Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

I expect we'll have plenty to talk about when we meet for lunch on Tuesday,
Peter.

Have you read Carol Brightman's "Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American
Adventure"?  It is right up your alley.

See Topic 29 in this conference for a discussion with the author.
  

    
Boy, living out here on the East Coast, my lunching opportunities
aren't what they could be! ;-)
  

    
LOL, yes, and I eat lunch almost every day!  Yes, David, that may have
been the first one I read, and I've burned through a half dozen others
since.  I'm finishing Steve Parish's Home Before Daylight now. (I'm
ready for Conversations with the Dead if you care to make a sale on
Tuesday.)   
  

    
>It's such a different time.  I think we've (mostly) lost touch with
the spiritual, emotional, and cultural strivings which motivated a
good
part of 60s activism.  Now it's mostly come down to (queue up the
O'Jays) money and power.<

I'm fairly sure that many Tea Party members see their movement as
spiritual, emotional and cultural striving albeit at odds with much
(but not all) the strivings of the 60's.  
  

    
I think one of the big differences is that they want to do whatever
they want but they don't necessarily want you to do whatever you want. 
The live and let live of the 60's is conspicuously missing from their
rhetoric.
  

    
That's a good observation.  There was certainly bitching about "the
straights" in my circles in the 60s and very early 70s, but overall the
focus was much more on "doing your own thing" than on calling everyone
else evil and corrupt.  Of course, as we've discussed re: the many
political strands which affected Ramparts, it depended on which part of
the counterculture you ended up in.  It was a long way from my
experience and beliefs to those of, say, the Weather Underground.
  

    
Mark, that split was one of things I learned about on this project. 
The politicos didn't always play well with the hippies. Warren
Hinckle's piece on the SF hippies in 1967 is one example. Another is
the Kesey/Garcia line on radical politics; in short, no thanks. (Or
rather, in Kesey's case, a little "Home on the Range" during a Berkeley
anti-war rally.)  



       
  

    
Kesey was from La Junta, Colorado: you can take the boy off the
range...
  

    
We all called ourselves "freaks" rather than hippies.  The distinction
is laid out very nicely, I thought, in Jane and Michael Stern's
"Sixties People."  That book is worth checking out.  They've become
known mainly as food writers, and it's been kind of overlooked as a
result.  It lays out the different threads of the 60s very nicely, and
the parts I am old enough to remember it gets right.
  

    
Thanks, Mark, I'll have a look. 

BTW, I've had a lot of luck at the Marin County libraries on these
topics--the 60s, Ramparts, the Dead.  (Dennis McNally assured me that
this was no coincidence.)  That saved me a lot of time and effort with
the Ramparts project.  

I'm moving back to the East Bay in a couple of weeks, but my five
years in Marin have been very sweet. I've even run into Stewart Brand a
few times. 
  

    
Thanks again for the discussion, and to David Gans for suggesting it. 


A quick announcement that A Bomb in Every Issue is now out in
paperback.  Here's the Amazon link: 

http://www.amazon.com/Bomb-Every-Issue-Ramparts-Magazine/dp/159558546X/ref=tmm
_pap_title_0
  

    
Congratulations, Peter!
  

    
That's great!
  

    
Yes, it makes an excellent stocking stuffer, lol.  I'm now
contemplating new projects inspired by other WELL discussions, 
ingesting Peter Conners's *The White Hand Society*, and looking forward
to that Inkwell conversation. (I gather it begins December 8.)