Counterculture

Petulia is one of those archetypal 1960s films that had completely passed me by for more than 40 years.  In contemporary roundups of 1968’s films and trends, it was invariably included with the most distinctive and “with-it” movies of the moment, along with Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby, The Graduate, and Bullitt.  Petulia recently showed up on Turner Classic Movies on a Julie Christie night, and I’m happy to say I’ve now caught up with it, if only (or mostly) for historical reasons.

Petulia was directed by Richard Lester, whose calling cards by 1968 were impressive:  the two great, wacky movies with the Beatles–A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Though American by birth, Lester had British credentials (and citizenship)–a bonus in the U.S. film world of the 1960s and early 1970s, so dominated by British talent, especially when it came to collecting Oscar nominations.   After some years of America looking to England for countercultural inspiration (you know:  Beatles, Stones, Carnaby Street, Twiggy and all that), by the late 1960s, America– especially San Francisco and California– was providing global benchmarks for hipness.  And to dispel any doubts about Petulia’s countercultural bona fides, Lester threw in micro-performances by Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead, and even some groovy colored-oil-and-light show effects.

Petulia was based on a 1966 novel, Me and the Arch Kook Petulia, by John Haase, a fulltime Los Angeles dentist and parttime novelist.  ”Kook” and “kooky” are words that show up a lot in the movie.  ”Kook” –Beatnik slang from the 1950s, meaning an eccentric or strange character– may have already been sliding out of popular usage by 1968,  another reason that Petulia seems a little dated.   Petulia, played by ravishingly beautiful, 26-year-old Julie Christie, is hardly a flower-waving hippie–she’s an exceptionally rich San Francisco socialite.  As the movie opens, she’s recently married to a “naval architect” (read:  sailboat enthusiast and playboy) played by Richard Chamberlain, a little older than Christie but almost as beautiful, cast against type as a spoiled and violently abusive husband.  Petulia decides early on to have an affair with George C. Scott’s character, Dr. Archie Bollen, after seeing his heroic action in saving the life of a Mexican boy who had somehow become part of Petulia’s family.  That part of the plot is told in flashbacks and flash-forwards, and it’s all a little confusing.

Of special note is the score by John Barry, which reminded me of Bernard Herrmann’s brilliant work for Alfred Hitchcock, and the cinematography by Nicholas Roeg, who would later direct such memorable movies as Don’t Look Now and Walkabout.  There’s a bright, jangly texture to Petulia, and a wonderful use of colorful locations in the San Francisco Bay Area (the requisite cable cars, swanky apartments, Alcatraz, and glamorous parties).

Film critic Jay Carr has an excellent article on this quirky (kooky?) movie on the TCM website, where he concludes:

“Petulia was a brave film for Lester to have made, and braver still for its matching of a jagged style to a jagged story. True to its essential melancholy, it never succumbed to popular and clichéd takes on the ‘60s. The result is that it’s one of the few films about the ‘60s still worth seeing.”

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The Teachings of Don Juan:  A Yaqui Way of Knowledge is a surprising artifact of 1968.

Surprising, since the extraordinary impact of this book really doesn’t come until its paperback version published (and reprinted endlessly) in the 1970s.  But here it is, in an extremely rare first edition, issued by the University of California Press in probably fewer than 1250 copies.  The original price was $5.95.  This particular example was recently offered by an Internet seller for nearly $3000.

Once upon a time– say, about 1971-72–”everybody” was reading Castaneda.  The Teachings of Don Juan, by then in a paperback edition with a semi-psychedelic cover, was on hundreds of thousands of college-room bookshelves.  (Full disclosure: I was not one of the “everybody.”  I’ve just read this seminal 1960s book for the first time.)  There were several sequels in the early 1970s, including  A Separate Reality (1971) and A Journey to Ixtlan (1972), and even an appearance by Castaneda on the cover of TIME in March 1973.  But the original book’s notoriety is all the more surprising since it began as a work of (allegedly) serious, unassailable–if hardly conventional– anthropological scholarship, presented here in a plain, decidedly un-groovy university press edition.

Peruvian-born Carlos Castaneda was a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles, and Don Juan was based on his dissertation research from the early 1960s on medicinal plants used by Indians of the Southwest United States and northern Mexico.  It is emphatically not dissertation-like in style or substance.  Within its first few lines, Castaneda is introduced to a Yaqui Indian, Don Juan Matus, who is alleged to be a powerful brujo, or shaman. Castaneda becomes apprenticed to him (not an easy passage) and is introduced to mind-altering organic hallucinogens such as peyote, jimson weed, and psilocybin mushrooms.  When Castaneda died in Los Angeles in 1998 (a death clouded in mystery and suspicion), the L.A. Times obituary writer called the book a “strange alchemy of anthropology, allegory, parapsychology, ethnography, Buddhism and perhaps great fiction,” a book that “made Don Juan a household name and Castaneda a cultural icon.”

One of the extraordindary things about this book was its instant and widespread critical reception.  How did a re-write of a Ph.D. dissertation (or maybe a master’s thesis; sources differ), published by a university press in a tiny edition, attract immediate, glowing reviews in the New York Times?  ”An extraordinary spiritual and psychological document,” wrote Charles Simmons in the Times on August 14, 1968:  ”Its style is so severe and yet easy, its narrative effects so expert, that if it had been published as a novel it would be, I think, destined for fame.”

The Teachings of Don Juan landed on fertile cultural territory in 1968, bringing together so many elements that now so clearly define the time:  a seeking for alternate pathways to spirituality; an openness to the teachings of “primitive” non-Western teachers or “gurus” (Don Juan is called a guru by more than one commentator); an eager, even grasping experimentation with mind-altering drugs; and a reverence for indigenous cultures, especially American Indians (and especially those of the Southwest).

Anthropology?  Fiction?  It  hardly seems to matter anymore, as it continues to maintain a firm grasp on its status as cultural icon.

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HAIR: AN AMERICAN TRIBAL LOVE-ROCK MUSICAL

OK, this is cheating a little bit: This is actually the original cast recording from the ORIGINAL production of Hair by the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Public Theater, run by the legendary Joe Papp. And so, yes, it dates to 1967 (!) NOT 1968.

But sensational as Hair was in 1967, it was really in 1968 that it became a mass-culture phenomenon, especially after its move to a Broadway theater, the Biltmore, 42 years ago today.

The “tribal” musical

More than the wildly successful original-cast recording, with its iconic “psychedelic” cover, this earlier version focuses attention on the musical’s sometimes overlooked subtitle: “tribal love-rock musical.” The book of the musical focuses on a group of politically active hippies living in Greenwich Village who refer to themselves as a “tribe,” and there are many references to American Indians throughout the script.

Hippies and Indians

The “doctored” group photo on the album cover mixes 19^th-century images of Indian with white hippies, wearing face paint, beads, and long hair, and mugging for the camera. This image—and Hair itself—is part of a larger pattern of appropriation of elements and images from Native American culture that characterized the counterculture in the 1960s.

Playing Indian

Hippies—and Hair fixed the image of “the hippie” in the American mind more strongly than any other cultural product—professed to “borrowing” from Native culture out of respect, to signal a broader quest for authenticity, “the primitive,” closeness to nature, and a devotion to non-mainstream spirituality. Externally, however, this was little different from white culture’s decades-long practices of “playing Indian”: Boy Scouts dressing up in feathered headdresses and buckskin, “Indian” costumes for Halloween parties, Indian performers in Wild West shows.  
Here’s a thumbnail of the back cover:

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Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead

Sooner or later, this blog was going to have to get around to MAD, right?  We could have done the 1968 election issue, with all of the candidates’ pictures scrambled (and maybe we’ll get to that one eventually).  But this issue — this cover, at least– is priceless:  Alfred E. Neuman– by this date universally recognized as the archetypal dope–decked out as a “hippie,” with a decorative border incorporating some distinctive five-part leaves and a classic MAD motto:  ”Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead.”  (”Drop dead” was a favorite MAD expression.) Here, Al is sporting a scraggly beard and longer red hair than usual, but he has the familiar gap-toothed grin, freckles, jug ears, and vacant expression.  Plus beads, flowers in the hair, cowbell and bear-claw necklace– like, wow.

“The Hippie”: Becoming a laugh line and a stereotype

To land on the cover of MAD in the 1960s was to achieve some sort of pinnacle of pop-cultural notoreity; MAD editors wouldn’t have bothered with you if you weren’t somehow culturally “of the moment.”   But the famous individual, or trend, or icon, or sacred cow had to have attained enough breadth of recognition to allow for sufficient pungency as a MAD lampoon.  And so the arrival of the hippie get-up on MAD in April 1968 tells us quite a lot about the hardening and the codifying of this stereotypical “Sixties” character.

It all happened pretty quickly.  Etymologists generally point to an early-1965 usage of “hippie” (in TIME magazine) as the first “conventional” use of the word, as opposed to earlier, more marginal uses– as variants of the beatnik-era “hipster,” for example.  So throughout 1965 and 1966– and especially by the January 1967 “Be-In” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and, later that year, the “Summer of Love”– the hippie moved rapidly from being “sub-cultural,” socially detached, and “different” to being an utterly familiar archetype–AND a figure of nearly bottomless hilarity.  I would not be surprised if there were “hippie” Halloween costumes in stores by 1968–as there are today.   I wonder when the first sitcom hippies appeared– 1968 again would be a pretty good bet. ( I know that some kind of nadir was reached the following year, when Lawrence Welk showed up in wig and full hippie regalia on his show:  not hard to find–but hard to watch–on YouTube.)

A “weird sub-culture”

So here’s MAD, throwing its considerable weight behind this process of Stereotype Formation.  I remember this issue well (I was 17 when it appeared on the newstands, its price now “30 cents– Cheap” instead of 25), not so much because of the cover but because of the hilarious (well, maybe you had to be there) send-up of one of my favorite TV shows, “Mission: Ridiculous.”   But the issue also includes an extensive “cover story”– a mock magazine called “Hippie: The Magazine that Turns You On (if you’re cool enough to light it up and smoke it!)”  The introduction says:  ”There’s a wild new group of people who have become prominent in America recently.  They have their own unique language, their own strange behavior, and their own bizarre philosophy which is commonly misunderstood by many oldsters.  The group is known as ‘Moderate Republicans.’”    It goes on to explain that there’s another “weird sub-culture” kn0wn as hippies, and MAD is going to explain them in this magazine as a public service.

For sentimental hippies?

The magazine includes fake movie ads (”The Wild Freakout Acid Trip at the Hippie Teeny-Bopper Love-In Orgy on the Strip”); classifieds (”Help! I’m being held prisoner in my Hi-Fi and TV-equipped own room in the suburban home of my materialistic, conformist parents”); a takeoff on the Peanuts “warm puppy” bestseller, this one called ”Uptight is a Dry Sugar Cube”; a gossip column (”Drachma the Digger has made arrangements for starving N.Y. orphans to receive food packages from Vietnam War Orphans”); and a gift guide for “sentimental hippies who want to collect relics of the past:  shoes, ties, soap, bras, draft cards, combs.”

You get the picture.

Finally, it’s been so long since I looked at MAD that I forgot that they carried no advertisements–except gag ads, like this takeoff on ads for “100 millimeter” cigarettes from the back cover of this issue:

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EYE magazine, where hipness met consumerism, was a brief candle amidst the flickering lights of the 1960s.

EYE magazine was a short-lived (15 issues, 1968-69) effort by the Hearst Corporation to cash on the exploding youth market in publishing (and, of course, in advertising profits).  The rainbow logo, with its echoes of Peter Max and  ”Op” art, gives you a hint right away.  Hearst was already publishing Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, and Harper’s Bazaar– and EYE, it seems, was largely meant for younger, female readers, to judge strictly by the advertising in this issue:  makeup, perfumes, hair products, more makeup, handbags, and a Wonder Bread (”Helps catch boys!”) ad inside the back cover:  ”Don’t forget this: boys love to eat. And they love Wonder sandwiches.”).

The Beatles–two of them, at least–and “Beautiful Persons.”

This issue features counterculture superstar John Lennon, in an oddly unmemorable (not to mention poorly focused) photograph by Linda Eastman, already gaining a reputation for her portraits of rock musicians.  He and Paul McCartney had been in New York in May for a whirlwind visit in connection with the creation of Apple Corps, their new company.  Their “101 hours” in New York are chronicled by Lillian Roxon, the Australian journalist who would soon be publishing her “Rock Encyclopedia,” a landmark in rock history.  Roxon was a Contributing Editor at Eye, and was responsible in this issue for two other pieces.  The first is a feature called “Elevator: People on the Way Up (and Down),” in which she calls the reader’s attention to 27-year-old “Mike Cimino,” who had just won the award for the World’s Best Television Commercial (a spot for Eastman Kodak), and who had his eye set on doing something big in Hollywood.  (As Michael Cimino, he would direct The Deerhunter and win an Oscar in 1978).   The second is an embarrassing one-page sermon on “Cosmetics of the Soul,” described as “the art of being as beautiful inside as outside. . . . Whatever you want to call it, it’s what everyone wants to be these day.  A Beautiful Person.”

Glitz, glamour, and guys with money

EYE was well known for its high-quality inserts:  foldout posters of celebrities, a record, a comic book (Spiderman).  In this issue, there are record reviews, a car review (the Bond-ish Lotus Europa), a fashion spread (fake furs, sexy models), an article about flying a glider, an interview with Jean-Luc Godard, an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s best-selling The Pump House Gang, an article about student radicals, and a gushing profile of four under-30 male entrepreneurial success stories, with the guys posing together in a bank vault: “Members of a generation in a hurry . . . not likely to stand still waiting for Success to happen.”

The conquest of cool

Though it was a brief candle in the life of Sixties publishing, EYE might well stand as Exhibit A for the “rise of hip consumerism” so well documented by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool (1997)–the rather rapid “discovery” that hipness and the counterculture were easily converted into commodities, and could be effective bandwagons for making money, even for corporations as historically identified with the conservative Establishment as Hearst.

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In the long hot summer of 1968, the ordinarily staid Saturday Evening Post published this astonishingly risqué cover.  (The Post was by now several  years into its attempt to re-brand itself as just the four-letter “Post,” to compete with Life, Look, and Time; it would change back to the full title in 1968 in a logo re-design, but the entire magazine folded in 1969.)   For most of the 20th century, the Post was famed for commissioning wholesome, high-quality (read: expensive) illustrations for its weekly covers.  Norman Rockwell was only the most famous (and probably the most wholesome) of the commercial artists who worked for the Post.  By the 60s, most of this had gone by the boards, though the Post continued to turn to Rockwell occasionally, at least until December 1963; his last cover for the Post was a memorial portrait of president John F. Kennedy.

Even Playboy cover girls in the 1960s were a lot more covered up than this model–the 23-year-old (maybe 24; accounts vary) Lauren Hutton, already a Vogue cover favorite.  (Ms. Hutton is probably not crazy about the nearly universal Internet descriptor of herself as the “gap-toothed supermodel.”) The model (unidentified in any way inside the magazine) displays a lot of midriff and a provocative decolletage while modeling what appears to be some art director’s idea of the garb of a Middle Eastern concubine.  ”What they’re wearing instead of clothes,” the headline says: “The Big Costume Put-on.”  ”They” in this sense is clear: “they” is not “us,” the middle-class, more than a little conservative grown-ups who read the “Post.”  ”They” is, simply put, “American youth.”  As the magazine’s editor, Bill Emerson, explains:  ”The turned-on people of today wear all sorts of extraordinary things instead of clothes. . . . You can very easily think . . . of clothing as weaponry. . . . It looks as if that curious subculture known as youth has ambushed us fogy-boppers with their costumes and is firing away.  The ammunition is not deadly, but it does make you feel angry and 150 years old.”
Buttressed by a photo essay deeper in the magazine, featuring numerous young people bedecked in slightly Edwardian or Indian or Elizabethan or military surplus or even vintage American fashions, Emerson waxes anthropological:  ”Man is changing his attitude about himself . . . This mind-boggling costume party has a much more serious message than simple disguise.  It may well be a part of a ritual effort to isolate a personality, and there is some question as to what will emerge.”

This cover story belongs to a genre that would by now be quite familiar to readers in 1968.  It might be called “Look at what those kids are (fill in the blank) now!”  The blank could be filled in with: wearing, saying, listening to, smoking, drinking, watching, listening to.  Magazine editors and photographers loved the so-called “counterculture.”  ”Those kids” made great pictures, they made great copy, and they sold magazines.  And if you could layer onto this head-shaking voyeurism a veneer of scholarly perspicacity, all the better.  Here that’s provided by none other than Marshall McLuhan (”maestro of media,” as SEP calls him), quoted extensively in this “Fashion” section.   A little McLuhan goes a long way, so here’s a little (we’ll revisit him again in a later post):  ”The mini-skirt, of course, is not a fashion.  It is a return to the tribal costume worn by men and women alike in all oral societies.  As our world moves from hardware to software [Ed. note:  This is 1968!], the mini-skirt is a major effort to reprogram our sensory lives in a tribal pattern of tactility and involvement.”

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