Changing the world on small change
Just because it was called the Summer of Love, that doesn’t mean the flower children weren’t ferocious. Some of them still are.
In the wake of Tony Serra’s complaints about distinctions between hippies and bohemians, Country Joe McDonald takes exception to the de Young Museum Summer of Love show curator who said she had trouble finding “museum quality” tie-dye. That attitude, he says, is rampant among “movers and shakers attempting to hijack our Summer of Love” who “really have not a clue about it,” he said.
“The real Summer of Love happened in secondhand shops and communal kitchens, garages and backyards and parks. Spaghetti dinners and seeds and stems,” he continued. “We were poor young disenfranchised young people creating a new world out of whatever we could collectively lay our hands on and have fun with. None of us were ‘museum quality.’ ” Curators and connoisseurs “did not understand us then and they don’t understand us now. But we did change the world on $1.50.”
I hear you, Joe. At the time, I too, thought we were changing the world. But considering the mess it’s in right now, I’m not so sure. The draft’s no more, but the U.S. Defense Department’s getting beefed up, prisons are filled with corporations making big bucks on them, women are paid less than men, Roe vs. Wade and voters’ rights are threatened.
Readers, did the Summer of Love change the world?
With similar goals, the Levi Strauss Foundation, the coffers of which are replenished by sales of America’s most treasured exports, announced on Wednesday, May 17, that it is donating $1 million in grants “to organizations that protect the civil liberties of highly vulnerable communities across the United States and abroad, including immigrants, refugees, the transgender community and religious minorities.”
It’s clear that the grants reflect a political point of view.
“Discrimination and stigma are anathema to our core values,” said Foundation Executive Director Daniel Lee. “This belief comes from our founder Levi Strauss, who was an immigrant himself, and still rings true today.”
Among the beneficiaries: National Domestic Workers Alliance, United We Dream, Transgender Law Center, Mobilize the Immigrant Vote, Asian Law Caucus, Council on American-Islamic Relations, International Refugee Relief Assistance Project.
Watching White House press secretary Sean “Spicey” Spicer at his press briefing Monday, May 15, said Lee Houskeeper, reminded him of watching SPCA ads in which Joe Cocker sings “You Are So Beautiful” while trembling, scared and downcast dogs stare at the camera with empty eyes. And then there’s the song Michael Fullerton can’t get out of his mind: “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Nixon.”
So the administration is inspiring many culturally aware Americans:
Sunday’s New York Daily News quoted Alec Baldwin on his “Saturday Night Live” impersonation of President Trump: “There are many people who do Trump now,” said Baldwin, “and they have different Trumps. They have kind of a ‘balls-ofhis-feet-light Trump’ or what I like to call ‘Gene Kelly Trump.’ But my Trump is ‘miserable Trump.’ No matter what, he wins, he loses, he’s miserable.”
That quote inspired Patricia Kelly, widow of Gene Kelly (and a great friend of the San Francisco Ballet), to take to Facebook. Although she knows Baldwin didn’t intend “any real slight of Gene (and I do think Baldwin’s version is spot-on and Gene would, too), can’t we please come up with better — less jarring similes and refrain from laxly linking someone truly decent with someone truly not.”
In a 2015 Huffington Post essay responding to a similar description of Trump’s ease, dancing through “nativist, racist, misogynistic slop as if he were Gene Kelly,” Patricia Kelly wrote that Trump’s “toxic comments about immigrants and women are completely counter to the spirit” of Gene Kelly. “Not only would Gene be appalled by Trump’s deplorable words and actions, he would be stricken that such depravity could be tolerated — and sadly, even celebrated — in a race for President of the United States.”
“Connecting Gene to Trump is odious,” emailed Patricia Kelly. “It seems fairly lame to link Gene to a travesty like Donald Trump, simply because someone needs a dance analogy . ... Donald Trump represents everything Gene abhorred, everything he fought against his entire life.”
Stephen and Ayesha Curry, who had seen “Hamilton” in the run-up to its official opening, were at a performance again on Thursday, May 11, reported Sara Ying Rounsaville and Lois Hirsch, who were both there, too. The audience broke into chants of “MVP! MVP!” and Curry turned in his seat to take a video of his cheering applauding fans. (The Warriors’ All-Star told ESPN recently that seeing the show had inspired him to get past a slump.)
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I met this girl at a bar. So she had like underwear and lipstick all over, and flying pigs on the wall. I decided not to stay.” Woman in Briones Park, overheard by Margery Eriksson