"... they’d fight in the lobby and leave pools of blood. Eventually, people came and went so fast, it was hard to tell who actually lived there and who didn’t. 'One time I wanted to cook something and found the kitchen occupied by some Russians drying Ketamine in the oven.... This kind of thing was very common.' And the people who actually did live there — mostly DJs — would loudly play music late into the night. One time, when [one resident] asked a roommate to turn it down, they replied, 'Asking me to turn down my music is like telling a painter to use less red paint.' ... Nearly a decade later, [another former resident] views San Francisco like an ex: a person whom she has a special connection with but won’t ever go back to. 'Like, I love you, but I’m not in love with you.... But we had our time together, and I wouldn't be the person that I am without you, but you changed.'"
From "Sex, drugs and dry wall: Life inside one of the last artist communes on San Francisco’s Market Street" (sfgate).
Remember when you wanted to live in a commune?
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27 comments:
Taylor Camp on Kaui in 1970. Google it.
"Like, I love you, but I’m not in love with you."
Your California sentence for the day.
NEVER did. Why work your butt off so some slag off like a Bernie Sanders could sit around doing nothing?? When you grow up in a large family, you RUN AWAY from living with a bunch of other people. You want PEACE and QUIET...and solitude.
I lived in one once. It was fun at first. And cheap—I saved a lot of money, but I was the only one with a day job. It was after-party central. I could get used to the noise, but I’d wake up every morning to a trashed common area. Everything was an ashtray. If I woke up in the middle of the night needing to use the bathroom, there’d be a line. I'm glad it’s part of my history, in both senses.
The key to the problem is that most people who live there don’t respect the space, so people visiting don’t either.
That all sounds super annoying. I guess the principle is that artists need fodder for inspiration...? Myself, I've always done my best creative work alone in quiet.
When my husband and I were in college, it used to drive me nuts that he wanted to play music while we were doing homework or studying. And it drove him nuts that I didn't. In later years, I went through a "daydreaming about living in a tiny house" phase; he is a wise man and pointed out that there was NO WAY we could live in ONE tiny house together.
(I still kind of want one, in the backyard. With one key, which I wear around my neck. He can have the whole rest of the big house.)
it's all hazy to me, but; i'm PRETTY SURE, the she's describing my college life
(for a couple of years, all one had to say was "party on Wood St" and people would know it was at my house... Come to think of it; no one ever really needed to say Anything)
Dearest Ames,
Of Course, i Will ALWAYS love you. The times we had, were what made me me.
Waking up in the Arboretum on Veisha sundays was So special..
But.. While i will treasure our memories, and still love you, i do not love you in That Way. Not anymore. It's not You that's Changed, it's ME
Well, honestly; it's both of us. Come on, don't cry; at least now you've got a basketball team that can beat the snot out of losers like Wisconsin (not that That was that hard)
Love, gilbar
I didn't want to, really. I hated pushy hippies and how they were always trying to get me high and psychoanalyze me if I wasn't down to F.
My best friend did it for me. She stayed in a commune in Los Gatos for, well, not very long really but on acid and mushrooms it seems long enough.
She had the advantage of being able to sleep easily, and was always down to F.
It was one of those things that were cool to say you had done.
Remember when you wanted to live in a commune?
Nope, never have wanted something like that....
I visited several communes back in the day. One was supported by drug dealing, one by a rock band, and one by some insurance money someone got (that was a small one of 15). None of them were real.
The commune scene in Easy Rider is hilarious. So serious. So incompetent.
Give me an autonomous collective, like the peasants in Python's Holy Grail.
My daughter lived in a semi-communal apartment building serving as a dorm off campus at UT-Austin. The 20 or so occupants couldn't collectively fix a broken light fixture because nobody knew where the group toolbox was. She got a free semi-feral black cat there, adopted as a kitten by the house but abandoned by all other residents at end of term. Such is communal life, if you want to call that living.
"Remember when you wanted to live in a commune?"
Nope.
Even if my hippie days, I never wanted to live in a commune. Those people were crazy losers back then. Most of them came from well-to-do families as opposed to many of us who were struggling middle class.
"Remember when you wanted to live in a commune?"
No. I don't like people all that much. And I don't like hippies at all.
The older I get the more it becomes evident to me that there were a lot of rules in society back in the 1940's and 50's regarding people's behavior and while I don't want to see things like racial discrimination come back, I sure would like to have some of those other rules back again because the world was a much more civil place and seemed to run a lot smoother.
I wanted to live in a commune... in the abstract. But I knew enough to cross it off my list of possible ways to live... and my list was really skimpy. I wanted to be left alone.
A woman I knew, from a prominent family in AZ (her husband's family) left her husband and took her four daughters to live in a hippie commune. The daughter that I know turned out to be a very conservative Catholic. I knew the mother and she was a dreamy, dopey leftist still. Nice lady, though.
Bright college days!
Curious how communal living today happens more in halfway houses and treatment centers than in hippie or artist settings. Maybe that was always the unspoken secret. Prisons, barracks, hospitals, hospices, homeless shelters, madhouses, brothels, and boarding schools are also examples of communal living.
I'm way too bourgie (or not bourgie enough) for communal living. There were some drug dens and half-assed semi-communes near the campus--the Crazy House in particular could be fun--but very few people went the whole route.
I never wanted to live in a commune. Even in my peak hippie days. I lived in a couple of houses in East Lansing with random people coming and going, moving in, moving out, or just appearing on our community sofa overnight- for days at a time. That was enough for me. But no...there was more.
I moved out west in those days and lived briefly in Boulder, CO. Stayed in a commune out there. On day ten, I was in our room with my roommate. The door was locked. And suddenly, a rustle on our doorknob, a key into the door, the door opens, a person starts to come in, then sees us and bolts! He clearly didn't expect us to be in our room. A room that housed everything we owned. A room we paid for with some of our very little cash reserves.
We looked at each other and decided right then to keep going further west. Boulder was not our place. (we ended up in San Francisco, but that's another tale for another time).
Never wanted to live in a commune, but I think it would be fun to be a cult leader.
There are so many leftist sheep out there to bamboozle.
In that regard, Obama is my hero.
So that's why communist countries have such large, brutal police forces...
"Remember when you wanted to live in a commune?" is quite a presumption- as shown by previous comments.
Communal living of any kind is not to my liking. Didn't appreciate open bay berthing in boot camp, or barracks living, or shipboard berthing. Always wanted my own bedroom growing up. Still haven't had one at age 66- I went and got married and have been sharing one since...
Fire alarm pulling is common in college dorms. According to my youngest son one of the anonymous middle of the night pullers was identified- and suffered for it. One of the things about communal living is some of the residents take it upon themselves to deliver justice.
I remember all that. Commune as in communicable disease.
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