On Being Young in the 1960s
Armstrong, David
BOOKS On Being Young in the 1960s THE HAIGHT-ASHBURY: A HISTORY by Charles Perry Random House. 306 pp. $16.95. THE '60s WITHOUT APOLOGY edited by Sohnya Sayres, Anders Ste-phanson, Stanley...
...Some of the writers are familiar: Ellen Willis, Murray Bookchin, Simon Frith, Kirkpatrick Sale, Aronowitz...
...gentle acid-heads versus hard-edged speed freaks and junkies...
...At their best, these two books are vivid, valuable histories...
...One of them, the political radicalism of the New Left, is analyzed in the anthology Aronowitz helped to edit...
...391 pp...
...Most are leftist academics, which assures that the word "hegemony" will be invoked like a mantra and that many articles will be wordy...
...Greta NemirofFs statement, "The most that many of us can do in these days of darkness is to crouch over our light and scribble," is at once an act of faith and a confession of dread...
...The fifty-eight contributors to The '60s without Apology share the hope, and some of the wistfulness, of Perry's account...
...The entries come thick and fast as 1967's ill-fated "summer of love" approached, and the national media—and the nation's teen-age runaways—descended on a once-nondescript San Francisco neighborhood...
...Regardless of their points of reference, the contributors to this volume are mindful of the editors' assertion that the way you interpret the 1960s reveals whether "you affirm or repudiate a whole part of your life...
...with money...
...Much of TheHaight-Ashbury's engaging quality is due to Perry himself...
...A Rolling Stone editor and former Haight habitu?, he has a deft way with an anecdote and wisely avoids duplicating the rococo prose of the underground of the period in his descriptions of "the psychedelic life in all its anguish and aimless gor-geousness...
...35 hardcover...
...But there is resolve in this book, too, and tart humor, such as Charlie Shively's observation, "The propaganda about the '60s being dead is not a description of history but a prayer by the uptight who never approved of it...
...The anthology begins promisingly with Aronowitz's richly detailed memoir of the origins of the New Left, a kind of activists' playbill...
...Even so, when this book is on, it's dead-on...
...We learn who invented the psychedelic light show, who opened the first head shop, when the first be-in was held, and how astonished Aquarian Age argonauts were to discover how many of themselves existed...
...These writers affirm it...
...As the neighborhood collapsed under the weight of 75,000 pilgrims and its own unrealistic expectations, Perry's entries become spare and scary: "August 3. No matter which way you turned it, somebody had actually been killed in the Haight...
...Especially valuable is Ellen Willis's analysis of the "radical feminism" of the late 1960s, which allied itself with other political movements and held that sexism was believing that men and womeri are inherently different...
...12.95 paperback...
...Charles Perry's history of the Haight in 1965-1967 is much better reading than The '60s without Apology...
...It includes overblown theorizing (from Fredric Jameson), failed impressionistic writing (Herman Rapaport on Vietnam), too-clever wordplay (a "glossary" by Ralph Larkin and Daniel Foss), and self-dramatizing recall: "I remember nights," writes Sohnya Sayres, "when you couldn't hold your own in a Buffalo bar without a willingness to strip, a taste for Quaaludes, and a good line on Althusser...
...Perry's story, a day-to-day recreation based on dozens of interviews with the original hippies, records cultural ephemera in loving detail...
...The other, the cultural radicalism of long-haired bohemia, is remembered in Charles Perry's affectionate and sad celebration of the Haight-Ashbury...
...Willis contrasts that with today's "cultural feminism," which, she argues, has divorced itself from a broad concern for social justice and characterizes women as intuitive, almost asexual nur-turers—precisely the stereotyped "feminine" values promoted by the Right...
...Written by present and former activists, these two books arrive, via different routes, at an identical conclusion: that the movements of the 1960s were positive and necessary, and that their legacy is still with us in significant ways...
...The hippie dream of transcending materialism and greed with good will ("flower power") failed, but not before it seeded the ecology movement, sparked interest in pacifism and humanistic psychology, gave birth to a network of free medical clinics, and illuminated a still-glimmering "vision of hope," Perry contends...
...Perry has a good eye for the polarizations that helped wreck the scene: hip merchants who wanted to make a buck versus politicized hippies who wanted to do away David Armstrong wrote "A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America...
...That is what distinguishes history from nostalgia...
...Like most anthologies, this one is uneven...
...By pointing the way back to a genuine radicalism, Willis not only records the past but renders it usable for present and future activists...
...THE '60s WITHOUT APOLOGY edited by Sohnya Sayres, Anders Ste-phanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson University of Minnesota Press...
...Other writers go on from there with articles on activism in the 1960s, its legacy abroad, and its meaning for women, gays and lesbians, leftists and minorities...
...Not that they do so without discernment or with equal clarity...
...by David Armstrong As sociologist Stanley Aronowitz writes in The '60s without Apology, "There were really two countercultures in the 1960s...
...everybody versus the cops...
Vol. 49 • February 1985 • No. 2
