TONIGHT, WE’RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999. That expression dates not to the actual turn of the third millennium, reckoned in anno Domini, a quarter century ago, but to about another quarter century earlier. By durable anecdote, Prince and his band were on the road at the tail end of a local tour in 1982 and stayed at a motel with free HBO, on which, in the small hours and under the influence of mind-altering substances, they watched the 1981 documentary The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, narrated by Orson Welles, about the cryptic book of predictions written by Nostradamus and how that sixteenth-century French astrologer and would-be prophet purportedly foresaw a world-historical apocalypse before the second millennium was done. “We’re going to look at his predictions of the French Revolution, the Kennedys, Napoleon, of Hitler,” intones Welles around a massive cigar as he wearily commands a curio-filled set. “If his predictions of the past are accurate, then his predictions for the future could very well affect the lives of all of us.” By the next morning, the story goes, the…
Thomas de Monchaux still owns the bootleg CD of a U2 concert that he bought in the summer of 1997 when he went to Prague.
