I'm no fan of the hippies but I have to admit that they came up with some interesting graphic ideas. The best hippie photographer I know of was Jerry Ulesmann. What imagination! I'd love to stand in a real philosopher's study like the one he did above, and see tumultuous clouds overhead. Click to enlarge. Imagine experiencing the wind and smells you encounter just before a thunderstorm while simultaneously feeling the staid, musty smell of a book-filled room. Why can't we have weather- protected rooms with no ceilings?Actually, I have this in my own house, sort of. I have a sleeping porch with a bed where most months of the year I can wake up to the dew and that early morning fresh smell. It's unbelievably great to sleep out there in a thunderstorm, completely protected yet sort of in the thick of things at the same time. Learn from Jerry Ulesmann! Get a sleeping porch!
What a great house (above) for a witch! I wish we had more trees with thick, exposed roots in the suburbs. We have to redesign the suburbs to make them more exciting and mysterious. I absolutely love the idea of suburbs, where you can have some of the rural experience within commuting distance of a great city. I even love the idea that prices were made low enough so that ordinary people could afford to live that way. We've had the inevitable first wave of Levittown-type shoebox houses, now it's time to design the first cool suburbs...with the help of people like Ulesmann.
Nice (above), very nice.
This image has become something of a cliche in fantasy films, but there's still something to be learned from it. Nobody knows how to make things float in the air but the best architects know how to make things appear to be so light that they almost seem to float. Think how the cathedral builders made it appear that thin pillars were holding up massive ceilings. The idea of appearing to defy gravity in a serene, natural setting is gold for the architect.
I once took a train ride through mountains in the early morning. We raced along tunnels and high wooden trestles and I watched the first light struggle to get a foothold. You could see mist creeping through through dark ravines and pathways just like the picture above. Actually, it looked even more like the eerie mist in DeMille's "Ten Commandments," the one that killed the son of the Pharoh.
Nice (above), very nice.
This image has become something of a cliche in fantasy films, but there's still something to be learned from it. Nobody knows how to make things float in the air but the best architects know how to make things appear to be so light that they almost seem to float. Think how the cathedral builders made it appear that thin pillars were holding up massive ceilings. The idea of appearing to defy gravity in a serene, natural setting is gold for the architect.I once took a train ride through mountains in the early morning. We raced along tunnels and high wooden trestles and I watched the first light struggle to get a foothold. You could see mist creeping through through dark ravines and pathways just like the picture above. Actually, it looked even more like the eerie mist in DeMille's "Ten Commandments," the one that killed the son of the Pharoh.What is morning mist but vapor in the air? I'd like to have morning mist outside my window and live in an environment that would heighten the effect, wouldn't you? That may be an achievable thing for an engineer or for architects who know how to maximize it . This is what I like about Ulesmann. He's a true artist in the sense that he gives us something to shoot for. He stimulates invention by giving us tantalizing glimpses of what could be.
Cataracts (above)! Ulesmann's right, we need more cataracts! And we need light elements nearby, like boats or leafy trees.
Hmm... I think that house in the second picture was used in the opening for the mid-'90s Outer Limits remake...
ReplyDeleteNice pics but they're too organic. It's like those blue paintings of dolphins and unicorns you see on ponytailed stoner's buses.
ReplyDeleteHey, someething jsut occurred to me, did the term stoner come from the The Rolling Stones?
We need more photographers like this. It shows that there are still people with lots of imagination. Man, I wish I had a house like that. It would sure keep them Jehovah's Witnesses away.
ReplyDeleteFor years my son had a huge poster of the rooted-house picture hanging in his room. Historians will one day describe this as his Heavy Metal Period.
ReplyDeleteJorge: Too "organic?" An interesting criticism! The hippies were always trying to create round houses. Even the furniture of the period had rounded edges. For hippies straight lines were symptomatic of a rigid way of thinking.
ReplyDeleteI like the space-age, holes-in-swiss-cheese rooms in some of the concept houses from that period. They require at least twice the space of conventional architecture, and they're wildly inefficient for storage, but they sure look nice on paper.
The shape that didn't work at all for me was domes. They're spacious and easy to put up but they're expensive to heat, hard to partition for privacy and sound insulation, a chore to make windows for, and are space hogs. It's hard to understand why hippies were so attracted to them.
"Stoner" comes from "getting stoned" as in the Ray Charles song, "Let's Go Get Stoned"
ReplyDelete"Rolling Stones" comes from a blues song called, "Rollin' Stone" by Muddy Waters.
"Blues" was a kind of music performed and listened to by African Americans. It spread from the Mississippi Delta in the late 19th century.
"Muddy Waters" is a reference to the Mississippi River.
Muddy was a master of the beat-heavy "Chicago Blues" style he helped to create in the 1950's.
The "Chicago Blues" was a style that influenced many guitar bands like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Humble Pie.
Everyone should at least have Muddy's greatest hits, if they know what's good for them.
jazz>blues
ReplyDeleteIDRC: Muddy Waters was great! I only have his "Electric Mud" record but I've never heard a bad cut with his name on it!
ReplyDeleteSheesh, what's with all the hippie hate?
ReplyDeleteIt's starting to feel like a Dave Berg comic strip around here!
Josh: I like individual hippies, I just don't like the movement. Hippies gave us hedonism, the drug culture, mysticism and anti-intellectualism.
ReplyDeleteThose things may be true Eddie, but I consider hippies indespensible. Where would we be without them? In a better world?
ReplyDeleteWhat about the really useful things we got from hippies? Ideas like sustainability, tolerance, peace, environnmentalism, political awareness, speaking truth to power, being smart enough not to join the army, etc?.
Hippies were all kinds of things. Many good.
I remember the last 50 years very well. Things woould not be better now without hippies. They would be much worse.
"Hippies gave us hedonism, the drug culture, mysticism, and anti-intellectuallism"
ReplyDeleteWe've had hedonism and drug cultures in this country for years; it was never publicized. What do you think New Orleans was? I also find a little mysticism never hurt anybody. I think it tries to get us to think beyond conventional lines. Anyway, awesome discussion.
IDRC, Weirdo: Fascinating! I'll show this to my hippie friends. It'll make them feel better!
ReplyDeleteIf America had never had hippies it'd be freakin' peak Athens or Rome right now.
ReplyDeleteJorge: Interesting comment! You might be right, though you could argue that America had acquired a European-style left by that time and they would have had their influence even without the hippies.
ReplyDeleteThe whole era is fascinating to look back on! When you think about it, hippies and radicals are very different kinds of people. The hippies were anarchists and the radicals wanted a whole lot more state power. Lenin and Trotsky hated anarchists. I'm amazed that these groups even talked to each other!
The hippies made an alliance with the radical left in the 60s and the combination had extraordinary appeal and influence. The problem, from the point of view of these movements, is that both were diluted and changed by close contact with the other.
All you have to do is look at what radicals published before the 60s. It was full of discussions of dialectics, surplus value, dictaorship of the proletariat, enforcing party lines and all that. Now all that seems quaint, even in left circles. That's a huge change!
The hippies, on the other hand, had to shed their visions of removing themselves to rural communes, free love and all that. The radicals made the decision to re-enter the workplace and local politics and establish socialism from within. They made the hippies feel guilty about romping in the woods and taking drugs.
You see these kind of unstable but amazingly powerful alliances all the time. The fascists started as a combination of anarchists and left syndicalists, and the conservatives as a barely-on-speaking-terms combination of religious traditionalists and libertarian secularists.
It's all infinitely fascinating but I try not to think too much about it. Getting a handle on art is a full-time job!
Peak Rome had a few critics, but they tended to get hung from poles, like your pal Jesus.
ReplyDeleteWithout hippies, America would be a lot more like that now, it's true.
Don't worry, there is still time. We are closer now than ever before.
Jorge, you may get your wish for a fascist paradise.
Now, why is that a good thing?
Young Eddie:
ReplyDeleteAs I remember it, neither hippies or yippies had any impact on the proletariat at the time. I remember hippies as so astonishingly naive & idealistic they could only come from money. There were working-class draft-dodgers around at the time who made a living selling them drugs, but the true basis of the "economy" was money from home. I admired the really crazy ones for trying to live Christ-like, but I couldn't identify with kneeling in Hazelton Lane sending love vibes to the cop who's beating you up.
I heard one summer in SF, the hippies threw a party & then left early when too many kids showed up. It's one thing to line up in the park for free food with a lot of photogenic young people who don't need it. These were kids who hitchhiked out from all over, many too young to work legally. Many came from abusive families or were kicked out for being gay. These were the freaks & the proto-punks. The hippies just joined white flight out of the cities. If any of them ever learned agriculture, it'd surprise me.
The yippies (Youth International Party) were kids on a student deferment who, having been privileged with a college education, had gained an insight into how much they were needed as leaders. The ignorant masses must (theoretically) be ripe for revolution against a state that is so rotten it's finally drafting even white students.
To be fair, these people were born into an economy where the U.S. GDP was more than half the entire world's GDP, owing to much foreign industrial capacity having been blown up. Wages of the American worker reached an historic peak as these kids graduated all-white high school. Optimism for the future seemed only reasonable & as far as being mystical, IMO any form of idealism needs a certain amount of magical thinking, or at least, a willful ignorance. And you have to admit, nothing's more pragmatic than idealism.
The term, "politically correct" was originally used by the "New Left" in the 60's to mock the "Old Left" who would bore people by quoting Mao in polite conversation.
Pappy: Is that where "politically correct" comes from? I wondered about that.
ReplyDeleteIt's fascinating to hear this discussion about the hippies and the time of the 60's. You're right Uncle Eddie, it is a fascinating time to research. For better or worse, the 60's changed America. It was a time where people reevaluated their values and what they stood for. It's great to hear from all sides of this argument.
ReplyDeleteI do have problems with some hippies, because their idealism often leads to their downfall. For example, when they decided to go out into the woods to get away from civilization. They didn't know how to survive, and some of them starved. it still happens in places like Montana. On the other hand, they opened up discussions on race, class power, the environment, political corruption, etc.
Evrything has Ying and Yang.
Eddie, actually, religious traditionalists were for the longest time apolitical, until the 90s or maybe a bit earlier, I believe. Theit entry into the politics is what led to new Conservatism I think.
ReplyDeleteToday my history teacher told me that after the Civil war, the South didn't vote for any Republicans until the 1970s, when the Democratic party became more liberal. Imagine that!
Originally in this part of the message I'd posted a combative message to my best pal "IDRK" but I spelled my password wrong and it asked me to type it in again. So I've deleted that portion. I deal with enlightened individuals all day at Wilrid Laurier University, I don't have time to deal with them now. Blogs are supposed to be fun.
Ain't you having fun? I am.
ReplyDeleteDid this guy ever work for Hipgnosis? That's some amazing mind bending imagery.
ReplyDeleteUlesman's photography has always amazed me. His darkroom work is simply inredible.
ReplyDelete