The forgotten 1960s

afri-cola.../charles wilp nonnen commercial

via boing-boing. I'm not quite sure what this German web site was about, but this link features an alleged 1968 commercial that has to be seen to be believed. It's sufficiently unusual that I wonder if the entire site is some diabolical experiment in art and gullibility.

It does remind me of something that attracts little comment. There were a lot of magazines and books in the 1960s that basically reflected the interests of 19 year old male libertines. I admit I read a few myself, though I was a child then. Within 10 years those books and magazines became quite hard to find -- even in used bookstores. It's as though they were erased.

I've always found this quite curious, but little is made of it. Instead the popular convention is that the decadent left celebrates the 1960s. Indeed there are some who celebrate a sort of synthetic memory that has some vague resemblance to the 1960s, but only fragments of the cultural artifacts of the 1960s survive. Or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places?

Visiting this page, I wonder if someone is going to start trying to reconstruct that lost popular culture. If so, we may learn that some things are best left in dark and dusty corners ...