[Parallax]

I want mine in paisley.


Steve

Tune in, turn on, and drop out.
If you can remember the Sixties you weren't there!

[Parallax]

Did this thread get opened back up?!

It's Norm's fault. He had the foresight to perpetuate it elsewhere during its hiatus.
(Hey, you didn't think I was going to take the blame, did you? )

[jac]

Did this thread get opened back up?!

No. You're in a time warp.

[normhead]

I couldn't help it, I had this image to post... now what else are you going to do with an image like this?



It had to have a home. I knew this was an important image, to many Pentax users. It just expresses their "raison d'être"

Cool how the spell checker put in that funny little French thing, even though I have no idea how you'd do that using the keyboard.

[Parallax]

I don't see any in there. (BTW, your spell checker isn't very good. It misspelled raisin.)

Seriously, if you really don't know; every character has a numerical ASCII code. In the text editor you can get any character by holding the Alt key and typing the appropriate number.

[magkelly]

Tune in, turn on, and drop out.
If you can remember the Sixties you weren't there!

That would depend upon how old you were at the time. The 60's are admittedly vaguely dim. I remember the 70's more clearly, more's the pity. I was in diapers but I was here by the late 60's and I do recall a few things about it. Mostly that Mom wore shorter skirts and way more makeup than Dad liked, and in particular used enough hairspray to nearly asphyxiate me whenever she picked me up. She totally disdained the smell of patchouli and incense in favor of Chanel # 5 and would get all snippy when the "hippies" next door smoked a certain weed and the smell managed to make it's way next door to our apartment. Never mind that she herself smoked tobacco like a chimney and drank like a fish she would always complain "That weed smells to high heaven and isn't good for a baby to be around!" Which is why by the time the 70's came around we were living in a "proper" house in the burbs, complete with station wagon, stone block patio, den, bar and BBQ.

I kind of wish the parental units had been hippies actually because for sure they somehow accidentally raised one. I was sitting in lotus position chanting "Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ" and "Oṃ Tāre Tuttāre Ture Svāhā / Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha" by the time I was 10 I think. Blatantly practicing witchcraft and insisting upon calling God "Her" too, which totally freaked some of my older and very religious half siblings and Grandma way out. My 10th birthday present from Gran was a set of those bible story books for kids. She was very worried I was growing up to be a little "heathen" because Mom and Dad just weren't much into going to church. What can I say, she had good cause to be worried, lol. To this day I'd still choose Buddhism, Hinduism or Wicca before any other kind of religion out there. I'm not much into labels though so I don't choose to categorize what I believe in that sense. Half my half siblings are Catholic, the rest are mostly Baptist though so let's just say me being "me" and going my own way that's been interesting...

By the time I was 19 I couldn't take it anymore, alcohol and suburbia, it was an insane and stifling combo. I ran off to NYC, then later Philly, and then still later to that mecca of hippiedom San Francisco, well, I was all over the Bay Area actually for a while. NYC was fun but hard, Philly was gosh awful. SF? I mostly loved it but it was not quite the place I thought it would be. SF proper was snotty, it's citizens seemed far too concerned with raising their social status, eating their food in as gourmet a fashion as possible, and consuming way too much coffee. My BMF who was from WA used to talk about the "Seattle Freeze" but I think SF was just as bad for me in that sense. People were very nice, but making any lasting friends was nigh on impossible at least until I moved out to the Oakland/Berkeley border and went to work for this one company and met him.

I never did make any close female friends out there. The women I met out there they were about as standoffish as it gets or totally crazy, one or the other. Most of the people I ended up getting to know were pretty flaky friends, and far more hipster than hippie. They were nearly all vegan, wore their all natural clothes, smoked pot nearly every day, but they still spent half their lives waiting in line in Starbuck's or Peet's, shopped at Whole Paycheck and disdained anyone who didn't for the most part. Mind you I'm pretty New Agey and semi-liberal myself but some of the stuff I heard people casually say? Well, it made me wonder if their parents had dropped a bit TOO much acid back in the day!

I don't mind the whole cosmic thought thing, but I tend to like it with a strong dollop of common sense. CA was interesting, that's for sure. The scenery though that was entirely worth the rest of the BS. I've never lived in a prettier place than the SF Bay Area. The light there it would just have me sighing. I couldn't wait to grab a camera and go outside most of the time. I even loved the fog. It was just awesome watching it roll in. I'd have to be rich to live in that area now. An apartment is 3X what I paid for one then. But if I was rich I'd move back there in a heartbeat, to CA, if not to SF proper. I'm thinking more about WA state these days because at least it's still in the Pacific Northwest and semi-affordable but if I had my "druthers" as they say I think I'd do Santa Cruz maybe or some other beach town like that. From what I've seen Santa Cruz is touristy enough to be helpful in terms of getting work and just hippie enough that I'd probably feel comfortable there. There's probably a Starbuck's on every other block now but the one time I went there it just seemed more laid back to me than SF was, more like SF likely was in the 60's anyway and less like living in a semi-foggy strip mall in suburbia...

[Parallax]

I was in my early teens in the late 60s. I HATED everything about the hippie movement. I hated it then, that is. I am now somewhat enamored of it. I couldn't stand the music of the era, but now it's my most listened to genre. At the time I refused to wear long sleeved shirts because I had heard that drug users wore them to hide track marks. I did, however, have an orange Neru (google it) jacket and a couple of paisley shirts.

EDIT: I should mention that I grew up within spitting distance of Berkeley and Haight Ashbury. "Those were the days, my friend......."

[rod_grant]

Who let the mod out??

[ZoeB]

It's Norm's fault. He had the foresight to perpetuate it elsewhere during its hiatus.
(Hey, you didn't think I was going to take the blame, did you? )

You blame it on Norm, but i found his thread because I went to the general talk forum to start one of my own, only to discover that he'd beat me to it. It was inevitable.

[clackers]

and less like living in a semi-foggy strip mall in suburbia...

Epic background, MK!

[clackers]

I was in my early teens in the late 60s. I HATED everything about the hippie movement.

As did the great Frank Zappa, Parallax.

That he did all those freaky albums without the benefit of drugs surely means he had a greater imagination than his chemically enhanced peers!

[robtcorl]

I did, however, have an orange Neru (google it) jacket and a couple of paisley shirts.

Here's as crazy as this old boomer ever got (me on right, with my older brother).
I loved that shirt!

[stevebrot]

I did, however, have an orange Neru (google it) jacket and a couple of paisley shirts.

I had many paisley shirts and a Nehru jacket as well. My folks were not fond of the Nehru.


Steve

[normhead]

The thing about the sixties was, the population at that time, the majority was under 26. The elders briefly lost the handle. Just way too many young-uns to keep track of. I believed in many hippy causes, they were good causes, but the people who championed them were often completely irresponsible, A defining moment for me was the work of a psychologist who worked with Brigs Meyer and studied the movement. I don't know if you're familiar with the scale but the hippy movement was 10% universalists, people with the vision to make the world a better place, but 90% of the followers were level 2, just interested in personal gratification. So you had the dichotomy of really bright motivated people out for the common good, and looking back you can see who those were, because they all went on to mainstream jobs and contributed some amazing things to society. And you can tell who the 90% were who were totally into self-gratification, because they're still smoking too much dope and calling each other "man", and hanging around a dilapidated "pad" all day.

[Jean Poitiers]

Yesterday's TBT question by hociR on FB : "Can you name this camera from back in the day" ... evil.