1981

With the few bucks that I saved after the holidays, I bought a CD of the Clash, and memories flood over me whenever I put on "The Clampdown" or "I Fought the Law," that group's raucous cover of a rock 'n' roll standard. While sight remains for many of us the strongest of our most immediate senses, sound, it seems, rules long-term memory. Put on Abba's "Waterloo," and my hips move in this disco-thing that I last did—without my wife laughing at me—in Hamden High School's bunting-filled gym. A1 Stewart's "Time Passages" is unrelenting, no matter how bad a song: I'm in Palm Beach, riding in a car with John Westerfield and Bob Crowe the winter a bunch of us waited tables at the Breakers Hotel. Remember our sophomore year when Elvis Costello's first record came out?

To be honest, I'm not the most nostalgic type; I get irritated by folks who like to tell stories of the way we were, when I'm more than worried about the way I am. But music puts the right sheen on this nostalgia. Granted, it's only lustrous for a few minutes—or, if you're listening to the Pretender's first album, what seems like a blissful forever—but it certainly makes your mind shimmy, just like your body did in that bunting-filled high school gym.

Greg Clow remembers Fleetwood Mac from freshman year—or is that from Clinton's first presidential campaign?—but wishes it had been something more, well, something more rock 'n' roll.

"I'm sure there are better choices," he told me, "like Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, but there you have it."

Surrounded by redwoods, Greg lives in Larkspur, Calif., with wife Kathleen and daughter Reyna and is working on computer-based design and graphics for the WWW—"the new world order and a breath of fresh life for artists everywhere," as Greg said. He pays the bills with stints as an art director for various advertising firms but more importantly is in the midst of creating our class's Web page, which, when it's up and running, can be accessed at the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine site. E-mail him with ideas for the '81 site or with any news on Stevie Nicks at .

If you were in San Francisco over the winter, did you get to the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum to see the exhibit "Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965"? Organized by NY's Whitney Museum of American Art, the show was augmented extensively and its installation at the de Young supervised by classmate Timothy Burgard, who's the curator of American art and head of the American art department there. To the show Timothy added additional objects that address important period issues such as McCarthyism, the atomic bomb, race and civil rights, and censorship.

"My current project," he said, "is a series of four exhibitions titled 'Art of the Americas' that focus on issues such as cultural complexity, regional pride and prejudice identity-based politics, and the distinction between art and ethnography."

Timothy and his wife, Kristin Tuff, an architect and art historian who's doing research on Renaissance patronage in Rome, have a Russian Hill apartment with a view of the Golden Gate and bought a motorcycle—those Beats had bikes—for coastal drives along Route 1. Man, I can hear the first drum-lick of "Born to Be Wild" from here.

4807 Dover Court, Bethesda, MD 20816, ; 1047 Lincoln Blvd., Apt. 10, Santa Monico, CA 90403;

Timothy Burgard added objects on McCarthyism, the atomic bomh, and civil rights when supervising a museum exhibit "Beat Culture and the New America. Abner Oakes '81

Pundit Dinesh D'Souza '81, p. 22