I have a friend who's a couple of decades older than me. Recently, he happened to mention that his daughter, when a teenager in the Sixties, had been a member of a hippie commune in Oregon, the Family of the Mystic Arts. He recalled that Life magazine had done a photospread on the commune back then.
I remarked that all of Life's photos were now online.
We found several photos. (Alas, his daughter is not pictured.)
One is posted below.
For the other two, I'm directing you to the Life archives, rather than reproduce them here.
Why?
Because they feature bare-breasted female children.
Yes, that's right. Due to the prevailing cultural insanity, this blog cannot safely feature photos which a general-interest G-rated magazine that sold millions of copies each week could show forty years ago.
So here's a little tribute to a more innocent and less paranoid time, when "weird" was almost the dominant cultural mode.
The year 2008 marks the twentieth anniversary of a classic tome: HIGH WEIRDNESS BY MAIL.
In those antique pre-internet days of the book's debut, your only resources for contacting and receiving strange information was the USPS. There are plenty of cheap copies of HWBM available online, if you want to get a nostalgic snapshot of that era.
But the SubGeniuses behind the book have also launched THE HIGH WEIRDNESS PROJECT, which strives to replicate the book as a web-based experience.
Of course you recall the baseball great, Ted Williams. Decapitated after death and head frozen, once the family quit squabbling in public...?
Well, now many of his possessions are up for sale at auction, including, ironically, a number of severed animal-head trophies. And also some fine "space alien" paintings and drawings by daughter Claudia, like the one at right.
Most Supreme Court cases are as dry as a particle-board sandwich. But not the one you can read about here. That's because this case involves a genuine wackjob cult named Summum, which believes, amongst other things, in sacred mummification of pets.
Category: Bums, Hobos, Tramps, Beggars, Panhandlers and Other Streetpeople, Drugs, Eccentrics, Family, Children, Parents, Hygiene, Nature, New Age, Pop Culture, Yesterday's Tomorrows, Religion, 1970's, Facial Hair