I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Hippie," where I ended up after reading a BBC article, "Did the Hippies have nothing to say?/The 1960s counterculture fuelled an artistic explosion in the US – but were the flower children merely privileged?" Excerpt from the BBC article:
It’s important to consider the context of the hippies, a majority white, middle-class group of young people with the undeniable luxury of being able to ‘drop out’. Even considering their participation in the civil rights and anti-war movements, the fact is that hippies had less at stake than those fighting for civil rights so that they could fully participate in society, not drop out. The hippies romanticised indigenous and eastern cultures (without considering the suffering of poverty) for their lack of modernity, experimenting with communal living and imaginary bohemia, creating an artificial marginality, which they saw as ethically righteous. Not to mention their unapologetic cultural appropriation._________________________
* "Ahbez composed the song 'Nature Boy'... Living a bucolic life from at least the 1940s, he travelled in sandals and wore shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He camped out below the first L in the Hollywood Sign above Los Angeles and studied Oriental mysticism. He slept outdoors with his family and ate vegetables, fruits, and nuts. He claimed to live on three dollars per week." Wikipedia. Here's the hit version of the song by Nat King Cole:
** "[Bootzin] dropped out of high school and left home to wander California with a group of self-styled vagabonds. In the 1940s, Bootzin, along with 10-15 other 'tribesmen', lived off the land in Tahquitz Canyon near Palm Springs, slept in caves and trees, and bathed in waterfalls. Decades ahead of the Hippie movement, Bootzin and his companions had long hair and beards, lived a carefree existence and were seasonal fruit pickers. The group became known as 'Nature Boys.' A combination of the philosophy of the Nature Boys and growing counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s in California may have been responsible for the emergence of California spirituality in the 1960s...." Wikipedia. And here's "Gypsy Boots" on "You Bet Your Life" with Groucho Marx in 1955:
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65 comments:
Sinatra also did "Nature Boy".
Born a poor, young country boy
Mother Nature’s son ...
The Beatles, White Album
I think they are a bit confused about hippies. Reading that nonsense is giving me a Gell-Mann moment.
I think the Wikipedia text was wrong in that it called Der Wandervogel "the hippie movement," so a replaced the bad text with the bracketed phrase "these proto-hippies." Should be more comprehensible now. This germ of the hippies was news to me. I thought of hepcats and beatniks.
Socialism is German theory on how to organize society and many hippies have left wing tendencies. Orwell, in Wigan Pier, saw how odd socialists could be.
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It would help enormously, for instance, if the smell of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly! But that, I am afraid, is not going to happen.
I would also suggest the hippie movement has its roots in the American culture of utopian communities ( now forgotten by many" going back to the 18th century-- Amana Colonies, Brook Farm and New Harmony in Indiana, or the Wisconsin Phalanx a Fourier community whose radical ideas, the use of feminism etc, have become mainstream thinking. Let us not be so quick to credit the Europeans when our own history is full of early radicals.
I go for natural dog food "0% fillers 100% nutrition" Purina One. Real chicken. Rice is mentioned.
A 35 pound bag delivered by second day air cheaper than you can buy it at the store, another nature movement.
"fin de siecle"... that's French for 'bicycle fender' isn't it?
Gypsy Boots visited my high school once. Was a health nut. Threw a football farther than our QB.
"Not to mention their unapologetic cultural appropriation."
I hate it when indigenous people, and even more so people from eastern cultures, dress up in western suits, t-shirts or sneakers like they think they're as good as white people without considering the suffering of poverty.
Known as Der Wandervogel ('wandering bird'), the hippie movement opposed the formality of traditional German clubs, instead emphasizing amateur music and singing, creative dress, and communal outings involving hiking and camping. Inspired by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, Hermann Hesse, and Eduard Baltzer,
So the proto-hippies we're also proto-nazis. That does explain a lot.
I would have thought the Roma (gypsies) had a big influence on the hippies.
Interestingly, McCartney's Mother Nature's Son was inspired by Nature Boy -- along with "a lecture on nature given by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India":
I seem to remember writing Mother Nature's Son at my dad's house in Liverpool. I often used to do that if I'd gone up to see him. Visiting my family I'd feel in a good mood, so it was often a good occasion to write songs. So this was me doing my mother nature's son bit. I've always loved the [Nat King Cole] song called Nature Boy: 'There was a boy, a very strange and gentle boy...' He loves nature, and Mother Nature's Son was inspired by that song. I'd always loved nature, and when Linda and I got together we discovered we had this deep love of nature in common. There might have been a little help from John with some of the verses.
https://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/mother-natures-son/
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a majority white, middle-class group of young people with the undeniable luxury of being able to ‘drop out’.
I'm reminded of David Sedaris's distinction between hobo and homeless:
“One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I went as a hobo. It's a word you don't hear anymore. Along with 'tramp,' it's been replaced by 'homeless person,' which isn't the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, the hobo roughed it by choice. Being at liberty, unencumbered by bills and mortgages, better suited his drinking schedule, and so he found shelter wherever he could, never a bum, but something much less threatening, a figure of merriment, almost.”
Chaplinesque might be the word. I've watched a bunch of silent film recently, primarily Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton shorts. The hapless / resourceful tramp is a stock figure.
Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London draws out this distinction against the backdrop of closely observed poverty, public harassment, police abuse, and charitable nonse. Among the appallingly neglected he does find the hobos by choice.
I drive into a Northern California hippie town every week or two and am always amazed to observe that young people’s clothing in 2018 is indistinguishable, to the smallest detail, from their grandparents’ clothing in 1968, fifty years previous. To put that in perspective, fifty years previous to 1968, World War 1 had just ended.
PhD Theses for sale:
"The Renaissance fueled an artistic explosion in the West – but were the humanists merely privileged?"
...Charitable nonsense... Don't want nonse confused with nonce.
Interesting. Roussoue should also get a head nod.
I would probably add that these kids had finally urbanized enough to romanticize the Wild. A kid shoveling 3 tons of pig shit a day has few such illusions.
Buddy Ebsen documents the homeless problem in Mayberry
Disclaimer: sometimes saying "Tuscarora" doesn't work.
A pretty good hobo song, Roger Miller's King of the Road.
What about the von Trapp family? The Sound of Music (1965) is based (in a Disneyfied way) on a real family well-known in the Thirties. The real Von Trapp family also belonged to the wandervogel movement. They learned folksongs, hiked in mountains. They were also Catholics and learned good church music (not in the movie). They also hated the Nazis and were hated by them and had to flee Austria for the USA.
The wondervogel was a widespread movement which came before and lasted after the Nazis and the particular distortion imposed by the Nazis.
Folk music in the USA had a wing led by Pete Seeger that was Communist. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were supposed to be the nextgen after Seeger. When Bob Dylan broke with that, dropped Joan Baez and took up with folk rock the Coms were furious and led booing against him at the Newport folk festival. It was like how Kanye West is now being treated. But Dylan was too talented to be destroyed by the Coms and their negations. Still you see how long they've been trying to control the culture and sabotage careers when artist deviate from the party line. Not that I think real Coms are still around but the wish to control and the smear technique is hereditary in the left.
Growing up in 1960s West Hollywood, I met a girl named Raquel whose siblings were Rochelle, Romelle, and Ronelle. Every time I went to her house at the top of Laurel Canyon, a friend of their free-spirit parents was there: Gypsy Boots. Charming, charismatic, and utterly nuts. In the middle of conversation, he might suddenly do a front roll/somersault/headstand. But never would he partake of a doobie.
wildswan:
A coda. At that same NFF, Dylan did return alone and played a 'folk' set. To cheers.
The fetal state of hippies' evolution. Are they still viable?
the history of the inevitable failures of utopian communities is too inconvenient for the left.
And the success of utopian communities doesn't resonate for the left: see, for example, the Mormons.
Steve Allen used to have Gypsy Boots on as a guest when Allen did that cheapass show from the Vine St Theatre. Loved that show. And yeah Gypsy Boots seemed like the firt hippie I ever saw.
"Hippie" was in use before that though, to refer to the jazz fans who hung around the musicians, got them dope and girls, and kept up with all the latest trends. Hipsters. But I think people spelled it "hippy."
I was a big fan of Gypsy Boots, largely because I was a big fan of Steve Allen, on whose various shows Gypsy often appeared. It was quite a revelation to me when GB was on one show doing push-ups and acrobatics, and then Steverino revealed that GB was in his fifties. Back then that was considered pretty old. Around the same time I learned that another tv "health nut," Jack LaLanne, was also in his Fifties. I looked at my relatives, then also middle-aged, looked at Gypsy Boots and Jack LaLanne, and thought, "Man, there's gotta be a better way to age than whadt my family is doing!" And that's when I became the clan' s "health nut."
Speaking of modern proto-hippies, Roseanne just got shit canned. Sad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2ZwJiK0fJ0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHnPdbR8tXc
Yes the inconvenient left has managed to hide the Amish community just. down the road from Madison and the Mennonites over in Iowa--the utopian communities failed for many reasons including the resistance to reproduction like the Shakers. Still they are one model for those who want to live and work communally on the land.
They still have some Hippie enclaves in Big Sur. They don't like a work schedule.Evan migrant fruit picking is an on and off job as each farmers fields are finishedin a few days.
The 'utopian' societies of the Mormons and the Amish are predicated on hard work and consensual social control.
What kind of utopia has hard work, much less social control?
They are obviously doing utopia wrong. Utopia is about everyone being happy with no effort. The Land of the Lotus Eaters. Which is why substance abuse tends to be big w bohemians.
Cows and crops don't care how you feelz.
Roseanne fired and the highest rated show on TV canceled for making a monkey joke about Valerie Jarret.
Where is that sixties sensibility of sticking it to the powers that be?
Of being outrageous and offensive like Lenny Bruce or George Carlin or Richard Pryor?
Where have all the hippies gone?
Who wants to stick it to the man?
What a bunch of bullshit your baby boomer hippies are. Bah.
So the Germans are responsible for Nazis AND hippies.
At least the Nazis gave us the Volkswagen.
-LWL
"Hippie" was in use before that though, to refer to the jazz fans who hung around the musicians, got them dope and girls, and kept up with all the latest trends. Hipsters. But I think people spelled it "hippy."
I'm Hip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPzt3A4Se_U
"I even call my girlfriend 'man' I'm so hip." Priceless.
This is what I was listening to when Althouse was discovering Dylan. The composer is Dave Frishberg...
“Yes the inconvenient left has managed to hide the Amish community just. down the road from Madison and the Mennonites over in Iowa--the utopian communities failed for many reasons including the resistance to reproduction like the Shakers. Still they are one model for those who want to live and work communally on the land”.
Don’t know that much about that side, but we have both Mennonites and Amish in the county here in MT. Buggy sign right across the river in the next town east of us, and see a fair number of Mennonites here, with their flock of perfectly behaved kids, in their baseline minivans, at the library or post office. They have a country store right across the road from my partner’s ex’s ranch. Her uncle visited back when she was with her ex, a couple decades ago, and being gregarious, got to know them. They would come over to watch him entertain, and bring along their homemade sausages and pickles. Best she had ever had. At least the Mennonites around here seem quite happy with their lives. Much happier than much of the general public that is facing limited job opportunities (esp after the environmental wackos shut down most of the lumber industry), and a drug epidemic (when we were in Missoula this last weekend, my partner told a rancher staying at the same motel that the only people who can afford to live in rural MT are people who inherited farms and ranches, and the retired, like us, and that is part of the drug problem. He agreed).
The only authentic hippies are dirty hippies. You can't be authentic if you smell like Irish Spring, or Breck.
Blogger J. Farmer said...”Speaking of modern proto-hippies, Roseanne just got shit canned. Sad.”
We should become very leery of ABC: Turn off, tune out & drop out. Just stop stop watching ABC.
What if I told you that the whole progressive movement was rooted in German immigrants to Wisconsin in the mid 19th century? Would you deny that as well?
J. Farmer: "Speaking of modern proto-hippies, Roseanne just got shit canned. Sad.”
ABC had to make room for their newest hire and exemplar of civilty and reason--Keith Olbermann.
Has Rosenstein expanded the Mueller/Dem hack investigation to include Roseanne's tweets yet?
I suppose Der Wandervogel movement was one strain that led to hippies, among others, including rebellion and juvie delinquency, revolution, the anti-war movement, various lefty causes, etc. La Boheme of Paris was another, more artsy source (yes, THOSE boheme), and that goes back to an 1851 novel, and earlier.
My father, with his crew cut, was the furthest thing from a hippie, but he was kind of like Der Wandervogel, because he loved camping and things of that nature, the Rooseveltian Strenuous Life.
When I was a kid there was still a granola-and-folk-art vibe to hippie-ism, but mostly if someone was called a hippie it meant that he smoked weed and/or took other drugs, and maybe he played guitar and had a rape van.
ABC and Disney were just looking for an excuse. They hated the fact that any TV show could show even a teeny bit of fairness to Trump and his supporters. So they are gleeful to do this when Jew haters like Joy Reid and Al Sharpton have full reign.
A smart competitor might pick up the show but I doubt that most of the social justice warrior actors would continue. Certainly lesbo dipshit Sarah Gilbert would follow fellow muffin muncher Wanda Sykes out the door so they have time to go to the Lillith Fair. The only way it continues is if someone throws a lot of money at them. Which might happen. I doubt it.
Get woke go broke.
M Jordan said...
Born a poor, young country boy
Mother Nature’s son ...
The Beatles, White Album
Full lyrics below.
"Born a poor young country boy--Mother Nature's son
All day long I'm sitting singing songs for everyone
Sit beside a mountain stream--see her waters rise
Listen to the pretty sound of music as she flies
Find me in my field of grass--Mother Nature's son
Swaying daisies sing a lazy song beneath the sun
Mother Nature's son"
It's easy to romanticize living a simpler life in the country but making it actually happen is hard work. If all you do is sit beside a stream or in a field of grass, you'll soon starve to death.
The Wandervogel movement is seen by many scholars as the forerunner of the Hitler Youth. In their beginning stages, the Wandervogel were an upper-middle-class reaction to the rapid industrialization of Wilhemine Germany. Hundreds of thousands of rural peasants were attracted to the burgeoning industrial centers which left many farms shorthanded for intensive work like plowing and harvesting. At the same time, sons of urban professionals rebelled against the planned lives and eschewed the university for a life on the road dedicated to poetry and music, seeking short-term employment as farmhands when the need for cash became acute, thus filling in for some of the urbanized rurals gone missing. It was a typical case of the kind of romanticization of peasant existence that was popular among the children of the bourgeoisie of the late 19th century all over Western Europe and parts of North America (Theodore Roosevelt idolized the "Cowboys and Indians" culture of the rapidly fading Wild West for much the same reasons that the Wandervogel went camping.) The difference in Germany was the inclusion of neo-paganism in the style made popular by Richard Wagner, himself a prototype of Wandervogel rebelliousness in his youth.
The movement gradually petered out as international conditions became more and more strained, particularly after the failed anti-tsarist uprisings in Russia. As political refugees migrated west to escape prison or exile to Siberia the tenor of German socialism became increasingly hostile to the romanticised notions of life in the forest primeval which were the bedrock of Wandervogel philosophy. By the summer of 1914, the Wandervogel had mostly returned home to take up the urban professional lives that were planned for them, just like hippies getting haircuts and law degrees in the sunset of Altamont.
Reality has a habit of interrupting daydreams. However, reality can be so brutal that daydreams are sometimes a tempting escape, which is what happened to many Germans after 1918. The three-way death struggle between socialists, monarchists, and nationalists caused the mostly abandoned Wandervogel movement to experience a revival that was quite out of proportion to its early history. The new happy wanderers weren't middle-class kids on a lark, they were discarded ex-soldiers disgusted by the bourgeoisie and the proletariat alike. Many of the new Wandervogel associated themselves with Nazi-style neo-pagan occultism long before the publication of Mein Kampf, and many became leaders in the Hitlerjugend.
"The only authentic hippies are dirty hippies. You can't be authentic if you smell like Irish Spring, or Breck."
If I recall correctly, we smelled of a mixture of patchouli oil and mothballs from Army surplus clothes. Middle class hippies were pretty clean. It was the rebellious rich kids who went all in on being dirty - great rebellion against Mom and Dad who were often funding them.
Roseanne just found out who rules over the New World Order. As Voltaire said, it is Valerie Jarrett whom no one can criticize.
German hippies rapping:
We dealt with the matter of our present mode of existence; and Deutschlin protested that it was poor taste for youth to explain youth: a form of life that discusses and examines itself thereby dissolves as form, and only direct and unconscious being has true existence.
The statement was denied, Hubmeyer and Schappeler contradicted it and Teutleben too demurred. It might be still finer, they ironically said, if only age were to judge youth and youth could only be the subject of outside observation, as though it had no share of objective mind. But it had, when it concerned itself too, and must be allowed to speak as youth about youth. There was something that one called a feeling of life, which came near to being consciousness of self, and if it were true that thereby the form of life was abrogated, then there was no sense of life possible at all. Mere dull unconscious being, ichthysaurus-being, was no good, and today one must consciously not be wanting, one must assert one's specific form of life with an articulate feeling of self. It has taken a long time for youth to be so recognized. --Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
Hippies have always been around. Free sex communes existed in early and mid 19th America. And some people say Jesus of Nazareth was a hippie.
St. Francis? God damn hippie.
Hippies!
The main challenges facing modern-day Hippies in San Francisco & Berkeley are:
1. The housing prices (damn high)
2. The academic standards at UC Berkeley requiring a 4.5 GPA and 1400 SAT.
The Hippies can't afford it here no more. They have been replaced by the Homeless.
In the VietNam era, Nixon threw the ancient Hippies a life-line by abolishing the draft. Had Nixon been more ruthless, he woulda abolished student-deferments and drafted all these privileged, erudite weasels.
I don't know how German Hippies fared during the Weimar Republic. Inflation was high.
Gypsy Boots.
He used to go to the Trojan football games when I attended USC in the 80's. We all figured he was a rich beach bum alum.
Proto-hippies? I’m picturing fish with love beads climbing onto the shore.
In honor of Althouse.
Tomorrow belongs to, like, everybody, man.
"I thought of hepcats and beatniks."
Yes, these were other streams that led to hippies, and the name came from hep, slightly altered.
And "Nature Boy" is really not a good song, musically or lyrically.
In Powells Dance to the Music of Time, the narrator sets out a flashback to summer 1914 where a collection of Simple Lifers living in the (British) village where he was a child, go out on runs with their mystic leader.
The world has always had idealists ready to say This is The Way. Strike out and start anew.
It has also always had people counting the pennies or florins or ban liangs and trying to keep the math straight, so that things dont fall apart.
These are not always opposing viewpoints, but there can be divergence. And then conflict.
I re-read Powell a few times, it seems, over the decades. There's something in his observation that things dont change, the forces at play are only framed differently, usually by those who are pre-occupied with framing. It may even be moreso now, in a world of immediate texts and tweets and articles and etc etc
Val-deri, val-dera etc.
But Althouse was only 4 at the time.
Would Roseanne still have a job if she had described Hope Hicks, or Kelly Ann Conway(sp?) as the off-spring of Muslim brotherhood, and the Planet of the Apes?
The author has the timing wrong on German immigration to the United States. German immigration was petering out by the 20th Century. The high point was 1881–1890, when 1,452,970 came from the Reich. (And you have to add in all the ethnic Germans from elsewhere, such as the Volga and Black Sea colonies.
M Jordan said...
"Born a poor, young country boy
Mother Nature’s son ..."
The Beatles, White Album
"Well I wouldn't trade my life for diamonds and jewels
I never was one of them money hungry fools
I'd rather have my fiddle and my farmin' tools
Thank God I'm a country boy"
Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., Back Home Again
Thank you Gahrie. Until today I never knew who that wild person was at the SC games. One of life's little questions answered.
Val Jar is a good Sharia, would not coexist with the Brotherhood.
"I think they are a bit confused about hippies. Reading that nonsense is giving me a Gell-Mann moment."
No, "Jupiter", the cognitive dissonance there is entirely your own. The original vision of the hippies isn't to be erased to fit your stereotype.
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