I guess I am a Millenial – please bear with me; but also I don’t care if you do because I’m a Millenial – but I think I have a pretty decent understanding of how things used to be, sometimes even from my own memory. Like, I have a non-ironic cassingle here somewhere.
What’s really a mystery though is how things got around. I don’t mean people but things. Information, books, gossip. In some book from the 30s – it may have been „Das Kunstseidene Mädchen“/“The Artificial Silk Girl“ (ambiguous translation that) – the narrator marvels at the Very Important intellectuals in a coffee place who read newspapers, „some of them not even in German“. And I’m wondering: yeah, how did they get those? Because even today it takes about a week for The New Yorker to be delivered.
I’m even more curious when it comes to cult objects, like forgotten books, or bootlegs. How did people get bootlegs anyway? Mail-order? I guess there was a strong local component. You can see it in comedy shows from the 90s that held a “general“ appeal but still were really specific in their references. Hell, to this day SNL will have sketches about weird subway ads for tattoo removal.
It’s about secret knowledge, of course, and smuggling that into the mainstream. “Seinfeld“ used quotes from a famous Buddy Rich rant at three occasions. The richest treasure trove like that is “The Kid Stays In The Picture“, the autobiography by famous producer Robert Evans.
Evans started out as a wunderkind at Paramount (after a brief career as an actor) and produced films like “Rosemary’s Baby“, “The Godfather“, “Chinatown“. He was a famous lothario – he bedded Ali McGraw – and an even more famous friend of the llelo. His autobiography touches on all these things. He writes in English, but his actual language is that of the silk robe: would you believe the things he’s seen and done, baby? No darling, you wouldn’t.
There’s a famous book on tape version that alone justifies the existence of that medium, but even before that there were bootleg recordings of a reading at Sundance, I think. It’s glorious. Anyway: it got passed around the comedy community. Bob Odenkirk wrote a sketch where God (not G’d, I gather) reads his own autobiography (aka The Bible) and modeled him on Evans. And Patton Oswalt has a bit where he pushes Evans’s gift for self-aggrandizing anecdotes into hilariously nightmarish territory.
There are still great things like that, but now they just get passed around on Facebook and then are forgotten. And when SNL does a parody it just feels old and trite. Best laugh at- by date. Is that a shame, babe? You bet it is.