Alcohol vs. Pot

Extra Medium, I'm trying to think of the ways the Movement has affected the present. I DO see it still in many of my friends, the older "bohemians" who went through that period as believers. Many of them became artists, professional intellectuals of various sorts. Not many of them became stock brokers or yuppies. I suspect--and I'd like comment on this because I do not know--that our film industry has remained affected, at least a portion of it. I don't think that TV writers reflect the values of that period, but some in the film industry have--and I'm not just thinking of Moore. I would like to get LightWizard on this.

One of the lasting effects of the Movement was the great emphasis on the individual, and the importance that each individual to pursue their own "bliss", as the late Dr. Campbell would have said. We were really driven by idealism and abstract thinking. That caused a lot of the problems in trying to revolutionize society. We thought, at least for a while, that we might really change how the world worked. We hoped to replace the very idea of war and conflict with peace and tranquility. We hope to abolish the tyranny of property and propriety, but that was an abject failure ... human nature can not be curbed by idealism alone. What we learned, I think, is that the real revolution isn't in changing society, but in reforming ourselves. That's a big lesson, and apparently there are a whole lot of folks who still haven't learned it.

i'm really enjoying this thread.

i wanted to add something for patiodog

He seemed to have some natural facility in car theft... well, maybe he was very relaxed about it.

What a depraved young man...

As another Bruin (and I've always wondered if I'd bumped into JLN or ossobucco), I hung around the sci-fi fans in L.A., the Cal-Tech nerds and the art and hippie milieu as well as what you might call the elites of Hollywood filmdom. We used to go to pot dinner parties at the house of the head of production of MGM. The martinis also flowed. In fact, I was introduced to an advanced recording of the London production of "Oliver!" one evening. Everyone in these "ensembles" smoked pot and drank. It was just part of the society. I rarely ran into anyone that would partake of one without the other.

I think when we ever drank with pot, it was to drink rather poorly selected red wine...

I don't think we were Bruin folk at the same time, GL, but I might have worked there when you were in school. Lessee, I first went to school there in '60-'64; worked in labs from 1965-1975 (then in another lab in SM til' 80), while taking UCLA extension studio art classes from '71-'75, approx 30 classes; then studied landarch via extension from '80-84, with many classes on campus, approx. 30; worked there on land use exhibit connected to the art department through '81. I suppose I should order a tee shirt... oh, I forgot, I took seven classes in italian through extension, 1989-91.

edit, I forgot more - I did an all day lecture (with lunch break) on italian piazzas for the land arch program back in 1995.

I graduated in 1964. Whose art classes were you in? The painter Jeanette Debonne who I have recently shown in galleries I worked in and my own was a student colleague. I was also taking classes at Otis Art Institute and Art Center. I had moved to Laguna Beach in 1965 and worked for a large picture frame, art supply, art classes and art gallery in San Juan Capistrano, "El Toro Fine Arts." I then opened my own gallery in Laguna Beach with a picture framing department.

I've read that Diebenkorn was teaching at UCLA around 1967, the year I graduated. I'm sure I am older than LW who graduated before me. I was a late bloomer academically because I spent time after high school studying at Chouinard (most of the students in the boarding house where I lived were studyng a Art Center), then I went to Mexico City to study at the San Carlos academy of plastic arts and the music school of the University (violin). So by the time I decided to go to college I was already 28 (in 1962). While at UCLA I didn't give art a thought (except for reading); I was fascinated by sociology and anthropology. At that time (before graduate school at CSLA and UCSD) I used to host pot parties. London Broil steak (saturated with a butter, parsley, and garlic sauce), fried potatoes and cheap red wine. It was delicious once the "munchies" set in. Those were the days. I'm more content with life now, but there was more fun then. Once I entered grad school with professional pretensions I quit pot completely. If the police are reading this keep in mind that I may be lying about such pot use. And you can't arrest me for lying. Or can you (with Asscroft in power)?

I think I'm in the wrong spot.

This has turned into a UCLA alum reunion board!

Its like half of the regular posters in here are former UCLA stoners! Whats that all about?

If someone comes on and says "Lets all meet at a Westwood coffee shop," beware, it might be a sting.

I sensed the same truth as you, Tcis. We really hijacked the thread, didn't we? Thanks for the advice. But we are all "respectable" citizens now, and we've gone beyond the statute of limitations and have, as far as I know, no political aspirations.

William Bryce was my most memorable teacher who was an accomplished abstract painter himself. His images were large, rock-like forms in muted earth colors. They were quite powerful. I actually took less art classes at UCLA but I did no through another cycle of art history classes. I don't remember the professor. I sent to East Los Angeles College first and after two years there as the student curator for the Vincent Price Gallery on campus I went to Otis, Art Center and got my degree at UCLA. I never quitted with some recreational or social pot until the late 70's in Laguna Beach. I was never a daily user of pot or alcohol. The last time I stayed in L.A. for any extensive time was in the 70's and again in the 80's for several months where I would spend weekends at a friend's house who was an insurance executive and knew the same Hollywood film people I did. Otherwise, I mostly live in the hills at Laguna and pretty much was absorbed in that small resort milieu. A lot of university professors lived there so I had good company.

(on topic, then -- Alcohol would kick Pot's ass, once it realized that sly comment earlier in the day wasn't really a compliment about it's new rayon shirt. Alcohol would stew about this for a while, broing some bartender with the details of what was done and what will be done as it screwed up the courage and the proper level of numb vanity to do the deed. Pot, for it's part, would knock away a couple of initial exploratory blows, saying, "Easy. Easy!" Pot would later straggle off to a friend's house to watch the Chapelle Show marathon on Comedy Central while Alcohol would go back to a quasi-dive-bar with bouncers and rail drink specials until 10:00 pm, where it would leer at college girls with fake IDs and tell a group of murmuring guys it recognized how it had just "totally kicked Pot's ass.")

Carry on, kids...

Well, in Laguna Beach, social drinking and conversation is a passtime in the restaurants and bars. You certainly can't sit their and smoke pot. And carry on at least a witty and intelligent conversation? Not where I could observe at the private parties where it was prevelant (remarkably few out in the open). One was too busy laughing and eating.

I once went to the Getty Museum (the old one in the Santa Monica mountains) after smoking some really good stuff from Maui and it was really a trip! We only had a drink after we left the museum at a seacoast dinner house.

:wink:

We Bruins could sure party!

Nah, Ships shut down.


Oh, this is so much fun.

GL. I was not an art major but a Bacteriology major.
My cousin, who I met in Kirkhoff at the bookstore, each of us backing off and advancing, since our parents did that, expressed amazement that we were both in that spot and became at the moment lifelong friends. Anyway, she was an art major and I was off in the zoology building back then. Surely a mistake but one I lived out.

OK, then, let me summarize that we may have been where some interesting sequences happened, at least one of us might by lying, but never never about our sense of history and politics. We might be wrong at some point, but most of us from that time try not to lie.

Lying, Osso? Are you referring to my claim to respectability now?
LW, I wonder. You mention a seacoast restaurant. Is that the one up the hill at Malibu? Just stretching. I wonder what fond memories and synchronicities our New York A2kers could conjure.

I have to say a few hours later that I don't remember what I meant. I know that is shameful, and that, past shameful, I might remember in the morning. Still, I don't like the sound of what I said.

j

Alcohol thought the fight was over, but it had just begun. Pot is deceptive like that. Alcohol, in its superficiality, had neglected to notice that Pot has powers which are extremely subtle. While Alcohol was ogling the girls and bragging at the loud bar, Pot was carrying out its smoky plan, underminng and shifting all of Alcohol's assumptions, leaving Alcohol adrift, a ship without an anchor. Next thing Alcohol knew, it was laying wasted, puking in the alley. Pot was getting the girls high at home, in front of the fire, on the rug. A splendid time was had by all, on that magic rug. Next morning, Alcohol's head pounded with a hangover as Pot ate a big breakfast and then continued to spread the love vibrations in final victory.