Why is there no show called "I Love the 20s"?
Via Journalista, I found these wonderful photos of a bar/club/speakeasy/hip joint in early 1920s Washington. It was called the Krazy Kat, after George Herriman's legendary creation, the ambiguously-gendered hero of a comic strip still studied today.
Apparently it was quite the hangout for flappers, artists, bohemians, homosexuals, and other such magnificent troublemakers. How can you tell it was cool?
Hint: if it's 1921 and a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a ball and chain is bringing you drinks in a fucking treehouse, that provides a working definition of cool.
Yes, I have an enormous weakness for the 1920s, when the concept of cool as we know it was invented. I make no apology, nor am I one of those sad Renaissance Fair folks who claim they'd prefer to actually live in an earlier era. I like indoor plumbing, decent heat, vaccinations, and liquor made by professionals instead of gangsters, but damn, sometimes it's a little tempting.
I once heard about a society in Los Angeles dedicated to note-for-note reenactments of late-70s early-80s punk shows. Expert reenactors play whatever musicians or notable celebrities were there, and the rest of the show fills up with fans who really want to have been at whatever Black Flag or Ramones show is being reenacted. Anyone wearing any clothing or accessory dating from even a day after the original show's date is barred at the door. The original set is performed precisely, including mistakes, breakdowns, and police interventions, including getting more reenactors to portray cops if necessary.
On the one hand, this seems like the world's sickest, saddest, most foredoomed attempt to vanish up one's own ass. On the other hand, let's face it, one of the defining attributes of punk culture is grouchy old bastards who tell anyone who'll listen that everything now is crap and you can't know anything unless you were there, man, really there, when it was all real, you know? You can only hear that so many times before you just get pissed at the one-way nature of time and decide that fine, you'll be there.
Moments pass. It's their nature. But the best ones linger in memory, and the biggest ones linger in cultural memory. It's natural to want to return to our best moments, and just as natural, though more frustrating, to want to return to moments we never had. So yes, there's a part of me that yearns for that strange, tentative late entry into the 20th century, after the Great War had blown everything up and those who remained had to put society together out of the old pieces and whatever new ones they could get away with making up.
And I want to drink illegal liquor in a treehouse. Because dude, fucking TREEHOUSE.
