Shit is Magic!

Anyone who knows me well knows how obsessed I am with years and people's ages and the relationship between these and historical events. I don't know what it is, but years have a magical quality to me. Each historical year is like a different holy name freighted with so much history and countless associations.
Year are so casually invoked. How many times have you heard someone say, “Well, let's see, I think 'at was back in '79 or 80” or “Yeah, uh, I graduated '94, and um got my B.A. at Rutgers in '98...” Mostly we think nothing of it. To me, however, to reference a year is to mutter an incantation, to cast a spell, to casually lift your shirt to reveal the gun tucked in your waistband. To mention a year, especially an old one, is to say, “I was there, motherfucker...where were you?”
This year fetish of mine is endlessly diverting when you mix it with a little history. By and by you begin to weave a large knotty tapestry, and all you need to know is a person's age and you can weave them right in too.
The Rolling Stones tune “Memo from Turner”, featured prominently in Donald Cammel's 1970 film Performance contains the lyric “I remember you in Hemlock Grove, 1956”, funny, that, seeing as how Mick Jagger was only thirteen at the time. Alan Ginsberg, on the other hand, turned thirty in June of that year. In January, he wrote the poem "America", one month before a young woman named Norma Jean Mortenson, just two days older than Ginsberg, would change her name to Marilyn Monroe. Six months later and a few weeks after her (and Ginsberg's) thirtieth birthday she would marry playwright Arthur Miller while an adolescent Mick Jagger was loafing about on Summer holiday and the death penalty was being abolished in his native England.
Mick was born in 1943, along with Robert DeNiro, R.L. Stein, Penny Rimbaud (the drummer for seminal anarcho-punk band Crass) Tony Basil (“Oh Mickey, you're so fine!”) and my Aunt Leela. These people, it seems to me, were the perfect age to appreciate the sixties, and did in varying degrees. Rimbaud was a vegetarian pacifist who made the leap to punk and made socially relevant avante- garde music during the repressive Thatcher regime. Jagger faded into obscurity after a few mildly-succesful gigs at working class taverns in Dartford (LOL). My Aunt Leela moved to the United States and married a white hippie psychiatrist-in-training named Bruce.
She arrived here in 1967, the year Liz Phair, Kurt Cobain, Judd Apatow and Guy Pierce were born and the year a twelve year old Jamaican boy named Clive Campbell moved to the South Bronx with his family. She was thirty-one years old when she gave birth to her first child in 1975, and thirty two when a female drug dealer from Jamaica Queens gave birth to Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson in 1976. 50 cent would achieve success by following in the footsteps of young Clive Campbell, who as DJ Kool Herc, began spinning two copies of the same record, at parties he threw in his building's rec room, so as to isolate the “break” and loop it to create beats, paving the way for what would become hip hop.
Herc was born in April of 1955, one year before Ginsberg wrote America and Monroe wrote herself into another doomed marriage. She and Miller were able to obtain a divorce in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico in January of 1961.
Six months earlier, and a thousand-or-so miles to the south in Cuernavaca, a young Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary was having his first trip on psilocybin mushrooms. Meanwhile, in various parts of the world, Vincent Gallo, Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman, and Steve Poltz were all being born.
Killing Joke released their most controversial album, Outside the Gate, in 1988, while Steve Poltz's friend Jewell Kilcher, at twelve, was busking with her father in Alaskan taverns to make ends meet and Vincent Gallo's friend and erstwhile bandmate Jean-Michel Basquiat: Warhol-protege, legendary old-school grafitti artist and darling of the New York art scene died of an overdose of heroin and cocaine. This was also the year I was born.
If you find this kinda shit fascinating, just think of what I left out. Where do you and yours fit in?