After this you will be able to spot Gay 90s nostalgia and amaze your friends with the degree of detail you can summon when spouting my opinion. People will be both amazed and yet saddened, not so much because your font of information has somehow ruined a period of American history that they may have previously held in some esteem, but rather because it seems as if you have an opinion about God damned everything.
Me? I don’t have an opinion on everything, really. I don’t have an opinion on the Obamacare bill, really. Or either of our current wars, really. Or really anything actually affecting my life, really. But I have an opinion on Gay 90s Nostalgia. This is because I am a dithering old man… I mean pulp magazine historian.
I know I promised both another story and a quick hit on Internet Cult Master to the Geriatric Set David Packatollah Pack, but neither are really set for sail yet. I’ve been in the midst of a few projects here, have had some social and employment related events, have been a little under the weather, there was a terrible flood and I, like many 1940s era superheroes, have had a serial run in with a giant vampire zombie whom I sincerely hope does not become my signature arch enemy, ala Daredevil verses the Claw, because I would be completely under-armed.
Or something like that.
I’m afraid I mischaracterized the Flapper somewhat in my entry about Commuter Libraries as well as in Hil-Gle’s pages on both Breezy Stories and Real Nazi UFO Man-Eater Cults. These people did not just pop in out of nowhere and start spewing sex fiction. They have something of a context unto themselves. The Roaring 20s was an era bracketed by a pair of depressions. It followed a fairly mindless war that was started by a confluence of pointy heads. If the Flappers had become disenchanted with intellectuals and the various ‘isms’ such peddled, they had good reason.
Another not often covered factor leading to the Flapper revolt was the prevalence of Gay 90s Nostalgia upon the era. The Gay 90s (Gilded Age) were the 1950s of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. (And 1940s, although it had faded somewhat thanks to Flapper inspired counterculture.) The ‘old fogies’ referenced by the Flapper could not resist bringing the era back in waves of nostalgia crazes. I did explain its effects on the pulps in The Laughing Wallflower, but not upon other art forms or society as a whole. I also failed to explain what the heck it was. What I intend to give you is just an overview—not of the 1890s themselves, but rather the massive squat down effect nostalgia for such had. If Jazz, Ragtime and Rhythm & Blues were reactions to anything, it was to the constant upchuck regurgitation of barber shop quartets and Sousa music. All of this repeating loop nostalgia fostered in youth of the time a strong desire to live in the here and now—or anyplace that wasn’t there and then.
I personally like Sousa music and Jazz and don’t really see the dichotomy, but I am a modern person. I think about this every time I am about to dismiss Rap as crap. Then I expose myself to some Hip Hop and I am cured. Rap really is crap and I am convinced no passage of time will make it seem otherwise-- although that would be contrary to every known historical pattern.
But I can see how one generation’s music is another’s noise.
I suppose we do have nostalgia crazes in today’s world, too, but they don’t go on for 30 years and completely stagnate all aspects of style from architecture to music like the Gay 90s did. What it was about the Gay 90s that seemed so attractive is hard to pin down through modern eyes.
Since it has faded, let me list its trappings. The banjo. The marching band. The ice cream social. Barbershop quartets. Gazeboes. Mannered parks centered near train stations. Straw hats for men. Ladies hats festooned with flowers in the shapes of sail boats. The striped suit. (Stripes in general, generally in three tones.) Suspenders. Cobblestone streets. Today these things are generally limited to theme parks. During the height of the crazes, they became reality—or at least summer fashion.
It was a celebration of Walking Culture, the last modern period before the manifestation of the car. In nostalgia mode, horses also disappear. Most of its rituals, parades and band concerts, demanded that cars and horses be banned from the immediate area. It was the last era before recorded music. Circuses, street performers, baseball and hot air balloons are often added to the mix. What is presented is a time when most Americans lived in small, slow paced towns wherein the cycle of humdrum life was occasionally spruced up by a gathering around the old train station followed by some highly formalized milling about.
If it sounds like a Ren Faire, there’s a good reason. Both are confections sprung from the imagination. Neither actually happened. The Gay 90s had more staying power, actually creating permanent camps centered on train stations and surrounded by homes with white paneled sides and narrow front lawns kept behind short iron fences. All of this was rimmed by shops with awnings and broad picture windows.
At one time style moved very slowly. Once a style became established it was very hard to dislodge, especially if it came with cheap to configure architecture. Gay 90s style ran across all mediums. It was the first style ever to sweep the entire country, popularized by magazine illustration and presented by rural free delivery via Wards and Sears. It was not so much a product of its actual time as it was industrialization. If you looked for any of the actual Gay 90s in the Gay 90s, you wouldn’t find it there.
The actual Gay 90s was the tail end of the first migration from the farms to the cities. There was no little town transition point. You moved for work. You went from working on a farm to working in a factory. From farm house to squalid apartment—do not pass go, do not stop at the little city with the gazebo, hot air balloons and free concerts on a Friday night.
Nor was the place you came from like that. If you lived on a farm, you lived on the farm. Only European farmers lived in towns. American farmers lived in remote farm houses, as they do today. If you did have a town nearby, it was a place to park heavy industry. It was the home of the saw mill, the black smith, the general store/post office, the beat dump and silos. If it did have a train station, it might have a bank and an implement dealership. Gather there in your Sunday best with a flowered sail boat on your head? Are you insane. It’s a linear place with a horse poop infested dirt road. The only people who live in town, work there. And if there’s a marching band dodging horse poop as it plods down the street, it’s only because someone died. The churches, the schools, the places where barn dances and other functions take place are out in the farms, where most people live.
Your big city isn’t much fun, either. They are laid out for the needs of transport and industry. Your living conditions are an afterthought. Besides the displaced farmers, they are crammed with foreigners bleating strange tongue and huddled together in enclaves. And the dirt streets are just as infested with horse poop.
(I don’t really blame the nostalgia mongers for banning the horses. It’s the first thing I would get rid of, too.)
In rural areas farms are getting larger and people are moving even further apart from each other. Rural centers themselves are shifting. Without a rail line or a river head, most little towns are doomed. In the cities we have taverns, cocaine use, child labor, washer ladies, prostitution and robber barons.
Where the hell is River City from the Music Man? Where is Our Town? Show me “Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana, Gary Indiana?” Where is Peoria, where everything must play? Or Waukegan? Where is this place that Vaudeville performers from the 1920s claimed to have gotten their clothing from? Search the 1890s and you’re not going to find it.
There is no River City. There never was an Our Town. Peoria was a transport hub, not a rural town. Waukegan was industrial. And Gary, Indiana was Gary, Indiana-- the most filthy part of Chicago. I’m getting soot in my ice cream social here!
As for the Vaudeville performers, they’re Jews dressing in Gay 90s style in order to “look American.”
It was the “American Look”, too. The Gay 90s Nostalgia style got its start in the exurbs of New York and did legitimately kick off in the 1890s. Well to do New Yorkers of the time were establishing little themed vacation villages throughout the near countryside. Not being actual farm folks themselves, they built these white boarded homes in the town. They were the original McMansions, endowed with the smallest amount of over-styled green space they could get away with. Merchants borrowed from the French gallery style in order to fit in with the grids of these houses. The newly launched neverlands soon sprouted gazebos, bifurcated parks, themed days and auto bans.
It became vacationland chic, spreading its tendrils to Atlantic City, Mackinac Island, Maine, the Dells, wherever summer fun could be found and bicycles rented.
(If bicycles had ever been such a big thing, the Bicycle Trust would not have collapsed.)
No, no one ever lived this way. No, no town was ever practically laid out this way. But for the summer, we can pretend. It became so popular it became prefab. Little islands of it, like Coney Island and Chicago’s RiverView started to sprout up. It wafted over the waspy-er districts of urban areas. They couldn’t get enough of it in Kansas City and Saint Louis. The trend invented the trade of siding salesman. What reason other than style would a sane person slap wood on their perfectly decent brick home?
The trend then moved to the reconfiguring rural areas. If the old home town didn’t look like the Gay 90s in the 1890s, it did by the 1930s. Gay 90s nostalgia came on the rails, pre cut from eastern mills and factories. The homogenization of America was on!
It got spotty around the Rockies and there were some places so poor or out of touch or so presupposed of their own sense of place that the style never touched. It bypassed Chicago, but hit its exurbs. Having found itself suddenly abutting Chicago, my own old home town, a former brick works, did itself up in Gay 90s splendor, complete with gas lamps and a district of oversized white houses during the 1920s and 1930s.
Beyond architecture, music and mannerly ritual, the Gay 90s also had its own literature. As an additive to the still strident Romantic Movement the Gay 90s gave us the Horatio Alger story. To most people this story supposedly reads: work hard, keep trying and eventually luck will make you a success. In actuality it was more along the lines of: suck up long and hard to the rich and one of them may notice you and make you his house boy. Alger wrote this story over and over again and he wasn’t the only one.
After some twenty years of this crap, a backlash was brewing—especially against the Horatio Alger idiom. As I have mentioned in these pages, the first bombs against the order were thrown by the suffragist movement. They and their trade union pals had established the 40 hour work week, banned child labor and gained for women the right to vote. They also led the fights to criminalize prostitution, marijuana and cocaine. Then they went and voted the whole theme park that was our nation dry, banishing beer with the horses.
That’s where our pals the Flappers got off the feminist bus. You can kind of see what they were up against. They didn’t point out that the whole set up was fake. They honestly didn’t know that. All they knew is that they wanted no part of the sexless and strident progressives and no part of the ice cream social eating straights. Like punkers, they took a piss on the whole thing.
I guess sex was the one thing neither the progressives nor the straights liked much, so it’s natural that it became the sole focus of Flapper Fiction. Although Flapper Fiction faded as quickly as the Flappers themselves had, many other forms the Flappers rooted for established some traction as counterculture.
The height of the Jazz age dovetails perfectly with the height of the Gay 90s Nostalgia craze. They were competing styles, The Gay 90s won in the short term. Eventually the Flappers became their mothers, put stilts on their feet and sail boats on their heads and went on their merry way. But they had logged a sticky fingered protest before they did so, setting the tone for all counterculture to follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment