From: Los Angeles Free Press - October 13, 1967

FLOTSAM and JET SET
by Liza Williams

OK so you are wearing beads, and your hair is long and from the
back you might be anyone, and from the front your face isn't too dif-
ferent either, your expression, is it an expression, is non-attend-
ance, and your style is all I ever know of you. Style, it's all style
and not much content, unless style is content, but what is the defini-
tion of decadence? Is It the substitution of style for content? Is that
why so many love children smile a lot and score off you for every-
thing they can get, cigarettes, hey man, lay a cigarette on me, or an-
other ploy, anybody got a match? OK, now who's got a cigarette to go
with it? Or you walk into an underground paper office where there is
a big sign on the wall that says "Don't make magic, Be magic" and
"Love" and you ask about something and receive cold indifference,
they are too busy manufacturing love to give away any samples.

Hippiebums, dirty long-haired hippiebums with nowhere to go and
nothing to do and they spend a lot of time using your daylight and
your floor doing their nothing so that if you have something to do it is
impossible. Who's that bunch of hippies out there in our garage-way
mending their shoes and dancing and inviting the man to come and
bust us, while we stand at the window and worry, from inside our
tenuous safety, where we just got through with a lot of cleaning up
after a departed hippie community, washing, wall painting, and re-
moving piles of animal shit from under the refrigerator?

Split, that's what it's come to, a big rift, hippies and hippiebums.
Upstairs the acid freaks are screaming and shouting and beating each
other up and chasing each other around in lace dresses and the child
who lives there sits at our table asking for food and wondering
where her mother is, only not too hopefully.

Hippiebums give you presents, like dirty feathers or one bead or the
clap. Hippiebums tell you about mystical experiences while they fin-
ger your breadbox. Hippiebums start off on your floor and make it to
the couch and then eye your bed. When it gets tight for them they
split, but they let you keep the feather or bead or the clap as a sou-
venir. You're materialistic they mumble at you as they drag them-
selves out your door, their pockets stuffed with peanut butter sand-
wiches.

Hippiebums write bad poetry and draw ugly pictures and make you
look at them. They sing dull songs to one chord change and tell you
how it is, letting you in on the secrets of life. Hippiebums hitch rides
with you and roll joints in the back seat leaving seeds on the carpet.
Hippiebums are just leaving for San Francisco or have just come
back. Hippiebums use your telephone to call Chicago and Great Falls
and three friends in New York; they pass the time on your phone.
Hippiebums are always there at mealtimes but can't wipe dishes;
hippiebums bring their friends over but never tell you their names.

Hippiebums come from middle-class homes and want you to be their
parents, want you to pay their rent, want to make your world their
high school. Hippiebums believe In the abundance of the Great So-
ciety, and want you to supply it. Hippiebums are predatory but wear
a disguise of love. Hippiebums serenade you with their bells and
dance for you, stepping on your feet.

I used to smile at everyone with a button or a bell or a flower, I used
to think how beautiful it was all becoming, how rich it was, how sweet
and good. But it's fantasy time, that's what it is, fantasy time in the
twentieth century and style is where it's at, and only a few maintain
content, and content, in the end, is really what creates a good world,
and love, and being together with people and doing and making peace
and feeling love and sustaining energy. So don't feel bad if you can't
love every long-haired flower bell child in the road; things aren't
always what they seem.