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COUNTERCULTURE DREAMS

Author : Gerard Charles Wilson

Publisher : Gerard Charles Wilson Publisher

Page : 251 pages

File Size : 35,8 MB

Release : 2024-01-01

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1876262559

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Book Description

The cultural revolution of the long 1960s (1960-1975) brought in one of the greatest cultural shifts the world has known. Music, dress, moral ideas, social manners, and political attitudes were turned upside down. The war generation hardly knew what motivated the post-war generation. Across Western Society a social fissure opened. The leaders of the revolution were twenty-year-olds (‘Don’t trust anyone under 30) mostly from an educated middle-class background. Counterculture Dreams follows the lives of a group of young people in Sydney who navigate the changes, some grasping the changes, others resisting and even condemning them, and still others making disastrous choices. The story centers on Danny Williamson and his younger sister, Angela. Danny ends school, innocent of the traps in society that others, including Angela, see. He forms a relationship with clever Cathy Dunn who clings to her Catholic traditions. He begins university in 1963 with Cathy, though at different universities. Meeting outlandish counterculture leader, Ronnie Newell, whose audacity impresses him, disturbs his relationship with Cathy. Not fully aware of the influences around Ronnie and his crowd he gradually drifts away from Cathy. He does not see where he is heading, despite Angela’s and Cathy’s warnings. All the while Angela plays a mysterious game with Danny’s best friend, Max Gallagher. But is it a game? Nobody is sure until Prime Minister Robert Menzies announces a national service scheme to meet the threat of communism taking over Southeast Asia, beginning with Vietnam. Danny and Max are eligible for the call-up. Gerda van den Donker, introduced in TIMES OF DISTRESS and with a bigger role in IN THIS VALE OF TEARS reappears. Jannie de Kam, also introduced in IN THIS VALE OF TEARS, reappears in close company with Gerda van den Donker. The Sixties series will consist of eight connected but stand-alone stories. The themes of the ‘Goddess’, neo-paganism, and Gnosticism are threads through the stories. The historical, political, and ideological background is the cultural revolution of the long 1960s and the Second Vatican Council. The author who lived through those times recreates its atmosphere. Book 1 Times of Distress Book 2 In this Vale of Tears Book 3 Counterculture Dreams Book 4 The Counterculture Goddess (2025) Book 5 Love in the Counterculture (2025) Book 6 Dreams to Nightmare (2026) Book 7 The Castle of Heavenly Bliss Book 8 A Sense of Loss due 2026



Acid Dreams

Author : Martin A. Lee

Publisher : Grove Press

Page : 392 pages

File Size : 30,93 MB

Release : 1992

Category : Body, Mind & Spirit

ISBN : 9780802130624

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Book Description

Provides a social history of how the CIA used the psychedelic drug LSD as a tool of espionage during the early 1950s and tested it on U.S. citizens before it spread into popular culture, in particular the counterculture as represented by Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and others who helped spawn political and social upheaval.



The American Counterculture

Author : Damon R. Bach

Publisher : University Press of Kansas

Page : 384 pages

File Size : 20,74 MB

Release : 2020-12-03

Category : History

ISBN : 0700630104

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Book Description

Restricted to the shorthand of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” the counterculture would seem to be a brief, vibrant stretch of the 1960s. But the American counterculture, as this book clearly demonstrates, was far more than a historical blip and its impact continues to resonate. In this comprehensive history, Damon R. Bach traces the counterculture from its antecedents in the 1950s through its emergence and massive expansion in the 1960s to its demise in the 1970s and persistent echoes in the decades since. The counterculture, as Bach tells it, evolved in discrete stages and his book describes its development from coast to heartland to coast as it evolved into a national phenomenon, involving a diverse array of participants and undergoing fundamental changes between 1965 and 1974. Hippiedom appears here in relationship to the era’s movements—civil rights, women’s and gay liberation, Red and Black Power, the New Left, and environmentalism. In its connection to other forces of the time, Bach contends that the counterculture’s central objective was to create a new, superior society based on alternative values and institutions. Drawing for the first time on documents produced by self-described “freaks” from 1964 through 1973—underground newspapers, memoirs, personal correspondence, flyers, and pamphlets—his book creates an unusually nuanced, colorful, and complete picture of a time often portrayed in clichéd or nostalgic terms. This is the counterculture of love-ins and flower children, of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, but also of antiwar demonstrations, communes, co-ops, head shops, cultural feminism, Earth Day, and antinuclear activism. What Damon R. Bach conjures is the counterculture in all of its permutations and ramifications as he illuminates its complexity, continually evolving values, and constantly changing components and adherents, which defined and redefined it throughout its near decade-long existence. In the long run, Bach convincingly argues that the counterculture spearheaded cultural transformation, leaving a changed America in its wake.



Radical Dreams

Author : Elliott H. King

Publisher : Penn State Press

Page : 271 pages

File Size : 12,16 MB

Release : 2022-03-17

Category : Art

ISBN : 0271091665

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Book Description

Surrealism is widely thought of as an artistic movement that flourished in Europe between the two world wars. However, during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, diverse radical affinity groups, underground subcultures, and student protest movements proclaimed their connections to surrealism. Radical Dreams argues that surrealism was more than an avant-garde art movement; it was a living current of anti-authoritarian resistance. Featuring perspectives from scholars across the humanities and, distinctively, from contemporary surrealist practitioners, this volume examines surrealism’s role in postwar oppositional cultures. It demonstrates how surrealism’s committed engagement extends beyond the parameters of an artistic style or historical period, with chapters devoted to Afrosurrealism, Ted Joans, punk, the Situationist International, the student protests of May ’68, and other topics. Privileging interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and material culture approaches, contributors address surrealism’s interaction with New Left politics, protest movements, the sexual revolution, psychedelia, and other subcultural trends around the globe. A revelatory work, Radical Dreams definitively shows that the surrealist movement was synonymous with cultural and political radicalism. It will be especially valuable to those interested in the avant-garde, contemporary art, and radical social movements. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jonathan P. Eburne, David Hopkins, Claire Howard, Michael Löwy, Alyce Mahon, Gavin Parkinson, Grégory Pierrot, Penelope Rosemont, Ron Sakolsky, Marie Arleth Skov, Ryan Standfest, and Sandra Zalman.



From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Author : Fred Turner

Publisher : University of Chicago Press

Page : 340 pages

File Size : 49,55 MB

Release : 2010-10-15

Category : History

ISBN : 0226817431

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Book Description

In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.



American Cultural Studies

Author : Neil C. Campbell

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 314 pages

File Size : 32,24 MB

Release : 2005-08-12

Category : Art

ISBN : 1134796927

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Book Description

Drawing on literature, art, film theatre, music and much more, American Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary introduction to American culture for those taking American Studies. This textbook: * introduces the full range and variety of American culture including issues of race, gender and youth * provides a truly interdisciplinary methodology * suggests and discusses a variety of approaches to study * highlights American distinctiveness * draws on literature, art, film, theatre, architecture, music and more * challenges orthodox paradigms of American Studies. This is a fast-expanding subject area, and Campbell and Kean's book will certainly be a staple part of any cultural studies student's reading diet.



The Beat Generation and Counterculture

Author : Raj Chandarlapaty

Publisher : Peter Lang

Page : 194 pages

File Size : 42,9 MB

Release : 2009

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 9781433106033

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Book Description

The Beat Generation and Counterculture examines three authors associated with the «Beat Generation» - Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac - and the relevance of their attempt to travel, learn, and write about exotic non-Western cultures and repressed minority cultures in the United States, projecting the influence of history, premodern religious practices, and postcolonial social and intellectual problems into the written development of countercultural ethos and praxis. The Beat Generation and Counterculture underscores T. S. Eliot's emphasis on «earning tradition - that is, in order for the corrupt, decultured, and unimaginative West that had been ruined by World War II to survive, it would have to internalize and project the value of distant cultures that had been misunderstood and racialized for centuries. This book also addresses the frequent criticism that these authors were «orientalist», white writers who freely translated non-Western culture without giving any credit to its creators.



Counterculture Green

Author : Andrew G. Kirk

Publisher : University Press of Kansas

Page : 320 pages

File Size : 27,88 MB

Release : 2007-11-19

Category : Nature

ISBN : 070061821X

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Book Description

For those who eagerly awaited its periodic appearance, it was more than a publication: it was a way of life. The Whole Earth Catalog billed itself as "Access to Tools," and it grew from a Bay Area blip to a national phenomenon catering to hippies, do-it-yourselfers, and anyone interested in self-sufficiency independent of mainstream America. In recovering the history of the Catalog's unique brand of environmentalism, Andrew Kirk recounts how San Francisco's Stewart Brand and his counterculture cohorts in the Point Foundation promoted a philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism that celebrated technological achievement, human ingenuity, and sustainable living. By piecing together the social, cultural, material, environmental, and technological history of that philosophy's incarnation in the Catalog, Kirk reveals the driving forces behind it, tells the story of the appropriate technology movement it espoused, and assesses its fate. This book takes a fresh look at the many individuals and organizations who worked in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to construct this philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism. At a time when many of these ideas were seen as heretical to a predominantly wilderness-based movement, Whole Earth became a critical forum for environmental alternatives and a model for how complicated ecological ideas could be presented in a hopeful and even humorous way. It also enabled later environmental advocates like Al Gore to explain our current "inconvenient truth," and the actions of Brand's Point Foundation demonstrated that the epistemology of Whole Earth could be put into action in meaningful ways that might foster an environmental optimism distinctly different from the jeremiads that became the stock in trade of American environmentalism. Kirk shows us that Whole Earth was more than a mere counterculture fad. In an era of political protest, it suggested that staying home and modifying your toilet or installing a solar collector could make a more significant contribution than taking to the streets to shout down establishment misdeeds. Given its visible legacy in the current views of Al Gore and others, the subtle environmental heresies of Whole Earth continue to resonate today, which makes Kirk's lucid and lively tale an extremely timely one as well.



Steal this Dream

Author : Larry Sloman

Publisher : Doubleday Books

Page : 470 pages

File Size : 19,45 MB

Release : 1998

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN :

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Book Description

In the tradition of "Edie, the oral biography of Edie Sedgwick, "Steal This Dream is a captivating roller-coaster ride of an oral biography of Abbie Hoffman and the sixties, told by over two hundred of those who demonstrated, protested, and lived through those tumultuous years. Abbie Hoffman was at the center of most of the political and social tumult of the sixties, as a participant, disciple, instigator, leader, and dissident. He helped fight for civil rights in the South, organized on behalf of the poor in New York City, was a leader of the Flower Power generation in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, and was one of the most vocal and visible counterculture guerrillas in the fight against the war in Vietnam. He created chaos on Wall Street, experimented with psychedelics, hashish, speed, cocaine, and free love, planned be-ins, attempted to "levitate" the Pentagon, helped to disrupt the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and was one of the forces behind Woodstock. A genius at exploiting and manipulating the media, and through them, inspiring a counterculture across the country and throughout the decade, Abbie was the most famous hippie and revolutionary of modern times. A fast-paced and utterly compelling oral history told by the people Abbie worked with, for, and against--from Tom Hayden and Jerry Rubin to Paul Krassner and Timothy Leary--"Steal This Dream is the finest social history of the sixties yet written.



High Anxiety

Author : Patricia Mellencamp

Publisher : Indiana University Press

Page : 446 pages

File Size : 14,45 MB

Release : 1992-08-22

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 9780253207357

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Book Description

"... acute look at the state of contemporary culture... A humorous... book, it yields rewarding advice for our perception of reality and fiction." --Back Stage / Shoot "Mellencamp's ease of movement between the conceptual and the commonplace is the great strength of this work.... High Anxiety is an invaluable contribution to the cultural studies debate... " --Art + Text Written with wit and flair, High Anxiety is a critique of the temporality of U.S. television, a narrative journey between Freud's texts on obsession and the cult of anxiety pervading contemporary culture. Operation Desert Storm, I Love Lucy, Anita Hill, Twin Peaks, and Oprah are a few of the subjects which form this "anxious" mosaic of popular culture.