Ok, this is the sweetest thing ever.
CC
Showing posts with label Hippies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hippies. Show all posts
Monday, July 20, 2009
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
At least they didn't play "Imagine"
TheCSO and I went to see Across the Universe, or as everyone seems to call it "the Beatles movie" on Sunday. It probably won't be a surprise that the hippie-centric movie did not impress. Essentially as string of decent music videos to Beatles songs strung together with a plot that is ripped off of "Hair" but is still porn-movie-thin, it was an amusing way to spend two hours, but not much more.
TheCSO and I left it wondering if like, "the Wild West," "The sixties" will at some point become a standard movie setting that has little to do with historical reality. Seems highly possible. There were a few nods to the historical reality of hippies. It was very clear that the men ran the little activist group the female lead joins, leaving the women to do all the work and act as the moral conscience. But it did seem odd that the publically affectionate interracial couple didn't merit so much as a stare.
The main character, Jude, of course, doesn't really do anything for most of the movie. Things happen to him and one goes through the whole movie with him not getting a sense of who he is. Jude reminded me of a bit from Tempest-Tost, a Robertson Davies novel I like:
Cobbler pondered for a moment. "Well," he said, "I suppose if I were you -- that's to say a somewhat inert chap, half content to be the football of fate -- I'd go right on doing whatever I was doing at the moment, and hope the whole thing would blow over."
The celebrity cameos improve things a bit, particularly Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite and the five Selma Hayeks (you kinda have too see it to believe it. But it was sexy.)
Toward the end, there is a weird sequence where Jude's girlfriend Lucy, who had broken up with him, is supposed to show up at a rooftop concert. Now, mind you, she doesn't know that Jude will be there. But when the cops won't let her in the door, the tone of the movie suddenly becomes somewhat tense. Jude expected her to be there! And she's not there! Does this mean she doesn't love him after all?
(CC thinks "Huh? Why would it mean that?)*
One would think any realistic person would just assume something came up and he could call her the next day, say "Hey, I came back from England for you because I was worried about you" and ask her out for coffee.
But reality isn't the point of this purely manufactured bit of drama. The point is her showing up at exactly the right time, so they can sing to each other across rooftops. The point is the image.
She makes it in the end, of course.
This is a silly, silly, movie.
And I have to mention my favorite moment, when Lucy-the-activist-hippie is fighting with Jude because he just wants to do his thing without doing a bunch of protesting. Lucy cries, somewhat hysterically, "I would throw myself in front of a tank if it would bring my brother home!"
And Jude says simply, "It wouldn't."
Damn right.
CC
*Upon further reflection, I have to concede that I have known at least one hippie who was a great believer in imagining how something with her lover should go, and if her lover did not follow the mental script and it didn't go exactly the way she had pictured, assuming she wasn't sufficiently loved and creating drama about it. So maybe that part was realistic.
TheCSO and I left it wondering if like, "the Wild West," "The sixties" will at some point become a standard movie setting that has little to do with historical reality. Seems highly possible. There were a few nods to the historical reality of hippies. It was very clear that the men ran the little activist group the female lead joins, leaving the women to do all the work and act as the moral conscience. But it did seem odd that the publically affectionate interracial couple didn't merit so much as a stare.
The main character, Jude, of course, doesn't really do anything for most of the movie. Things happen to him and one goes through the whole movie with him not getting a sense of who he is. Jude reminded me of a bit from Tempest-Tost, a Robertson Davies novel I like:
Cobbler pondered for a moment. "Well," he said, "I suppose if I were you -- that's to say a somewhat inert chap, half content to be the football of fate -- I'd go right on doing whatever I was doing at the moment, and hope the whole thing would blow over."
The celebrity cameos improve things a bit, particularly Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite and the five Selma Hayeks (you kinda have too see it to believe it. But it was sexy.)
Toward the end, there is a weird sequence where Jude's girlfriend Lucy, who had broken up with him, is supposed to show up at a rooftop concert. Now, mind you, she doesn't know that Jude will be there. But when the cops won't let her in the door, the tone of the movie suddenly becomes somewhat tense. Jude expected her to be there! And she's not there! Does this mean she doesn't love him after all?
(CC thinks "Huh? Why would it mean that?)*
One would think any realistic person would just assume something came up and he could call her the next day, say "Hey, I came back from England for you because I was worried about you" and ask her out for coffee.
But reality isn't the point of this purely manufactured bit of drama. The point is her showing up at exactly the right time, so they can sing to each other across rooftops. The point is the image.
She makes it in the end, of course.
This is a silly, silly, movie.
And I have to mention my favorite moment, when Lucy-the-activist-hippie is fighting with Jude because he just wants to do his thing without doing a bunch of protesting. Lucy cries, somewhat hysterically, "I would throw myself in front of a tank if it would bring my brother home!"
And Jude says simply, "It wouldn't."
Damn right.
CC
*Upon further reflection, I have to concede that I have known at least one hippie who was a great believer in imagining how something with her lover should go, and if her lover did not follow the mental script and it didn't go exactly the way she had pictured, assuming she wasn't sufficiently loved and creating drama about it. So maybe that part was realistic.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Hanging out with my favorite hippie
I was hanging out with Edie-who-sells-books tonight and we were talking about nutrition. She complained that if she drinks at all, she's sweaty the next day.
"That's weird. I get sick if I have much hard liquor, which means I don't drink much at all these days, but my realy problem is caffiene. I'm getting to where if I have any of it I get weirdly paranoid." I explained.
"You know what used to do that to me?" Edie said, "getting high." I laughed. "No, really, I always thought anyone who looked at me would know. One time we had a 100 pound bag of pot in the trunk of my car and..."
"Edie!" I said with mock consternation. "That's a bag of pot the size of, like, Calista Flockhart!"
"I know, I know" Edie said, making me wish I hadn't interrupted her. "Well, you don't want to hear my old hippie stories..."
"Are you kidding?" I said, "Edie, you are my all-time favorite hippie."
That seemed to really touch Edie. "That is SUCH a sweet thing to say," she said.
"It's not that much of a compliment. You should see how obnoxious all the other hippies I've known have been," I said.
"Oh, I KNOW." She said "Honey, I was THERE."
I have the coolest friends.
CC
Monday, July 24, 2006
Quotes made for the Chaliceblog
Bart: So, according to creationism there were no cavemen.
Homer: Good riddance! Their drawings suck and they look like hippies!
CC
Homer: Good riddance! Their drawings suck and they look like hippies!
CC
Friday, July 14, 2006
What IS it with CC and hippies?
DISCLAIMER: This mostly applies to Gen X/Gen Y hippies, sometimes called "Neohippies." I'm not necessarily talking about older hippies, though if you see yourself or your older hippie friends in this, that's not my fault. That said, some older hippies seem to have had a genuine committment to changing the world and really tried to do things in effective ways. Props to them, but I don't see hippies in my generation doing that really at all.
My thing against hippies dates back to at least my college years, though I have certainly had experiences since that have confirmed it.
There was an entire dorm full of hippies at my college and my experiences with them were mostly negative. Probably the most dramatic of these was during my senior year. I was president of the "Egghead Dorm" where all the science majors lived. I had won on a platform of "Vote for me and we won't have a dorm-wide party. We will buy a hammock for the courtyard and some picnic tables instead." I had a meeting every Sunday night where I would gently dole out advice to the suite leaders under me, basically running things under a "don't be an asshole' shall be the whole of the law" sort of philosophy.
Our dorm was non-drinking, the only non-drinking dorm on campus, and there was a tacit agreement with the administration that we got away with a lot of minor rule violations but the campus police wouldn't walk through often because we were slighly out of the way and we were so darn well-behaved on the big stuff.
Then the administration decided that since our dorm was SO good, that they should move a few of the biggest hippie troublemakers into our dorm. Maybe that would make the troublemakers behave.
Of course, it didn't work that way. Pretty soon, a solid quarter of the science majors were partying all night and the dorm always smelled like pot and nobody could study. Every meeting was a mix of self-righteous hippies bitching at me because I was trying to enforce the rules, sometimes assuring me that if I just used drugs I wouldn't care so much, and appalling things like a guy in a wheelchair saying "PLEASE make everyone be a little bit more responsible with their glass bottles. I'm getting broken glass caught in the treads of my chair and it's cutting up my hands!"
So basically, my sweet little meetings became hell. Five years later, I would read the Tipping Point and start to understand what had happened.
Since college, I've continued to see evidence that hippies tend to have certain qualities that drive me crazy in a human being. I tend to think that people who have these qualities are drawn to hippiedom, which reinforces them. If a self-declared hippie does not have these qualities, I can get along fine with them, it has happend before.
SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS-- There are many decent examples of this, probably the best being the Andressohn case in Florida. These were hippies who were raising their five children on a raw food diet. One died of what appeared to be malnutrition.
That article doesn't have much on it, but the parents' defense was that the baby had a congenital disease which they didn't know about because they don't believe in the medical establishment.
Had they taken their kid to a doctor when it only gained a few ounces in its first six months of life? Of course not. A doctor would call that "failure to thrive" and start running tests, but they knew better than the medical establishment. They're hippies. So they treated the kid with wheatgrass enemas. As far as I've read on the case, if the parents even understood that they could have saved their baby's life by taking him to a doctor, they never acknowledged it. Their way was the only way.
The prosecution contended they starved the baby to death.
Needless to say, several hippies I have known have brought this case up as an example of the horrible discrimination raw foodists face. When Christian Scientists do this kind of thing, I hate it too. But at least with Christian Scientists they are doing it for religious reasons. For hippies, it's about showing off that you know better than the establishment.*
Do most hippies take it this far? Of course not. But the number of defenders this couple has, and the amount of "anything mainstream must be bad. I always know better because I'm hippie" attitude one sees other places is enough to turn me off.
POT SMOKING--- People who smoke pot smell really bad and don't seem aware of that. And if you smoke up every time life gets hard, you become a little kid emotionally who expects the world to revolve around you because you don't have the maturity that dealing with unpleasant experiences like an adult brings.
LAZINESS AND SELFISHNESS- Hippies like to complain about politics, but when they do anything about politics, it's usually something pointless like a protest march. (And nothing makes a protest march less effective than a plurality of hippies. People going by look at them and think "This march isn't full of people like me. It's just a bunch of hippies." PLEASE people, if you must attend a protest march, wear your dockers.) The hippies I have known like to bitch and moan but are almost never up for anything actually effective because effective things involve sustained effort. IMHO, they like to bitch more than they like to improve things.
And LOTS of them live off their capitalist parents.
ADDED LATER:
SPECIFIC TOLERANCE: "You can believe anything you want to, as long as it is what I believe. If you differ from my beliefs in any way, politically, nutritionally, morally, etc, then I have the right to lecture you endlessly. Because if you really understood the world, you'd see things my way." (I thought of it as a part of self-righteousness, but someone just emailed me making the case that this deserves an unattractive quality category all its own.)
CC
*Clarification: If ADULTS want to go and live off in the woods free of capitalism and the medical establishment, they have my blessing. But the ones who break a leg, then call for capitalism and the medical establishment to send a helicopter, get fixed up and then go back to bitching about capitalism and the medical establishment suck.
My thing against hippies dates back to at least my college years, though I have certainly had experiences since that have confirmed it.
There was an entire dorm full of hippies at my college and my experiences with them were mostly negative. Probably the most dramatic of these was during my senior year. I was president of the "Egghead Dorm" where all the science majors lived. I had won on a platform of "Vote for me and we won't have a dorm-wide party. We will buy a hammock for the courtyard and some picnic tables instead." I had a meeting every Sunday night where I would gently dole out advice to the suite leaders under me, basically running things under a "don't be an asshole' shall be the whole of the law" sort of philosophy.
Our dorm was non-drinking, the only non-drinking dorm on campus, and there was a tacit agreement with the administration that we got away with a lot of minor rule violations but the campus police wouldn't walk through often because we were slighly out of the way and we were so darn well-behaved on the big stuff.
Then the administration decided that since our dorm was SO good, that they should move a few of the biggest hippie troublemakers into our dorm. Maybe that would make the troublemakers behave.
Of course, it didn't work that way. Pretty soon, a solid quarter of the science majors were partying all night and the dorm always smelled like pot and nobody could study. Every meeting was a mix of self-righteous hippies bitching at me because I was trying to enforce the rules, sometimes assuring me that if I just used drugs I wouldn't care so much, and appalling things like a guy in a wheelchair saying "PLEASE make everyone be a little bit more responsible with their glass bottles. I'm getting broken glass caught in the treads of my chair and it's cutting up my hands!"
So basically, my sweet little meetings became hell. Five years later, I would read the Tipping Point and start to understand what had happened.
Since college, I've continued to see evidence that hippies tend to have certain qualities that drive me crazy in a human being. I tend to think that people who have these qualities are drawn to hippiedom, which reinforces them. If a self-declared hippie does not have these qualities, I can get along fine with them, it has happend before.
SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS-- There are many decent examples of this, probably the best being the Andressohn case in Florida. These were hippies who were raising their five children on a raw food diet. One died of what appeared to be malnutrition.
That article doesn't have much on it, but the parents' defense was that the baby had a congenital disease which they didn't know about because they don't believe in the medical establishment.
Had they taken their kid to a doctor when it only gained a few ounces in its first six months of life? Of course not. A doctor would call that "failure to thrive" and start running tests, but they knew better than the medical establishment. They're hippies. So they treated the kid with wheatgrass enemas. As far as I've read on the case, if the parents even understood that they could have saved their baby's life by taking him to a doctor, they never acknowledged it. Their way was the only way.
The prosecution contended they starved the baby to death.
Needless to say, several hippies I have known have brought this case up as an example of the horrible discrimination raw foodists face. When Christian Scientists do this kind of thing, I hate it too. But at least with Christian Scientists they are doing it for religious reasons. For hippies, it's about showing off that you know better than the establishment.*
Do most hippies take it this far? Of course not. But the number of defenders this couple has, and the amount of "anything mainstream must be bad. I always know better because I'm hippie" attitude one sees other places is enough to turn me off.
POT SMOKING--- People who smoke pot smell really bad and don't seem aware of that. And if you smoke up every time life gets hard, you become a little kid emotionally who expects the world to revolve around you because you don't have the maturity that dealing with unpleasant experiences like an adult brings.
LAZINESS AND SELFISHNESS- Hippies like to complain about politics, but when they do anything about politics, it's usually something pointless like a protest march. (And nothing makes a protest march less effective than a plurality of hippies. People going by look at them and think "This march isn't full of people like me. It's just a bunch of hippies." PLEASE people, if you must attend a protest march, wear your dockers.) The hippies I have known like to bitch and moan but are almost never up for anything actually effective because effective things involve sustained effort. IMHO, they like to bitch more than they like to improve things.
And LOTS of them live off their capitalist parents.
ADDED LATER:
SPECIFIC TOLERANCE: "You can believe anything you want to, as long as it is what I believe. If you differ from my beliefs in any way, politically, nutritionally, morally, etc, then I have the right to lecture you endlessly. Because if you really understood the world, you'd see things my way." (I thought of it as a part of self-righteousness, but someone just emailed me making the case that this deserves an unattractive quality category all its own.)
CC
*Clarification: If ADULTS want to go and live off in the woods free of capitalism and the medical establishment, they have my blessing. But the ones who break a leg, then call for capitalism and the medical establishment to send a helicopter, get fixed up and then go back to bitching about capitalism and the medical establishment suck.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
CC's Doppelganger
At the gathering of folks from my area who are going to GA, I set my bagel down across the table from a benign-looking older hippie.
"Will you be in the CUUPS both again this year?" The woman asked.
"Excuse me?" I said, looking up.
"You were in the CUUPS booth in Ft. Worth."
I smiled sweetly. "No, actually I wasn't. But I'm sure it's an easy mistake to make. There are a LOT of chubby brunette chicks in Unitarianism."
The Hippie looked at me for a long moment, "Thank you for the gift of your humor."
I think that was a smackdown.
CC
"Will you be in the CUUPS both again this year?" The woman asked.
"Excuse me?" I said, looking up.
"You were in the CUUPS booth in Ft. Worth."
I smiled sweetly. "No, actually I wasn't. But I'm sure it's an easy mistake to make. There are a LOT of chubby brunette chicks in Unitarianism."
The Hippie looked at me for a long moment, "Thank you for the gift of your humor."
I think that was a smackdown.
CC
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Maybe they were kidding
Another thing that interests me is how people always take historical quotations at face value.
For one example, Robin Edgar recently quoted P.T. Barnum in saying "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much."
The quote itself is nothing unreasonable. I don't agree with him as my spiritual method is to start with believing in nothing, and then see what the evidence your life presents forces you to believe. If you're not believing in much, to my thinking, you might just be early in the process, while if you're believing too much, you haven't started yet. I'm sure a lot of fine people agree with him, though.
But P.T. Barnum made his living by never underestimating the credulousness of the American people. He claimed to have mermaid's remains, after all.
Maybe when he talks about lack of belief being a bad thing, he has his own agenda. It would have been a bad thing for his bottom line, after all.
Similarly, every hippie I've ever known has brought up Nixon saying that the vietnam war protests really made a difference.
So the most famously treacherous president in American history had a moment of candor and told people that a practice of his opponents' that some argue makes them look stupid and alienates people from their cause, was actually something that made a difference in his decision-making when he made decisions that seem to fit well with his overall approach to foreign policy anyway, and we believe him?
So now we have hippies who think that getting on the news with a giant "Fuck Bush,' sign "really makes a difference" all because Richard Nixon said so.
I think he's right.
As old ladies, young families and religious people who don't like war see what antiwar protesters look like, they turn off their televisions and abandon any thought of joining the movement.
It does make a difference. Exactly the difference a Republican would want.
But every protester to ever mention it quoted that line to me straight, as if there was no possible way that Richard Nixon could have been anything less that downright candid when he said it.
It's not like he was a famous weasel or anything.
CC
For one example, Robin Edgar recently quoted P.T. Barnum in saying "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much."
The quote itself is nothing unreasonable. I don't agree with him as my spiritual method is to start with believing in nothing, and then see what the evidence your life presents forces you to believe. If you're not believing in much, to my thinking, you might just be early in the process, while if you're believing too much, you haven't started yet. I'm sure a lot of fine people agree with him, though.
But P.T. Barnum made his living by never underestimating the credulousness of the American people. He claimed to have mermaid's remains, after all.
Maybe when he talks about lack of belief being a bad thing, he has his own agenda. It would have been a bad thing for his bottom line, after all.
Similarly, every hippie I've ever known has brought up Nixon saying that the vietnam war protests really made a difference.
So the most famously treacherous president in American history had a moment of candor and told people that a practice of his opponents' that some argue makes them look stupid and alienates people from their cause, was actually something that made a difference in his decision-making when he made decisions that seem to fit well with his overall approach to foreign policy anyway, and we believe him?
So now we have hippies who think that getting on the news with a giant "Fuck Bush,' sign "really makes a difference" all because Richard Nixon said so.
I think he's right.
As old ladies, young families and religious people who don't like war see what antiwar protesters look like, they turn off their televisions and abandon any thought of joining the movement.
It does make a difference. Exactly the difference a Republican would want.
But every protester to ever mention it quoted that line to me straight, as if there was no possible way that Richard Nixon could have been anything less that downright candid when he said it.
It's not like he was a famous weasel or anything.
CC
Friday, December 09, 2005
Trying to be a socially responsible sexy person
A really interesting comment on the Target post got me thinking.
Where CAN one buy socially responsible underwear?
Pepsi, Pixar, FedEx and Weight Watchers all make the lists of socially responsible companies but no place to buy underwear makes this list or any of the similar ones I found.
So perhaps we'll try process of elimination.
It's a rough ol' life, trying to make a better world.
CC
who swears she only spent half an hour or so on this.
Where CAN one buy socially responsible underwear?
Pepsi, Pixar, FedEx and Weight Watchers all make the lists of socially responsible companies but no place to buy underwear makes this list or any of the similar ones I found.
So perhaps we'll try process of elimination.
- I'll concede that Walmart isn't the place to go for this.
- Target is indeed just as bad or almost as bad as Walmart by most social responsibility indexes. Which is too bad because their Gilligan O'Malley line manages to be lacy without being prissy.
- Victoria's Secret (which has a new flagship store right near me, something that really deserves a post of its own) is owned by Limited Brands. They are currently being boycotted because they Send too many catalogues I have to wonder if any of the people behind this are on libereal-beloved L.L. Bean's mailing list, because I am and damn, I think I get something from them every two days. If you consider giving to Republicans a sign of social irresponsibility (which I don't really, but some people who post here seem to) Limited Brands gives 73 percent of its PAC money to Republicans, a higher percentage than WalMart.
- Frederick's of Hollywood gets a lot of its undies from a company called Gelmart that is notorious for nasty labor practices.
- Leggs, Hanes, Gossard, Loveable, Bali and Wonderbra are owned by Sara Lee. Sara Lee seems to be a better choice on the whole, especially if you're pro-Isreal and.or for gun control. That said, gay rights folks are justifiably peeved about this billboard. But a fair amount of their stuff is still produced in East Asia.
It's a rough ol' life, trying to make a better world.
CC
who swears she only spent half an hour or so on this.
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