“Zabriskie Point” (director, Antonioni) was the film where at the end the house blows up over and over again in some weird, nihilistic orgasm. I hated that film when I saw it as a hippie.

I watched Antonioni’s “Blowup” again not long ago. It held up well enough. Then I looked it up on the internet and found an interview with one of the actors who said the overblown “what is reality” theme adored by the critics was basically a last-minute save by Antonioni.

Antonioni had blown through his budget on stupid crap like repainting the road to a preferable shade of gray. His backers pulled the plug when Antonioni had only shot half the film. “Blowup,” as we know it, is a hasty re-edit to make do with what was left. Antonioni originally intended a conventional, noirish mystery.

Ha. Reminds me of that great ( as in unconsciously hilarious) scene in either Vanishing or Zabriskie Point – or was it Easy Rider? – where the hippies are seen sowing seed broadcast style in a dried out good for nothing looking field.

DNW: There was such a scene in “Easy Rider.” It looked hopeless to me even when I was a hippie.

Ok Thanks. One for three. Well, you know, long time ago; college age, laying on the couch after the bars closed, snoot full of beer, gazing at the late show.

Ha. Reminds me of that great ( as in unconsciously hilarious) scene in either Vanishing or Zabriskie Point – or was it Easy Rider? – where the hippies are seen sowing seed broadcast style in a dried out good for nothing looking field.

DNW: There was such a scene in “Easy Rider.” It looked hopeless to me even when I was a hippie.

Ok Thanks. One for three. Well, you know, long time ago; college age, laying on the couch after the bars closed, snoot full of beer, gazing at the late show.

Leary’s “Turn on, tune in and drop out” slogan was apt, if impractical.

DNW: There was such a scene in “Easy Rider.” It looked hopeless to me even when I was a hippie.

The scene was supposed to be at the New Buffalo commune near Taos, NM but New Buffalo wouldn’t allow filming. New Buffalo couldn’t make it off the land either and eventually was squeezed out economically.

None of the hippie back-to-the-land communes survived. Mine never got off the ground, so to speak, but the commune leader and his wife bought a spread on the outskirts of the Ozarks and did well for themselves.

They have a great garden where they grow much of their vegetables and store what they don’t eat fresh. The leader built a couple of houses on their land, then took what he learned and made close to a million dollars as a contractor. He adhered to the hippie ethos but he wasn’t a typical hippie.

The Mel Lyman hippie commune cult from Boston made their money in construction and remodeling. They lowered their hippie profile, transplanted to SoCal and used their skills and countercultural cred to do quite well for themselves, often working for Hollywood money.

The star of “Zabriskie Point,” Mark Frechette, was a big Mel Lyman follower and was always trying to convert the director, Antonioni, to the Lyman message.

huxley on December 11, 2018 at 4:17 pm at 4:17 pm said:

Back in my commune days I lived in a trailer park. I worked pick-up construction, stoop labor in the fields, and worst of all, poultry farms.

Country living looked like a lot of hard, physical labor. And mostly it is. There’s a beauty to it, but it wasn’t for me. Since then I’ve lived in cities.

But I never forgot the basic realities and the people who attend to them which make city living possible.”

Ha. Reminds me of that great ( as in unconsciously hilarious) scene in either Vanishing or Zabriskie Point – or was it Easy Rider? – where the hippies are seen sowing seed broadcast style in a dried out good for nothing looking field. Grizzly Adams was one of them. Ah, what you could learn from late night TV movie broadcast in the late 1970’s and early eighties.

What does a good dreamer really need to know about anything then, if he can imagine, and doesn’t balk at breaking a few social eggs in order to realize his social engineering dreams?

Country living looked like a lot of hard, physical labor. And mostly it is. There’s a beauty to it, but it wasn’t for me. Since then I’ve lived in cities.

But I never forgot the basic realities and the people who attend to them which make city living possible.

Is s/he suggesting one cannot write about the ancient world in modern English?

Is s/he suggesting there were no apartment buildings housing the poor before the 1830s? (In ancient Rome, the bulk of the poor population lived in insulae, apartment buildings of up to six or seven stories – the evidence is both archaeological and in descriptions by classical authors)