The Future Looks Bright

That was then — when the Great March for Peace was about to change the world, when Pasadena was beginning to battle creeping quiche, when the Motels were the band to watch — and this is now. Some glimpses of the future from the past, through the time warp of the present:

From "Hitting the Fan in 2002," by Michael Ventura; January 11, 1979

Prediction One: Psychic Powers Accepted and Cultivated

Within the next 10 years there will be a burst of psychic activity. It will be like jogging — one year nobody did it, the next year thousands are doing it. Thousands will start cultivating their psychic powers with the discipline and energy they now use for running. The techniques needed to develop psychic powers, which have been around for thousands of years, are being popularized in modern terms by various books and by groups such as Lawrence LeShan’s workshops. The changes artificially induced by the drugs of the ’60s will be multiplied a hundredfold, and God alone knows what happens then — for no doubt the darkness in our natures will have its say along with the light.

What will a race with heightened psychic powers mean to government, entertainment and industry? For humankind will be substantially not as we know it. All forms of governmental and corporate secrecy will become obsolete. The medical profession will be out of a job. Every form of media now known or imagined will be hopelessly antiquated.

Even the way we grow our foods will change: It’s well-documented that in the community of Findhorn, in Scotland, huge healthy vegetables are made to grow in the sand and in snow through the psychic power of what the Findhorn people call prayer. If this talent spreads across the world, it could mean the end of Third World dependence on American and Russian support. In short, the spread of psychic powers would be the end of "power" as we know it now.

From "L.A. Bands," by Don Snowden; April 12, 1979

The class of the field is the Motels, the only area band to pick up on and extend the Velvet Underground–Roxy Music tradition. It’s mutated rhythm & blues, as guitarist Fretts Ferrari once described it: music of the heart and soul filtered through the technology of the ’70s. Martha Davis is a star, period; the band a perfect vehicle for dressing up simple melo dies with impeccable ar rangements and powerful playing, the songs still fresh and distinctive. The newest addition to their set, "Celia," is rapidly becoming a crowd favorite, and if "Total Control" isn’t an AM hit in six months’ time, the entire promotional staff of the label that signs them should be summarily executed. See the Motels now (catch a late set if you can, when they’re looser and louder), and in a year you’ll probably be telling your friends you saw them when.

From "Jerry on the Road," by Andrew Kopkind; March 29, 1979

It is not only Jerry Brown who sees that politics in America is about to make a leap into the ’80s, that a change is due, or overdue. The early revolt against Carter within the Democratic Party . . . is simply one more sign of instability and the demand for change. So far, the demand is unformed and unfocused, but Brown’s candidacy is one of the most important consequences.

From "The First Americanization of Soccer," by Pattie Freeman; March 21, 1980

While the media sages are sitting around prognosticating what new trend will pop up in the ’80s, let Tony Morejan and Peter Dunn make a prediction: The ’80s will be the decade of American soccer. And if it won’t happen naturally, they’ll give history a nudge. Morejan and Dunn aren’t clairvoyants, they’re promoters . . .

Morejan says that the creation of American soccer heroes is imperative to the growth of the game in this country: "We have to keep kids looking up to an American boy and saying, ‘If he can do it, why can’t I?’" "Right now," says Dunn, "the kids can’t even pronounce a lot of the players’ names."

From "At Home With Tom and Jane," by Danae Brook; November 28, 1980

Jane [Fonda] says that if she hadn’t found politics and Tom, her "energies would have had nowhere to go. I’d have been a numb and dumb pill-popping blonde." Tom [Hayden], always more reticent, says, "She gave me a deeper, broader understanding of women, and maybe I gave her a focus for her political viewpoint." . . .

Indeed, if one thinks about it, one realizes they occupy an unusual place in the American political and social landscape. What other couple has dedicated themselves to building a political organization and movement based on progressive political ideas and framed their lives around that very unlikely lifestyle? No others that leap to mind. And yet, to see them together is to recognize as well two adults who, with considerable affection, seem to have accepted that they are each other’s life mates.

From "The Battle for Pasadena," by Rick Cole; December 5, 1980

The area’s cheap rents had always attracted the adventurous and the desperate. Artists and house painters, bohemians and rednecks, sexual outlaws and derelicts — they created a neighborhood that never closed down. They hung out at Jake’s Diner and in the dives, and the bohemians created the café society at the Espresso Bar and the Prufrock Bookstore. They brought scruffy galleries and playhouses, generated countercultural institutions from the upstart Doo-Dah Parade to the avant-garde Filmforum. But in creating a warm place among the alleys, they have made the neighborhood safe for designer jeans.