Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies

Description

Print Length: 393 pages Publisher: Vintage  Publication Date: March 13, 2018 ISBN 9781524733391 (hardback) ISBN 9781524733407 (eBook) Request #1582215691.97584 Celebrated painter Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. Taken directly from the notebooks Hannah kept throughout the decade, Twentieth-Century Boy is a fascinating, sometimes lurid, and incredibly entertaining report from a now almost mythical time and place. Full of outrageously bad behavior, naked ambition, fantastically good music, and evaporating barriers of taste and decorum, and featuring cameos from David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, and many more, it is a rollicking account of an artist’s coming of age. “A phantasmagoria of alcohol, sex, art, conversation, glam rock, and New Wave cinema. Hannah’s writing combines self-aware humor with an intoxicating punk energy.” —The New Yorker “A farewell to an entire era of decadence. . . . An unusually levelheaded portrait of New York in the seventies.” —The Paris Review “Filled with gritty, evocative memories.” —Vice “A gallery of the louche, the lurid, and the illuminating.” —Vanity Fair “These diaries . . . are like the Dead Sea Scrolls of a mythological Lower Manhattan underground. As the writing progresses . . . we glean Duncan’s romance and eventual providence: to be cool is not the idea, being an artist in love with the universe is.” —Thurston Moore, co-founder of Sonic Youth “In which a teenage Minnesota boy is drawn into the swirl of downtown New York in the 70s — yeah, lots of sex, drugs, rock n roll and art! Hannah’s personal documents become an accumulation of detailed cultural insights as he too becomes an accomplished artist. Complete with ‘guest appearances’ by just about everyone who defined the explosive scene of this period.” —Jim Jarmusch “Twentieth-Century Boy provide[s] a rich, endlessly diverting answer to the question ‘What do men want?’ These journals—full of hunger, curiosity, and wonder—are raw, graceful time capsules. Art, sex, ambition, drugs, music, alcohol, movies, excesses, and extremes are all there, but Hannah observes the world around him with rare, and loving, attention.” —Joan Juliet Buck “Hannah documents that impetuous, drugged-up scene with flushed revelry and latent apprehension. These journals, simultaneously breathtaking and detached, are riveting cautionary tales, demonstrating the necessity of raw experimentation as a source of discovery and creativity.” —Bookforum “Eloquent and funny, written by a teen wise beyond his years. Duncan Hannah’s journals bring back the adolescence that most of us wish we had.” —Gillian McCain, coauthor of Please Kill Me “Hannah’s book illuminates this last great bohemia. . . . How fortunate that [he] managed to stagger home to bed to . . . immortalise his passage through this starry vortex.” —The Art Newspaper “So brilliant, so sexy, so real.” —Danny Fields “Terrific! Delightfully funny, written with great candor.” —Michael Lindsay-Hogg, director of Let It Be “[A] hugely entertaining diary.” —John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil