“We have a regular high tea. Each month, Lacy Knightly [stages] high-quality burlesque. Sword & Veil produces these immersive dark art experiences.”
The key to the “Dream of the ‘90s” Portlandia '10s was that Portland is just perpetually 17 years behind the curve, culturally, but that’s about the length of one retro cycle so it more or less works.
:: sees the youth around him reclimbing the 90s-2000s style path::
oh my god Coachella-ass headdresses are gonna come back
I'm pretty you have at this point declared, within the last year or so, the 20s to be the New 70s, New 80s, and New 90s all at once.
Yeah, a lot of things recur on roughly a 35 year cycle give or take but they don’t happen as a programmatic block, and the give and take varies for each so they don’t synch up the same every time. I expect the coming decade to feature dynamics we last saw in the 70s, dynamics we last saw in the 80s, AND dynamics we last saw in the 90s.
We may be back to a part of the cycle I lived through before but my sense of the ‘80s is still childhood Impressionism, but I have the sense we’ve progressed to the Mega Man II stage, maybe even DuckTales NES
Oh something I’m saying when I say it’s feeling pretty ‘80s, that’s a reactionary period. We’ve had 3 major ones in the 20th century – the Reagan '80s, the 50s, and the post-WWI “return to normalcy”, and they were all marked by processes that wrecked the things that came out of progressive tendencies since the last one, wiped the board, and reset the clock. So maybe take brace position for that.
1980s: Blacks and cities get chewed up by crime, drugs, and general “urban decay”, gays have AIDS to deal with. The “Farm Crisis” also pretty much ends America’s long and historically quite central tradition of family farming. A rising Christian conservatism lays claims on the culture
1950s: the Second Red Scare digs out leftism which had established itself throughout national institutions through the Depression and Popular Front '40s. The Third KKK; attempts to suppress Black agitation fail largely for lack of cross-sectional unity, however, and the Civil Rights Era kicks off. Significant cultural backlash: the stifling conformity dramatized in say Pleasantville (1998) was only The Way Things Had Always Been to Boomers going through childhood; adults who had been paying attention lamented its sexual, intellectual, and cultural impoverishment compared to what came before
(1919-early) 1920s: the post-WWI Return to Normalcy. Major themes of semireligious utopianism and pacifism that had been common and somewhat challenging to wartime stance faded. The First Red Scare. The Palmer Raids rounding up leftists and deporting them to the new Soviet Union. The second KKK, Red Summer, and 2 years later the Tulsa Race Riot that Watchmen depicted, postwar Black ambition checked.
Now: well, Musk taking Twitter and deleftizing it definitely counts. Ellsworth Toohey, from Ayn Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead was a maybe overdone portrait of a real tendency seen in period journalism of dismissively, sentimentally moralized leftism, that was part of what the '50s wiped away. The Asian split to the right in California, other minorities in general, whatever Black/Jewish shit is going on.
Some rightists think that pressing on queer stuff will work, I personally think that’s mistimed and they’ll lose that one like race in the 50s, in the process stigmatizing complaints about “pedophilia”. Covid and the fact that there’ll be appeals on behalf of the lonely and vulnerable to spend resources and control on protecting them that no government will be able to survive indulging and so will have to culturally pivot to normalize ignoring, ending the era since Clinton’s “feel your pain”.
I have a highly cyclical understanding of history, and someone just said it was like I saw the world as in a time loop
