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web > Short aesthetic summaries of past decades


[https://samkahn.substack.com/p/decade-by-decade]

1910s — The split screen between those who had experienced the trenches and those who hadn’t. Gabriel Chevallier in Fear returning home to find his father drinking and playing cards with his friends exactly like in the old days, all the girls envisioning “spending their whole lives sailing on some limpid blue lake, with their heads on the shoulder of a faithful companion.” Chevallier finishing his leave longing to get back to the trench, where at least there’s something like the truth of modern life.

1960s — The smartest man I know describes the Prague Spring as an ‘LSD event.’ There are videos of Czech army officers across the decade. At the beginning they’re uptight and professional. By the end, they’re hanging off the rafters. Anybody who’d heard an electric guitar, anybody who’d taken LSD, unable to help but feel that the world had to be perfectible. Czech soldiers on LSD