Allan Tannenbaum's NEW YORK IN THE 70s Featured in Paper Cuts

David Kelly at Paper Cuts, the book blog of The New York Times, takes a look at Allan Tannenbaum's New York in the 70s: "Only the 1970s could have brought Yoko Ono and P. J. O’Rourke together. Yoko provides the preface, and P. J. the foreword, for “New York in the 70s,” a new book of eye-catching photographs by Allan Tannenbaum.

As O’Rourke makes clear, that decade produced its share of odd couples (and odd threesomes): How did the 1970s become so wild? The squares did it. They got hip. … No one was too L-7 to be a hepcat. If you doubt it, turn to the last photos and see Roy Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy’s chief persecutor of degenerate commies, lounging at the Mudd Club between Halston and Steve Rubell. O’Rourke also zeroes in on the practical problems all that widespread hipness created: The essence of hipness — besides sleeping until noon — is a knowing, clued-in superiority to average citizens. However, when the average citizens are hip. … You see the problem the 1970s faced. Everybody was more wised-up than everybody else and nobody was awake to make the bagels."