Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Spring 1968 - People are Strange

See "People are Strange" video
The world was in chaos. Death, drugs, unrest and rock ‘n’ roll led the news. Its conflicted energy invaded my preteen self-centric fantasy and hung eerily in the void between me and the greater reality. Waking up to it was no longer an option; I was awakened with a jolt. In 1968, my world came undone.

Spring sprung as usual with its life-brimming excitement. My friends and I began crafting our innocent tomfoolery, welcoming a new season of dance moves, music and mischief. But then…

My dad sold his radio station, the house, the horse and all. He told us to pack up, we were moving to Cape Cod. Amid the packing materials, a detailed itinerary of an around-the-world journey appeared. It was then I knew; we’d never be coming back home. My dad dropped out; and my mom and their four confused teenage girls followed, reluctantly. His behavior was “anti-social,” breaking the strict mores of his peers, he was strange. But it was the 60s and dad’s ruled.
What did American teeny-boppers care about exotic travel? All we wanted was to hang out with friends, boyfriends, and the ever-changing happenings of our generation. We didn’t want to miss a thing. Forced to abandon my comfortable fantasy, I was conflicted by the turmoil in my family and the world at large.


Thursday, November 4, 2010

1968 - The Sounds of Silence


My Parents
In the late sixties, our post-depression, post-war parents were giddy with their successes.  Dads rode the pre-dawn train to work and martini lunches in New York City.  They sported narrow ties and dark suits.  Moms car-pooled, gardened, emulated Julia Child and worked for the Junior League.  They all wore Ray-Bans.  On weekends, most parents drove sports cars and partied to shake off the long days of working, striving and managing their growing progeny.  Cocktail parties were the rage –see The Graduate- and children were preferably seen-and-not-heard.  And we did our best to remain unseen, acting out our harmless preteen dramas, tuning in the distractions of friends and folly, tuning out our parents.  We were rebels, or so we thought. 

All the while, unbeknownst to me, my parents were planning a rebellion of their own.  In 1968, they broke out of the country club circuit.  Were they set off by assassinations, war, social/personal unrest or were they just on a lark?  We’ll never know, but the course they set for us in spring of '68 sent our social sphere into a spin… 

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

1967 - Southern Connecticut


gaggle of misfits
In 1967, during the height and high of Drop City, while Clark was emulating Bucky Fuller, I was obsessed with Paul McCartney, Matt O. and gum-wrapper chains. I was a “disruptive” and frustrated seventh-grader in a girls’ school, an old Vanderbilt estate on Long Island Sound. As the carpool parents drove away, we would roll down our knee-highs and roll up our regulation seersucker skirts, talk about boys, dances, make-up, make-outs and smoke our parent’s cigs on the beach during recess. Our little gaggle of misfits poked fun at our conventions and tore at the grosgrain ribbons that were our shackles.

listen to "Dancing in the Street"

On weekends, we’d gather with our boyfriends-of-the-month, eat onion dip in wreck rooms and Boogaloo to Martha & the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye and the Beatles. Tennis, swimming and sailing filled our summer days, manners were taught at dinner, but late at night we’d steal from our sweltering quilted bedrooms to smoke and kiss in the spacious fields of our rural landscape. On those late night escapades, we were mischievous and rebellious, funny and dangerous, bound by our salacious secrets.
The exhilaration and freedom I felt in the darkness –and safety- of our great outdoors fueled my courage and the passions erupting through America's suburbs paved the way for my escape.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Drop City: the legend and the legacy


UPDATE:  A documentary about Drop City and its inspiration is in progress.  Production has begun and a "KickStarter" campaign has been launched to fund this exciting project.  Please donate what you can, so the film will go forward.  See a video trailer and pledge info here:  http://kck.st/9uk7Ed  Thanks.
Clark Richert's Preview of Drop City - 1967


Most of us have heard of it.  The image resonates, in my mind, with the philosophy of the 60s, a nebulous state of cool.  But what was Drop City.. a city of drop-outs or Timothy Leary’s acid-dropping experiment?  Or T.C. Boyle's wayward book of the same name?

Nope, it was none of these.
 
Drop City was an intentional community formed in the hills near Trinidad, Colorado in 1965, the inspiration of artists Clark Richert, Gene and Jo Ann Bernofsky, and Richard Kallweit who just wanted to escape the system, live rent free and focus on their art.  It was a scrubby goat pasture they bought for $450, and the "first rural hippie commune."

Known for its geodesic dome-style architecture, combining the principles of Buckminster Fuller with salvaged car roofs and old telephone poles, Drop City* became an icon of rural communal living.  In 1967, fourteen residents lived with the land and created paintings, sculptures, furniture, and the domes, works of art themselves.  Eventually, nine domes, including the Icosadome, the kitchen, theater, and the Triple dropped onto the horizon.  The droppers lived to their hearts content, with no intention of becoming a large community. But, media coverage and the Joy Festival in June 1967 attracted hundreds of hippies, and Drop City grew.  


According to Gene Bernofsky,  "...we were not models, hippies, or a commune. Those trademarks are strictly the invention of establishment media." 

But, like it or not, the Droppers had the kind of visionary optimism that would soon characterize the entire hippie movement.  Jo Ann Bernofsky says, "We knew that we wanted to do something outrageous and we knew we wanted to do it with other people. . . . It was full of vitality… exciting and wonderful. You had the sense that anything was possible."

To Clark Richert, inspired by Mark Rothko and Bucky Fuller, his own limitless art/science sensibilities and the junk yards of southern Colorado, Drop City was his passion.  He remembers the synergetic interaction between artists and residents that created experimental expression. 

Since 1973, he has worked as an artist, geometer, philosopher, and professor at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design.  In February, Clark presented a highly acclaimed retrospective of his work, “1960 – Present,” in Denver.  This summer, he was honored as participant in the Biennial of the Americas. 

One of Clark’s current goals is to develop another creative-person community, and soon.  Drop City may rise again!

            *In 1967, Drop City won Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion award for innovative and economic housing construction.

 http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=pondchadwick&annotation_id=annotation_203430&feature=iv#p/a/u/0/Nb-DbSGg4Qg

Friday, June 18, 2010

Alternative Living Today

      Sitting on the shore of a remote isle in the Pacific Northwest, where scrub oak and madrone tumble from the hills to the high water line, and residents ferry to their chosen isolated lifestyle, we’re thinking of alternatives to our traditional American way.  Here, we feel at once the slowing of island time and the awareness of lost immediacy.  There is the comfort of self-dependence, the forced inaccessibility, the certain confidence in ones ability to accept, and find the freedom in, the limitations.  For the effort, we are greatly and naturally rewarded.

       Though it was instinctual at the time, I know why we chose remoteness, challenges and self-sufficiency in the 70s: the satisfaction and low impact of paying attention to every cause and effect.  Before debates over climate change and resource depletion, it felt good to take only our share.

Friday, June 11, 2010

The Threshold of a Dream: the sixties


When the 1960s began, I was a six-year old kid discovering the friends and fields of my Connecticut neighborhood.  Daddy drove his Mercedes coupe to his radio station; Mommy filled the Country Squire with chatty girls.  My three sisters and I explored Greenfield Hill at will, and I was happily oblivious to the world.  But the sixties held changes unimagined.

MLK and "I have a dream,” the Beatles, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, rock ‘n’ roll music, Civil Rights, the yogis, Drop City (look for it in my next post) and the ERA contradicted the Bay of Pigs, assassinations of our visionaries, In Cold Blood and the Vietnam War.  Wrapping up with Woodstock, psychedelic drugs and free love, riots and be-ins, the country was gripped by a true revolution.  It was an amazing decade, energy toward enlightenment and violence divided the country.

In my little town, my parents worked and partied, succeeded and fretted, while we kids built a frenetic world of our imaginations.  In the sixties, I grew through Ginny Dolls to Barbie to horses to making out, drinking and smoking.  And music, always music.  By 1968, I had experienced the World’s Fair, Broadway, Europe, Jazz Festivals, and Playland.  Then, the ultimate betrayal and gift, Daddy sold everything and packed us off on a trip-around-the-world. 
Life would never be the same.

That decade spun me round and spit me out a bold teenager with wide eyes and few skills.  In 1970, I quit high school and moved away, dropped LSD and road-tripped in a VW van, and I began MY life as a W-O-M-A-N, in the new era.  Anything was possible, and I believed it.

Where were you in 1970?  

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Memorials & Memories

My mother (World War II era) and I (Vietnam War era) stood at my father’s grave for the Memorial Day ceremony.  Around us, the purple mountains and fruited plains stood witness as the proud and the brave gathered.  “Love your country and remember those who died for your freedom,” said a WWII vet.  The 21-gun salute, military fly-over, “Taps” and lone bagpiper brought tears to hundreds of eyes.
When I looked into the faces of the Vietnam Vets gathered there, I saw my peers, the horrors and pride still burning in their eyes.  It broke my heart.  I thought about my anti-Vietnam stand in the 70s, about my dodging and dissenting friends.  We were never anti-soldier; only anti-war.  Not anti-American, we were anti-violence.  The soldiers believed they were fighting for a just cause, and more than 211,000 troops were killed or wounded in a war we would/could never win.  We believed our government was sacrificing their lives in a senseless war.

Then I looked down at my 3-year-old grandson, and imagined “a brotherhood of man.”  I am still anti-war, but I am mostly pro-peace.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Divine Right's Trip: Whole Earth revisited

In 1968, as a generation of long-hairs headed “back to the land,” Stewart Brand published the Whole Earth Catalog to give them the tools they’d need to get there. Steve Jobs said it was "like Google in paperback form," but pouring over the black and white newsprint, Brand’s work of drama, led to epiphanies of an era no website will ever invoke. It gave us our whole future.

Recently, Stewart Brand published a new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. A lifelong ecologist and futurist… controversial, determined and productive, Brand has something important to say. He went to Stanford, he served the US Army, the Merry Pranksters, Jerry Brown, and the Santa Fe Institute and he founded The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. I bought the book. I’m going to see if I have an inner ecopragmatist.

Then I’ll pass it to my daughter, an urban planner in rural Eastern Oregon. She dismays over the spread of the west, productive land being laced with pavement and plumbing. She’ll find much to learn from and concur with in this book. She’s a smart gal, Brand’s a smart guy. The exchange of ideas, even unspoken, between generations of clever and conscious people is encouraging.

In our cabin, the Whole Earth Catalog joined Be Here Now on the barnwood shelf. What book sat next to your copy?

Thursday, May 20, 2010

“What does ‘hippie’ mean anyway?...



These kids aren’t hippies – they’re seekers.”  -- Allen Ginsberg, January 1967 San Francisco Human Be-In

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the 1960s: anniversaries, drug-flashbacks and  revolutionary memories from those who were there and aware. At the same time, a running analysis waxes on: what went right, wrong and sideways. Those who were too old, too young, too stoned or too square still wonder. Each has a different story or theory, but one thing is clear: the sixties were rife with tumult, love and angst, all fed by passion.

In my story, the lessons and legends of the riotous sixties spirited through my childhood and sent me seeking into the seventies…

While the decade began painfully, murder at Kent State and drug-abuse deaths of Jimi, Janis and Jim, it also ushered in Sesame Street, Earth Day and the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It was a time of change and resolve. A national debate over Civil and Women’s Rights and the Vietnam War led the American people to disgust or defense. The Cultural Revolution threatened the status quo and few citizens were apathetic. Draft-dodgers, drug-dealers, artists, activists and flower children, the visible and verbose youth of the seventies were rattling American values, sometimes with violent consequences. Eventually, hope and unrest brought us a new government, an end to the war, a dramatically new country, and changed my life forever. 

For me it was a time of immense growth, as I ran away from the comforts of home and into the arms and rhythms of a generation on fire. Not panhandlers or vagrants, we were pioneers, curious and inspired. We worked hard, liberating mining cabins in the Colorado Rockies, turning soil in British Columbia or raising tipis on the western plains. We lived simply, minimally, building communities, passionately bound by hearts and minds.

In this blog, with photos, music and other stimuli, I want to remember the early 1970s, the essence of those charming and turbulent years. From the urban or rural communes, farms and campuses of the seventies, stories beg to be told. Not drug-fazed rants, these are tales of inspiration and joy, of hardship and triumph, of living with the Mother Nature and all her children in harmony, of seekers.

Help me tell it as it was.