You're either on the bus..

Sweater: vintage, thrifted by my mom
Dress: '70s, ebay
Tights: Target
Boots: '70s, ebay
Belt: because I have to cinch dresses like this or I'll look pregnant.

My last year in undergrad I took a '60s lit class that ended up being one of my favorite classes ever (I was a Lit major). it was taught by an energetic, quirkily awesome professor who always complimented my outfits and writing and also taught a beat poets class that I annoyingly couldn't take because I had to squeeze in other requirements. We read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; studied the Diggers and the hippie movement in Haight-Ashbury and Kansas; read about Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. This big, coffee-table Hippie book was on the recommended list and I bought it because of my love for giant coffee-table books, and it was so worth it. It has lots of photos of arguably everything important to the '60s: music, political movements, drugs, literature.

Honestly I don't think I would be a hippie if I was around then, but I'm completely fascinated with learning about it. Communal living is so interesting but is also something I could never ever ever do. And style-wise I'm not into the flowers and the flowy-ness for the most part-- this outfit is as close as I come to that. I just like how the vibe seems to have been so amazing, like you knew something important is going on.. And then it came to a crescendo, and by the "summer of love" it was a commercialized parody of what it was. From Fear and Loathing:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...

And that, I think, was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back (Thompson 68).

Fear and Loathing is one of my favorite books. I went through a phase where I carried it around and would pull it out randomly to read certain bits.

In general I try not to romanticize time periods, even though there are eras that I love to death. I don't want to do the grass-is-always-greener thing because as pretty as the past might look to us, it certainly had drawbacks (particularly for women) that people tend to gloss over when they talk about how much they love whenever. But I suppose that's the advantage of getting to read about it.















If you like this kind of thing, I highly recommended Cows Are Freaky When Then Look At You: An Oral History of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers. It's basically a collection of Kansas ex-hippies telling their (mostly acid-related) stories-- it's super interesting and some bits are hilarious, some kind of squicky-yet-awesome.

(Completely unrelated, but I'm getting three wisdom teeth taken out Thursday. Yikes, sob, dread!)