I haven't written in a while. I've been out living life. I've been laboring long hours at Maggie's farm on weekdays. Saturdays I spend drunk or asleep. Sundays, I go to down to Venice and try to forget that I need to rejoin the chain gang on Monday. I might get brunch with beer in the early afternoon, read on the beach or walk the boardwalk, and in the evening dance at the drum circle, or stop by Venice Bistro and dig the Doors tribute band.
They won't let me order a pitcher by myself. I think that's what all my malaise comes down to. The jive-ass job at the salt mines with long hours and no pay, the discontent with my living situation (which now needs to change by October 1st), the lack of a lady. I'm going down to Venice, to Hippie Haven where they ought know about communal living, and I'm grooving to tribal beats because I want to plug in to the cosmic consciousness and share with someone.
In my rock-and-roll curriculum, I've been studying the late 60s, the Flower Power era, from the Summer of Love to Woodstock, and all the great music with its sometimes trite but still worthwhile messages. And then I look around the round world today, and I see all the red-state/blue-state division, and you read about ridiculous litigation, and people get shot on the highways, and it's the FCC versus free speech, and women want power over their own bodies, oh, and there's a war going on. Also, we're being homogenized with fashion mags, and ironic hipster clothing being sold at malls, and hype about reality TV, and Jack FM's play-it-safe programming. They're trying to get us all on the same page, but it's just a glossy page that's hawking Axe body spray. We're numbers, tax returns and credit reports, ISP addresses. That's how we're viewed by the powers, and as a result that's how we start viewing ourselves. We speak of "identity theft," but I really hope my identity goes beyond a nine-digit number The Man gave me.
It's a lot of strong feelings and strife, and I think, man, that's what was going on in the 60s, and look what came out of it.
Dylan and the Doors are as apropos today as they were then. It's time for another cultural revolution. We want the world and we want it...now!
Yes, it failed before, thanks to Altamont and Manson. But try, try again, right? And look what it reaped last time as far as the arts. The cinema of the period is some of the best ever..."Midnight Cowboy," "Bonnie and Clyde," "Butch Cassidy," "Cool Hand Luke," "Cuckoo's Nest," "Easy Rider" (Maybe we just need to start killing our heroes again). They were all born to rebel against the status quo, to praise the ones who saw the system as faulted.
And the music...MAN! We're still catching up to Hendrix.
Being political today means putting a bumper sticker on your car. I saw one on an SUV the other day that read, "No War For Oil." The young people of the 60s, everything they did was a strike at the system.
Volunteers of America, let's start a revolution. Here's the manifesto:
*****Get your politics through philosophy, not ideology.
*****Let's strive for utopianism where people help each other, and the government can fuck off. Give a bum a dollar. Welfare and the like should spring from humanism, not communism.
*****Drugs were a big part of the counterculture. They were trying to think outside the box. I can't believe I just used corporate terminology like that. But we're surrounded by it. We need to alter our consciousnesses (ah, the fact that it's plural is part of the problem). It is a statement...The world sucks, so I'm going elsewhere.
Seriously, we don't celebrate our drunks anymore, but they usually have the most vision. Look at all the great poets and authors. I wish Bush still drank. And let's face the fact that marijuana is only a problem because the government has made it one, because Anheusser Busch throws money at them to do so. If the freeway shooters had some pot, I'd sit higher in my seat. And, I'm willing to bet that a good hit of acid's more entertaining than watching Elaine's boss from "Seinfeld" cha-cha.
*****Let's lose the hang-ups. I can't believe the knee-jerk reaction to Janet Jackson's tit. The NFL and CBS wouldn't have had a problem if she had the Budweiser logo on it, although...Was that a pull-tab?
I hate the argument, "But kids might have been watching." For the early part of life, the breast is a source of essence, and then you turn around and attach shame to it? That's got to do a number. And if you've got kids you're worrying about protecting, it means you did some "dirty" things with a member of the opposite sex. So you're a hypocrite. Next time have the missus swallow.
So, my original point there was to lose the hang-ups. If you show me yours, I'll show you mine.
*****Free love. This one we really need to bring back. Everybody would be a lot looser if they got laid more often. No pun intended. Please, someone fuck some snipers.
Ladies, you're at war constantly over abortion. You don't want the men in government telling you what you can or can't do with your bodies. But every time you make a guy wait for sex, you're buying into the values of an ages-old Judeo-Christian patriarchy. Free love was a form of feminism, and I am volunteering for the cause. Get on all fours, babe. Aw, yeah, you like it when I smack your ass?
*****As ironic as it is to post this in a blog – Technology ain’t helping. The mass media’s making us mindless drones. And all the stuff that was going to create the "global village" and bring us all together like Coca Cola kids on a hillside had actually bred solipsism. I’m acting like I’m on a soapbox in a revival tent full of people, but the truth is, I am alone. I’m talking to myself.
*****We need ritual and rite. "Stopping at Starbucks is part of my morning ritual." No. You need communion, not coffee. We’ve lost our religion – to each their own – but we’ve also lost the connectivity of consciousness that comes with it. Look at the musical events of the 60s. Watch Woodstock, and the bottles of wine being passed down the rows for whoever to take a swig. Consider Jim Morrison asking a crowd, "Is everybody in? The ceremony’s about to begin." And then consider Live 8, which people watched in their own living rooms on their TVs or their PCs.
This weekend, let’s start this revolution off over some Sierra Nevada. Come on, people, let’s buy another pitcher. Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
