\As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.' This is the most famous line of Scorsese's 'GoodFellas,' which is, and will always remain my favorite movie, and it generally sums up how I feel. It's not because I absolutely love organized crime (or at least the cinematic depiction of it), but rather because gangsters thrived in the most fascinating, tumultuous historical periods in the United States. In short, I feel as if I was born in the wrong decade'this era of hip-hop, blogging and 'Halo''and my preferences in music and especially movies reflect it.
I finally got an iPod Nano for Christmas, and I'll admit it's a pretty handy little device when trudging around in this atrociously frigid weather, but there's nothing on it besides classic rock culled from my vinyl collection. If you enter my house, chances are Cream's Greatest Hits, the White Album, or Skynyrd's Platinum and Gold are blaring on the record player. The kind of movies I watch religiously and hope to make some day are bustling tales of past decades, especially the '20s/'30s or '60s/'70s, chock-full of visceral camerawork, impressive verisimilitude, and, of course, wall-to-wall music.
If it was my choice, I would have been born in either 1900 or 1945, because this would've placed my formative twentysomething years in the 1920s or the mid-'60s and early '70s. I have a lot of affection for the Roaring Twenties, which was spurred in no small part by Prohibition-era films like 'The Untouchables,' 'Once Upon a Time in America' and 'The Cotton Club.' I could see myself rocking out to Cab Calloway or Duke Ellington, drinking copious amounts of moonshine and running around hitting on flappers all day. Cruising around in a Model T on the streets of burgeoning metropolises, going to the movies when they were still a novelty, reading the latest from F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway'that I would much prefer to my Honda Accord, multiplexes and 'The Da Vinci Code.'
But, as fun as it would have been to 'keep cool with Coolidge,' the '60s and pre-disco '70s were the time I was made for. The Beatles, free love, bell-bottoms'what more could you ask for? (I'm kidding about the bell-bottoms). I love going to the Moondance Jam, a July outdoor classic rock festival in Minnesota, and listening to aging hippies telling stories about everything from the debauchery at Woodstock to 'that asshole Nixon.' When I tell them that their stories make me jealous, they go ahead and think of more. Were I to spend my time in any period of history, the first place I'd go would be a time when I turn on the mainstream radio and, instead of Usher and Nickelback, Buffalo Springfield and Creedence Clearwater Revival would be playing. I would definitely get along with the Dude.
Maybe a few decades down the road, I'll fondly recall elements of the present time period that I've taken for granted. It's easy to make theoretical judgments when I have a cell phone and an iPod and a laptop computer, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to deal with the Great Depression or having to move to Canada to avoid going to the sweltering jungles of 'Nam. When I bitch about the present, I sometimes conveniently forget that those past decades were times of great turmoil and unrest, not just endless glory days with better music. But in the meantime, I'll be routinely popping in 'Dazed and Confused' and 'Miller's Crossing,' yearning for a nostalgia I'll never have.
