Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest

Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest
Author: Jack Loeffler
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2017-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0890136270

This book pays homage to the counterculture movement through the words and photographs of a select gathering of people who lived it. At its height in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the counterculture movement permeated every region of America as thousands of activists took on the establishment. Although counterculture has often been trivialized as “dirty hippies” and “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” committed activists formed powerful strands of resistance to the political/military/industrial complex. American Indians, Hispanos, Blacks, and Anglos joined in marches and protests—often at their peril. Veterans of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, communards in northern New Mexico, practitioners of drug-induced mysticism, disciplined seekers of spiritual awakening, back-to-the-landers, defenders of wilderness—counterculturalists all—questioned, reframed, and redefined American and global perspectives that remain to this day. The American Southwest became a haven for individuals from both coasts seeking refuge in this vast landscape. Many found an affinity with the native cultures and local inhabitants who were already here. Others joined forces to combat the Vietnam War, racial discrimination, and pillaging of the environment. Still others founded communes based on diverse cultures of practice. Movement leaders organized community events, protests, and spoke for their generation; many used their talents as writers, musicians, artists, and photographers to express their angst and promote change. Jack Loeffler draws from his extensive archive of recorded interviews and transcribed conversations with contemporaries—among them writers, artists, elders, activists, and scholars—including Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, Shonto Begay, Camillus Lopez, Tara Evonne Trudell, Roberta Blackgoat, Richard Grow, Alvin Josephy, David Brower, Dave Foreman, Elinor Ostrom, Fritjof Capra, and Melissa Savage. The book includes personal essays by Yvonne Bond, Peter Coyote, Lisa Law, Peter Rowan, Siddiq Hans von Briesen, Art Kopecky, Bill Steen, Sylvia Rodríguez, Enrique R. Lamadrid, Levi Romero, Rina Swentzell, Gary Paul Nabhan, Meredith Davidson, and Jack Loeffler. It includes photographs by Lisa Law, Seth Roffman, Terrence Moore, and others.

Huerfano

Huerfano
Author: Roberta Price
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781558495739

A "splendid book that beautifully captures the spirit of [commune life] . . ." (Nick Bromell, author of "Tomorrow Never Knows"), Price's memoir is at once comic, poignant, and honest, recapturing the sense of affirmation and experimentation that fueled the counterculture without lapsing into sentimentality or cynicism. 40 illustrations.

Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie

Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie
Author: Iris Keltz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

The '60s--the music, the clothes, the political and sexual idealism, the experimentation with drugs, the hunger for peace, creativity, and sharing--were a watershed in the way America sees itself. Hippie culture was at the very zenith of that watershed, and Taos was its beating heart, a Mecca that beckoned young pilgrims from all over the country. Iris Keltz was one of those pilgrims who came to Taos in the '60s. She stayed to become a folk historian of the tribe.

New Buffalo

New Buffalo
Author: Arthur Kopecky
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780826333957

Kopecky's journals take us back to the beginnings of New Buffalo, one of the most successful of the communes that dotted the country in the 1960s and 1970s, where he and his comrades encountered magic, wisdom, a mix of people, the Peyote Church, planting, and hard winters.

Mescaline

Mescaline
Author: Mike Jay
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2019-06-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0300245084

A definitive history of mescaline that explores its mind-altering effects across cultures, from ancient America to Western modernity Mescaline became a popular sensation in the mid-twentieth century through Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, after which the word “psychedelic” was coined to describe it. Its story, however, extends deep into prehistory: the earliest Andean cultures depicted mescaline-containing cacti in their temples. Mescaline was isolated in 1897 from the peyote cactus, first encountered by Europeans during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. During the twentieth century it was used by psychologists investigating the secrets of consciousness, spiritual seekers from Aleister Crowley to the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, artists exploring the creative process, and psychiatrists looking to cure schizophrenia. Meanwhile peyote played a vital role in preserving and shaping Native American identity. Drawing on botany, pharmacology, ethnography, and the mind sciences and examining the mescaline experiences of figures from William James to Walter Benjamin to Hunter S. Thompson, this is an enthralling narrative of mescaline’s many lives.

Storytelling in Museums

Storytelling in Museums
Author: Adina Langer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2022-06-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1538156954

With chapters written by a diverse set of practitioners from across the museum field and around the world, Storytelling in Museums explores the efficacy and ethics of storytelling in museums. The book shows how museums use personal, local, and specific stories to make visitors feel welcome while inspiring them to engage with new ideas and unfamiliar situations. At the same time, the book explores the responsibilities of museum practitioners toward the storytellers included in their narratives and how those responsibilities shift over time and manifest in different contexts. The book’s eighteen chapters represent a conversation among a diverse set of professionals for whom storytelling connotes their daily museum practice. As educators, collectors, curators, designers, marketers, researchers, planners, and collaborators, the authors of this book consider the “real work” of storytelling from every angle. From the inclusion of personal stories in educational programs to the meta-narratives on display in exhibitions, this book balances practical examples with ethical considerations, placing the praxis of storytelling within the larger context of the 21st century museum. The book moves beyond advocacy for storytelling as an essential part of the museum’s toolkit to explore the many ways in which museums use personal stories, and multiple storytelling techniques, to support the larger public narratives embedded in their missions. The contributors demonstrate how museums that emphasize storytelling from multiple angles can serve as a kind of counterpoint to our tendency to fixate on singular images of things we know little about. They encourage museums to both acknowledge that they cannot control the narrative and to embrace their power to contribute to it through the multivalent, multivocal stories they choose to share.

Dreams Unreal

Dreams Unreal
Author: Titus O'Brien
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2020-01-15
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 0826361501

The psychedelic rock poster is one of the most explosively inventive, instantly recognisable, and profoundly influential aesthetic movements of the last century. The poster art that gave visual life to the amazing music that sprang up across the Bay Area from 1965 to 1970 lives on in 'Dreams Unreal'.

Well Met

Well Met
Author: Rachel Rubin
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2012-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814771386

The Renaissance Faire—a 50 year-long party, communal ritual, political challenge and cultural wellspring—receives its first sustained historical attention with Well Met. Beginning with the chaotic communal moment of its founding and early development in the 1960s through its incorporation as a major “family friendly” leisure site in the 2000s, Well Met tells the story of the thinkers, artists, clowns, mimes, and others performers who make the Faire. Well Met approaches the Faire from the perspective of labor, education, aesthetics, business, the opposition it faced, and the key figures involved. Drawing upon vibrant interview material and deep archival research, Rachel Lee Rubin reveals the way the faires established themselves as a pioneering and highly visible counter cultural referendum on how we live now—our family and sexual arrangements, our relationship to consumer goods, and our corporate entertainments. In order to understand the meaning of the faire to its devoted participants,both workers and visitors, Rubin has compiled a dazzling array of testimony, from extensive conversations with Faire founder Phyllis Patterson to interviews regarding the contemporary scene with performers, crafters, booth workers and “playtrons.” Well Met pays equal attention what came out of the faire—the transforming gifts bestowed by the faire’s innovations and experiments upon the broader American culture: the underground press of the 1960s and 1970s, experimentation with “ethnic” musical instruments and styles in popular music, the craft revival, and various forms of immersive theater are all connected back to their roots in the faire. Original, intrepid, and richly illustrated, Well Met puts the Renaissance Faire back at the historical center of the American counterculture.

Studying the Dead

Studying the Dead
Author: Nicholas G. Meriwether
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2013-07-11
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0810891255

Although academic study of the Grateful Dead began shortly after the group’s formation, the dramatic growth of scholarly literature only occurred after the band’s formal retirement of the name in 1995. One major incubator of much of this work has been the Grateful Dead area of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association. Inaugurated as a separate section in 1998 and nicknamed the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, it has produced almost three hundred papers over fifteen years, nearly a third of which have been revised for publication. Caucus presenters have also edited a dozen books and periodical volumes, all of which have drawn on Caucus presentations, some almost exclusively. Studying the Dead: The Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus provides an informal history of the Caucus and sketches its significance as a scholarly community, focusing on its increasing self-awareness, its ability to span diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, and most of all, its contribution to our understanding of the Grateful Dead phenomenon. For the academy as a whole, the Caucus is a fascinating model for the development of discourse communities, from the role of orality to its interrogation of the texts that are derived from them. Remarkable for its interdisciplinary dialogue, the Caucus demonstrates how the nature of the art—and the phenomenon that it studies—can shape these discourses. Though ostensibly aimed at scholars of the Grateful Dead, others who will find this book of interest include students and teachers of popular culture, as well as fans of the band.