Modernism, Winter Surfing and a Book About the 1980s

I’ll turn 60 on September 24. So what’s next? I survived cancer, survived one of the nastiest—and most criminal—political hits of the decade, survived the recent Jennifer Lopez album. What I want to do is go winter surfing and write a cultural history of the 1980s. I have a title: Tomorrow Started: Modernism and the Culture of the 1980s.

I don’t like hyperbolic grifting. I’m not crowdfunding this project because THE COMMUNIST LEFT IS TAKING OVER YOUR TOWN or THE WORLD IS ENDING and THEY ARE EATING DOGS IN THE STREET—even if both those things may be true. I’m not perfect but I’m honest. I want to go winter surfing and write a book. Any donation over $200 gets a signed hardback copy of my book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.

The 1980s began on May 21, 1980, with the release of the film The Empire Strikes Back. They ended on September 16, 1991, when the band Talk Talk issued their final masterpiece, Laughing Stock. In between those two events was a lot of brilliant art, literature, theology and music. No one has ever written a book about the culture of the time.

In his book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Simon Reynolds notes that to be alive and young in the 1980s was to be against nostalgia. I was a high school and then college student living in Washington, D.C. in the 80s. The cultural atmosphere was one that celebrated the latest artists, writers and musicians. Just a few blocks from the small row house I shared with three other guys in Georgetown were two jazz clubs, two art house cinemas, three record stores, and a used bookstore owned by the writer Larry McMurtry, whose masterpiece Lonesome Dove was published in 1985. In one weekend I could see Ran, or David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, pick up the latest record by avant-garde modernists Siouxsie and the Banshees, see the Replacements at the 9:30 club, and browse paperbacks by the newest and best writers.

In 1984 Editor Gary Fisketjon launched Vintage Contemporaries, a paperback imprint of Random House. By the end of the 80s, Vintage Contemporaries would have almost 100 titles. As Joy Williams once noted, “The line was a mix of reprints and originals, and nearly thirty years later the checklist found in the back of the books reads like a ballot for some Cooperstown of late-20th Century fiction.” There was a culture. We weren’t atomized or digital slaves. It’s an era worth remembering, but was so special and positive that historians aren’t interested.

1980s pop culture borrowed heavily from modernism—"ransacked" is the term Simon Reynolds used. It was a brilliant time, many of the musicians were conservative (and got pushback from the punitive left). The critic Hilton Kramer argued that mainstream Americans absorbed and accepted modernism. It was forward-thinking while also nodding to tradition and reality. John Taylor of Duran Duran complained about taxes and overly-serious rock stars. Spandau Ballet openly supported Margaret Thatcher. Johnny Ramone was proudly right-wing. Pope John Paul II fought “the pulverization of the human person” that had resulted from communist regimes. People had woken up from the 1960s. I felt more in common with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald then with the Grateful Dead or the New Left.

So that’s it. I want to go surfing and write a cultural history of the Reagan Era. In a way I feel like Cervantes, even if I’m not possessed of his genius. Cervantes survived warfare and captivity to go on to write Don Quixote. The poet George Green wrote a poem “Lepanto,” about Cervantes’ trauma and his time as a captive:

Cervantes, wounded three times, nearly died,

and, luckily, his left hand had been mangled,

which saved him from a slow death in the galleys.

The Moors would hold him captive for five years,

but, even after three escape attempts,

they let him stroll at leisure on the beach.

Waiting for ransom, he beguiled his captors

with palm readings and astrological

prognostications, helping them resolve

disputes, while scheming, desperately, for food.

Barefoot, in rags, he paced around the fort

and wrote his verses in a crumbling tower;

wrote them by memory, wrote them in sand,

to keep a tenuous hold on fading powers.

Watching the sea until he thought the sea

was watching him, he lost all track of time,

dreaming of indecipherable books,

and monsters that his sword would never wound.

Back home, he took great pride in his survival

and knew those years of wrangling with corsairs,

those years of starving on the beach, had taught

him more than patience in adversity.

He could, at will, dissolve into the ether,

dissolve into the empty golden shore.