"Open Fly."

Subliminal Headline of the Day:

From the NYT home page, linking to this article (about influencers' high jinks at the Open).

I don't know about you, but I take line breaks seriously. I saw and thought about "Open Fly" far too long before the headline congealed into the imprecation to "let your freak flag fly." Is that expression still alive after all these decades? I associate it with Jimi Hendrix. And, yes, I see the original appearance of the expression came in Jimi's 1967 song “If 6 Was 9”:

They’re hoping soon my kind will drop and die
But I’m gonna wave my freak flag high

Then there was David Crosby, in 1970's "Almost Cut My Hair":

But I didn't and I wonder why
I feel like letting my freak flag fly
And I feel like I owe it to someone

But it's more than half a century later! Are we still saying that — I mean, other than jocosely and to refer to the trappings of hippiedom?

And I'm seeing it in the NYT now and then. For example, from 2022, there's "This Is What Happens When Election Deniers Let Their Freak Flag Fly." "Let your freak flag fly" seems to have come to mean "Be yourself" or "You do you," except that it includes the notion that what you are is weird. And not in a good way. For Crosby and Hendrix, it was good. Very good. 

"There’s one thing that’s stealing when you are a teenager and you want the adrenaline rush. And part of it is about testing the rules..."

"... and getting away with something. But what I’m seeing on TikTok and social media is people saying that they’re stealing from Whole Foods not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification. Because the rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I? And Jeff Bezos has too much money — he’s a billionaire — so why should I have to pay for organic avocados? My friends and I have started calling this microlooting, because it has a slight political valence to theft, as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something. Have you noticed this around you online? Have you noticed more people talking about stealing in this way?"

Says NYT writer Nadja Spiegelman on an episode of the NYT "Opinions" podcast, "'The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?'Why petty theft might be the new political protest."

Those other 2 characters are New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker, a political commentator I blogged about a year ago when he was being touted as the potential "Joe Rogan of the left."

Tolentino says: "I think it’s great that the valence of property is on the table as something to be toyed with, in terms of direct action. We’ve forgotten that there is a long and storied history of sabotage and engagement with property destruction, even, which is abhorrent to people...."

Piker: "In the Marxist tradition, adventurism is the action that is oftentimes decentralized. Oftentimes, anarchists will say, 'This is the propaganda of the deed.'

"The Summer of Love became the template: the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love; Occupy Wall Street is related to the Summer of Love."

"And it became the new status quo. The Aquarian Age! They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that. Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Florence Nightingale, said that when the success of an idea of past generations is ingrained in the public and taken for granted the source is forgotten."

Said Country Joe McDonald, quoted on this blog 12 years ago, here, and repeated today, because I'm reading the news that Country Joe has died. He was 84.

Here's his famous set at Woodstock:

Well, come on, all of you big strong men/Uncle Sam needs your help again/Got himself in a terrible jam/Way down yonder in Vietnam....

"What's the original version of the adage 'Friends don't let friends [blank]'? Is it about drunk driving? is it 'vote Republican'? What's the first one and where did it go from there?"

Just a random A.I. prompt of mine. That came up this morning.

Yesterday's equivalent was: "What was that hippie poster that was mostly text and included something like and if we find each other it will be beautiful?"

On Thursday, my idle musings got me to: "What is the old waltz most associated with ice skating?"

Without A.I., things like this would float along, fermenting, festering, and maybe one day you'd happen to run into the answer and think aha! I've been wondering about that for the longest time. Now, you can get the answer immediately, and it doesn't amount to much other than that I've destroyed the groundwork for what might have been a delightful aha moment somewhere done the road.

"His daughter Lana... recalls flying to Austin to visit Nelson and failing to recognize him until her son shouted, 'That’s Grandpa!'"

"The last time she’d seen him, in Nashville, he had short hair and wore country-club clothes. Now he had long hair and a beard and wore a T-shirt, a bandanna, and an earring. 'He went from jazz musician to hippie,' she said. In Texas, Nelson cut back on the drinking. His face thinned out. His features sharpened. He ran five miles a day through the Hill Country, practiced martial arts, kept smoking weed—it tamped the rage down, he said—and read spiritual tracts and 'The Power of Positive Thinking.' People who killed the mood didn’t stay in his orbit for long. 'Somewhere along the way, I realized that you have to imagine what you want and then get out of the way and let it happen,' he told me."

From "How Willie Nelson Sees America/On the road with the musician, his band, and his family" (The New Yorker).

The New Yorker now has its entire 100-year archive digitized and on line.

You can get into everything starting here. I guess you need a subscription, but I have a subscription. I impulsively clicked into the year 1967 because I love 1967, and then into November 11, because I love Saul Steinberg:

But that's not the only Steinberg cover for 1967. There are at least 6 more! But don't get distracted.

"But what if there was a missing layer, a lost generation of artists whose work ran hot-to-feverish in temperature and was driven by a Whitmanesque love of the human body and its longings?"

"This is the question raised with appropriate hippie optimism in 'Sixties Surreal,' an ambitiously revisionist exhibition opening on Sept. 24 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It brings together about 150 works by 111 painters, sculptors, photographers, collagists, cartoonists, junk assemblage-ists, and at least one Kabballah-ist, most of whom were pushed to the sidelines of the ’60s art scene for various unkind reasons...."

From "Roll Over, Warhol: Taking the ’60s Beyond Pop Art/A thrillingly revisionist history of the era at the Whitney Museum uncovers a current of art that sprang from eros and the uncensored minds of R. Crumb, Martha Edelheit and others" (NYT).

"Of the 111 artists in the show, 47 are women... On a recent afternoon, I visited the studio of Martha Edelheit, a little-known, twice-widowed Manhattanite, now 94, who is about to make her Whitney debut.... She was part of a generation of proto-feminists who painted explicit nudes. In 1965, she recalled, she had a show at the Byron Gallery in Manhattan. The New York Times critic John Canaday came in to look, only to politely explain to the gallery owner that he couldn’t review 'that obscene woman.' Stretching 16 feet wide, across three panels, ['Flesh Wall With Table' (1965)']... embeds a group of female nudes in the space surrounding her drawing table. Languid bodies sprawl from edge to edge of the canvas, snoozing comfortably, their flesh graced with a rainbow of color that progresses from delicate ivories and pinks to dense ceruleans and purples."

Suggestive!

"He was the same age as many of the young people who wore bright, flowing garments during the so-called Summer of Love..."

"... but he detested flower power.... The hippies liked soft fabrics that reflected an innocent view of a world, where peace and love would win out in the end. Ozzy favored capes and heavy boots. He had gone to jail, not college. It took him a while to find a style that worked, especially before the money rolled in. 'I’d walk around in an old pyjama top for a shirt with a hot-water tap on a piece of string for a necklace,' he wrote in his memoir, adding: 'You had to use your imagination. And I never wore shoes — not even in winter. People would ask me where I got my "fashion inspiration" from and I’d tell them: "By being a dirty broke bastard and never taking a bath."'"

From "Ozzy Started With Style, and Built From There/Osbourne and Black Sabbath pioneered a horror-inspired heavy metal look that was an alternative to the colorful tie-dye of the hippies, and a prototype of things to come" (NYT).

Ad I mistook for part of a Trump post for one delightful moment.

 

Here's the link to his post. I'm pretty sure you'll get a different ad, so you will just need to imagine my puzzlement and quasi-delight in fathoming the look of Bryan Bedford. Made me think of the Incredible String Band or some such thing. Donovan. 

Here's the website for Gudrun Sjödén, in case you — male, female, or whatever — would like to pursue a retro hippie vibe for traipsing about in the garden or village. 

"Totally Drunk Guy Is A Famous American Novelist Who Viewed Hippies With Disgust On National TV."

An incredibly stupid YouTube title for what is a fantastic episode of "Firing Line," from 1968, with William F. Buckley interacting with Jack Kerouac (and a sociology professor and Ed Sanders of The Fugs):

Kerouac died 7 months later. He may be drunk but every word he says has more value than anything that comes from the sociology professor. And nobody on the stage has much of a good word to say about hippies.

Speaking of death, Buckley opens the show with: "The topic tonight is the hippies an understanding of whom we must I guess acquire or die painfully...."

"'The Mod Squad' was one of the first prime-time series to acknowledge the hippie counterculture and an early example of multiracial casting."

"It centered on three hippies in trouble with the law, who avoid jail time by joining the police department and working undercover. Mr. Cole was cast as Pete Cochran, a wealthy kid who was kicked out of his parents’ house for stealing a car. [Clarence Williams III] played Linc Hayes, and [Peggy] Lipton played Julie Barnes.... In his 2018 memoir, 'I Played the White Guy,' Mr. Cole described turning down the role, because he did not want to play a character who ratted on troubled teenagers. 'It sounds stupid, and I hope it never gets on air,' Mr. Cole recalled yelling the show’s producer, Aaron Spelling, during the audition. But his attitude was exactly what Mr. Spelling was looking for in Pete Cochran, he said. Ms. Lipton died in 2019, and Mr. Williams died in 2021...."

From "Michael Cole, ‘Mod Squad’ Actor, Dies at 84/Mr. Cole, who played the wealthy Pete Cochran, had been the last of the show’s three stars still living" (NYT).

I remember the opening — where "Julie Barnes" gets out of breath trying to keep up with "Pete" and "Linc" who seem to need to lug her along on their hippie-busting venture — but I don't remember watching the show...

"One day, she was noodling around on an electric piano with a chord sequence... 'Do that again,' he said."

"Two hours later, they had written their magnum opus, which became the opening track of their debut album.... [W]ith its imagery of a 'white bird in a golden cage' who 'must fly, or she will die,' the song encapsulated a longing by the flower-power generation to escape a conformist life and soar toward a loftier plane of existence. The song lived on, but the romance between the LaFlammes did not.... 'What we didn’t realize,' Ms. LaFlamme once said... 'is that we were connected so musically that we were not connected in the sense that you would say, married people had this love....'"

From "Linda LaFlamme Dies at 85; Her 'White Bird' Reflected a Hippie Fantasy/With her husband, David LaFlamme, she founded the rock band It’s a Beautiful Day and wrote a soaring paean to a generation’s dreams of escape" (NYT).

What was the "loftier plane of existence" described in that song? Meade and I had entirely different impressions (dating back half a century). Tell me yours and I'll fill you in on ours later.

"But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them."

"In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes. Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide...."

Writes Jonathan Malesic, in "There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore" (NYT).

I remember "vibes" as a hippie word, so I have trouble seeing how it functions these days in the speech of the young, and so, it annoys me. I wish I'd made a tag for it long ago, so I could could keep track of how it annoys me — at least in its usage by mainstream media. Do non-media young people go around saying it? I don't know. It just irks me when I see it in media.

For example... 

"It’s rare to find anyone these days who actually wants to get to early retirement by living off beans..."

"... those people, with their stringent penny-pinching, are largely known in the community as LeanFIRE. A lot more people aim for CoastFIRE (a more measured approach that involves front-loading your retirement savings and 'coasting' on compound interest and working lightly until you’re ready to quit) or BaristaFIRE (quitting your job but buttressing your retirement with a side gig, such as that of a part-time barista, to receive health-insurance benefits) or FatFIRE (a luxurious, no-sacrifice approach to retirement, the polar opposite of LeanFIRE — and the subset to which Wong belongs). You might be tempted to regard early retirees as layabouts, soaking up sunshine while everyone else toils. But why not see them as brave maniacs, daring to build an entirely new vision of the world?"

Writes Amy X. Wang, in "Your Neighbors Are Retiring in Their 30s. Why Can’t You? Meet the schemers and savers obsessed with ending their careers as early as possible" (NYT)(free access link).

FIRE = Financial Independence Retire Early

I'm glad this article mentions the 1992 book "Your Money or Your Life" (commission earned). Here's a WaPo article from a couple years ago, "Why this 1992 personal finance book still has a cult following" (free access link).

The NYT article was the subject of yesterday's episode of The Daily Podcast, and it's an excellent listen, with things that are not in the article. I was drawn in by this part, going into the psychology of one of the "FatFIRE" retirees, Alan Wong, who looked at the question "who am I without work?" 

"Dictionary.com has chosen 'hallucinate' as its 2023 Word of the Year, but not in its traditional, trippy sense."

"Instead, Dictionary.com is highlighting the word’s increased usage among users and critics of artificial intelligence (AI) programs, who have adopted the term to describe the inaccurate and often outlandish outputs that chatbots and other prompt-based AI programs attempt to present as fact...."

The Hill reports.

"My family ate Pop Tarts washed down with Carnation Instant Breakfast every morning for years..."

"...mainly because my mother hated cooking. We thought we were the Jetsons."

That's the top-rated comment on "Confessions of a Pop-Tarts Taste Tester/When my family was enlisted nearly 60 years ago, little did we suspect that the pastry would become a pop-culture phenomenon and inspire a Seinfeld movie" (NYT)("Kellogg’s considered calling them 'fruit scones' — was changed to reflect the sensibilities of the ’60s, when Pop Art was ascendant").

This got us talking about "pocket porridge" — a product a family member had encountered on a recent trip to Germany. And I reminisced about when granola bars were new... and then when "granola" itself was a new word.

A vogue word, rejected.

You don't need to care about the NYT crossword to be interested in what follows — it discusses a current buzzword — but it does reveal a couple answers. 

From Rex Parker's write-up of today's puzzle:

"Kramer’s old uniform—camp-collar shirts in colorfully printed silk or rayon, sack pants that pull up a little short at the ankle to reveal white socks, clunky-soled shoes, a thin gold chain..."

"... is new again. This summer, the stylish young men I’ve seen around New York have continued their rejection of the once-inescapable skinny pants and check shirts in favor of something a little looser and decidedly more louche."

Writes Amanda Mull in "It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Everyone Started Dressing Like Kramer/It’s the summer of Kramercore" (The Atlantic).

"Years of stretch fabrics that really needed the stretch have given way to breezy textiles and retro short-sleeved knits with a natural slouch, idiosyncratic prints, a lot more color, and maybe a little bit of embroidery. There are fewer sneakers and more loafers. And then there are all those camp collars.... Tired of the sameness and omnipresence of new clothes and nostalgic for a past that many of them don’t remember, young people have plunged themselves into thrifting and vintage resale, hunting for weird or interesting things from the ’90s and early 2000s."

"Sitting around in my own mess, pissed off at the world, disdainful of the people in it, and thinking my contempt for things somehow amounted to something..."

"... had some kind of nobility, hating this thing here, and that thing there, and that other thing over there, and making sure that everybody around me knew it, not just knew, but felt it too, contemptuous of beauty, contemptuous of joy, contemptuous of happiness in others, well, this whole attitude just felt, I don’t know, in the end, sort of dumb."

Writes Nick Cave, responding to a fan who asked "When did you become a Hallmark card hippie? Joy, love, peace. Puke! Where’s the rage, anger, hatred? Reading these lately is like listening to an old preacher drone on and on at Sunday mass" — at The Red Hand Files. 

After his younger son Arthur, aged 15, fell off a cliff and died, Cave thought about "the precarious and vulnerable position of the world" and felt he ought to try to help the world, "instead of merely vilifying it, and sitting in judgement of it."

In 2022, his older son Jethro died, aged 31.

"First thought; Can I work/live there? Maybe it will help me grow back my lost hair from all the stress of 'normal daily life :)"

"Seriously, look at all these folks beautiful hair! Am I the only one that dreams of just dropping everything and moving to a forest and living off the land and selling goods the 'old fashioned' way... you know, actually selling things you physically make? Maybe I just need to move out of New Jersey. Anyway, thank you for sharing this story with us folks stuck in cyber-world tending to our keyboards, twiddling our fingers on plastic buttons, growing roots out of our posteriors." 

A reader comments on the NYT article, "Taking to the Woods With Maine’s ‘Tree Tippers’/Generations of Mainers have made a living working seasonal, nature-based jobs. Harvesting the balsam used to make wreaths is one of them."

The old hippie dream is always there, waiting for revival — replete with hair... long beautiful hair.