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"We're the Eagles, from Los Angeles."

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"We're the Eagles, from Los Angeles."

It is the evening of March 21st 1977 at the Capitol Centre, a now-extinct concert arena in a suburb of Washington, D.C.  The Eagles are on stage.  “Thank you and Good Evening,” Glenn Frey says to the audience following the group’s rendition of “Hotel California.”  He stands upright, focused, guitar-draped, dressed in Young-American seventies garb - blue jeans, and a University-of-Colorado t-shirt.  He is beautiful, he is a success, his band, having just released its career-topping Hotel California album, is a success.  He knows it.

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“A Man Went Looking for America… and Couldn’t Find it Anywhere”

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Dennis Hopper’s 1969 film Easy Rider is perhaps the most definitive film of the 1960’s American counterculture.  Along with producer Peter Fonda and screenwriter Terry Southern, Hopper had witnessed the rise and pre-fall of the youth movement that had been accelerating over the course of the decade, and wanted to speak to it directly.  The characters’ journey paints a landscape of a deeply divided nation, a nation purporting to be a “land of the free” where anyone with long hair is verbally abused and sometimes murdered.

“I Want You” Twice: a Sexy Analysis

People do crazy things when they are in states of want.  The wanter who utters - or sings - “I want you, I want you, I want you” is past all hope.  He is in the hellish nether regions of lust-gone-wrong and is capable of anything.  Without checks or balances on lust, murder and other extremes sometimes find their ways into the picture.  This singular kind of want, this obsessive kind, leaves no room for the want of anyone else, it leaves no room for the potentially mutual want of its object of desire.  This kind of want is proud, it is churlish, it roars harder, moans louder, digs its nails in deeper than any other want could ever do.  This kind of want wants to win.

The Guy Who Never Grew Up: Five Easy Pieces

“I move around a lot, not because I’m looking for anything really, but because I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay,” says Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), the protagonist of Bob Rafelson’s 1970 classic Five Easy Pieces. Bobby Dupea is The Guy who Never Grew Up, and this line of dialogue spoken during a revelatory speech to his incapacitated father, perhaps best sums up his character, as well as the overall mood of the film. 

Ben Kingsley and Company on Learning to Drive

“The ferryman takes you from one bank of the river in his little craft, his boat, to the other bank of the river,” says Sir Ben Kingsley on this variety of the taxi-passenger experience. “You get off his boat and feel that your molecules have somehow been rearranged. You’ve learned something, something’s happened, there’s been a transition, though you might not be quite sure what it is.”