Sic transit gloria mundi, Man

A few months back, the hippy shoestore next door closed up shop for good. Place had been there since 1973. As I understand it, this was the first Birkenstock retail outlet in... the country? the city? Anyway, the storefront was something of a retail landmark. If you'd ever been in the place, you would remember it. The design aesthetic was something between cave interior and geodesic mud-hut; loads of shaped plaster curving into protozoaic alcoves, lumpy arches, fungal shelving, low toadstool benches. The whole place was painted in shades of tarragon and applesauce, and the carpeting always looked damp, but wasn't. The summer when I was ten years old, reading The Lord of the Rings, stretched out on the shag, in front of the standing fan with blades the size of banana leaves, the inside of that shoestore would probably have been indistinguishable from my dream house. Just picture bunkbeds, books and trolls instead of shoeboxes, open-toed sandals and leather-clogs.

This week, there were guys with big saws, crowbars and sledgehammers, stripping the joint back to the bricks. I stood out on the sidewalk today, in a light rain, watching these burly gentlemen hauling out big chunks of plaster and chicken-wire to their truck. When they're done, the joint will no doubt be just another, narrow and rather anonymous little retail space; one long, low room full of skimpy girl clothes, or pita sandwiches, or one of those weird little Korean groceries that survive on cigarette sales and caffeinated booze. Who knows?*

For about a month before the tear-down, there was a temporary tenant, selling Rasta-wares: floppy knits, Bob Marley T-shirts, bongs, big hats, etc., all in those Jamaican flag colors that, no disrespect intended, always make me think of hotdog-condiments: relish/mustard/ketchup. No Rastafari were ever in evidence in the place, which seemed to be exclusively staffed by one or two, rather nervous looking teenagers of East Indian descent, if I had to guess. The whole operation looked very much like what it proved to be: a kind of fly-by-night, packed and unpacked in a day, flea-market kind of business. Left just the way it came, too, without so much as a hint of ganja in the air to suggest it had come and gone.

Whatever the circumstances that finally convinced the original owners to close up the comfortable shoe business, I couldn't say. I never shopped there, but once. Years ago, I went in, but could not convince the very nice clerk that Berks were not for me, until he'd insisted on trying to get one on my foot and failed. Never could wear Birkenstocks myself. I do wear comfortable German clogs pretty much every day, roughly eight months of the year in Seattle, but the Birkenstock design, for whatever reason, seems to presume a flat, thin foot with which I was not blessed. (I have feet like fresh mozzarellas, and find that some other good Europeans, at Mephisto Shoes, actually make an even more expensive leather clog with the fat-footed gnome, as apposed to Birkenstock's healthy blond hiker, in mind. Highly recommended, fellow fat-footed bookstore gnomes -- and you know who you are.)

Seeing my ten-year-old-self's fantasy of a perfect Hobbit-hole being deconstructed today reminded me that, depending on one's opinion of avocado appliances, foil wallpapers, deep pile, and matchy-matchy, etc., the 1970s have not yet quite survived long enough to become forgivable, in any way, including as a period of style and design. Elements, specially in fashion, from that most experimental of times, have recently been reintroduced with varying degrees of success; the, to me, noisome prints of Emilio Pucci have come back here and there, for instance, as have wedge-platforms, the halter-dress, and bare legs for the ladies, but the quite rightly much maligned leisure suit, gentlemen's caftans, and wide ties, not so much.

As for interiors, perhaps the less said about Italian Revival furniture, suede sectionals, and the four foot lampshade, the better. Try not to even think about wicker.

Reminiscing about all of this with the work-wife, my dearest T., who is of my own generation and was in fact, I think, married barefoot in a peasant gown, we had to laugh when I remembered my sister's happiness when she was able to redecorate her bedroom as a cool teenage chic. Remember that ubiquitous "psychedelic" mushroom and sunflower patterned contact-paper of the period? (Remember contact-paper?) I can close my eyes and still see my big sister's "Hang On Snoopy" poster above the bed, her princess phone, her portable record player with the "built in speakers", her collection of Stevie Nicks shawls all over everything. Bless her. It was all rather hideous, wasn't it?

This has all set me to thinking about what does and does not survive, and what should and shouldn't, from the still not so very distant past. Looking up a list of Billboard's Top 100 for 1973, I was not surprised to see pop junk like Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree, or the empty rock of the Edgar Winter Group's Frankenstein, or the still cringe-inducing My Love from Wings, right up there. I was pleased however to see a number of solid songs about which none of us need now be embarrassed, from the likes of Marvin Gaye, the Doobie Brothers, Paul Simon, Carly Simon, and so on. Truth be told, even today I'd listen to an album -- yes, an album -- made from maybe half of what's on the Billboard list.

The best movies of 1973 make an even more impressive list -- though anyone who thinks that at ten I'd ever heard of Mean Streets, or Truffaut can not remember what being ten was like. (Great list though.) Even among the straight box-office champs, about the only thing other than Disney's very minor Robin Hood that I know I saw in my one-horse hometown's one movie theater, the beloved and still operating Guthrie Theatre -- note "theatre", so classy -- would have been The Exorcist. (Couple of my sister's girlfriends -- also still operating, I'm glad to say -- managed to sneak me in with them. The movie was what was then called "a hard R," which was most unusual at the Guthrie in those days. I had to see it though. Luckily, one of the girls was, shall we say, surprisingly full flowered for fifteen or so, and by insisting that she was my mum, she got me in. The girls all watched the movie between their fingers, shrieking like banshees. I myself was quite naturally terrified, but could not look away. Memorable night.

As for the bestsellers' list from that same year...

Bestsellers' lists are almost invariably awful, it's true. That of 1973, I won't even review. No one would remember half of it. Much that one might remember would only be because of the movies, not nearly so bad, at least for being briefer, that were made from those books. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, suffice it to say, was at the very top. Jacqueline Susann comes after that. As bad as that sounds, and I can think of few things worse, again, there are a few books from that year that have some claim on posterity: Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, Gore Vidal's best historical novel, Burr, Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul, just from the top ten fiction titles. Pretty good, that. As for the nonfiction, that might be today's NYT Bestsellers, for all the difference nearly forty years can make to such things. Diet, sex, self help, these things don't change much.

Elizabeth Bowen and Noel Coward died that year, as did Kid Ory, Jane Bowles, LBJ, Picasso, Conrad Aiken, Arna Bontemps, J. R. R. Tolkien, Henry Green, Gene Krupa and Wystan Auden.

Stephenie Meyer was born in 1973, thus insuring, I suppose, the continuity of the bestsellers' lists down just about to today.

Things change and they don't. Remembering 1973 doesn't do much for me, frankly. I was ten, first off. How memorable, by the grace of God, should ten be? My grandmothers were alive. My school teacher's name was... Watergate was something that would eventually interrupt my Saturday mornings. Vietnam was still "the war."

It gives one pause, certainly, to think how very important 2011, the whole of it to date, will probably look, thirty five or forty years hence, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, I'm all but completely preoccupied just now with trying to work out what I might read, if I might read aloud, for William Makepeace Thackeray's 200th birthday, come July 18th. I am no less sanguine about doing so, for this brief exercise in nostalgia, nor any the more hopeful of either the reading coming off or happening at all, but I can certainly see why it is important, I think, to acknowledge in some way, the survival of genius.

Mustn't let the little of glory that survives fade away. Just look at what we must wade through to find it, man.

Peace.

*Learned on Friday, the place is going to be a Yogartland. Also, evidently the funky interior predates even the shoestore. More if and when I learn it.