Ta Ta Tatiana

Lions and Tigers and Bears... OH MY!
Poor Carlos...
And the others mauled...
And the others who Saw

Durga rides a tiger (or a lion) into battle.
And I can't help but wonder...

... what made that Tiger jump her Moat?

We'll probably never know for sure,
but now there will be more cameras
to watch
to watch
to watch over with eyes of...

Wash away....

We used to go to Stowe, Vermont to ski for a week or two every winter during my later teen years.
Dad rented someone's time-share condominium, and Mom would do the flatlanders' Nordic skiing at the Von Trapp Family Lodge while my sister and I played daredevil games on the bumps and chutes on the Mountain.

We ate a lot of fondue, got extra Irish ruddy in the weather, mediated that fine line between fashion and warmth, and tried to keep our toes warm without the benefit of the brandy everyone else seemed to be toting about. It was the only time of the year I ever actually ENJOYED hot chocolate!

For some reason, we were in the same person's house every year. And they had an 8-track tape player, with about a dozen albums to choose from. Three Dog Night was the one that tickled my and my sister's fancy, and we played it over and over and over and over again.

Someone sent me a YouTube clip recently, and for this current transition... its just so perfect:

"Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain, with the rain from Shamballa
Wash away my sorrow, wash away my shame, with the rain of Shamballa..."

Eye Am A Daughter, but not a Mother

My Mother calls me "Darling."
My Mommy calls me "Rachy."
My nieces call me "Tia."
But no one calls me "Mama."

And that absence of a name makes me cry some times.

This is Jesse's mama, nursing him in the Spring of 1967.
"The Hippie Madonna" is what Oracle's Allen Cohen called her.
Earth Mother Illustration Number 1 is what my diss labels her.

It would be nice to know how she names Herself, these days. The former Mrs. Hilsenrad, mother of Four.

Dona Nobis Pacem

I am home, in New York, and it is good.

I was late, in the morning, missing the plane, which was also good.

... because driving from Newark airport to Park Slope, Brooklyn, would *not* have been fun at 6 pm. But at 2 a.m... which is when I finally made it across the Manhattan Bridge... things were quiet, calm, peaceful...

and that's not a bad way to transition from Berkeley back to the East.

So here I am, back in Queens for the time being, still prowling for research. My "spiral development" process, to rely terribly on a DOD metaphor, continues. And going back into Wolfgang's Vault, to find one more Gene Anthony photo of Mountain Girl and Sunshine, I discover that some of the "serene" art I had been enjoying... so different from many of the Fillmore artists... IS in fact illustrated by a woman artist.

Bonnie MacLean.

As the Fillmore folks explain: "Bonnie MacLean could have made the "Fillmore Five" artist stable the "Fillmore Six" had the idea of women's' liberation been extant in San Francisco in the late 1960s. During the early days of the Fillmore, MacLean was the most "present" member of the staff. She collected tickets, passed out handbills, blew up balloons and counted money for Fillmore productions. Impressed with her lettering skill on the upcoming attractions chalkboards, Bill Graham surprised her with an easel and art supplies for Christmas, 1967, and MacLean's poster artist career was launched. Untrained in graphic arts, MacLean's early style evolved into ornate, Medieval-Gothic designs. Faces in her posters wore trance-like stares, steady and serene, and evoke the detached spirituality of the sixties. Of her work, MacLean has said, "... What's significant is that these posters were created with an intensity that was lived." MacLean lives on the East Coast and continues her career as an artist. Recently, she has reproduced replicas of some of her poster designs on canvas. "

So here's one more tidbit on that, for future reference:

"BG100 is one of Bonnie MacLean's favorite posters. She started the assignment when she was pregnant with her son and wove the peace dove into the composition as her symbolic wish for the new year. This New Year's Eve concert continued the Bill Graham tradition of non-stop, 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. celebration and included breakfast for the diehard fans remaining on the dance floor."

Hipstorian thinks... Hmmm... New Year's Eve... 1967 rolling into 1968... Mommy was in her 4th month of pregnancy with me, crying every night when she came home from teaching first grade in North Philadelphia. Aunt Maryanne was in Korea, to be near her West Point husband, and seven months pregnant with Tommy.

It's a little strange thinking of history and women and hippies and wombs, and then comparing that to my maternal relatives' experiences at the same time.

More than a little, actually.

"This is not a conventional society of people..."

Sometime in the "wheeeeee!" stage of things, we were sitting in the Bayside Diner, on Northern Boulevard, in northeastern Queens, probably eating pancakes. And on that auspicious (read fateful) day I decided to change my surname upon marriage.

Not some major decision destined for the history books, by any means. But since I'm on a writing tear lately, and since my divorced parents would have been married forty years this month, I've been thinking about what my own experiences have been around "traditional" marriage. As well as ruminating about "alternative" and "experimental" forms of it sprouting out of the seeds of the Sixties Flower Children, a la conventions and iconoclasm and normative v. counter social formations. Names being only part of the play of chaos and fluidity of course.

(The current blog title is from Steve Parish's testimony in that CourtTV rock-widows saga of two other Mrs. G's, describing informal marital arrangements and experimental sexual ethics of the California counterculture.)

What was the seduction tactic?

As I recall, some classically codependent sad-sack story about a vetoed opinion on the niceties of a gravestone engraving (the Witty Widower trip), coupled with the family-vibe consideration of a tender teenage kid whose schooling I had suddenly become over invested in emotionally (the Jay Bird Trip), and like a Quantum Leap, whoosh! snap!! kazam!!!, there went three-plus decades of a family alliance.

Unlike the other previous twenty boyfriends-who-might-be-spouses, however, I had neglected in this version of Dr. Mr. Fantasy to practice signing the anticipated neonom. Had I bothered to try that pen-to-paper scrawl even once -- which in execution requires an awful lot of loops -- no doubt my paternal vestige of the Norman invasion of Eire would have stayed intact. But noooooo....

I signed on the line, stepped into heteroringer (but not breeder) line, stepped outside of the ideological Radical Gender Studies limn, leapt without looking, and discarded the feminist "Ms." with a strange scripted femininity.

I'll try not to get Lawerence Summersy-essentialist on my impetuous ass and call it hard-wired genomic genuflection. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. And the L-Double-L assonance sounds far better than it writes. And...

... then I go into my archives, and look at just how damn difficult it was for women in the 1970s to keep their "maiden" names, and the rashness of my emotionalism makes me wonder.

By the way, as I ponder the mythic architectures of conformity, circuitous thanks to Jeanne Parvati, now of Beloved memory, for publishing her before-and-after wedding photos in HYGEIA: a woman's herbal, and triggering my pursuit of countercultural "feminisms" along the cliotheoretical scripts of sexual politics, gender norms, and Earth Mothers.

But this photo is from someone / somewhere else. Gene Anthony mebbe?
.

Pondering The Symposium

MG's first response to hearing the title of my long-lingering dissertation, "Dirty Hippies, Earth Mothers, Love Children" was an enthusiastic laugh: "All three of my daughters were love children."

But, I have to ask: What's that Feather in your Hair mean in Herb Green's photo?

And what does a feminist academic have to say, to talk about, to make meaning of ... when it comes to holding up a Great Woman, Prankster, as an emblem of counter-cultural womanhood?

Given the love story/stories of what Cynthia Robins called "a hippie soap opera" in a 1997 San Francisco Examiner profile of Ms. Adams, some sensitivity might be called for.

"Go Tell it on the Mountain," that angelic gospel choir I sang in at age eight (1976) flips around in poetic play and how mothers' stories intersect with daughters' longings to something cautioning against gossip.

"Why would someone say something like that?" Jerry asked poignantly.

Witnessing the Summer of Love

So its the fortieth anniversary of the so-called SUMMER OF LOVE, and San Francisco is embracing it with gusto.

Actually, the day of the big concert would have been my parents 40th wedding anniversary, so its like... the anniversary of my conception!

And, ya know, with all the sex going on in the Haight... one would think that the 2B1 Media crew who put together a "forum" of a dozen witnesses to the event... could have come up with more than one woman.

Albeit, Lenore Kandel.

One of the daughters got up and addressed the forum, asking where the women were. But before anyone had a chance to answer, the mike kept being passed to new folks, and nothing was addressed.

Typical?

Just take a look at the various nymphs decorating the poster art for the event. Nine of the 26 posters feature the beauty of the female form. But through whose eyes?

In the middle of April...

How different this Spring feels from the last two... life twists and turns, but mostly now feels like a whirlpool tucked in between two large rocks, a submerged tree, and a quicksand bank where I dare not walk.

Inbetween New York and Sonoma County, the pear blossoms here are just starting, while in northern California things are green and glowing, a few more months of verdant pastures before the sun scorches the meadows into golden brown.

My family on this coast pulls me back, wishes me lunar emotional presence. My old happiness on the Pacific coast feels to have evaporated with all the upheaval in moving back and forth.

I am everywhere and nowhere.
I am here and there.
I am...

... uncomfortable.