Amcult Exam 2, Lecture 12 And 13

Front 1

vietnam day committee

Back 1

Just WHAT is Happening?
The Vietnam day Committee (VDC) plans a huge protest for Berkeley
The Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) was a coalition of left-wing political groups, student groups, labor organizations, and pacifist religions. It was formed in Berkeley in the spring of 1965 by activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.
On May 5, 1965 the VDC several hundred students marched from the Berkeley campus to the Berkeley Draft Board, where staff were given a black coffin as a gift, and a number of students set alight their draft cards.

Front 2

never trust a prankster by Kesey

Back 2

“Never Trust A Prankster”
Kesey, after playing an out-of-key harmonica and singing “Home on the Range” told the audience:
“There’s only one to do. There’s only one thing’s gonna do any good at all. And that’s just everybody look at it, and turn your backs and say… f it!”
Although the message was not lost on the nascent hippies in the crowd, the message, by Abbie Hoffman’s own admission: “…confounded the radicals.”

Front 3

the hippies emerges

Back 3

The Hippie Emerges
On 5 September 1965, the first use of the word hippie appeared in print. In an article entitled "A New Haven for Beatniks," San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse, using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight. Fallon reportedly came up with the name by condensing Norman Mailer's use of the word, "hipster" into "hippie".

Front 4

pranksters vs learytes

Back 4

OH WOW VS. OH OM
PRANKSTERS VS LEARYITES
Tripping Can Change The World
Tripping is Fun Tripping is Sacred
Prank & Fun & Introspection Set & Setting & Introspection

Front 5

chet helms enter

Back 5

Chet Helms Enters
Chet Helms, a long haired freak from Texas, who had just finished hitching from there with Janis Joplin, was trying to become a “player”. When Ellen Harmon and Luria Castell, the originators of the Family Dog dances left, Helms jumped on the opportunity to exploit the naïve.

Front 6

psychedelic solution

Back 6

The Psychedelic Solution
On January 3, 1966, Ron and Jay Thelin opened what is regarded to be the world’s first head shop on Haight Street called The Psychedelic Shop
LSD was still legal, and the shop signaled the beginning of the psychedelic revolution on a subcultural level.

Front 7

the limit of the absurd

Back 7

The Limit of the Absurd
The Merry Pranksters decided to REALLY take their trips festival public and rented the Fillmore for January 8, 1966 .
Graham was hired to produce the whole thing on virtually a moments notice, but it netted such great profits, and people were so free with it, that Graham saw the exploitation of the scene as a done deal.

Front 8

the trips festival

Back 8

The Trips Festival
Owsley Stanley had turned his perfectionist attentions to the sound equipment being used by the Dead. He'd bought cratefuls of amplifiers and speakers and monitors and even an oscilloscope.
The Pranksters were able to wire the place up with microphones and speakers in unexpected places, so you might be downstairs watching somebody make a fool of himself on the closed-circuit TV and suddenly hear something you'd said upstairs a few minutes ago broadcast all over the hall.
Neal Cassady was there spouting his famous raps.
Dancing, strobes, ultraviolet lights that made Day-Glo paint fluoresce all the more brightly, strange things being written on the overhead projector and flashed on the wall (Anybody who knows he is God go up onstage) and announced over the loudspeakers.

Front 9

beatles and the haight

Back 9

The Beatles and The Haight
The Hippies found Beatles songs “strangely compelling” because
of their simultaneous suggestiveness of expansiveness and grief
The Beatles try to
release their
“Yesterday and
Today” album with
the infamous butcher
block cover.

Front 10

brilliant lights and shining rock

Back 10

Brilliant Lights and Shining Rock
The San Francisco rock scene continued to grow with at
least two ballroom performances per week.
The audience began contributing more too by wearing costumes,
that actually were becoming their street clothes, body painting,
etc.
The poster artists began creating artwork that would
revolutionize the way we see the world.
Light shows got better, and so did the bands, becoming tighter
and more professional sounding.

Front 11

what was different about the 60s (4)

Back 11

What Was Different About The
60s?
What would assist the 60s generation be among the first to “think
in pictures?”
Television
Light Shows
Psychedelic Drugs
And these resulted in many things: among them…

Front 12

the medium is the message

Back 12

The Medium is the Message
What does this famous quote from Marshall McLuhan mean?
It means precisely what we’ve been talking about:
Not just is the medium through which a message is
transmitted more important than it’s message (e.g.
television itself is more important than any show that
appears on it because the medium has changed our lives in
ways that the shows never will)
It also means that the fragmentation of that medium, ergo
its images, are of primary importance to us…
Therefore… we have become a society in which the more
fragmented a medium (read message) is, the more importance
we place upon it

AND… perhaps the most important, and certainly the most
relevant for this discussion, is the idea put forth by McLuhan
that: technology … destroys the alphabet
AND… in this regard, technology (the medium) precisely
creates a greater link between experience and the medium by
which that experience and the means by which that experience
is transmitted.
In other words, our world of experience is now a fragmented one
primarily populated by, and understood as, image.
One of, if not the first physical manifestations of this
fragmentation/experience link was the psychedelic poster.

Front 13

look at posters

Back 13

look at posters in 13