It’s surprising to me that the 1960s are cool again. It is especially so when you consider the particular aspects of the 1960s that are now cool. Woodstock is not cool and Playboy is. On the other hand, it also makes perfect sense to me. I always thought the world was a better place before the revolution.
My mother died a couple of years ago and, recently, my sister sent me a bunch of photos of my mother that she had found cleaning up afterward. One was a shot of my mother and father together at a nightclub. It’s a very hip-looking nightclub and my sister was pleased to think our parents really had been as hip as she liked to think they once had been. That’s because my sisters and I are all middle-aged now and we know we aren’t hip anymore if we ever were and this sort of discovery is reassuring.
The truth, however, is that we were never as hip as our parents were.
In any case, I had a surprise in store for my sister. I said, “I think I know which club that is.” My sister was thrilled at first. She was a little less so when I told her I was pretty sure it was the Boston Playboy Club. And she was even less pleased when, with the help of Google, I found images that conclusively proved that it was.
My parents were big fans of the Playboy Club and they went fairly often. The thing is, they weren’t the sort of people you think of when you think “Playboy Club”. They were married with four children in the years when the Playboy Club was one of their favourite places to go. They were also devout Catholics and no copy of Playboy Magazine ever found its way into our house. I’m sure my father saw a copy now and then but I doubt he ever bought one except maybe when out of town on a business trip and we were never going to know if he did.
But they went to the club because it was hip and fun to go and when they stopped it was because it had stopped being cool. That was sometime in 1970 and I remember being present when my folks were having a conversation about where to go and the Playboy Club was discussed as a possibility and the two of them deciding it was no longer acceptable. They went to a Greek restaurant instead that night.
We forget the astonishing degree to which magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire and Playboy drove the culture back in those days. It was a culture that was urban, decidedly not ethnic and a culture that was much more optimistic than we are today. The members of this culture were people for whom the word “plastic” had positive connotations. It was a culture that mocked the idea of authentic ethnic identity and preferred made-up cultures such as Tiki culture to "the real thing". They were scared of nuclear weapons (arguably, with more reason than we are) but they believed nuclear energy could and would work.
Yes there was a certain fraud to it and you can see it right in the these lines of the oft-quoted introduction to the first issue of Playboy:
Natasha Vargas-Cooper, in an interview with The New Yorker said:
That’s where all the criticism of the fans of Mad Men and its many imitators falls apart. The critic says, these people just don’t get how bad it was before feminism but they are talking to a generation who will mostly be working in service industry jobs where women are expected to be sex objects. Is it a bad thing that women were expected to present themselves as sex objects back then as depicted in season one of Mad Men? Well, if your answer is yes, you can’t seriously pretend it’s better today. Women who worked as bunnies were all taught to dip so that the top of their uniforms wouldn’t gape open. The young women who work at the neighbourhood pub all pointedly do bend over so I can see their breasts and do so as if their jobs depend on it (and they probably do).
More next Tuesday.
My mother died a couple of years ago and, recently, my sister sent me a bunch of photos of my mother that she had found cleaning up afterward. One was a shot of my mother and father together at a nightclub. It’s a very hip-looking nightclub and my sister was pleased to think our parents really had been as hip as she liked to think they once had been. That’s because my sisters and I are all middle-aged now and we know we aren’t hip anymore if we ever were and this sort of discovery is reassuring.
The truth, however, is that we were never as hip as our parents were.
In any case, I had a surprise in store for my sister. I said, “I think I know which club that is.” My sister was thrilled at first. She was a little less so when I told her I was pretty sure it was the Boston Playboy Club. And she was even less pleased when, with the help of Google, I found images that conclusively proved that it was.
My parents were big fans of the Playboy Club and they went fairly often. The thing is, they weren’t the sort of people you think of when you think “Playboy Club”. They were married with four children in the years when the Playboy Club was one of their favourite places to go. They were also devout Catholics and no copy of Playboy Magazine ever found its way into our house. I’m sure my father saw a copy now and then but I doubt he ever bought one except maybe when out of town on a business trip and we were never going to know if he did.
But they went to the club because it was hip and fun to go and when they stopped it was because it had stopped being cool. That was sometime in 1970 and I remember being present when my folks were having a conversation about where to go and the Playboy Club was discussed as a possibility and the two of them deciding it was no longer acceptable. They went to a Greek restaurant instead that night.
We forget the astonishing degree to which magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire and Playboy drove the culture back in those days. It was a culture that was urban, decidedly not ethnic and a culture that was much more optimistic than we are today. The members of this culture were people for whom the word “plastic” had positive connotations. It was a culture that mocked the idea of authentic ethnic identity and preferred made-up cultures such as Tiki culture to "the real thing". They were scared of nuclear weapons (arguably, with more reason than we are) but they believed nuclear energy could and would work.
Yes there was a certain fraud to it and you can see it right in the these lines of the oft-quoted introduction to the first issue of Playboy:
We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion of Nietzsche, jazz, sex.Never mind that Hugh Hefner never read a page of Nietzsche in his life, just note that jazz is what supposedly gets discussed but mood music is what gets listened to. But so what? They were hypocrites about some things just like we are now. The thing that makes it so compelling now is not the things they pretended to be but what they actually were. Nowadays that mood music sounds a lot better than the more “authentic” rock music that came later.
Natasha Vargas-Cooper, in an interview with The New Yorker said:
The big villain on “Mad Men” is history. No matter what happens to these people’s lives, you know what’s coming next, and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done to help these people feel like they’re any less subject to the throes of history.She thinks we are living through a similar moment now. Here’s another possibility, we look back at that time and we can’t help but think that something went deeply wrong somewhere. History is the villain beacuse it robbed us of all that promise and hope.
That’s where all the criticism of the fans of Mad Men and its many imitators falls apart. The critic says, these people just don’t get how bad it was before feminism but they are talking to a generation who will mostly be working in service industry jobs where women are expected to be sex objects. Is it a bad thing that women were expected to present themselves as sex objects back then as depicted in season one of Mad Men? Well, if your answer is yes, you can’t seriously pretend it’s better today. Women who worked as bunnies were all taught to dip so that the top of their uniforms wouldn’t gape open. The young women who work at the neighbourhood pub all pointedly do bend over so I can see their breasts and do so as if their jobs depend on it (and they probably do).
More next Tuesday.
No comments:
Post a Comment