Books from left to right: Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin by Myra Friedman , Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 70's by Andy Warhol, The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade by Gerard J. De Groot
The latest post on Rookie Magazine really meant a lot to me. I’m always complaining about how I wish I lived in the 1960’s and the post was all about making us feel that not everything from our generation is so bad. And like Tavi expressed in her post for Rookie, I, too, constantly have this dreamy vision of growing up as a flower child. My dream goes a little something like this: In the summer, I’d drive around in a neon Volkswagen that me and my gal pals painted and stuck lots of stickers on (stickers are really important to my teen ethos and the wrong stickers can be like a tramp stamp for a car), up to Woodstock where we’d meet idealistic boys with long hair who would play new songs they had written just for us on their guitars as we frolicked through the dewey fields. When we’d get hungry, we’d dance over to our local diner where the waitresses twirl around the booths on rollerblades, as we'd share milkshakes made of pies and things like Freewheelin' Fries (I just invented this for my imaginary 1960's menu). Sometimes I’d go to Andy Warhol’s Factory and other times I’d sit in my basement and hangout with my lava lamp and make love beads and batik my dresses.
The clothes, boys, diners, music (everyone go watch the movie Pirate Radio. I could write an entire blog post just about this, but it's about Rock 'n Roll being prohibited on the radio in the 1960's and the subversive music industry culture then.), dancing (why do people of my generation dance so SERIOUSLY, at parties? Let’s emit grinding from our vocabulary and do the Monkey dance!!!), plus, not to mention, cool slang words like "groovy"…it all seems better. Although living in the 1960’s would have meant I would have had to live through all sorts of political and social adversity that was prevalent throughout in the 60's, I still think being a teenager would have meant more. Now with a quick-click we can just sit from the comfort of our homes and write whatever we want hiding behind our computers, without putting any thought our action to our words, while a girl my age in the 1960’s could be out at a peace protest against the war in Vietnam. So yes, like Tavi wrote for Rookie, I, like many others, romanticize the 1960’s, but I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with doing so. It was a decade known for it’s radical changes and it’s nice to fantasize about society being able to get back to such a simple yet hopeful time in our history.
During an excursion with my best friend for the school newspaper, we went to the Salvation Army by our school. I came across this totally lurid psychedelic button down shirt, reminiscent of Cream’s Disraeli Gears album cover. The shirt was priced at $2.99, but it cost me a measly $1.50, as all green tags at the Salvation Army are always 50%. Yes, I get totally get giddy saying that! It’s such a thrill when I buy some of my most favorite items for virtually nothing. The fabric is a really strange silk and makes wonder if it was originally a mate to a pair of pajama bottoms. Those would literally be the coolest PJs ever. Whenever I am wearing the shirt I sing my favorite Rolling Stones song, “She’s A Rainbow” to myself and imagine rainbows swirling out of my shirt. Listen to this and maybe you will too:
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