Today's Today

A few hours after this picture was taken, he'd be dead

James Dean's death is one of those odd cultural milestones that mark both the ending of something and the beginning of something, both of which are all balled up together.

I don't know how to articulate it properly, but it seemed like we started to wake up a little in the mid-50s, thinking we should be aspiring to something more and better than what we had - that we should put an end to the weirdly rosy attitude that everything's fine as long as we all smile and chit-chat and pretend that nothing could possibly go wrong with this charmed life we're all living just ten years after a 35 year period that saw two World Wars sandwiched around almost 20 years of economic depression.

We were on top of the world, but it just didn't feel right - we needed it to change.

America can be a very strange place.