brought back to mind a popular seventies term “fucking wussies.”
Jeez. Texans gone soft. Used ta be every gas station was actually a liquor store.
Should add here that a bunch of us loosely connected folks met at SeaTac for a trip to the Olympic peninsula. Several had not met before. Last in the van was our Texas friend. Her first words were "Please tell me you got plenty beer in this rig, and pop me one before we roll." She coulda held her own with Molly.
Ah, Fun City... NYC of course has never been as much fun since what parasitic financial interests and a reactionary sensibility...
Wotta time. Not gonna see its like again in my lifetime...
i'm here to say: i had to look her up, and now i know the same person edited three of my absolute pantheon movies (the Hustler, Bonnie and Clyde, and Dog Day Afternoon)? Dede Allen, bless you and thank you for your service, RIP
She was amazing.
This was also a time before mass homelessness appeared and worked its disciplinary magic, threatening anyone with a spirit of resistance with winter in the cold.
The Vietnam War had a tremendous, undeniable impact on films of the 1970s - grisly scenes of real war were being beamed into living rooms for the first time in real time on the news - so of course everything became more gritty, intense and visceral. As a race of beings we were becoming more desensitized and horrified simultaneously (paradoxical in concept perhaps, but here we are), same as after WWI and WW2 but wildly amplified. All those gratuitously violent and psychologically shocking horror films of the age are proof perfect of this.
Anyway I love Slap Shot and had no idea it was on Netflix - THANK YOU :)
Excellent essay, Roy.
One might view Tarantino's critical examination of (mostly) 1970s genre films, Cinema Speculation, as the Super 70s Sports of movies. It's much in the same spirit.
Super 70s Sports is one of those accounts that made Twitter fun and interesting, along with stuff like Rob Delaney's absurdities (in the old days) and Elizabeth Nelson's pithy remarks about songs, albums, and music in general. Strange how few of those accounts show up in my timeline anymore.