Tonight’s Dead to the World might of interest to the historians among you. I’m planning to spend two hours with Eric Christensen, the director of The Trips Festival Movie. He showed it at the Mill Valley Film Festival a few months ago and then taped a panel discussion with Mountain Girl, Bob Weir, Stewart Brand, Ramon Sender, and others, and that’s included on the DVD as well.
A few random notes I took while excerpting sound bites:
“…people trying to reinvent civilization with no better preparation than a liberal education…” – Stewart Brand
” It just took me back to the days when I was just learning how to wear my life. It fit right, and I’ve been wearing it that way ever since. No reason to change.” – Bob Weir
A kid in Iowa, summer of ’67, an outcast; he’s got long hair and smokes dope, doesn’t fit in. He reads in LIFE magazine that something is happening in SF, goes to the Haight, meets a girl, they drop acid, she takes him to the Avalon Ballroom, and it’s like nothing he’s ever seen before… it becomes difficult for him to tell where he ends and everything else begins… a moment of enlightenment.
The beatnik era of art that got to participate… and then pass… the kind of thing that Burning man is now – no specators, all show – was born that night. Art that is assembled in the viewer was also one of the things that came out of that kind of event. Grand-uncle of the raves…
“I’m sure people went to the Trips Festival thinking ‘nobody’s going to be as far out as I am.’ And they were very surprised to find out that whoever you were, there was somebody farther out than you.”
We’ll be on the air 8-10pm PST, and you can listen online
KPFA archives the show, so you can listen to it later via this page
Here’s my original blog post on this event
The Trips Festival movie’s web site