Justin79, you have such a unique way of "telling it like it is". I love your posts. I'm still loving your comment about generations being big fields....

Hey, I like that comment from your friend about your cohorts being like the Beats of the next generation. But what did you mean by "I havent got a clue."?

BTW, I prepared a list of Tv shows debuting in 1984 (Miami Vice was one of those) and 1983, but I posted it on Generations and TV Shows instead of here. Check it out and tell me if you think it means anything as pertains to the 3T Question.

I had it hammered into me for a long time that I was a Boomer. I committed "1946-1964" to my memory when I was in high school, and I read "Great Expectations" by Landon Jones when I was in college.

But I wasn't sure that book was about me. It was about my older cousins (I'm the child of two Silents who were both the youngest in their families.). My cousins were rebels and hippies; I was quiet and outwardly conventional, but alienated. In college, I related more to people in classes that came after mine, not before.

I grew up with the Brady Bunch, Elton John, and disco. I had a 33 1/3 RPM record player and an eight-track in college.

Late last year, I read "Generations" and realized that I'm not really a Boomer after all, but a first-wave 13er/Xer. It was revealing and rather liberating. It felt kinda cool (hey, I'm not at the butt end of one generation, I'm in the vanguard of another!).

And now I understood why I got so impatient with older folks a lot of the time. Silents with their indecisiveness and handwringing, and Boomers who wanted to talk things to death rather than do anything about them. I'm generalizing, I know, but it really did seem to apply in a lot of instances.

Still, though, I didn't identify with the grunge crowd either. Too nihilistic for me.

So I'm comfortable with the Jones moniker. I checked out the Jones site and felt quite at home.

And I enjoy being on these boards, lurking and learning.

Kiff '61



_________________
My GenX Credo (after Strauss and Howe, "13th Gen"):

1. Do the dirty work.
2. Have a little fun.
3. Help the kids behind me.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kiff '61 on 2001-10-01 13:27 ]</font>

On 2001-10-01 13:24, Kiff '61 wrote:

Still, though, I didn't identify with the grunge crowd either. Too nihilistic for me.

So I'm comfortable with the Jones moniker. I checked out the Jones site and felt quite at home.

And I enjoy being on these boards, lurking and learning.

Kiff '61

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kiff '61 on 2001-10-01 13:27 ]</font>

Join the club.

FWIW, I think too many older Xers put too much emphasis on Grunge.

It would be like saying that every single person of HS and College age in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a Punk Fan. All of you wore black, loved the Sex Pistols, spiked your pink hair, wore dog collars, and shoved safety pins through your cheeks and nose.

Doesn't that sound silly, or is it just me.

On 2001-10-01 02:10, Justin'79 wrote:
There used to be a sign in a place we'd hang out in my high school that said "The opposite of love is not hate, its apathy"
So maybe the last nomads were rebelling against not caring. That was when the ages of the people in the high school were roughly 1977-1980.
I always thought of my small cohort group (those born between 1976 and 1980ish) as sort of like the way the late silents were to the Boomers.
I always had a strong feeling that we would be like the Dennis Hoppers, or Peter Fondas of the next generation, refugees from our own generations apathy and malaise...riding away from it all on our motorcycles.
But it seems like its a pretty nomadic tendency to want to ride away from it all.
My friend whos an 80 cohort said we would be like the Beats of the next generation.
I havent got a clue.

I have some ideas for thinking about this Third Turning thing.
I would say that 1983-84 can be delineated for the following reasons.
---------
Technological...the rise of personal computers, fax machines, answering machines, widespread installment of cable, VCRs,
Social...drop in divorce, abortion, charges of child abuse in day cares, AIDS, Run DMCs first album is released

I'm still not positive about the start of the 3T. I'm partial to 1982 myself. Looking back now, things started to change then, but that's also a child's perspective. I do think that by 1984 the 3T was already in full gear.

The Beatniks. I have question for those who remember. How influential were the Beats? Were they like Hippies who didn't get all the attention? What did they do? All I have is the media image of twentysomethings who wore black clothes, sunglasses, read nonsense poetry, and banged bongo drums in the 1950s or early 1960s. What exactly was their effect on the Boomers?

Also, how big was this among the silents themselves?

What about that James Dean rebel thing? Was that real, or Hollywood storytelling? Was that a Beatnik style too, or something different?

Dear Jessie: regarding the Beats...they believed the term to be a shortening of "beatific".
Many of them were seeking a more authentic experience of life than was considered "normal" in America in the late 1940's thru the early '60's, normal at least in the context of white middle class America.
If you're interested you could read Jack Kerouac [especially On the Road], Allen Ginsberg [Howl] or...my memory is not sending book titles up to the top of my brain, I bet Barbara would have a few suggestions.
They romanticized alot of what we would now call the Black experience, the hip world of jazz and urban living, marijuana smoking and long road trips without any particular destination or time of arrival.
They were very influential on alot of boomers, I know that they influenced me back in the 60's.
Of course, by the time we were reading their books and trying to emulate some of their lifestyles many of them had burned out on drink or drugs or just hard living in general. When I read Kerouac's Desolation Angels I began to have a different take on them, which was that they hadn't grown up at a certain point and that their lifestyles were becoming more and more self-destructive and pathetic.[Kerouac died of alcohol-related health problems as I remember].
But...many of them also became practitioners of Zen meditation and contributed to literature over the next several decades.
It would be interesting to hear how someone like yourself who is from a different generation than mine would react to reading something like On the Road. Would it turn you off as being immature and self-indulgent or would it elicit other responses?

I think alot of genXers I know like the beats alot.
One thing I didnt get was what the big deal was.
They go on a big road trip, wander around, think about life, have sex, get stoned.
Thats nice, but not exactly an Earth shattering moment in my life.
I still think that the Beats independence and disdain for the mainstream culture was soaked up by alot of literate genXers. The very do it yourself ethic that you could live your own life by your own means was appealing.
Theres a book called Into the Wild by Jon Kraukauer which kind of is about a GenX beat who starves to death in Alaska after years of hoboing. Kurt Cobain actually met with Burroughs, and is listed as a beat on several beat websites.
While we are harping on grunge...its not just grunge...it is the sense of a musical and artistic community.
When I was 14, 15 years old, I could tune into underground hip hop stations from New York City, I could watch Alternative Nation or 120 Minutes on MTV and see totally outrageous groups that would NEVER get airplay.
I think my moment of generational clarity came in 1997, when they rereleased Star Wars, and I was in FAO Schwartz in manhattan, and I was there with all these other people in their late teens and early 20s, with piercings and pink and green hair playing with Star Wars toys.
And I was thinking...wow...my generation grew up.

may i add that i felt extremely vindicated when South park the movie recieved an oscar nomination, and extremely pissed off when phil collins won...and i attribute this to lame boomers making decisions about which is better because they suck.
may i also add i felt good when tom green was on dennis miller and dennis asked tom about burt reynolds and tom replied "you mean that guy from smokey and the bandit"
I again felt like something that meant something to me was actually permitted on television.

Justin, your last post was so dead on. I started to read "On the Road" in college, but never finished because I couldn't figure out what the big deal was. I mean it just seemed like a typical road trip to me. Not knowing much about other generations at the time (it was 1987), I didn't get that this was a revolutionary act for someone of the Silent Gen.

"Into the Wild" was huge among Xers, especially here in the Pacific Northwest. People here actually do that sort of thing on a regular basis (just wandering into the wilderness alone). But, no-one really thinks that it could kill them.

On 2001-10-01 14:58, alan wrote:
Dear Jessie: regarding the Beats...they believed the term to be a shortening of "beatific".
Many of them were seeking a more authentic experience of life than was considered "normal" in America in the late 1940's thru the early '60's, normal at least in the context of white middle class America.
If you're interested you could read Jack Kerouac [especially On the Road], Allen Ginsberg [Howl] or...my memory is not sending book titles up to the top of my brain, [b]I bet Barbara would have a few suggestions]/b].
They romanticized alot of what we would now call the Black experience, the hip world of jazz and urban living, marijuana smoking and long road trips without any particular destination or time of arrival.
They were very influential on alot of boomers, I know that they influenced me back in the 60's.
Of course, by the time we were reading their books and trying to emulate some of their lifestyles many of them had burned out on drink or drugs or just hard living in general. When I read Kerouac's Desolation Angels I began to have a different take on them, which was that they hadn't grown up at a certain point and that their lifestyles were becoming more and more self-destructive and pathetic.[Kerouac died of alcohol-related health problems as I remember].
But...many of them also became practitioners of Zen meditation and contributed to literature over the next several decades.
It would be interesting to hear how someone like yourself who is from a different generation than mine would react to reading something like On the Road. Would it turn you off as being immature and self-indulgent or would it elicit other responses?

ok, Alan, you nailed me <g>.

I've avoided telling you guys about the Beats, but it's only been to not uncover all my past influences. I was as influenced by the Beats as a late Boomer or an older Joneser was influenced by Woodstock (just a bit too young, but yearning to have been a bit older). I'd been thinking that you Xrs wouldn't get it, but now I realize that in these suddenly dark times and now that many of you are redefining and evolving to next stage-of-life, you will see that Silents and Xrs do share the Beat-en-ness.

I have to be somewhere now for a couple of hours, but I'll come back tonight and write more. I think the Beat experience was really far more influencial than anyone official ever gave them credit for, for they started the Awakening chaos, really. Mary T would know, too. It wasn't what we envisioned, of course. The next gen (Boomers) took it and made it their own.

Now I'll leave you with this article. It does a good job of explaining the MOOD of the Beats, and of my gen in particular. Take note of the in-general generational references, too.

This Is The Beat Generation
by John Clellon Holmes
The New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952
Several months ago, a national magazine ran a story under the heading 'Youth' and the subhead 'Mother Is Bugged At Me.' It concerned an eighteen-year-old California girl who had been picked up for smoking marijuana and wanted to talk about it. While a reporter took down her ideas in the uptempo language of 'tea,' someone snapped a picture. In view of her contention that she was part of a whole new culture where one out of every five people you meet is a user, it was an arresting photograph. In the pale, attentive face, with its soft eyes and intelligent mouth, there was no hint of corruption. It was a face which could only be deemed criminal through an enormous effort of reighteousness. Its only complaint seemed to be: 'Why don't people leave us alone?' It was the face of a beat generation.

That clean young face has been making the newspapers steadily since the war. Standing before a judge in a Bronx courthouse, being arraigned for stealing a car, it looked up into the camera with curious laughter and no guilt. The same face, with a more serious bent, stared from the pages of Life magazine, representing a graduating class of ex-GI's, and said that as it believed small business to be dead, it intended to become a comfortable cog in the largest corporation it could find. A little younger, a little more bewildered, it was this same face that the photographers caught in Illinois when the first non-virgin club was uncovered. The young copywriter, leaning down the bar on Third Avenue, quietly drinking himself into relaxation, and the energetic hotrod driver of Los Angeles, who plays Russian Roulette with a jalopy, are separated only by a continent and a few years. They are the extremes. In between them fall the secretaries wondering whether to sleep with their boyfriends now or wait; the mechanic berring up with the guys and driving off to Detroit on a whim; the models studiously name-dropping at a cocktail party. But the face is the same. Bright, level, realistic, challenging.

Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective ... The origins of the word 'beat' are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth.

Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their dreams. The fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the eventual blackout. Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds, swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in gin mills and USO's, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world, or in the home town invaded by factories or lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedon, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later.

It is a postwar generation, and, in a world which seems to mark its cycles by its wars, it is already being compared to that other postwar generation, which dubbed itself 'lost'. The Roaring Twenties, and the generation that made them roar, are going through a sentimental revival, and the comparison is valuable. The Lost Generation was discovered in a roadster, laughing hysterically because nothing meant anything anymore. It migrated to Europe, unsure whether it was looking for the 'orgiastic future' or escaping from the 'puritanical past.' Its symbols were the flapper, the flask of bootleg whiskey, and an attitude of desparate frivolity best expressed by the line: 'Tennis, anyone?' It was caught up in the romance of disillusionment, until even that became an illusion. Every act in its drama of lostness was a tragic or ironic third act, and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was more than the dead-end statement of a perceptive poet. The pervading atmosphere of that poem was an almost objectless sense of loss, through which the reader felt immediately that the cohesion of things had disappeared. It was, for an entire generation, an image which expressed, with dreadful accuracy, its own spiritual condition.

But the wild boys of today are not lost. Their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces elude the word, and it would sound phony to them. For this generation lacks that eloquent air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions. Furthermore, the repeatedinventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about the mud in moral currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation, do not concern young people today. They take these things frighteningly for granted. They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them. They drink to 'come down' or to 'get high,' not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiousity, not disillusionment.

Only the most bitter among them would call their reality a nightmare and protest that they have indeed lost something, the future. For ever since they were old enough to imagine one, that has been in jeapordy anyway. The absence of personal and social values is to them, not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a problem demanding a day-to-day solution. How to live seems to them much more crucial than why. And it is precisely at this point that the copywriter and the hotrod driver meet and their identical beatness becomes significant, for, unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. As such, it is a disturbing illustration of Voltaire's reliable old joke: 'If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.' Not content to bemoan his absence, they are busily and haphazardly inventing totems for him on all sides.

For the giggling nihilist, eating up the highway at ninety miles an hour and steering with his feet, is no Harry Crosby, the poet of the Lost Generation who planned to fly his plane into the sun one day because he could no longer accept the modern world. On the contrary, the hotrod driver invites death only to outwit it. He is affirming the life within him in the only way he knows how, at the extreme. The eager-faced girl, picked up on a dope charge, is not one of those 'women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs from public places,' of whom Fitzgerald wrote. Instead, with persuasive seriousness, she describes the sense of community she has found in marijuana, which society never gave her. The copywriter, just as drunk by midnight as his Lost Generation counterpart, probably reads God and Man at Yale during his Sunday afternoon hangover. The difference is this almost exaggerated will to believe in something, if only in themselves. It is a will to believe, even in the face of an inability to do so in conventional terms. And that is bound to lead to excesses in one direction or another.

The shock that older people feel at the sight of this Beat Generation is, at its deepest level, not so much repugnance at the facts, as it is distress at the attitudes which move it. Though worried by this distress, they most often argue or legislate in terms of the facts rather than the attitudes. The newspaper reader, studying the eyes of young dope addicts, can only find an outlet for his horror and bewilderment in demands that passers be given the electric chair. Sociologists, with a more academic concern, are just as troubled by the legions of young men whose topmost ambition seems to be to find a secure birth in a monolithic corporation. Contemporary historians express mild surprise at the lack of organized movements, political, religous, or otherwise, among the young. The articles they write remind us that being one's own boss and being a natural joiner are two of our most cherished national traits. Everywhere people with tidy moralities shake their heads and wonder what is happening to the younger generation.

Perhaps they have not noticed that, behind the excess on the one hand, and the conformity on the other, lies that wait-and-see detachment that results from having to fall back for support more on one's capacity for human endurance than on one's philosophy of life. Not that the Beat Generation is immune to ideas; they fascinate it. Its wars, both past and future, were and will be wars of ideas. It knows, however, that in the final, private moment of conflict a man is really fighting another man, and not an idea. And that the same goes for love. So it is a generation with a greater facility for entertaining ideas than for believing in them. But it is also the first generation in several centuries for which the act of faith has been an obsessive problem, quite aside from the reasons for having a particular faith or not having it. It exhibits on every side, and in a bewildering number of facets, a perfect craving to believe.

Though it is certainly a generation of extremes, including both the hipster and the radical young Republican in its ranks, it renders unto Caesar (i.e, society) what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. For the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the 'square' society in which he lives, only to elude it. To get on a soapbox or write a manifesto would seem to him absurd. Looking at the normal world, where most everything is a 'drag' for him, he nevertheless says: 'Well, that's the Forest of Arden after all. And even it jumps if you look at it right.' Equally, the young Republican, though often seeming to hold up Babbitt as his culture hero, is neither vulgar nor materialistic, as Babbitt was. He conforms because he believes it is socially practical, not necessarily virtuous. Both positions, however, are the result of more or less the same conviction -- namely that the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable.


For beneath the excess and the conformity, there is something other than detachment. There are the stirrings of a quest. What the hipster is looking for in his 'coolness' (withdrawal) or 'flipness' (ecstasy) is, after all, a feeling on somewhereness, not just another diversion. The young Republican feels that there is a point beyond which change becomes chaos, and what he wants is not simply privelege or wealth, but a stable position from which to operate. Both have had enough of homelessness, valuelessness, faithlessnes.

The variety and the extremity of their solutions are only a final indication that for today's young people there is not as yet a single external pivot around which they can, as a generation, group their observations and their aspirations. There is no single philosophy, no single party, no single attitude. The failure of most orthodox moral and social concepts to reflect fully the life they have known is probably the reason for this, but because of it each person becomes a walking, self-contained unit, compelled to meet, or at least endure, the problem of being young in a seemingly helpless world in his own way.

More than anything else, this is what is responsible for this generation's reluctance to name itself, its reluctance to discuss itself as a group, sometimes its reluctance to be itself. For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them. Only the need for them goes on, and it is this need, exhausting one object after another, which projects the Beat Generation forward into the future and will one day deprive it of its beatness.

Dostoyevski wrote in the early 1880's that 'Young Russia is talking of nothing but the eternal questions now.' With appropriate changes, something very like this is beginning to happen in America, in an American way; a re-evaluation of which the exploits and attitudes of this generation are only symptoms. No single comparison of one generation against another can accurately measure effects, but it seems obvious that a lost generation, occupied with disillusionment and trying to keep busy among the broken stones, is poetically moving, but not very dangerous. But a beat generation, driven by a desparate craving for belief and as yet unable to accept the moderations which are offered it, is quite another matter. Thirty years later, after all, the generation of which Dostoyevski wrote was meeting in cellars and making bombs.

This generation may make no bombs; it will probably be asked to drop some, and have some dropped on it, however, and this fact is never far from its mind. It is one of the pressures which created it and will play a large part in what will happen to it. There are those who believe that in generations such as this there is always the constant possibility of a great new moral idea, conceived in desparation, coming to life. Others note the self-indulgence, the waste, the apparent social irresponsibility, and disagree.

But its ability to keep its eyes open, and yet avoid cynicism; its ever-increasing conviction that the problem of modern life is essentially a spiritual problem; and that capacity for sudden wisdom which people who live hard and go far possess, are assets and bear watching. And, anyway, the clear, challenging faces are worth it.
________________________
for educational purposes only

Wow, Barbara. Fascinating post about the Beats. They always seemed like such an enigma to me before, a mysterious but intriguing dollop in recent history. I can't believe that article was written in 1952 (did I read that right?) Its author obviously was already aware of generational cycles, in his comparison of the Beats with the Lost--both are recessive generations. The Beats' "worldweariness" sounds so much like Xers. Silents may have been overprotected, but they lived through war and depression as children, so were not as "innocent" as one might think.

I'm looking forward to reading more.

Question: Jane Jacobs, Silent or GI? (Barbara, Chris L.?)

I ask because, through her organizing and civil disobedience skills, she stopped Robert Moses from bisecting Greenwich Village with a freeway, after he tore down sumptuous Penn Station and dumped it in the Meadowlands. Talk about "the man" run amuck in a 1T! Jacobs wrote an legendary book, and then walked the walk, pre-awakening.

Also, Betty Freidan, GI?


Could there also have been something subversive and pre-seasonal about GI women? They got a lot of freedom during the 4T and may not have liked to see military hierarchy, and tactics applied to the homefront during a 1T? Just a thought from someone who only knows this stuff through books and documentaries (and Barbara, of course).

On 2001-10-02 17:58, Neisha '67 wrote:
Question: Jane Jacobs, Silent or GI? (Barbara, Chris L.?)

GI, born in 1916 and still going strong

Also, Betty Freidan, GI?


Could there also have been something subversive and pre-seasonal about GI women? They got a lot of freedom during the 4T and may not have liked to see military hierarchy, and tactics applied to the homefront during a 1T? Just a thought from someone who only knows this stuff through books and documentaries (and Barbara, of course).

Subversive, certainly. Preseasonal? probably not. It's just that GI women were Heroes, with all that entails. From my experience, GI women are as ready to speak their mind and stand up for what they think is right as much as anybody. It's just that most GI women pretty much agreed with the condition of society in the High, and a few of those who didn't really knew how to make their point.


Old Toby
Least Known Dog on the Net

i really DUG that article on the Beat Generation. I also enjoyed the bit about the Lost. Thats EXACTLY how I felt and still feel. My philosophy is that life is absolutely pointless, and you might as well do what you want before you die, and not waste your time trying to do things that wont happen, like have a responsive democratic government.
Those Lost dudes must have been really fun to hang out with.

On 2001-10-02 17:58, Neisha '67 wrote:
Question: Jane Jacobs, Silent or GI? (Barbara, Chris L.?)

I ask because, through her organizing and civil disobedience skills, she stopped Robert Moses from bisecting Greenwich Village with a freeway, after he tore down sumptuous Penn Station and dumped it in the Meadowlands. Talk about "the man" run amuck in a 1T! Jacobs wrote an legendary book, and then walked the walk, pre-awakening.

Also, Betty Freidan, GI?


Could there also have been something subversive and pre-seasonal about GI women? They got a lot of freedom during the 4T and may not have liked to see military hierarchy, and tactics applied to the homefront during a 1T? Just a thought from someone who only knows this stuff through books and documentaries (and Barbara, of course).

Neisha:

Going with your GI women = Strong & unconventional theme -- I was reminded of a book I read from the library last year, about the female movie actresses of the pre-Hayes censorship code years and their character roles from those years.

Since I don't own this book, I looked it up on Amazon.com, and I think some of the comments about the book are valuable to this discussion. (I was particularly blown away by the years this period covers, 1929-1934, which closely parallel the time between that Crisis' catalyst and regeneracy!) Anyway, these women were by and large early GI cohorts, some like Colbert, (b. 1903), Shearer (b. 1902) and Dietrich (b. 1901), perhaps Lost cuspers even.

Here's some of the rhetoric surrounding this book, Complicated Women : Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, by Mick Lasalle, 2000. I've got to guess that many GI women looked upon these actresses in this time period as positive role models.

Editorial Reviews
Entertainment Weekly:

"LaSalle writes wittily about the risque world Hollywood created in the Pre-Hays-code 1920s and 1930s...The examination of women's roles in pre-Code and present-day films is sophisticated and provocative."

From Booklist:

LaSalle mines the brief, rich period of Hollywood history between the talkies' advent and that of the industry's production code, under which not only didn't crime pay but adultery, divorce, extramarital sex, and even women working outside the home were punishable when not verboten. Typically, the schemes of an offending woman in an American movie led to a crushing denouement. LaSalle concentrates on Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo as representative stars of the period. Subsequently less celebrated. Shearer was a transcendent celebrity in the early '30s, who greatly impressed, among others, Clark Gable: "Damn, the dame doesn't wear any underwear. . . . Is she doing that in the interests of realism or what?" She and Garbo portrayed women as independent beings possessing thoughts, urges, and desires. Those last two the code sought to suppress. Excellent on Hollywood as it entered the era of studio dominance, the book may also reawaken interest in Shearer. Meanwhile, limned less lengthily in an epilogue are Bankhead, Loy, Harlow, Lombard, and others. Mike Tribby
Copyright ? American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Kirkus Reviews:

An overdue tribute to the myriad of strong and independent women film stars of pre-Code Hollywood (1929-34).LaSalle provides a detailed summary of an important five-year period in Hollywood history-the interval that preceded the strict censorship of films by the Production Code Administration under the leadership of Joseph Breen. Typically, the "Code" era is remembered in film histories as an age of production that was bound by the suppression of nudity and the proscription of obscene language. LaSalle argues cogently that the Code more dangerously demanded an adherence to conservative and rigid gender roles. Pre-Code films, he points out, were filled with self-reliant, intelligent, and sexually independent women. This was a period dominated by powerful female stars-Mae West, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert, Jean Harlow-whose power and talent were undermined by a Code that made impossible all but the most chaste and wifely female roles. LaSalle, the regular film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, provides reviews of the films from pre- and post-Code Hollywood with loving detail; photos accompany the reviews and there is a helpful index of film stars and a filmography of the period. LaSalle, however, fails to unite his excellent reviewing skills with a much-needed social analysis of the era. The Code that consigned women actors to the sidelines appears as if out of nowhere, and LaSalle accuses Breen of single-handedly knocking Hollywood to its knees. Also, LaSalle has a none-too-subtle preoccupation with Norma Shearer-a powerhouse from the pre-Code days who, unlike West or Garbo, has remained unappreciated in the film annals of today-and he risks, at times, slipping into unmitigated Shearer adoration.By no means a social or cultural history of the period, LaSalle nevertheless offers an engaging and often-affectionate account of the strong women who dominated the films of this pre-Code Hollywood -- Copyright ? 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Book Description:

Between 1929 and 1934, for five short years, women in American cinema were modern! They took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, led unapologetic careers and, in general, acted the way many think women only acted after 1968.

Before then, women on screen had come in two varieties - good or bad - sweet ingenue or vamp. Then two stars came along to blast away these common stereotypes. Garbo turned the femme fatale into a woman whose capacity for love and sacrifice made all other human emotions seem pale. Meanwhile, Norma Shearer succeeded in taking the ingenue to a place she'd never been: the bedroom. Garbo and Shearer took the stereotypes and made them complicated.

In the wake of these complicated women came others, a deluge of indelible stars - Constance Bennett, Ruth Chatterton, Mae Clarke, Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis, Ann Harding, Jean Harlow, Miriam Hopkins, Dorothy Mackaill, Barbara Stanwyck, Mae West and Loretta Young all came into their own during the pre-Code era. These women pushed the limits and shaped their images along modern lines.

Then, in July 1934, the draconian Production Code became the law in Hollywood and these modern women of the screen were banished, not to be seen again until the code was repealed three decades later.

The author, Mick LaSalle , June 30, 2000:

COMPLICATED WOMEN GOT AWAY WITH MURDER
COMPLICATED WOMEN is about the wonderful period in Hollywood when movies were uncensored and a lot of great women -- Garbo, Shearer, Harlow, Crawford, Stanwyck, Dietrich, Colbert, Kay Francis and a dozen others -- got away with murder.

It's a story that can't be beat. I think it's the most exciting and important story in movie history. That's why I wrote the book.

Here's something most people don't know: Before July, 1934, Hollywood films were uncensored. When most of us think of old movies, we think of the staid, safe films from the forties and fifties, which invariably ended with women apologizing all over themselves for having a job, a lover, a life.

Those films were the result of the Production Code, created by a cabal of reactionaries who wanted to turn back the clock and put the wife back in the kitchen. BEFORE the Code, things were different. Women acted like women. They took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, held down professional positions without apologizing for their self-sufficiency, and, in general, acted the way many of us think women acted only after 1968. They had fun.

COMPLICATED WOMEN is their story. It's about the real-life heroines who fought to push the boundaries -- and about the movies they made.

Here's a quote for you: "The morals of yesterday are no more. They are as dead as the day they were lived. Economic independence has put woman on exactly the same footing as man." Who said that? Germaine Greer in 1971? No, it was Norma Shearer, talking to a fan magazine in 1932.

Here's another: "The modern girl ... is built for speed. We have tremendous vitality of body and complete emancipation of mind. None of the old taboos mean a damn to us. WE DON'T CARE." Actress Dorothy Mackaill said that in 1930. See, these women knew they were part of a larger social movement, and they took their role seriously. No wonder the forces of repression did everything they could to stamp them out.

The bad news is the bad guys ultimately succeeded, damaging careers in the process.

The good news -- the great news -- is we still have those movies, scores of films that document the emerging new woman -- films that explore sexuality, question tradition and challenge institutions. They still seem modern today.

The thing is, the people who created the Code did what they did because they did not approve of assertive, free, happy women. But we approve of them, and it's time we reclaimed tham and the pictures they left us. COMPLICATED WOMEN was written to help you do that.

I invite your comments. micklasall@aol.com

About the Author
Mick LaSalle is the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, and teaches a class at University of California at Berkeley on Pre-Code Film. He lives in San Francisco, CA.

Barbara, that 1952 article struck me as the best take, not just on the Beats, but on the whole Silent gen, and by extension on the Artist archetype, that I've ever seen. I was particularly struck by the comparison-plus-contrast with the Lost Generation, and by the disgruntlement expressed with the High's lack of faith and values. This was the first iteration of a theme that would be taken up by Boomers more loudly.


Do you think it's fair to say that the recessive archetypes, in addition to counterpointing the theme set by their next-elders, also foreshadow the theme set by their next-juniors? Can we find a similar foreshadowing done by Xers, a disgust with hypocrisy and dysfunctional societies, to which the Millennials are beginning to respond?

Here's another book about (mostly) GI actresses from slightly later in film history:

"Fast-Talking Dames" by Maria Di Battista

I heard the author interviewed on NPR (Fresh Air, I believe) and she had interesting things to say about smart, independent women while the Hayes Code was in force. She had an answer relevant to this forum when asked why she didn't include Mae West--that she was definitely not fast talking in any sense of the word and a throwback to the late 19th Century. Mae West was, of course, a Lost, and didn't belong with the GI women that were the subject of the book.

Here is the book description from Amazon.com, reproduced for educational purposes only:

"There is nothing like a dame," proclaims the song from South Pacific. Certainly there is nothing like the fast-talking dame of screen comedies in the 1930s and '40s. In this engaging book, film scholar and movie buff Maria DiBattista celebrates the fast-talking dame as an American original. Coming of age during the Depression, the dame?a woman of lively wit and brash speech?epitomized a new style of self-reliant, articulate womanhood. Dames were quick on the uptake and hardly ever downbeat. They seemed to know what to say and when to say it. In their fast and breezy talk seemed to lie the secret of happiness, but also the key to reality. DiBattista offers vivid portraits of the grandest dames of the era, including Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, Barbara Stanwyck, and others, and discusses the great films that showcased their compelling way with words?and with men.

With their snappy repartee and vivid colloquialisms, these fast-talkers were verbal muses at a time when Americans were reinventing both language and the political institutions of democratic culture. As they taught their laconic male counterparts (most notably those appealing but tongue-tied American icons, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart) the power and pleasures of speech, they also reimagined the relationship between the sexes.

In such films as Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, and The Lady Eve, the fast-talking dame captivated moviegoers of her time. For audiences today, DiBattista observes, the sassy heroine still has much to say.

About the Author
Maria DiBattista is professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton University, where she also chairs the film studies committee and serves on the women's studies faculty

There is truly no doubt in my mind that people born between the mid-to-late 50s and the mid-to-late 60s are part of a wholly seperate generation

As someone born in that same period of years who has considerable doubt about the above, let me suggest an alternative hypothesis.


Those born, say, '55-'60 who don't consider themselves Boomers (but do consider themselves similar in mindset to their like-aged peers) may be defining the Boomers not in terms of mindset but in terms of certain cultural events that happened in the late 1960s up to about 1970. Meaning, of course, events such as the Summer of Love, the antiwar movement, the Chicago Democratic Convention in '68, or Woodstock.


It isn't that so-called Jonesers don't feel or think recognizably the same as older Boomers, but that we sometimes don't feel or think the same about those events -- which all of us were too young to take part in.


I never went to a single anti-Vietnam rally. Certainly I wasn't at Woodstock. (Oh, yeah, my parents were permissive, all right, but allow me to travel all the way from Texas to upstate New York at age going-on-13 to go to a three-day rock concert with a bunch of drug-zoned naked older kids? Not bloody likely!)


But the essence of Boomerdom doesn't really rest in participation in those events or even one's attitude toward them. It rests in an idealistic, spiritual or quasi-spiritual, moralistic view of the world, and was equally -- perhaps even more purely -- engendered in the 1970s as in the '60s, around causes like feminism or environmentalism, or in the context of new-age, eastern, or evangelical religion.


Let me put it this way. There are differences between me and someone born in 1943 (13 years my senior). But they pale in comparison to the differences between me and someone born in '61, just five years my junior. I can identify with and understand how the '43 cohort saw the civil rights movement or the Free Speech Movement, and can see myself taking part in those things if I'd been old enough. I can also understand the nihilism and self-destructiveness that characterized the Atari-wave Xers -- but that ain't me.


There is a sharper, harder edge to the later Boom cohorts than to the early ones. But that's just a variation on a theme.

Brian Rush Wrote

As someone born in that same period of years who has considerable doubt about the above, let me suggest an alternative hypothesis.


Those born, say, '55-'60 who don't consider themselves Boomers (but do consider themselves similar in mindset to their like-aged peers) may be defining the Boomers not in terms of mindset but in terms of certain cultural events that happened in the late 1960s up to about 1970. Meaning, of course, events such as the Summer of Love, the antiwar movement, the Chicago Democratic Convention in '68, or Woodstock.


It isn't that so-called Jonesers don't feel or think recognizably the same as older Boomers, but that we sometimes don't feel or think the same about those events -- which all of us were too young to take part in.


I never went to a single anti-Vietnam rally. Certainly I wasn't at Woodstock. (Oh, yeah, my parents were permissive, all right, but allow me to travel all the way from Texas to upstate New York at age going-on-13 to go to a three-day rock concert with a bunch of drug-zoned naked older kids? Not bloody likely!)


But the essence of Boomerdom doesn't really rest in participation in those events or even one's attitude toward them. It rests in an idealistic, spiritual or quasi-spiritual, moralistic view of the world, and was equally -- perhaps even more purely -- engendered in the 1970s as in the '60s, around causes like feminism or environmentalism, or in the context of new-age, eastern, or evangelical religion.


Let me put it this way. There are differences between me and someone born in 1943 (13 years my senior). But they pale in comparison to the differences between me and someone born in '61, just five years my junior. I can identify with and understand how the '43 cohort saw the civil rights movement or the Free Speech Movement, and can see myself taking part in those things if I'd been old enough. I can also understand the nihilism and self-destructiveness that characterized the Atari-wave Xers -- but that ain't me.


There is a sharper, harder edge to the later Boom cohorts than to the early ones. But that's just a variation on a theme.

Great post Brian, each cohort of each generation experidenced their chilhood and young adult turnings from a slighly different, however still pretty similar angle. For instance The last cohorts of the millenial generation will barely remember,if at all the unravelling like the first wavers did. However they will share similar experidences of coming of age as their first waver generational comrades.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Tristan Jones on 2001-10-06 04:15 ]</font>

Do you think it's fair to say that the recessive archetypes, in addition to counterpointing the theme set by their next-elders, also foreshadow the theme set by their next-juniors? Can we find a similar foreshadowing done by Xers, a disgust with hypocrisy and dysfunctional societies, to which the Millennials are beginning to respond?

Brian, I think you're onto something here. Recessive generations first become aware of and identify the societal problem(s), whatever it may be, that needs to be addressed, and the next-younger, dominant generation takes action to eradicate those problems (not that they necessarily succeed). For Heroes, the action taken is constructive, involving building or instututing something new to replace or improve on the old, and for Prophets the action taken is destructive, and involves tearing down the old to make way for the new and improved.
Artists and Nomads are both passive, ie, they don't take action per se, but they first identify and point out the problem which the next younger generation picks up and runs with. The difference between them is the type of problems they identify. Artists identify inner-driven, spiritually and culturally-oriented problems that are later addressed in the Awakening and to some extent in the Unravelling; Nomads identify outer-driven problems with institutions and systems that are addressed in the Crisis and High.

Even the Byrds sang is their famous song about turnings (before S&H discovered them):
A time to build up; a time to break down
a time to love, a time to kill...[etc.]

As far as whether Jonesers identify more with Boomers or with Xers, I think it depends on the individual and his or her circumstances. In general, Xers and Boomers can be divided into four types, two types each generation:
First wave (Woodstock) Boomers are Optimistic Idealists;
Last wave (Joneser or "Pong Wave" Xer) Boomers are Pessimistic Idealists
Atari-wave Xers are Pessimistic Realists;
Nintendo-wave Xers are Optimistic Realists.

The beauty of this is that a simple two-word phrase completely sums up how these four cohort groups differ. Jonesers share the Boomer idealism but also the early Xer pessimism. They're a sort of hybrid. So if you're talking about ideals only, yes, a late Boomer has more in common with early wave Boomers than with Xers; but if you're talking about optimism vs. pessimism, a Joneser is much more like an early Xer, but shares nothing in common with a late-wave Xer, who is not pessimistic OR idealistic. It seems also from what I've seen that first wave Xers are more antagonistic toward early Boomers than last wave Xers are; this makes sense, as the first wave of Boomers and Xers are complete opposites according to this theory. Last-wave Xers share the early Boomer optimism, which may explain why you see more social activism among Nintendo wavers than you ever did with Atari wave Xers.

_________________
Insanity is the only sane way to cope with an insane world.--RD LANGE

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Susan Brombacher on 2001-10-05 19:03 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Susan Brombacher on 2001-10-05 19:14 ]</font>

Barbara - have you been hoarding that article for nearly a half a century? Wonderful, and captures what hit me in the midwest 7 years later. FWIW, a high school senior's (class of 1960) reading list, as well as I can reconstruct it: Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Ginsburg, Buber's "I and Thou", Camus's "L'Etrangere", Sartre's "No Exit" and "Being and Nothingness", Hesse's "Siddhartha", Kierkegaard's "Sickness unto Death", Doestoevsky's "Brother's Karamazov", "The Idiot", and "The Possessed", and, of course, Hugh Hefner's "Playboy Philosophy." Also, "Rebel Without a Cause" was an epiphany for me, which I must have seen the first time in 1959.

By the way, I have always considered myself part of the Beat Generation, which is clearly an Artist one, and have only grudgingly accepted the Silent monikker, because S & H use it, but Silent has never described my reality. I rebelled, and loudly. HTH.

Pax,

Dave Krein '42





<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: David Krein on 2001-10-05 19:33 ]</font>

Heroes: Constructive activity (building, establishing institutions and governments, etc.)

Prophets: Destructive activity (tearing down outmoded institutions, governments, etc.)

Nomads: Passively identify and call attention to the need for contructive action which is later taken up by Heroes (disillusionment with old institutions and regimes that don't work, etc.)

Artists: Passively identify and call attention to the need for destructive action which is later taken up by Prophets (disillusionment with old belief systems, cultural values, etc.)

On 2001-10-01 14:58, alan wrote:
Dear Jessie: regarding the Beats...they believed the term to be a shortening of "beatific".
Many of them were seeking a more authentic experience of life than was considered "normal" in America in the late 1940's thru the early '60's, normal at least in the context of white middle class America.
If you're interested you could read Jack Kerouac [especially On the Road], Allen Ginsberg [Howl] or...my memory is not sending book titles up to the top of my brain, I bet Barbara would have a few suggestions.
They romanticized alot of what we would now call the Black experience, the hip world of jazz and urban living, marijuana smoking and long road trips without any particular destination or time of arrival.
They were very influential on alot of boomers, I know that they influenced me back in the 60's.
Of course, by the time we were reading their books and trying to emulate some of their lifestyles many of them had burned out on drink or drugs or just hard living in general. When I read Kerouac's Desolation Angels I began to have a different take on them, which was that they hadn't grown up at a certain point and that their lifestyles were becoming more and more self-destructive and pathetic.[Kerouac died of alcohol-related health problems as I remember].
But...many of them also became practitioners of Zen meditation and contributed to literature over the next several decades.
It would be interesting to hear how someone like yourself who is from a different generation than mine would react to reading something like On the Road. Would it turn you off as being immature and self-indulgent or would it elicit other responses?

Hi Alan. Is it beatific, or beatnik? I've always heard the term Beatnik. Just wondering.

I've never read anything by Kerouac. I did check out some of the chapters that are online for "On the Road", and to be honest, I probably wouldn't have finished the read. It reads too much like "Catcher in the Rye". Another so-called classic that drove me up a wall.

Barbara! How could you sit on that article for so long????

Soooo that was the Beat culture circa 1952.

I can't believe that article was written that long ago. I was awestruck about how much of it can apply word for word to Xers.

The comparison to the Lost was just as interesting. I've read articles about the Lost and some of the comparisons are dead on.

Now, can somebody clear something up for me. Was the James Dean or Marlon Brando rebel type characters Beats? Yeah, it sounds silly, but my Supervisor Cyndi ('66) is convinced they were. Me, I'm not sure if they are one in the same.

Where did the bongo drum image come from?

This part of the article struck a chord

""Its only complaint seemed to be: 'Why don't people leave us alone?""

I can't tell you how often I've heard my age group say this all my life. One of the reasons there was no group activity or "spirit" was because we wanted to be left alone!

I can still hear it ringing in my ears.."Why don't they just leave us alone", or "I wish they would just drop dead so they would leave me alone". Amazing.

Another question for those who knew the Beat culture first hand. Who wore those black beanie hats? Was that you guys, or the hippies? Seriously, because these were in when I was a teenager and they always reminded me of what I thought of a Poet spouting Beat.

Come to think of it..the same thing could be said for the leather jacket culture of the late 80's and early 90's. Just curious because I have often heard that the late 1980's and early 1990's were somehow like the late 1950's and early 1960's. Has anyone heard the same thing?

Jessie--I recall that Kerouac claimed "beatific" as the source word, whether it was in one of his books or in an interview, I don't exactly remember since it was probably 25 years or so since I read it.
Also, that whole beatnik image thing of bongo drums, coffeehouses, strange poetry that makes no sense, black berets and turtlenecks, little goatees, etc...there were some people who originally looked like that on their own but by the mid '50's it had really become a media creation that people dabbled in who were not beats at all. I remember Halloween in about 1957 or '58 [which would have made me 7 or8] and lots of kids came as beatniks.
The media monster was quite well and alive back then, just as it is now.

"beatniks out to make it rich...oh oh...must be the season of the witch"
Donovan sang that.

you know, this board has helped me make sense of my increasingly cusper status and understand much more of what is behind each archetype, and help me figure out where i come in in all of this.

When juxtaposed between my Xer relatives born in the late 60s and early 70s, and my Millie relatives, of course i say i have way more in common with them. i was at christmas 84 with them...christ, i was even at thanksgiving 79.
Im old. I ALWAYS saw my millie cousins as being very different. I associated their life with more technology at an early age, and a much more constructed childhood. I saw my childhood as untethered, fun, and very grassroots.
But really what the difference between me and my next juniors is is this....

I am not a joiner. They are.

It is my utter failure in life it seems that even though I can bitch and moan about the shape of the world, I cannot find one dependable bone in my body to do anything progessive about it.
Sure I can go to a protest now and then and pretend like I am doing something completely honest and completely how I feel, but really, there have been very few times in my life I have been caught up in passions for a cause.

I used to hate myself for this lack of motivation and how passive I was about everything. I went to vote for the first time, and they told me i wasnt on the list, so I said "ok" and went home.
But I WAS on the list. Im just so used to failure and things not working I just accept them as part of life.

In Student Governement, I was the Vice President. But really I was just good for some fun and some jokes. The dominant generation had arrived and they ran everything. I dont know how they did it, but they had the skills, and I did not.

Im not sure if my brain was rotten by television, or if the world has been explained to me in a very different way than it was presented to them.
But something is very different here.
They look different.
They act different.
They run the other half of the culture, while the boomers run the top half.
And where do I figure into this. My guess is that in midlife Xers will be shut out of everything cultural just as they were in young adulthood. Although people will talk about them, they will never in their lifetimes be invested so much into America that they will come to stand for America.

We arent joiners enough to do that.

So even now as we are kind of on the verge of teetering all out into a full blown fourth turning, im really scared.
In a country full of judgemental, passionate moralistic boomers, and relatively obedient, passionate, collective, teamworking youth..
the people in the middle that can actually see through the patriotic flag waving bullshit will feel once again like they are on a runaway train.
and like Jesse74 says
well probably want to be left alone.
Why is the world so hard for our minds to get a fix on and make order out of.
It always seems so chaotic and not worth bothering yourself about.