substitute

The Los Angeles Times Magazine has been in decline at least since 1986.

They have tried to recast themselves as the New York Times Magazine, as a Southern California Lifestyle Thing like Sunset Magazine, as maybe four other things. Nothing works.

This week they managed to hit a new low with a feature article on a young woman named Cory Kennedy.

Cory has been internet famous since she was 15, which was in 2005. Someone took pictures of her and posted them, and the phenomenon grew as those things can. She is a pretty girl, and her prettiness is of the gamine waif variety. She will look 15 until she's 25.

The Times Magazine article is the typical deploring/promoting titillation piece. They at once portray her as the "grew up too fast" pop culture victim and as a high-flying teen hottie. They play this game very well. They also made sure to post forty-four pictures of her to accompany the article on the Net.

Ephebophilic disasters like this aren't new. The current crop probably started with the Guess? ads in the 1980s. The "new" men's magazines are all over it. It's creepy. The way this article presented it was particularly damaging, though. She's presented as someone who did this of her own initiative and was in charge all along. It started when she was 15. This appears to confirm predators' belief that their young victims are behaving as adults and not being manipulated.

Edie Sedgwick died in her 20s. I wonder how long Cory will make it?

When I was a kid, I went to a used bookstore called the Apollo. It was just across the boulevard on 18th Street, next to the music store where I got my Schirmer classical sheet music. It was a classic of its type: dark, confused, and full of toppling piles of paperbacks and magazines.

For a kid with only small amounts of kid money, it was paradise. I could get a big fat read for fifty cents. And the disorganization was really a plus. A visit to the Apollo meant strange finds and surprises, even if the surprise was a mechanical engineering manual from 1903 wedged in the "Occult" section.

Used bookstores are overstocked with the last few decades' bestsellers in paperback, and the last generation's bestsellers in hardback. You can always see who's dying now by looking through old hardbacks. At the time, it was clear that the generation that read A.J. Cronin's The Keys to the Kingdom and lots of Dreiser had just kicked the bucket. The paperbacks were a mix of 1960s radicals, 1960s radical reactionaries, 1960s freakouts, 1970s aquarium bubbleheadism, 1970s sexytime explosions, and 1970s thrillers. Since those were great decades for sf, I bought a lot of science fiction there too.

This is also where I met Madman Moriarty. He was an employee at the store and was... colorful. More than once he showed up in full 19th century Scots military finery including kilt, tam o'shanter, and assorted belts and medals. Civil war regalia occurred as well. He drifted in and out of a Scots accent. At 13 years old I had no tools for dealing with him, so I just listened as he described his war reenactment club's activities, the glory of Scotland and the Scots fighting man, and many details of military life. He lived to correct small errors in his areas of expertise, but there weren't many people breezing in from the Costa Mesa small business district to talk about Wallace's last battle or the proper method for throwing a World War I German "potato masher" grenade.

Much later in life I realized that the 5149.5 stalker guy who hounded red_maenad at the bookstore and the over-the-top Scotsman who accosted vegemitelover and bruisedhips at the swap meet were the same affable madman who had delighted and terrified me 25 years before.

While I was in Los Angeles the Apollo moved from 18th street to a trailer in the parking lot next to Hi-Time Liquor. Nothing else changed. Over the years I bought some wonderful books there, including old recipe collections, vintage periodicals, and complete editions of both Pepys' diaries and Burton's Arabian Nights.

They're closing now. After 44 years they're packing it in, selling as many books as they can, and putting the rest on the Internet.

If you're local, drop by and say hi and pick up a crappy paperback or two.

Dan Goodsell's blog has a great set of 1970s Hanna-Barbera promo art today. Most of this stuff is familiar but some of it is totally obscure to me. Robonic Stooges? What? I did have a Quick Draw McGraw card game that I loved.

The page with the weirdest stuff is in this fairly large scan he put on Flickr. (799 x 1042 jpg).

I've previously written about the Decade of Brown as a cultural phenomenon, and more recently about the Big Kids and their heavy metal lives. The parents are their own story.

My own parents were the identified weirdos in the community. Our family was politically left, pacifist, intellectual, and artistic. And we all had big noses. One friendly neighbor said to my mother over a cup of coffee "Ann, you're really nice people. But you're not like the others." Even in the corduroy 1970s, our corner of Orange County was lily-white, right-wing, know-nothing, and kinda stupid. As registered democrats who didn't go to church and drove a Volvo, my parents were clearly alien.

The 70s were also the decade of divorce, though. More than half of my friends had split families in elementary school. They'd talk about their weekends with Dad, or how Dad and Mom were fighting about the house or the dog. A lot of them got pretty badly stressed by it. I particularly remember a couple of boys who, after their father left, became very combative and tried to ascend to alpha dog by shoving the other boys and challenging us to fights.

Going to their houses was odd too. You weren't supposed to mention the dad when the mom was around, and a few of the houses had dad's den preserved as he'd left it because either removing it or using it was too painful. When the mom said "your father..." to the kid there was ice hanging in the air. Being with a friend at the dad's house was even weirder. Dad usually lived in a smaller place or in an unconventional kind of housing like the Balboa Bay Club or a boat or some condo tower. He'd be in full weekend dad mode trying to provide entertainment for junior and his friends, which was cool, but there was clearly some panic going on there.

And then there was the sex problem. This was the disco era, and the divorced moms and dads were dating like crazy. I'd be over at someone's house and realize that the mustachioed, nervous Tom Selleck looking guy this week was different from the last one, and that he wasn't addressed as a dad but as "Tim" or "mom's friend". Tim and mom would stand 5 feet apart when the kids were around, and Tim also had a habit of bringing gifts or candy and smiling in a terrified way at us.

The dads' girlfriends were disco hoochie mamas mostly, and terrified of children. They'd totter around in heels and short skirts grinning at us and making inane small talk for the minimum possible time before vanishing. They were all very tan and wore lots of jewelry. Sometimes girlfriend and dad would go in a room and close the door and have really loud arguments.

The weirdest part of the divorced households was that the adults would just disappear. Mom or Dad and their life mate du jour would flit off for a precious weekend afternoon together leaving us kids to our own devices. I'm surprised that we didn't manage to burn down any houses or kill any pets. We did break at least one major appliance that I remember.

Finally, drugs. My own parents were of the pre rock 'n' roll generation, and having seen a friend melt his head in very early LSD experimentation, they were anti-drug. Anything more than a glass of wine with dinner was a bad idea in our house. But it was pretty clear that Disco Dad and Saturday Night Mom didn't live that way. I was fascinated by the sight of "responsible adults" being clearly high, or clumsily trying to hide paraphernalia or pills from us.

I think a lot of my cynicism comes from the huge contrast between the reactionary moral and political attitudes of the adults around me and their own behavior. My parents, the distrusted lefty secular humanist eggheads, had a stable and nurturing family and worked out their problems. And they were sober and didn't go out on Saturday night and leave me at home with a TV dinner. Meanwhile, the local Elmer Gantrys and Dimmesdales were popping disco biscuits, partner-swapping, and shaking their butts to Peaches & Herb while Junior at home was finding their weed stash.

The Ice Storm was like a documentary about my friends' families growing up.

Of course, now these conflicted right-wing hedonists are running the country. It explains a lot.

Some of us never get over the childhood desire for the impossible. I remember a book I read as a kid, colorfully illustrated without words, in which some children get magical christmas presents of unknown origin. The presents turn out to be strange jumpsuits with backpacks on them. When they are put on and a button on the chest is pressed, the backpacks sprout wings and the children fly off.

The kids soar over beautiful green farmland and towns, land and visit friends, get ice cream, fly some more, and finally return home happily exhausted. When they wake up the next day, the magic flying suits are gone, and in fact never were; it was all a dream.

This is a terrible cheat. Not only is it a nasty trick to use the "it was all a dream" trick anywhere, but the author of this book didn't have the balls to let the poor kids have their science fiction flying suits of the future in a work of fiction! I remember being really upset by the end of that little book.

Throughout childhood I had a series of impossible dreams: toys my parents could never buy, mostly. As I got older I wanted various Cool Stuff that was out of my reach: the ultimate bicycle, various electronic items, eventually a computer. I would make elaborate lists of the exact specifications of things I would never have. It's not that I was a demanding child; quite the opposite! I was almost always too polite to ask for anything, and just hoped that someone would notice my obsession with the current golden dream and present it to me.

But I had a talent for wanting the unreachable. I wasn't often satisfied; one bicycle and a walkie-talkie set stand out as dreams fulfilled. Rosebud! O my Raleigh 10 speed, and the little walkie talkies with the separate microphone that was so cool.

As the Apostle says, now that I think as a man I put away childish things. My toy planning now is limited to the occasional configuration rampage on an auto maker's or computer company's website. I don't like to play the "if I won the Lottery" game or read books about how to become the CEO of a company. That stuff feels immature, silly.

But if there's a woman I know who's unavailable, I'll fall for her whether she's attached, uninterested, or just emotionally inaccessible. Reliably and fatally, I'm attracted to whomever won't reciprocate: ice queens, people who live far away, people in love with someone else, and people who just aren't interested.

And when I think about solving my problems I need to fix everything, now and forever; I insist on total cures for my ills and freedom from every demon that dogs me. I can hold up some ridiculous image of future perfection and call it a goal, and I'm being serious.

And when I let my mind drift and imagine some kind of happiness like that, I always next imagine betrayal and failure. Clearly I'd be dumped by anyone I wanted, obviously any success at defeating my troubles would blow back in my face sevenfold once I told myself I'd won. I build tragic ends to every daydream.

There's life lived with nose pressed to the glass. The flying suits never arrive, and if they did it was all a dream. Real life is more like marching than like flying, and that's never suited me.