This is Not a Book Review
Jun. 18th, 2014 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
insilentmeditationA Wanna-Be Hippie Reasseses Her Stance
“This ain’t the Garden of Eden/There ain’t no angels above/Things ain’t what they used to be/And this ain’t the Summer of Love”
– Blue Oyster Cult, 1975
For my birthday this year, my daughter Betsy gave me a copy of Hippie by Barry Miles. This book is interesting and filled with information about the multitude of movements that happened in America and Britain from 1965 to 1971. It was a tumultuous, terrible, deadly, inspired, mystical, and hopeful time.
During it all, I was in my formative years, watching the war and the riots on television. I am of the first generation to grow up with television for my whole life, yet I had no idea what kind of Happenings were going on.
The Summer of Love and Woodstock are but idealistic dreams of my teen years, something I thought I would have wanted to be part of if only I’d known about them at the time. Of course, I learned over time that there were dark secrets hidden under the floorboards of these utopian dreams.
In fact, there were so many things happening during those years, there is no way to extricate them from one another. The flower children of San Francisco, the poets and musicians of New York, the rock bands of Los Angeles, and the London Underground emerged separately yet are undeniably connected. Woven through these growing pains of youth were the horrors of war, near and far.
The Vietnam War, the confrontations between police and protestors and hippies, the race riots, rape…all of these were violently wrapped around visions of hope represented by flowers and bright colors of youth at a Be-In.
In this book, Miles brings all these aspects of the times together, giving the reader an overview of a decade, illustrated with photographs, newspaper clips, advertisements, album covers, and posters. It seems to have everything…almost. One Amazon reviewer laments the lack of any mention of the Jesus Freaks. Now, the Jesus Freaks are one group I recall from my own experience. It does seem a shame that they are missing from mention, at least by name. Peter Max doesn’t even get a sentence. I, however, notice something more important missing.
Throughout the book, we read of the great poets and artists who influenced the various movements or who became a part of them. Of all the poets, artists, and musicians who are mentioned, only a handful of them are women. Two female singers stand out – Grace Slick and Janis Joplin. Singer Marianne Faithful gets a nod, but only as a girlfriend. One female visual artist is mentioned by name – Yoko Ono. Perhaps she was more than just the “girl who broke up the Beatles” after all! Finally, there is not one mention of a female poet in the book. Not one.
I’ve been pondering the reason behind this. Does it mean that there were no excellent female poets of the time? Of course it doesn’t. Denise Levertov, who attended a 1963 conference with Ginsberg, was writing during these times. Anne Waldman broke out in the 1960’s, and is considered an integral part of the latter Beat movement. Lenore Kandel’s book of erotic poetry, entitled The Love Book, was deemed pornographic and was censored in 1966. Adrienne Rich was an anti-war activist and feminist, and is one of the most highly read poets of the 20th century. Susan Polis Schutz was a peace activist and poet.
These are hardly the only female poets who were actively writing and involved in the movements of the 1960’s. Besides poets, of course, there were many amazing writers of all ilk including singer/songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. This book mentions these two in passing. Of course, Miles would be remiss if he didn’t discuss William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and their influence on what was to become the Hippie generation. However, mention of other writers who emerged from the scene, like Maya Angelou and Beatrice Sparks would have been welcome.
Of course, I do understand that it would be impossible to include everyone who created or was created by this volatile era. It became more explosive as the decade wore on. Hippies made way for Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies. Violence on campuses and in the streets, Charles Manson’s “Family” sneaking into homes and killing people in hopes of starting a race war…the sixties started with violence and ended with violence. Of all the female writers and activists of the era, Miles chose to dedicate a full page to only one – Valerie Solaris, the founder and sole member of S.C.U.M. (sometimes said to stand for “Society for Cutting Up Men,” though Solaris denied it). Solaris was a radical lesbian feminist whose manifesto was published in The Berkeley Barb in 1968. What made her – and her manifesto – important was an act of violence. In 1968, she shot and wounded artist Andy Warhol, who had agreed to produce a play she wrote and promptly lost it. She demanded payment, so he hired her to act in a film for which he paid her $25, according to information I found on the internet. When another publisher, Maurice Girodias, promised to publish her work, but retain all rights, she felt that they were all conspiring to steal her work. Solaris also shot art critic Mario Amaya, who happened to be with Warhol at the time. She would have taken a shot at Girodias as well, but he was out of town.
Interestingly, I had never heard of Valerie Solanas until reading this book. Yet her angry anti-male manifesto reflects the darkest frustrations of women emerging from a June-and-Ward Clever, Ozzie-and-Harriet fantasy. It is fodder for conversation – what did she say of value? Was anything she wrote intrinsic to the women’s liberation movement? While Solanas’ attempted murder of Warhol (some call it an assassination attempt) may not be as “important” an event as the Manson murders, it seems that it has some value in find a real understanding of the times…and a true understanding of those times is something I need.
I have lived most of my life imagining the Hippie life as a utopian, perpetually cool, idealistic commune of sunshine and flowers. I wished I’d been there, that I had not been only 11 the year of Woodstock. It’s been a wistful fantasy, wishing I’d been to anti-war protests and Be-Ins, instead of the Happenings of my own life, which seemed to pale in comparison. The view that I’ve had has been skewed, in spite of having met many who not only lived it, but were willing to admit it. Some of them, very young, had romanticized the Haight-Ashbury scene and went there, flowers in their hair. Yet, by the Summer of Love, the coolest street corner in America had begun to degenerate into a seamy district of junkies and teenage prostitutes.
I met a lot of once-upon-a-time Hippies later, when I lived my own Happening at Venice Beach in 1987, twenty years after the Summer of Love. Many of them were disillusioned, flowers wilted, innocence lost. One was an eternal space cadet, insisting he was Jesus, and not like “Jesus is all of us,” but the man himself. One had blown his mind so far that he sat, nodding knowingly, as another young woman told him she was not ready to go live “at Jerry’s place up north,” because she and her friend were so busy creating a new solar system, and were having trouble with one of the planets. Some, addicted and stuck like an old vinyl of Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come” slept along the piers of Santa Monica, next to wounded Vietnam Vets with PTSD, spending their days begging for quarters to buy the next bottle of whatever they drank or a dime bag of smack.
There were those who had truly idealistic ideas for creating a better world. The ones who were honestly dedicated to caring for the planet and one another grew up and opened natural food stores, grocery co-ops, neighborhood gardens. Across the United States, spiritually oriented dreamers who had been in some way part of the Hippie movement helped usher in the New Age. 1987 was the year of the “Harmonic Convergence.” It was part of my Happening, and many of those with whom I connected during that time truly dreamed of a better world. The Age of Aquarius, as had been predicted, would be the dawning of peace, love, and harmony.
Yet like the Hippie era twenty years before, the New Age movement of the 1980’s was only one aspect of a complicated time. Alongside the spiritual growth and outreach, the recognition of pluralism, and the move toward acceptance of cultural and socio-religious differences emerged new kinds of music, fashion, and art. New names wove in with the old, eventually supplanting all but the biggest, most popular bands from the early days. Punk, Glam, New-Wave, and Heavy Metal…and that’s where I came in.
Timothy Leary’s popular 1960’s mantra, “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out” transformed into Ian Drury’s “Sex and Drugs and Rock & Roll.” Looking back over these subcultures of youth and young adulthood, certain similarities stand out to me. These mantras mean the same thing, down under. Beneath the psychedelic tie-dye patterns, the Victorian velvet beauty of both boys and girls. Like dust-bunnies under John and Yoko’s Peace bed, beneath the spandex, big hair, eyeliner, and Aqua Net® runs a theme of patriarchy, power, and rape culture.
As I read through Miles’ book I noticed that all the photographs of Flower Girls and Hippie Chicks depicted thin, fresh-faced young women. This tells me that these women mattered more to the chroniclers of the era. In the book, women other than the handful of singers and artists mentioned were girlfriends or wives, most were unnamed. One wonders if the photographers bothered to ask the names of most of the women. This was a time that is often referred to as the “Sexual Revolution.” One wonders whose revolution it really was. The Gurus of psychedelics touted group sex and called it enlightenment. They gathered women around them like harems. Yet, rarely did they seem to listen to the thoughts and ideas of women. The only poetry deemed worth reading or listening to was written by men, the same men who either hated women or loved too many of them without ever really loving any of them.
Twenty years later, male musicians and artists slept with stoned underage groupies, dated exotic dancers, and those who were married rarely shared that information. Drugs developed for medicinal purposes began to emerge as “date rape drugs.” Pop songs by females or groups headed by females glamorized dressing for casual sex at the expense of the woman’s own identity. For instance, in 1984 the pop band Animotion sang “Who do you want me to be to make you sleep with me?” MTV showed the average size, regular girl that she wasn’t sexy enough. Only the tall and thin could pull off skin-tight spandex pants and a crop top with spike heels.
On the other hand, there were a number of strong female singer/songwriters who faced the challenges of relationships head on. Singers like Pat Benatar, Annie Lennox, and Aimee Mann dealt with domestic abuse and independence. Yet even in the telling of such stories it was evident that girls’ art was somehow judged as beneath that of the boys’. Aimee Mann and her band ‘Til Tuesday sang “Voices Carry,” a song that to me spoke of verbal abuse. In the video for “Voices Carry,” the male partner confronts the female about her time rehearsing, calling her music a “little hobby.” Those of us who had lived in domestic abuse found solace in the songs and videos that showed us the strength of the woman who was “walking…walking out the door!” In the world of Heavy Metal, female artists were rare. Included in the handful were Maxine and Roxy Petrucci of Vixen and Lita Ford, who kept her nails short, played lead guitar and eventually sang with Ozzie Osborne. On the lighter side, Cyndi Lauper wanted to have fun, and Madonna introduced blatant sexuality, materialism, and brilliant marketing to girls for generations to come.
From my vantage point of thirty years out, I can see the blazing path that the women of the 80’s rock world opened for the females of today, yet back under the belly of the beast, I recognize manipulation of the market by the powers that be, whoever they are. Heavy Metal is still dominated by males, lyrics are often hateful and patronizing (“I like your pants around your feet”), and when a female fronts the band, it’s most often symphonic rock, and she is supplementary to an all male band. It’s still news when a woman is the lead guitarist or the band is all female. Generally, it seems as if girls and women continue to be marketing tools, one night stands, play things to be used and put away or left behind when the game is done.
It is little different in the worlds of poetry and art. There are thousands of fabulous female poets, some of whom are quite famous, yet still the names I hear dropped as the greats are Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, now with the addition of Bukowski, all of whom have been accused of misogyny, and perhaps rightly so. While this doesn’t take away from their talents, it certainly gives me pause, particularly in a world where I have heard the words, “girl poetry is not worth reading” come from the lips of lesser writers.
After all these reflections, I come back to the question that brought me here. Although Barry Miles coffee table book Hippie is a fairly exhaustive exposé of the youth movements of the mid to late 1960’s and very early 1970’s, there is little reference to the work done by females, particularly in the areas of poetry and visual art. Is it simply because a crowd of 7,000 would not fill a hall to hear the works of female poets at the time, as they did for William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Adrian Mitchell, and a host of others, all of whom were male?
We’ve come a long way since the 1960’s in many ways. Yet in the area of the arts, where talent and appeal should trump gender, there are still few females who come to mind as “household names.” One would think that there has been progress, when the whole country mourned the recent passing of poet and author Maya Angelou. One would think…until one finds that there are some who would detract from the value of her work by debating – just days after her death – her right to call herself “Doctor” based on having received around 30 honorary degrees over her lifetime.
By the way, I am a girl poet. I have written a lot of crap that’s not worth reading. I’ve also written a few things that are worth reading. Pretty much like any other writer, even the men.
“This ain’t the Garden of Eden/There ain’t no angels above/Things ain’t what they used to be/And this ain’t the Summer of Love”
– Blue Oyster Cult, 1975
For my birthday this year, my daughter Betsy gave me a copy of Hippie by Barry Miles. This book is interesting and filled with information about the multitude of movements that happened in America and Britain from 1965 to 1971. It was a tumultuous, terrible, deadly, inspired, mystical, and hopeful time.
During it all, I was in my formative years, watching the war and the riots on television. I am of the first generation to grow up with television for my whole life, yet I had no idea what kind of Happenings were going on.
The Summer of Love and Woodstock are but idealistic dreams of my teen years, something I thought I would have wanted to be part of if only I’d known about them at the time. Of course, I learned over time that there were dark secrets hidden under the floorboards of these utopian dreams.
In fact, there were so many things happening during those years, there is no way to extricate them from one another. The flower children of San Francisco, the poets and musicians of New York, the rock bands of Los Angeles, and the London Underground emerged separately yet are undeniably connected. Woven through these growing pains of youth were the horrors of war, near and far.
The Vietnam War, the confrontations between police and protestors and hippies, the race riots, rape…all of these were violently wrapped around visions of hope represented by flowers and bright colors of youth at a Be-In.
In this book, Miles brings all these aspects of the times together, giving the reader an overview of a decade, illustrated with photographs, newspaper clips, advertisements, album covers, and posters. It seems to have everything…almost. One Amazon reviewer laments the lack of any mention of the Jesus Freaks. Now, the Jesus Freaks are one group I recall from my own experience. It does seem a shame that they are missing from mention, at least by name. Peter Max doesn’t even get a sentence. I, however, notice something more important missing.
Throughout the book, we read of the great poets and artists who influenced the various movements or who became a part of them. Of all the poets, artists, and musicians who are mentioned, only a handful of them are women. Two female singers stand out – Grace Slick and Janis Joplin. Singer Marianne Faithful gets a nod, but only as a girlfriend. One female visual artist is mentioned by name – Yoko Ono. Perhaps she was more than just the “girl who broke up the Beatles” after all! Finally, there is not one mention of a female poet in the book. Not one.
I’ve been pondering the reason behind this. Does it mean that there were no excellent female poets of the time? Of course it doesn’t. Denise Levertov, who attended a 1963 conference with Ginsberg, was writing during these times. Anne Waldman broke out in the 1960’s, and is considered an integral part of the latter Beat movement. Lenore Kandel’s book of erotic poetry, entitled The Love Book, was deemed pornographic and was censored in 1966. Adrienne Rich was an anti-war activist and feminist, and is one of the most highly read poets of the 20th century. Susan Polis Schutz was a peace activist and poet.
These are hardly the only female poets who were actively writing and involved in the movements of the 1960’s. Besides poets, of course, there were many amazing writers of all ilk including singer/songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. This book mentions these two in passing. Of course, Miles would be remiss if he didn’t discuss William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and their influence on what was to become the Hippie generation. However, mention of other writers who emerged from the scene, like Maya Angelou and Beatrice Sparks would have been welcome.
Of course, I do understand that it would be impossible to include everyone who created or was created by this volatile era. It became more explosive as the decade wore on. Hippies made way for Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies. Violence on campuses and in the streets, Charles Manson’s “Family” sneaking into homes and killing people in hopes of starting a race war…the sixties started with violence and ended with violence. Of all the female writers and activists of the era, Miles chose to dedicate a full page to only one – Valerie Solaris, the founder and sole member of S.C.U.M. (sometimes said to stand for “Society for Cutting Up Men,” though Solaris denied it). Solaris was a radical lesbian feminist whose manifesto was published in The Berkeley Barb in 1968. What made her – and her manifesto – important was an act of violence. In 1968, she shot and wounded artist Andy Warhol, who had agreed to produce a play she wrote and promptly lost it. She demanded payment, so he hired her to act in a film for which he paid her $25, according to information I found on the internet. When another publisher, Maurice Girodias, promised to publish her work, but retain all rights, she felt that they were all conspiring to steal her work. Solaris also shot art critic Mario Amaya, who happened to be with Warhol at the time. She would have taken a shot at Girodias as well, but he was out of town.
Interestingly, I had never heard of Valerie Solanas until reading this book. Yet her angry anti-male manifesto reflects the darkest frustrations of women emerging from a June-and-Ward Clever, Ozzie-and-Harriet fantasy. It is fodder for conversation – what did she say of value? Was anything she wrote intrinsic to the women’s liberation movement? While Solanas’ attempted murder of Warhol (some call it an assassination attempt) may not be as “important” an event as the Manson murders, it seems that it has some value in find a real understanding of the times…and a true understanding of those times is something I need.
I have lived most of my life imagining the Hippie life as a utopian, perpetually cool, idealistic commune of sunshine and flowers. I wished I’d been there, that I had not been only 11 the year of Woodstock. It’s been a wistful fantasy, wishing I’d been to anti-war protests and Be-Ins, instead of the Happenings of my own life, which seemed to pale in comparison. The view that I’ve had has been skewed, in spite of having met many who not only lived it, but were willing to admit it. Some of them, very young, had romanticized the Haight-Ashbury scene and went there, flowers in their hair. Yet, by the Summer of Love, the coolest street corner in America had begun to degenerate into a seamy district of junkies and teenage prostitutes.
I met a lot of once-upon-a-time Hippies later, when I lived my own Happening at Venice Beach in 1987, twenty years after the Summer of Love. Many of them were disillusioned, flowers wilted, innocence lost. One was an eternal space cadet, insisting he was Jesus, and not like “Jesus is all of us,” but the man himself. One had blown his mind so far that he sat, nodding knowingly, as another young woman told him she was not ready to go live “at Jerry’s place up north,” because she and her friend were so busy creating a new solar system, and were having trouble with one of the planets. Some, addicted and stuck like an old vinyl of Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come” slept along the piers of Santa Monica, next to wounded Vietnam Vets with PTSD, spending their days begging for quarters to buy the next bottle of whatever they drank or a dime bag of smack.
There were those who had truly idealistic ideas for creating a better world. The ones who were honestly dedicated to caring for the planet and one another grew up and opened natural food stores, grocery co-ops, neighborhood gardens. Across the United States, spiritually oriented dreamers who had been in some way part of the Hippie movement helped usher in the New Age. 1987 was the year of the “Harmonic Convergence.” It was part of my Happening, and many of those with whom I connected during that time truly dreamed of a better world. The Age of Aquarius, as had been predicted, would be the dawning of peace, love, and harmony.
Yet like the Hippie era twenty years before, the New Age movement of the 1980’s was only one aspect of a complicated time. Alongside the spiritual growth and outreach, the recognition of pluralism, and the move toward acceptance of cultural and socio-religious differences emerged new kinds of music, fashion, and art. New names wove in with the old, eventually supplanting all but the biggest, most popular bands from the early days. Punk, Glam, New-Wave, and Heavy Metal…and that’s where I came in.
Timothy Leary’s popular 1960’s mantra, “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out” transformed into Ian Drury’s “Sex and Drugs and Rock & Roll.” Looking back over these subcultures of youth and young adulthood, certain similarities stand out to me. These mantras mean the same thing, down under. Beneath the psychedelic tie-dye patterns, the Victorian velvet beauty of both boys and girls. Like dust-bunnies under John and Yoko’s Peace bed, beneath the spandex, big hair, eyeliner, and Aqua Net® runs a theme of patriarchy, power, and rape culture.
As I read through Miles’ book I noticed that all the photographs of Flower Girls and Hippie Chicks depicted thin, fresh-faced young women. This tells me that these women mattered more to the chroniclers of the era. In the book, women other than the handful of singers and artists mentioned were girlfriends or wives, most were unnamed. One wonders if the photographers bothered to ask the names of most of the women. This was a time that is often referred to as the “Sexual Revolution.” One wonders whose revolution it really was. The Gurus of psychedelics touted group sex and called it enlightenment. They gathered women around them like harems. Yet, rarely did they seem to listen to the thoughts and ideas of women. The only poetry deemed worth reading or listening to was written by men, the same men who either hated women or loved too many of them without ever really loving any of them.
Twenty years later, male musicians and artists slept with stoned underage groupies, dated exotic dancers, and those who were married rarely shared that information. Drugs developed for medicinal purposes began to emerge as “date rape drugs.” Pop songs by females or groups headed by females glamorized dressing for casual sex at the expense of the woman’s own identity. For instance, in 1984 the pop band Animotion sang “Who do you want me to be to make you sleep with me?” MTV showed the average size, regular girl that she wasn’t sexy enough. Only the tall and thin could pull off skin-tight spandex pants and a crop top with spike heels.
On the other hand, there were a number of strong female singer/songwriters who faced the challenges of relationships head on. Singers like Pat Benatar, Annie Lennox, and Aimee Mann dealt with domestic abuse and independence. Yet even in the telling of such stories it was evident that girls’ art was somehow judged as beneath that of the boys’. Aimee Mann and her band ‘Til Tuesday sang “Voices Carry,” a song that to me spoke of verbal abuse. In the video for “Voices Carry,” the male partner confronts the female about her time rehearsing, calling her music a “little hobby.” Those of us who had lived in domestic abuse found solace in the songs and videos that showed us the strength of the woman who was “walking…walking out the door!” In the world of Heavy Metal, female artists were rare. Included in the handful were Maxine and Roxy Petrucci of Vixen and Lita Ford, who kept her nails short, played lead guitar and eventually sang with Ozzie Osborne. On the lighter side, Cyndi Lauper wanted to have fun, and Madonna introduced blatant sexuality, materialism, and brilliant marketing to girls for generations to come.
From my vantage point of thirty years out, I can see the blazing path that the women of the 80’s rock world opened for the females of today, yet back under the belly of the beast, I recognize manipulation of the market by the powers that be, whoever they are. Heavy Metal is still dominated by males, lyrics are often hateful and patronizing (“I like your pants around your feet”), and when a female fronts the band, it’s most often symphonic rock, and she is supplementary to an all male band. It’s still news when a woman is the lead guitarist or the band is all female. Generally, it seems as if girls and women continue to be marketing tools, one night stands, play things to be used and put away or left behind when the game is done.
It is little different in the worlds of poetry and art. There are thousands of fabulous female poets, some of whom are quite famous, yet still the names I hear dropped as the greats are Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, now with the addition of Bukowski, all of whom have been accused of misogyny, and perhaps rightly so. While this doesn’t take away from their talents, it certainly gives me pause, particularly in a world where I have heard the words, “girl poetry is not worth reading” come from the lips of lesser writers.
After all these reflections, I come back to the question that brought me here. Although Barry Miles coffee table book Hippie is a fairly exhaustive exposé of the youth movements of the mid to late 1960’s and very early 1970’s, there is little reference to the work done by females, particularly in the areas of poetry and visual art. Is it simply because a crowd of 7,000 would not fill a hall to hear the works of female poets at the time, as they did for William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Adrian Mitchell, and a host of others, all of whom were male?
We’ve come a long way since the 1960’s in many ways. Yet in the area of the arts, where talent and appeal should trump gender, there are still few females who come to mind as “household names.” One would think that there has been progress, when the whole country mourned the recent passing of poet and author Maya Angelou. One would think…until one finds that there are some who would detract from the value of her work by debating – just days after her death – her right to call herself “Doctor” based on having received around 30 honorary degrees over her lifetime.
By the way, I am a girl poet. I have written a lot of crap that’s not worth reading. I’ve also written a few things that are worth reading. Pretty much like any other writer, even the men.
In Mind
There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but
fair-featured and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears
a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she
is kind and very clean without
ostentation-
but she has
no imagination
And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl
or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers
and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs
but she is not kind.
Denise Levertov, 1964
There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but
fair-featured and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears
a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she
is kind and very clean without
ostentation-
but she has
no imagination
And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl
or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers
and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs
but she is not kind.
Denise Levertov, 1964
