Posted on 08/02/2013 10:38:47 AM PDT by Baynative
It’s where young people go to retire.
LOL! Thanks for sharing!
Ken Kesey wasn’t a hippie. He was a merry prankster. His second book was about a guy who crosses a union picket line.
The hippies were America’s youth who saw media presentations of the lifestyle of the post-beats in California and headed westward subscribing to whatever fashion and drug trends were being sold to them.
They weren’t as active in contributing to the culture. They took from the free store without offering things in return. They overloaded the free food distribution systems. They joined communes but didn’t want to work the land.
Ken Kesey was to the Left of Jack Kerouac (who supported the war in Vietnam) but he wasn’t full onboard the liberalism train (some of his take seems more libertarian).
The real “Hippies” were only in existence until 1966, after that, came all of the copycats and posers.
Groovy isn’t even a hippie word. I’ve heard it used in rockabilly records in the mid-1950s.
In England, they didn’t have hippies. They had “flower children/people”. Sky Saxon (LA singer of the Seeds, “Pushin’ Too Hard”) tried to call himself a flower power artist (mid-1960s) before there was a word “hippie”.
Until recently moving to another city nearby, my sister lived in Asheville for 35 years.
She’s of the hippie generation but left it decades ago.
On one visit a few years back she was asking me why the kids and I liked going downtown at night. We put her in the car and took her for an evening tour past the hippie drum circle and and the street performers and crowds.
She hadn’t been to downtown in over 20 years and her response was “where did all these people come from”?
In England, the movement came out of Left Wing politics and poetry as well.
The first big happening was a poetry reading staged at Albert Hall. Booked on a whim, they were surprised to see it sell out. It was filmed by Peter Whitehead as “Wholly Communion” (1965) (he later made Let’s All Make Love In London in 1967 with The Pink Floyd and others).
Both are in full length (1 hour+ each) on youtube.
There’s far more copycats and poser wannabes carrying on the “hippie” life today than the true counterculture subterraneans (whether they be beats or industrial).
Even the punks that sprang up to point out the hypocrisy of the politically correct “hippies” became subverted by the same PC political subversive “joiners”.
I attended university not too far away at WCU, and there wasn’t anything much downtown at that time but junk stores, the Wachovia high rise, the original art deco high rise government center and either NOAA or National Weather Service in the Grove Arcade. It’s all nice, renovated, clean, occupied and well-patronized now, on the whole one of the prettier downtown areas I’ve seen.
They are waiting to take us into the severed garden.
East Oregon is righteous country God love em
Like Texas sorta
The coast is a craven land of wackos from Cave Junction to Portland
I don’t know how y’all do it.
I couldn’t
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