A Visit to the Jazz Age

So, last night "The Artist" won the Best Picture at the Oscars. Good for them! A very fabulous film it was, evoking not only the loss of innocence in a most unusual way, but an era long gone. Certainly I reveled in the recreating of  the Jazz Age, both visually

The Artist with Jean Dujardin & Berenice Bejo

and in that flashy sensibility of post-war/pre-Depression glamour and fun. My own novel, "The Big Town," achieves the same feeling, I believe, and I really see "The Artist" and "The Big Town" as almost aesthetic and historical companions. There is a sense in both of a time existing so close to our own that it seems recognizable, yet is not, being now a generation separated from the living, the memory of it reconciled to print and celluloid. If both works of art are more than homages to that lovely and tragic era, they are also reminders of how much we lose with the past, and how much of the past we carry through to the present. We are still human, after all: hearts love and break and heal again; the world intrudes in our lives; we persist always. As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."