A Journal of the Sleaze Decade

I finished reading A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe yesterday. I didn't love it. I mean, kinda went from okay to meh. It's very dry and very repetitive. I mean, I'm not not glad I read it, especially now as if not now then I guess when would I ever(?). And there are bits to find with some parallels to today, but there's also a lot of tedium and hashing out of numbers surrounding all the sections/parishes of London. Other than that, later at night Mary Beth and I hit up Indie Memphis's virtual site and watched this documentary called Creem: America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine. The title does pretty well to describe its subject matter! I never knew a whole lot about Creem except that Lester Bangs wrote for it for a while. And given the little bits I know of it through musical culture osmosis, the story was pretty close to what I guess I would have imagined. It's kinda funny 'cuz it reminded me of the cognitive dissonance I experienced when I first started getting intimations of Creem having been a credible/relevant institution back in the day as my first exposure to it was seeing it on the racks or whatever (not actually reading it) when I was growing up, which by that time it was in its last phase of being a cheesy metal mag after it'd gotten sold (which the documentary only mentions enough to say "then that happened" and otherwise not going into any detail about that period, which I guess it didn't need to since it really was a completely different magazine with a completely different ethos run by completely different people). Also, I know this isn't the first time it's come up, but the 70s was a really weird decade, eh? It's weird I can say I lived during it (though yeah, only a year and a half). This morning Mary Beth brought me breakfast in bed so I'm certainly feeling like a special guy!