Hippies C or D

lol hippie drum circles
again, i get it, but why does it have to be so bad? there is this thing here in mtl called the tam tams that happens every sunday at a big park and which i try to stay v far away from b/c it fucks up my vital chakras something awful - and i wonder if this is b/c i am being a judgemental asshole or if the whole drums in the park thing is just plain wrong - the beats are always off and annoying and seem to come from no place at all

i also believe in the all-natural healing gaia seven-petals power of a fucking bath

I was 16 in 1970. I knew actual hippies, spoke with them, shared meals with a few. Ultimately they were dud, but for a short while they seemed to hold out hope when hope was in short supply.

What later generations often fail to appreciate about the most fucked-up aspects of the Sixties youth culture was that they were reactions to an enormously fucked-up world. And as fucked-up as the USA is today, it was distinctly more fucked-up in 1967-1974 than it is now. Really. I know that is hard to believe, but it was. Oh boy, was it ever! You probably can't imagine.

the inter-generational battle over who is more fucked up seems to have been going on for a v v v v long time

The assassination scene nowadays just isn't what it was.

I'm not a big fan of the aesthetic side of hippiedom but I've never gotten knee-jerk hippie hate.

there was actually some great stuff in the hippie aesthetic if you think of, you know, swinging london and such.

Old school hippies pretty awesome.
New neo-hippies, total shit.

http://www.leather.com/images/clearance/f200_front_leather_suede_jacket_fringe_216.jpg

a real let-down after 'father ted'

Swinging London isn't really hippies is it? Not all youth culture/counterculture in the '60s was hippie culture.

the simon pegg sitcom was quite rubbish if i remember.

-- acrobat, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 9:30 PM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Link

lol obvious jokes amirite

Yeah mod != hippie!

xpost

worst hippie fashion atrocity has to be the across-the-forehead headband, as seen here in olivia newton-john's retro stylings:

http://www.olivia-newtonjohn.com/images/photos/8a9f5057.jpg

Swinging London isn't really hippies is it? Not all youth culture/counterculture in the '60s was hippie culture.

-- Curt1s Stephens, Wednesday, June 27, 2007 10:50 PM (25 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

london hippies sort of came after the classic mid-sixties 'swinging london', which was aesthetically very un-hippie, more mod (but not quite real mod). they were sort of a part of it, sort of not. by 1969 david bailey looked like a hippy.

basically "was syd barrett a hippy"?

semantic problem. aesthetically, "hippie" tends to denote too much sloppiness.

if you think of swinging london as meaning the opening scene of 'austin powers', then that's not hippie.

or cliched tie-ins with more spiritual and natural cultures

xp

but there's no denying that there's something that still resonant today in those desires

Based on the "Summer of Love" exhibit at the Whitney museum, the hippie aesthetic had a lot to do with saturated colors, amoeba-shapes, toplessness, and swirling lights.

we had that in london too, kind of independently of what was happening in san francisco (and kind of not).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Boyle

I can get behind this "toplessness" aesthetic, most of the time.

hippies rule as long as they are bubble puppy

http://www.recordresearch.com/Album_Photos/images/Bubble%20Puppy.jpg

http://home.austin.rr.com/david709/lavinghouse2.jpg

http://home.austin.rr.com/david709/parlament.jpg

first pic, not hippies

Also, pls to post a photo of yourself for comparison

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/157/355781246_b869e2a3e4_o.jpg

AAAAAAAAAAA!

Sorry, you scared me. You can't just sneak up on people like that! I could've had a heart attack!

what would you call them in the first pic if you're not calling them hippies?

Dandies.

Fops, psychedelic post-mods

i look like a marine now though. a really gay one. i know, are there any other kind? but still...

i think there's gray area here

x-post

they just wanted to look spiffy for their album cover! i think they generally just looked like the pictures below the album cover.

i don't think fops are allowed in texas.

10s of thousands are currently en route to arkansas's ozark national forest for the annual rainbow family gathering. the towns up there are worried.

I move to Asheville, NC on Sunday.

I love and miss Asheville. I spent a few months in that area back in '01 and have been aching to get back there since. Mellow Mushroom downtown is a great place for pizza, but there's a restaurant in Black Mountain whose name I've forgotten that rules also.

As an avowed ex-hippie (90s version), I have to say that "it felt good at the time." But last summer I encountered a number of Rainbow types who had migrated to southern California afterward. They impressed me with their hypocrisy about the sort of social issues that hippies are supposed to care about.

The prime example was one of them standing outside of an organic food co-op, whining about Babylon and The Man, then going over to a nearby supermarket chain to buy ground beef and Con-Agra potatoes to make dinner that night.

I'm moving to the Bay Area next week, so I'm really curious about the varieties of hippiness I'll run into.

i don't think fops are allowed in texas.

-- scott seward, Wednesday, June 27, 2007 6:13 PM

this is true! my short lived fop got stares.

idea of hippies = +
actual experience with hippies = -

My girlfriend used to be a hippie, sort of. We went to Schwagstock together a few years, ostensibly for her to do a photo story, and god it SUCKED ASS, all of the time.

I'm not sure what makes a hippie in 2007, but the originals were never big on philosophical consistancy or staunch adherance to a cause. They were very big on personal freedom. Avoiding hypocrisy, in the sense of whatever they did this minute being inconsistent with whatever idea they may have espoused a half hour ago wasn't seen as all that important. Freedom trumped everything. Freebies were mighty big, too.

Yeah, that's something I realize now. But as a kid in the early 90s immersing himself in the written history of the sixties, it was really easy to conflate the social progress achieved by grassroots groups with the new-agey acid-era crap espoused by Leary, etc.

I'd bet that a good portion of young hippie-types in the 90s were in it for this same reason.

Yeah I've lived in Asheville before, and can't wait to get back. Look forward to seeing the hippies, beats the conservative homogeneity of central TX. But I echo the sentiment so oft expressed here, hippies are better in theory than in practice/personal encounter. They can often seem so thick/hypocritical/smug/downright amoral/evil.

lol @ "they're not hippies, they're psychedelic post-mods!"

I don't know if he's trying to compare hippies and beats but I see them as near opposites. I find beatnik rhetoric much more attractive than what I've come to recognize as hippie rhetoric.

there was a lot of crossover. the transition in san francisco from beat to hippie was smooth-ish.

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/s480x480/68448_542354555790049_817769286_n.jpg

looks like the hippie got killed by some kind of greaser