Rich Mintz  

Driving up the New Jersey Turnpike tonight, after the sun had gone down but before it was really dark — in other words, prime nostalgia time — I was listening to Billy Joel on Rdio. I’m not talking about “River of Dreams” Joel, about which the less said the better (although if that’s your thing, you know, good for you) — I’m talking about the early stuff, like draw a line right through the middle of “Uptown Girl” (or maybe right after it if you’re feeling generous) and consider everything before.  The two peaks of this period were, of course, The Stranger and 52nd Street.

I should confess at this point that I’m not a particularly rabid Billy Joel fan, but unlike many other wealthy and popular singer-songwriters, the man is both a genuine musician and a very gifted entertainer, and those two albums are probably two of my lifetime favorites, as listenable and interesting now as they were 30 years ago.

So, I was listening to this stuff, you know, “My Life” and “Only the Good Die Young” and “Rosalinda’s Eyes” and so forth, and a wave washed over me of nostalgia for something I never actually experienced (I’m sure the Germans have a word for that) — namely, the New York City of the 1970s and early 1980s. I mean post-Simon and Garfunkel (who essentially marked the very tail end of the falling-away of an old New York, a city of homburgs and Checker Cabs) and pre-Wall Street (which is a convenient marker of the rise of a new New York, the New York of super-rich douchebags and, as all my native New Yorker friends never tire of repeating and repeating and repeating, “mallification”).

It just happens that that period exactly coincides with my growing-up years (I entered kindergarten in 1970 and graduated from college in 1987), a period during which I had almost no experience of New York City.  (I visited for 36 hours in 1982, at age 17; found it disturbing and chaotic and unsafe and definitely unappealing; and didn’t return for years, except once or twice briefly during college.)

New York in the 1970s and 1980s is an experience I entirely missed, and I regret it. By all accounts it was a heady time, and not Masters-of-the-Universe headiness, but the headiness of “everything might change, if we want it to, and we do, don’t we? So let’s try something.”  You know, post-Watergate, post-”Drop Dead,” but pre-Helmsley. Not everyone experienced life this way, of course, but enough people did that the memory of it is still in the cultural air here.  And elsewhere, too — the post-Watergate malaise/hopefulness was national — but everything tends to be muted in Los Angeles where I grew up, people are parochial and on average tend not to give much of a shit about things that happen in the outside world.

Early Billy Joel stands for (and, in snippets, captures and reflects back) that New York City in its moment of transition, which I wasn’t mature enough to get excited about when I encountered the very tail end of it in 1982. By the time I spent significant time in New York — in 1995 and 1996 — everything was ruined.

Don’t get me wrong, the city is still a lovely, powerful, vibrant, and diverse place, of course, and in countless ways is better now than it used to be — I happen to hold the bourgeois and out-of-fashion opinion that a city in which you are not likely to be murdered or slashed or larcenized is a better place than one in which you are, even if that comes with a side of Starbucks. I’m very glad I get to have the experience of living and working here, and helping to effect the next round of accretive change. But people who lived here before about 1990 have a sense of wonder about what they lived through — oh my God, we all did this and this and *this*, I can hardly believe it now, and we all did it *together* — that people who lived here afterwards don’t really have. I missed out on that New York, and it’s never coming back.

I was one of those kids who did creative and/or geeky things after school. I took an afterschool art class in the first grade (we experimented with all kinds of interesting media — it was the ’70s), took an afterschool class in simple electrical circuitry in the third grade (batteries and switches and light bulbs), took a disco dance class at a dance studio in the sixth grade (best not say too much about that), took the bus alllll the way up to a hobby store in Northridge to buy Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia in the seventh grade, and so forth.

But one of the most formative experiences of my creative youth was taking pottery classes at Everywoman’s Village, the hotbed of ’70s do-your-own-thing women’s liberation on Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys.

The Village (not just for women, although mostly so) was like a cross between an ashram and the Learning Annex, with a dollop of macramé and a soupçon of consciousness-raising stirred in. They offered classes in all sorts of arts, crafts, and life skills, from the pottery and guitar classes I took to more practical skills like typography and layout. As importantly, in those late-’70s days when self-actualization was in the air, they embodied a vision of life that’s not so different from the Brooklyn of Etsy and homebrewed beer and curated moustaches. It was a place where people who had started off narrow, or with limited options, came to open their minds; the sorts of people I remember from my classes were like the women in 9 to 5 — which was a journey of self-actualization, too. The closest contemporary approximation I can think of is Brooklyn’s Third Ward, but the Village seemed much more politically charged.

Physically, Everywoman’s Village was a collection of modest beige stucco bungalows on an asphalt lot with some patches of scrubby grass, surrounded by cinderblock walls. (I’d call the style “High 1960s Community College Annex.”) It was a simple place, some studios and classrooms with metal folding chairs. But the vision transcended the surroundings. The colorful murals, like other wall art of the 1970s, put ideals and social commentary right in front of you in visual form. (Sandy Bleifer’s Can of Cardines, under the Hayvenhurst Avenue overpass of the Ventura Freeway, is from the same time period and only about two miles away.) And while on the grounds, you felt like you were part of a grand experiment in community — a crowdsourced place, back in the days when “crowdsourcing” required you to get an actual crowd all into the same place at the same time.

The Village is long gone — there’s a cheap-looking newish hotel on the site, verified by this Google Street View picture of the “Kauai Surf” apartment building I remember from just outside the back entrance to the premises, right behind where the pottery bungalow used to be, where my mom used to pick me up. But I think of it from time to time. It had a cameo in the script of Boogie Nights, so I know I’m not the only person who remembers it.

There’s not much left online, but the image above of “housewives on the way to practice yoga at Everywoman’s Village” will give you the flavor. More images from the same series here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I have the Rockford Files (as often happens) on in the background tonight, and at the beginning of this episode, Angel (Jim’s troublesome ex-cellmate, played by perennial character actor Stuart Margolin) is walking into the fleabag SRO where he lives, and over the mailboxes is a sign with the quote “Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.” I had to look it up; it’s from Daniel Webster, the last person I expected to see associated with a cheesy ’70s TV series. But the quote is actually not a terrible thing to see up on the wall of an apartment building full of hopeless people trying to turn their lives around in a bad neighborhood, at least viewed through a generous paternalistic lens. And certainly in context it’s humanizing. Some propmaster or Minister of Scenery or whatever, back in 1977, decided to put that up (or leave it up); nice touch.

I think I’m readdicted to satellite radio (that didn’t take long, did it?). It’s a whole new ballgame now that my iPhone, combined with the docking speakers that are already strategically placed around my life, can play satellite radio anytime I feel like it.* Sure is easier than hauling that boom box around in the car, like I did in 2002!

In honor of my new addictions, here’s a musical gem turned up for me by the inspired programmers at Sirius XM: “Indiana Wants Me” (1970), a Canadian #1 and American #5 hit, by R. Dean Taylor.

*Some of my docking speakers aren’t compatible with iPhone 4. Fortunately, they’re the crappy ones I already hated…

And now, because I can, some Herbie Rides Again action. God, these Disney movies from the 1960s and 1970s movies were well made — well cast, well acted (with good-natured actors just short of caricature), well shot, visually rich, fun for people of all ages, and completely devoid of anything nasty or unwholesome (which doesn’t mean devoid of humor or villainy, both of which are in evidence throughout). And Ye Chicken Tournament Jousting Today! There is so little in popular culture nowadays that feels like this. And the scenery! They’re worth watching just for the backdrops, usually of a clean and tidy California (here it’s San Francisco) that isn’t around anymore.

I’m coming up on my 25th college reunion, which means that for a quarter of a century, four or six or however many times a year, I’ve been getting Harvard Magazine out of the mailbox, flipping to the class notes in the back, looking for names I recognize in the classes from the eighties, and throwing the magazine in the garbage. Oh, the routine’s changed a little over the years — nowadays, I throw it in the recycle pile — but the substance is the same.

No, no, kidding, kidding! Class notes may be the raison d’etre of an alumni magazine, but I do flip through every issue of Harvard Magazine, and I usually end up looking through some of the features. Unlike your typical alumni-office house organ, HM is editorially independent, and the editorial staff put out a thoughtful product, which reads a little like The Atlantic with a bit less politics and foreign affairs and a bit more science.

This month the editors graced us with something exceptional: “Dropouts,” a feature in which they tracked down three people who dropped out of the class of 1969, at a turbulent time and each for his or her own reasons, and reported on their lives. It’s not entirely surprising that people who had the means and the mojo to make their way to Harvard managed to build thoughtful and interesting lives despite not staying around for the degree — one of the things that struck me when I was there was that it seemed a lot harder to get into the place than to get through it. But it’s still interesting to read about how they did it, each in his or her own way.

As someone who’s had a career path that is in many ways nontraditional, who walks a narrow line between careerism and self-directedness, and who is periodically saddled with doubts originating on both sides of the line — would I benefit, on balance, if I were more conventionally career-oriented? Should I chuck it all and go move to [place of the moment]? — I find stories like these reassuring. These people stepped off the straight-and-narrow, but still wound up okay. They still have the same kinds of doubts that I have — which is part of why the stories are reassuring. They wonder about how things would have been different if they’d made different choices — as I do. And yet they’re content in their uncertainty, knowing that the lives they ended up with are blessed with good fortune and love and self-actualization and other things worth having.

You know the movie Freaky Friday? With Jodie Foster and John Astin and Barbara Harris and Dick Van Patten and a passel of other B-listers from the 60s and 70s? (I’m talking about the real Freaky Friday (1976), not the superfluous remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan.)

Well, here’s a fun fact: the baseball game near the end of the movie was filmed in Encino Park, across from my elementary school — on the very same baseball diamond where we once played a “students vs. teachers” softball game when I was in the sixth grade — which was, incidentally, right about the same time the movie was made. In fact, if you squint, in one scene you can see my school across the street.

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Also filmed in and around Encino Park: parts of Where Have All the People Gone (1974), an unjustly forgotten low-rent sci-fi flick.

Incidentally, while Googling for that, I found this gem (click for more), courtesy of Encino realtors Marsia and Eugene Powers: