“Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties” explores the crash pads, hippie communes, infinity machines and other far-out dwellings of the time period. Author Alastair Gordon, whose other works have dealt primarily with the clean modernism of airports and mid-century Hamptons homes, turned his attention to the design, architecture and visual culture of LSD-inspired era, much of which hadn’t been adequately preserved or documented until now.
“Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs and dirty words, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday, a spokesman said. He was 71.
Carlin, who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. PDT (9 p.m. EDT) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.”
(via Reuters. One of my favorite routines: George Carlin talking about “Stuff” )
“At the time of this writing, interesting recent press coverage hearkens back to two of 1969s most notorious events.
The first story concerns the new search for possible Manson family murder victims long rumored to have been buried in the desert near Manson’s old hideout at Barker Ranch in California’s Death Valley. This theory of unknown murder victims stems from a statement attributed to Manson family member Susan Atkins, who allegedly told a fellow inmate she was incarcerated with that there were “three people out in the desert that they done in,” referring to other possible victims during the Manson family’s spree of killings during the summer of 1969. As reported by the press, a team of forensic scientists have traveled recently to Barker Ranch and used cadaver dogs, ground penetrating radar and other equipment in an attempt to locate these possible victims. According to the report, the scientists located “three large areas of interest.”
The story second concerns a BBC News report that details the revelation from the FBI’s own files that the Hell’s Angels may have actually tried to assassinate Mick Jagger at his rented home in Long Island, New York in retaliation for Jagger?s comments following the disastrous concert at Altamont in late 1969. The murder attempt supposedly failed after the boat carrying the would-be assassins foundered during a storm, almost drowning them.
That these two stories continue to resonate in modern times in not such a surprise. The article below discusses the detrimental effects that the Manson murders, the ill-fated concert at Altamont, and numerous other crimes that the press of the day dubbed “hippie murders”, had on the hippie image.”
(via Steamshovel Press)
(For another good read about the dark side of “the Age of Aquarius” check out “Turn Off Your Mind”, by Gary Lachman)
“Join me now, if you have the time, as we take a stroll down memory lane to a time nearly four-and-a-half decades ago – a time when America last had uniformed ground troops fighting a sustained and bloody battle to impose, uhmm, ?democracy’ on a sovereign nation.
It is the first week of August, 1964, and U.S. warships under the command of U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison have allegedly come under attack while patrolling Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf. This event, subsequently dubbed the ?Tonkin Gulf Incident,’ will result in the immediate passing by the U.S. Congress of the obviously pre-drafted Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which will, in turn, quickly lead to America’s deep immersion into the bloody Vietnam quagmire. Before it is over, well over fifty thousand American bodies – along with literally millions of Southeast Asian bodies – will litter the battlefields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.”
[..] Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world in those early months of 1965, a new ?scene’ is just beginning to take shape in the city of Los Angeles. In a geographically and socially isolated community known as Laurel Canyon – a heavily wooded, rustic, serene, yet vaguely ominous slice of LA nestled in the hills that separate the Los Angeles basin from the San Fernando Valley – musicians, singers and songwriters suddenly begin to gather as though summoned there by some unseen Pied Piper. Within months, the ?hippie/flower child’ movement will be given birth there, along with the new style of music that will provide the soundtrack for the tumultuous second half of the 1960s.”
(via The Center for an Informed America. h/t: Conspiracy Planet)
R.U.’s former co-conspirator Mark interviews R.U. on the Boing Boing blog:
I think it does the job of establishing that there is this stream; a spirit really, that runs through history. Several spirits perhaps. This non-authoritarian, non-conformist, antic, changeable character, or community of characters, keeps coming up throughout human history. Sometimes they show up as artists or anti-artists, sometimes as religions or spiritual path; sometimes as a political revolution or change, sometimes as a scientific movement, sometimes as nihilism. Some seem to contradict others; representing opposite political sides. Or they represent opposite attitudes towards civilization and technological development ? that comes up quite a bit. And yet, I think the book shows various memetic lines of transmission that sometimes seem to run in parallel and sometimes seem to criss-cross.
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