10 Comments

You've placed both Ma Rainey and Don Fanucci nearly 40 years too early.

Expand full comment
author

Well, I wasn't being too literal about this. The idea with this piece is that it's dealing with our (or specifically my) perception and about the way that different decades seem to coalesce into an 'ideal type.' The 1880s are 'beyond the technological horizon' for us and so have far fewer immediate associations - although maybe something like Butch Cassidy or the Assassination of Jesse James captures it better. Although FWIW Don Fanucci would have been alive in the 1880s! We just happen to meet him a little later on.

Expand full comment

Okay. And Fanucci is after all a fictional character.

I will suggest though that Ma Rainey as a representative historical figure is pretty specific to the 1920s, in a couple different ways one of which is technology.

Expand full comment

Britney was in the 2000s

Expand full comment
author

Thanks Nolando. As in my note to Paul above, I'm not being overly literal in my cutoff for the decades. The Britney Super Bowl commercial was in 2001 but Britney, to me, is the essence of the '90s.

Expand full comment

In any voice but in t voice of Movietone? As a tree it can start on stick legs of bluid tunes. Ma Rainey s was young though 34? When she died and that was 47? I will assign an idiocracy to t present where apartment neighbor does not appreciate maximally the obscuring walls to sound and my Mulligan makes me "ig'nant'. Funny. I like it. This is welcome unrealism. Use it in place of a battle order roster poster.

Expand full comment
author

I agree. Never use a battle order roster poster!

Expand full comment

Interesting. Every decade from a male point of view. Imagine if you were a woman — it would read so differently I think.

Expand full comment
author

Hi Leslie, you're right of course. I'm male and have my male perception. I was thinking through what this would look like from a female perspective and it's so different that I felt I would have a hard time doing it. 'Ideal types' are so subjective that it's very hard to get outside of one's limited view with them.

Expand full comment

I love this piece and the idea of it as an exercise to do every once in a while. See how our memory of the past changes. Also, that Britney Spears commercial. Whoa. That took me immediately back. I just read Maupassant's "Boule de Suif" story for the first time and it's the 1870s incarnate in my mind.

Expand full comment