I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.
Remember how many beautiful women there were in the 1950s and 1960s, without any surgery? And now, thanks to degeneration, we have this.
If you want to write something of length, however modern and radical, you must live the life of an elderly gentleman of the 1950s.
I had no television when I was little, just a stack of old, beat-up comics from the 1950s and 1960s.
Television from its inception had the number one goal to alienate as few people as possible. That's why if you look at 1950s, 1960s American sitcoms, the characters don't live any place in particular, religion is never discussed, politics is never discussed, you never really know what anyone's job is; nothing that could make these people seem different from you is ever discussed.
There was a time traditionally - say, GM in the 1950s - it was trying to develop a consumer base that would be loyal and lasting and they were thinking in terms of an institution that would remain and grow and thrive in the society. By now, a lot of the investment firms - bankers, hedge funds - are perfectly happy to destroy what they're in and come out with huge, tremendous benefits. That's a new stage of capitalism.
I grew up in Marin County north of San Francisco, and in the 1950s and '60s it was a natural paradise.
I don't want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.
There won't be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won't be any more white folks around who actually remember them.
From the cranberry cancer scare of the 1950s to the Alar-in-apples hysteria of the 1980s, from the "new ice age" of the 1960s to the "global warming" of the 1990s, environmental alarms almost always turn out to be false. Few non-political scientists fear ozone loss, global warming, or acid rain. These are just issues that some people hope to use to reorder the lives of the rest of us.
And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.
The first time I remember our being socially in the same place was after we graduated and [author, investment counselor, philanthropist, and fellow 1950s Yalie] Peter Wolf had a party at his house in the Hamptons.
I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s.
There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.
