[lbo-talk] hippies and la recherche du temps perdu

[tfast]

As a kid I thought it was all fucked up.  Although I came at the end and did
not receive anything close to a memory until it was well done 76 or so.
There was my dads good friend John, apparently the son of one Macys exec and
his equally aristocratic wife Martha who some years later would join an
women's only commune and swear that John had molested their daughter (which
the daughter never corroborated).  There was a concert saxophonist etc. etc.
a logician etc., etc., a supreme court judge's son etc., all characters in
this bizarre play that was, upon reflection the post hippie era. A bunch of
idealists, free spirits and once in while revolutionaries and mostly good
hearts whom life had gotten to.
John could play chess and work the angles. From drugs to ebay this guy never
came late to a party.  Like many of the trust fund hippy set he would later
retire to one of the islands off the west coast where rumour has it he made
some cash as an early player in ebay.
Full-on my early years were a litany of draft dodgers and malcontents from
the empire.  What a bizarre scene in the little serene scene of small town
Canada.
As I get older I have less contempt and more adoration for that crew.  Sure
they fucked it up big time.  But they did so in a way that I learned a
tremendous amount.  All of them took some risks and paid the price.  So what
the fuck...if they did not prove it all night long.


>
> ``...For those of you around at the time, part of the New Left, what
> did you think about what was going on? Did you feel the hippies were a
> problem?  Join on board?..'' (Kelley?)
>
> ---------
>
> Yes and no. Yes the errant free sex, drugs, and rock n'roll were a
> diversion. OTOH, they were a welcome diversion and opened up whole new
> fronts of assault on the prevailing anal, uptight, hypocritical
> postures of the George Bush types who ran the US. (George is a
> throwback.) Screw your morality, your version of life, your world,
> your whatever. Screw it all. We've got another plan. Well, no plan,
> actually, but definitely not that plan.
>
> There was something entirely too disciplined, locked down, anal,
> Mao-like about the political left at that point. Did you really want
> to become a left authoritarian like old guard communists. Fuck no?
> Life was too short. Events and reversals were coming too fast.
>
> And the deeper chaos was extremely attractive, because you could feel
> the social foundations begin to dissolve. For example at that
> particular moment, I had a queer grad student roommate whose lover was
> a kid at Berkeley High School---who besides being queer also wanted to
> revolt against the whole plan his parents set out for him. They came
> and went as they pleased. I envied them their freedom and their
> adventures, their romance. I was stuck grinding it out at Cal through
> one academic requirement after another just to get through.
>
> I suppose this isn't really very clear. Try to imagine that our place
> was a `hippie' hang out in Berkeley about three blocks from campus
> where all sorts of people came and went. There were no social
> boundaries between ages as the relationship above illustrated, but
> there also no boundaries between working class and grad students
> either, since another roommate was a machinist apprentice, on probation
> from the state juvenal justice system---so his buddies were supplying
> the drugs. Another whole gang breezed in from the Univ of Montana,
> Missoula where a friend from Iowa had his first teaching job. He
> brought some of the students and a couple of part time faculty with
> him to check out Berkeley and SF during Thanksgiving break, circa
> 1967. They were camping in the living room. Sometime around this
> period, a guy from the US Marine Corp, straight out of a fire fight in
> some northern province of South Vietnam landed in the same living room,
> high on speed, 18 fucking hours out of Apocalypse Now. Another buddy
> going to SF state in creative writing was doing an theater adaptation
> of Camus's The Plague for his drama professor. At one dinner, all
> these people and some of their attending girlfriends or boyfriends
> were at the same table, eating my chili, drinking Red Mountain, and
> getting loaded on lousy marijuana. The only point of political
> contention was the music. I kept insisting on jazz, Miles Davis, John
> Coltrain, Cannonball Adderly, etc. Most of the crew wanted hard rock,
> the Stones, etc. Satisfaction won over My Favorite Things.
>
> Was it political? Well, it was sure as hell anti-war and
> anti-establishment---including the Marine. That's why he was there. It
> was his only home, the only place he could be at that particular
> moment. Whether it had a well reasoned, clearly outlined leftist
> political program as not part of the equation, that evening or any
> other.
>
> If I could re-write this scene, I would put a couple of black guys in
> it, because they were missing. I knew they were missing back then, but
> had no idea why or how. How about the black kid on the bus to downtown
> who was going to a Huey Newton rally the same morning I went to the
> induction center to refuse. We were talking back and forth passed each
> other as we tried to prove to each other the war or racism was more
> important. What funny conversation that was.
>
> Well, and what Mike Smith said, ``..hoisting a glass of claret, and
> not his first...'' Nor mine of Cabernet.
>
> I watched Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart last night in my
> continuing project to resurrect the past because afterall the present
> most certainly sucks. While this movie was done only a few political
> moments after what I just sketched, I saw it with another roomate from
> that period and we were the only ones in the theater laughing as
> Laurent fucked his mother. There was something in the spirit of that
> film, that captured la recherche du temps perdu...
>
> CG
>
>
>
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