That Seventies Show

the 70s!
I remember them. when gay men were the masters of the universe? when we would hear on saturday night at Flamingo what would be on radio stations next week? when you could get a blow job in a NY gay bar faster than you could get a beer?
The end of an era, the beginning of a movement?
Armys of men cruising the piers, fornicating in the backs of trucks, and attending discos, bathhouses, and S&M clubs?
I remember those. how nice of Glenn to remind me.

To Beck: you mean when it was Howard Beal losing his shit on TV and not you?

What a loon. Yeah, I remember, having to get up to change the channel becuase there were no remotes, no ac in cars, no color tv, no freakin’ mcdonalds for christ’s sake, bahhh, no thanks, I like it here just fine, I don’t want to go back.

There were also back-to-back recessions, high unemployment, high inflation, domestic unrest, endless failed foreign wars…

Me thinks there’s something familiar about all that.

to damn funny not to share

Drunkest Guy Ever Goes for More Beer

Meh. The best discussion of “The Good Old Days” I’ve ever seen can be found in “No Country for Old Men” when Tommy Lee Jones’ character is chatting with another sheriff about how times have changed. I wish I could find that clip. Anyway, Glenn Beck is a Dumbass Racist Douche.

@Capt Howdy: Now that’s comedy. If only a nun and a bride could have been involved it would be about perfect.

@Benedick:
the “exit” is classic.

I just read in the comments on YT:

“According to Wikipedia, in 1979, the date of the commercial that made Glenn Beck cry, his mother drowned in a mysterious boating accident. His parents had divorced in 1977 and he then had to move to a different town to live with his father. His step-brother subsequently committed suicide.”

HE WANTS TO GO BACK TO THE YEAR HIS MOTHER DIED.

wtf?

@RomeGirl:

Some people will do anything to get away from Glenn Beck.

Original Andrew: Cold.

I like it.

@Original Andrew: And let’s not forget the horrendous fashions. Oh, the polyesters that gave their lives…

I have fond memories of the seventies. That was exactly when I was old enough to enjoy my childhood innocence but just before Reagan got elected and I became aware, by intuition, of the coming cannibal anarchy.

The seventies, for me, were filled with camping trips. No, Stinquers, not the kind of camping trips where one would hike into the wilderness with a backpack and a buck-knife and three strips of toilet paper in order to contemplate the vastness and humbling ambiguity of Nature.

No, the proper kind of camping trip, riding in the back of my favorite aunt-n-uncle’s shag-walled van with the 8-track cranking Steely Dan or Bad Company through crackling speakers, cruising through the lonely chapparal-swatched high passes of Interstate 8 on the way to or from some family-friendly campground on the outskirts of the Anza-Borrego desert.

Or, with my other side of the family (since I was blessed to be a child of divorce at an early age), moseying slowly but steadily up and down those steep grades in a Winnebago towing a double-deck trailer that barely accommodated the two dune-buggies Providence blessed our family with, plus an assortment of ATV’s and motorcycles, headed for an epic Thanksgiving weekend in the middle of the sand dunes, where the only goal was to aim for those desert tortoises and try to survive a rollover of the death-trap vehicle of choice on warm sands of Competition Hill.

Ah, good times.

@Capt Howdy: I like the fact that its midday, full daylight. This guy is committed. I could never get fully drunk in the daytime and carry it on into the evening without cocaine, which, to bring it back to the original subject, the good old days, that was a 70s-80s thing, huh? It was never worth it, you were using up the next three days when you did that, anyway.

@ManchuCandidate: I was wondering if, when Beck has a day off, they just run Peter Finch rants from Network in his time slot.

So the two kids driving the car to the party we weren’t supposed to go to were Bush and Cheney? W certainly seems like the guy that would do that.

Friends, you might wonder, from my previous dispatch detailing the redneck-ish circumstances of my upbringing: how did Pedonator grow up to be such an erudite, cultured example of humanism?

I will tell you.

Even when I felt the stinging pain of a scraped and bloody shin due to a daring feat of swiping too close to a telephone pole on a three-wheeler: yes, even then, when I tucked myself into my sleeping bag chrysalis out there in the desert, I could dream.

There I would huddle with a flashlight and a smuggled copy of Les Fleurs du mal, reading whilst moving my lips. Sometimes the rythym of the poetry would cause me to rub myself through the soft cottony barrier between my nether regions and the vinyl covering of the drop-table sleeping alcove of the recreational vehicle.

Baudelaire led me to Rimbaud, and I’m sure you can understand, at that point I was lost. Lost to the passionate blandishments of Romanticism and Victorian-era pornography.

That was when I really began to feel, I am different from the others.

@Pedonator: Being very much a bog-standard middle-class Seventies Child, I have no idea what happened to me. Unless it was that bite from a radioactive rabbit.

@nojo: Yes! WIN!!!

That productive use of stimulus funds saved us taxpayers $700K.

Which should just about pay for the remodel of Adam Storch’s new COO office at the SEC. If he’s thrifty.

Damn, can you imagine what you would have done at the ripe old age of 29, if you were suddenly thrust into the role of the Fox guarding the Wall Street hen-house?

@Pedonator: Hasn’t I told you of my youth spent mud-bogging in Florida swamps in four wheel drive pickups, dipping skoal and saying “yup,” “Damn straight,” Fo Mo Co,” Fo No Go,” First On Race Day,” and listening to Skynyrd?

And then I went home drunk on Miller High Life and devoured HST and Catch-22 and Vonnegut and Swift and then I went to college, because thats where the Gators played, and discovered that poetry classes involved less reading than novels classes, and, anyway, it never worked for me, from the get go, the rat race, the american dream, and I never beleieved a word of it, still don’t.

The best days of my life were spent building tree forts, exploring the swamp, collecting bird eggs, climbing trees, scuba diving, exploring the caves of central florida’s karst geography ( I once picked up a girl in a bar, and to show her a good time, took her out to a cave near campus and we went crawling down the narrow entrance and through the mud down to the first big room, with the big underground lake bordering it on one side, and the amazingly clear, literally invisible water, you could not see its surface, there you were, underground, in complete darkness and silence, it was a holy place to me, I was showing this drunk chick this place that was holy to me, she was probably wondering why I wasn’t trying to fuck her. Oh well, I enjoyed it, I wonder if she remembers the crazy guy who toook her spelunking at 3 AM.

@Promnight: If only you’d been playing for my team, you’d have had me simply by whispering “karst” and “spelunking” in my ear.

That said, even the gheys, at least my kind, loved to build forts.

Ok, still do.

@Promnight: poetry classes involved less reading than novels classes

My only F was freshman year, trying to squeeze blood from a turnip for a paper on Red Wheelbarrow — and I strongly doubt I could do any better now. Later in the term we were assigned a Faulker story — something meaty — and the prof was amazed at my improvement. But really, I just had more to work with.

Still, I didn’t know shit about writing that year. It took a later Basic Grammar class for me to understand how to construct things.

@nojo: By the time I got to higher education it was all about de-constructing things.

Not that it was a total waste, but really, can’t we all just get along mean what we say?

@Pedonator: That was grad school.

Actually, no — we may have been Wittgensteinians, but we weren’t postmodernists. We actually cracked open Derrida for a seminar, and I was amazed at how much bullshit he was putting across — that because words can have multiple meanings, it renders them meaningless. The prof ended up griping at me for not playing along.

Well you were all up late. I was awake shortly after five and am about to get outside to split the older daylillies and move them to new sites.

@Capt Howdy: Touching. Where are the snows, indeed. I was in England. In rep in Yorkshire, among other places, walking the streets, freezing my ass off trying to phone home, cursing the OH for talking so much. No call-waiting, no cells, no online chats, nothing. Just a pay phone on the corner. Then back to the digs hoping I had enough shillings to feed the meter so the gas fire kept going till I got to bed. Then waking in the morning and being able to see my breath, steeling myself for the terrible moment of jumping out of a warm bed into the freezing bedroom till I could get the fire going and pull on some clothes so I’d stop shivering. Happy times.

@Mistress Cynica: Speak for yourself, missy. I have a pair of French gaberdine trousers of such beauty I have never been able to throw them away though the day has long since passed that I was able to get them on. PS; ‘gaberdine’ is the correct spelling in England; in the US the usual spelling is of course ‘gabardine’. Don’t think I didn’t think you’d spot that.

@Pedonator: I became famous in the Scots branch of my family for the time I was taken camping by my uncle and cousins and managed to fall in the river Dee (reputed to be the coldest in Scotland) every day we were there. That was the same holiday as when I was called a cad by a very little man who got out of an enormous Rolls-Royce and became aware of that other people had feelings.

I take it your favorite song is I’m Always Chasing Rimbauds.

@nojo: Just a way to make the critic more important than the work. I’ve been floored by the grace of the construction of Les Miserables (oh my God! the sequence in the sewers!! Not only as a fictional thrill-ride but as a metaphor of free-will, destiny and Providence all worked out in the stinking shit of Paris. It is magnificent.) but I hope I’m understanding what Hugo intended. Or at least trying. But then perhaps I simply don’t understand the newer fashions of lit-crit as I didn’t go to school and have no comprehension of philosophy.

woody:

“everything our parents told us were good for us are bad.
red meat, milk, college.”

beck is the new tammy faye baker.

@Benedick: Nothing will kill one’s appreciation for literature like a college lit course, where they really know how to suck all the pleasure out of reading and delight in imposing modern psych theories on the classics. I’m in the minority school that believes literature should be viewed in the context of its times.
As to fashion, I still have horrid memories of this dreadful flammable fabric called Qiana™. I was a teen then, and it was practically impossible to find natural fabrics, especially in that capital of the textile industry, SC. I did have a lovely debutante gown though, with gorgeous hand beading. Thanks for the explanation of gaba/erdine. I had my red pen out.

@Mistress Cynica: The 70s were all oranges and browns, and I remember polyester shirts in jr. high with elastic wasitbands that ensured they would ride up the midriff. On guys. And velour-ish hiphugger pants with a ring on the fly to hold the zipper up, oh and cheap rubber soled platforms.

I was fortunate that by the time I was sixteen my new best friend introduced me to his native Texas redneck chic, flannel shirts and Levis that is. By the time I adopted Chucks for the second time in my young life, I was ready for the Ramones. If you fix your memory on 76 and after, the 70s were an awesome decade.