Polyester postcards from my past

Couple summers ago, I set myself the task of recovering my memories of the 1970s.

It wasn't that I'd forgotten. I wasn't suffering from a case of decade specific amnesia, my polyester-traumatized mind refusing to re-experience a world defined by hot combs, Earth Shoes, and shag carpeting. It was more a matter of imaginative blindness. I couldn't see my life as I lived it at the time.

I couldn’t see my life because I kept seeing Shaun Cassidy's.

This is still a problem.

I can see the 60s through my then self's eyes. Same with the 80's and the two decades since.  But when I try to see the 70's I end up watching television.

I see the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and not myself and my family in our living room watching The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries.

I don't see the 70s as I saw them. I see them as other people saw them through various lenses.

I think I watched too much television with too close attention.  Too much Bob Newhart, too much Mary Tyler Moore. Too much Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch. As a result, when I try to see people I knew in the 70s as they were then I see too much Marcia Brady in knee socks. Too much Laurie Partridge in pant suits. Too much Shirley Partridge in pants suits. Too much Mary Richards and Emily Hartley in pants suits.

You getting the idea I wasn’t a fan of pants suits? Pants suits and leisure suits were actually like Venom in Spider-man, creatures from outer space that wore the human beings who thought they were wearing them and used their hosts to advance their own evil purposes.

I may have a mental block. It may be that  don't want to see what I was seeing because I would see myself embarrassing myself.  I did a lot of that back then.

But it was when I began to spend a lot of time in the intimate company of pretty young women and I would like to be able to see them again.

This was bothering me so much for a while that I came up with a plan to fix it.  I would fight media with media. I would watch a bunch of movies from the time on the theory that seeing people living through those days would reignite my own memories of living through them.  In the movies the 70s were less obvious. Movies were also real-er.

I figured, though, that this wouldn't work with the better movies or any of my favorites because they are indelible in a different way. They insist on being seen and remembered for themselves. Manhattan and Annie Hall, Network, Three Days of the Condor, Coming Home, Nashville, The Long Goodbye, Shampoo, Dirty Harry, the taking of Pelham one two three, An Unmarried Woman, the Seduction of Joe Tynan, to name a few, are all very much reflective of their time---they look like what the 70s probably looked like. But they look even more like themselves.

But it might work, I thought, with movies that didn't already mean much to me, lesser known films and bad films and films my parents thought would be bad for me, movies I didn't remember for their own sakes because I didn't see them. So...Gator. Night Moves.  Getting Straight. The New Centurions...one after another, I tried.

And it did work, to a degree. I got glimpses. Short but vivid scenes.  Maybe I'd have gotten more if I'd kept at it.

I gave it up.  It stopped feeling necessary. Most everything worth remembering from the 70s was still part of my life in the 80s.  Friends and family I want to see from back then I can see as they were only a few years later.

Every now and then I'll still try. It usually happens when a memory bobs up on its own and I try to hold it on the surface for a really good look.

But it's just nearly impossible to wipe out the overlay of media.  Just when I've got a bit of the window scraped clean, somebody comes along and slaps something like this over the glass.

This comes by way of Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns and Money, for whom I believe the 70s are only of historical interest.  He’s a punk kid. I don’t think he’s even forty. I doubt he has any real polyester nightmares of the time.  His media version of the decade was given to him by Sesame Street. His idea of the fashions of the times is probably Underoos, and isn’t this the weirdest ad ever?

At any rate, thanks to Erik, there’s more Levi’s 70s horror to be found at Retronaut, if you can stand it, and seriously, have you ever had a bad time in Levi’s?