(Roughly) Daily

Stephen Paul Miller calls the seventies the uncanny decade — the “undecade.” Things were particularly weird in these years, which remain shrouded in America’s cultural memory, as if by a kind of smog. One reason for the haze is the period’s elusive placement between the highly overdetermined sixties — often considered by historians to last well into the subsequent decade — and the more garish icons that come to the fore later in the seventies, like disco and punk, Pong and Star Wars, Jonestown and the Bicentennial. Indeed, liminality is a key characteristic of the early seventies. Radical and transformative forces unleashed in the sixties mutated and dissipated into much broader segments of culture and society. One no longer needed to be an inhabitant of San Francisco, the East Village, or Ann Arbor to explore the creative maelstrom of drugs, uncorked sexual experimentation, and the alternative worldviews associated with radical politics or the occult revival. Thresholds were everywhere.

At the same time, and in stark contrast to the previous years, the horizon of individual and social possibilities abruptly narrowed. Whether left, right, or center, the nation drifted into a Slough of Despond perhaps unprecedented in American history. In polls taken at the end of the seventies, people looked back at a decade of “disillusion and cynicism, helplessness and apprehension,” a list we might as well round out with disorientation, paranoia, boredom, and frustrated rage. I suspect that one reason we find ourselves dependably amused by tacky seventies fluff like shag carpet, massive sideburns, and smiley face buttons is that we need to keep the trauma and perplexity of the era at bay. This is despite (or due to) the fact that so many of the era’s bummers resonate with our own: fears about terrorism and environmental collapse, surveillance paranoia, political cynicism, foreign war fatigue, and a pervasive apocalyptic undertow that tugs beneath an over-heated, desperately sexualized, fantastical, and often bleak popular culture…

Three psycho-spiritual “events” of the 1970s — involving Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence and Dennis McKenna — had a strange synchronicity.  In an excerpt from his new book, High Weirdness, the ever-illuminating Erik Davis explains: “In the Age of the Psychonauts.”

* Robert Anton Wilson

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As we push at the doors of perception, we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that the theatrical musical Jesus Christ Superstar premiered on Broadway.  With music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice, it had originated the prior year as a concept album (that was given a concert performance in Pittsburgh earlier in 1971).

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