There is some dispute about when precisely the 20th century began (Jan. 1, 1900; Jan. 1, 1901, or Nov. 11, 1918 being the top contenders). My vote is for Nov. 5, 1899, the day Sigmund Freud gave birth to the Modern Dream.
Born two world wars later, in Northern Ireland and Belgium respectively, the writer Nik Cohn and the artist Guy Peellaert spent their formative years riding the birth of another 20th century infant: rock 'n' roll. In 1963, at the age of 17, Cohn found himself in London with "a job at The Observer . . . pontificating about Youth" and, five years later, looking back at the golden age of rock in a classic book of jaundiced jeunesse called "Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom." Ten years later, he found himself across the Atlantic chronicling the disco dreams of a Brooklyn wild child that would eventually see the light of projection as "Saturday Night Fever."
Even more significantly, the '70s brought Cohn into collaboration on a book of rock art with Belgian artist Peellaert--the now legendary "Rock Dreams." Now disastrously out of print, "Rock Dreams" made Peellaert a favorite of rock 'n' rollers worldwide--John Lennon framed the cover of the British edition (which featured him and Elvis) and David Bowie and Mick Jagger fought for custody of Peellaert's time and genius like jealous parents (he eventually designed album covers for both gentlemen). Twenty-five years later, Cohn and Peellaert are back together, closing out the century with the mad, baaaad and dangerous-to-open-in-public-spaces "20th-Century Dreams."
According to Cohn's preface, "20th-Century Dreams" purports to be a series of illustrated excerpts from the journals of one Max Vail. Vail, born in 1900 as Maxim Valesky in St. Petersburg, Russia, grew up to become the great unconscious for the stars of the century. Mascot to Rasputin at 14, Bolshevik spy at 17, Vail met Freud and Mata Hari before touring with Isadora Duncan and coming "to know the Zurich of the Dadaists, the Paris of Proust, the Venice of Diaghilev," not to mention the New York of Babe Ruth and John Barrymore and the unfrontiered world of Hitler and Picasso, Greta Garbo and Duke Ellington, Einstein and Hemingway.
