I just saw the re-release of The Last Waltz. I recommend.
- steve 4-17-2002 5:25 am

just in case anyone forgot what hippies were.
- bill 4-22-2002 3:31 pm [add a comment]


Yeah, and I guess the original Woodstock was Scorsese's first big gig, but it's hard to think of him as a hippie. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is about as close as I can come to a film embracing counter-culture values. The real landmark was Taxi Driver, which to me is the seminal Punk film. It embodies the frustration and alienation that followed the demise of the hippie dream. It was not so much the botched courtship involving a Kris Kristofferson album, but the retrenchment, the desire for purification, and especially the cutting of the hair (the Mohawk!) that spoke powerfully to me at the time. I saw it with my best friend, under the intellectual auspices of the Detroit Film Theater. A week later he had really short hair. I'd grown my hair for six years, since grade school, and it had got to where I didn't quite know what to do with it, but cutting it all off seemed extreme. Still, it was clearly a new era. The hippies felt they had a mission to behave in an extreme manner as a sort of example of what might be. We felt that we were pushed into a position of extremity by virtue of our cultural reality; it was about our inability to be. That summer ('76) my friend and I were in NYC at a Parsons summer session. Between the heat and the winds of change I let him talk me into cutting my hair. He said he knew how, but he just cut straight across and I ended up looking like Prince Valiant. Had to run out to a barbershop, quick. Didn't realize it would take more than a decade for me to work my way back to being a hippie again. Even so, I can't grow my hair back. I still think that if I'd never cut it I'd still have it all today…
- alex 4-22-2002 9:56 pm [add a comment]





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