This week, The Barbican hosted the UK premier of Joan Grossman's new documentary, Drop City (2013) -the story of the so-called primeval hippie colony outside Trinidad, CO and, especially, the inner experience lived by their builders. http://www.dropcitydoc.com. The history of the city is short (1965 - 1973), but the effect that the first years had on the lives of the original inhabitants is mystic and endurable, expanding down into their senescence. At the very end of the doc, Gene Bernofsky, one of the original founders and now a handsome gram-pa with deep voice, oracles the sacred nature of the place: "For me, visiting now this land is like entering the time machine - that was one of the best experiences of my life". One can nevertheless grasp the emotion of those truth-seekers, genuine explorers now annealed by the un-extinguishable fire of time. It is the same feeling of the up-rooted that comes back home, that of the old football player in the abandoned field where he learned to play. It is a mark of humane religion.
The evolution of the colony was not steady, being the rise and splendor swift and thrilling and the fall long and painful, exactly alienating, starting in 1967 after the debauchery of the Joy's festival. In the beginning there was a clear element of exclusivity in it. The city was art, talent, knowledge, inspiration, spirit, heart; secrecy, confidentiality, tenderness, everything that is called humanity, etc. Not everyone is capable of that much! Those founders were special... Once the door was opened to all, myth and mediocrity popped in, like water filling the available space. Touristic visits, excessive parties, drugs, justifications and abandonment, everything that was not in the beginning and that the builders did not look for came in. Bans and manifestos were born, catchy sentences and monolithic consensus were drawn. The spirit, gone; the idea, deceased. Just another giant crystal-lie for the world, untouchable and phony... . I was sitting in the theater, looking left and right and whispering to myself that the show itself was the umpteenth perversion of the original idea: all those genuine hippies making themselves naked to the voraciousness of such a gregarious audience... Yes, modern, stylish Londoners, but tribal and fashionable, feeding the prejudiced concept of hippie with all its false and adapted bullet points...
As a matter of fact, the work of Joan Grossman says a lot against the topic. I was not expecting that and I was pleased to find something to really think about. From "I was not ready for that level of communal stuff" to the countless images of the women putting the children to sleep or doing domestic chores. Nothing wrong with that! As a matter of fact, the sequence of Towards Tomorrow: Utopia, showed prior to Drop City, showing domestic life with Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changing is tender and beautiful, albeit traditional. But, alas! They don't change the times! They perhaps can aspire to change themselves and that is a good start. Reminds me of that Sufi story of the youngster than prays to God to get strength and change the world, but ends up his life as an old man asking humbly for strength to change himself!... Watch the scenes here (minute 3' on) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb-DbSGg4Qg.
The founders dropped the world and looked for a renewed and better universe constructed from the disposed and wasted droppings of the old. This is very much in the Christian tradition -in my view, the greatest relief for the wronged: "I will build my Church with the stone disposed by the master mason", says the Christ. The thinking of those years is tidy, the symbolism, neat. The books of the time, in all the attractiveness of the aesthetics of the 60s talk of "living and non-living forces of nature" with exquisite delicacy. The radical choice of life of the founders of Drop City is as much radical as their search - those hippies took part for something and rejected something else,
took a modern choice, exhibited clear, sharp, exclusive ideas: this is better than that... The contradiction with our postmodern lives is flagrant - flows with the gaudiness of iodine tincture down the skin.
The original hippies of Drop City persevered also in finding new perspectives, new ways of looking at reality and its connection with something beyond. The filming we have today of Drop City were recorded in 16 mm. The presence of cameras those days is typical: you used it in the hope of finding a secret angle and then shared it with the rest. There were something religious in it!
The fall and end of the community came in with fights, the socking death of a 23 year-old girl and appalling stampede. The whole sweet castle of dreams crumbles down like made of cane sugar. The Beach chronicles the disaster in a faithful way. One can ask: The builders looked for everything that is human and that the alienating society had taken away, did they get it at least? Did they get something at last? The answer is no, and here the failure becomes irredeemable: it is the people of Trinidad and surroundings who is terrible concerned with the wretched lives of the adults and the precarious conditions of the children, while the hippies steadily dropped and flew away. Dropping droppers, how ironic!There was a moment when the cooking of outsiders was more valuable that any painting or any art. The moment when the search for humanity has stopped and the evil grass has occupied the darkest corners of the heart.
The evolution of the colony was not steady, being the rise and splendor swift and thrilling and the fall long and painful, exactly alienating, starting in 1967 after the debauchery of the Joy's festival. In the beginning there was a clear element of exclusivity in it. The city was art, talent, knowledge, inspiration, spirit, heart; secrecy, confidentiality, tenderness, everything that is called humanity, etc. Not everyone is capable of that much! Those founders were special... Once the door was opened to all, myth and mediocrity popped in, like water filling the available space. Touristic visits, excessive parties, drugs, justifications and abandonment, everything that was not in the beginning and that the builders did not look for came in. Bans and manifestos were born, catchy sentences and monolithic consensus were drawn. The spirit, gone; the idea, deceased. Just another giant crystal-lie for the world, untouchable and phony... . I was sitting in the theater, looking left and right and whispering to myself that the show itself was the umpteenth perversion of the original idea: all those genuine hippies making themselves naked to the voraciousness of such a gregarious audience... Yes, modern, stylish Londoners, but tribal and fashionable, feeding the prejudiced concept of hippie with all its false and adapted bullet points...
As a matter of fact, the work of Joan Grossman says a lot against the topic. I was not expecting that and I was pleased to find something to really think about. From "I was not ready for that level of communal stuff" to the countless images of the women putting the children to sleep or doing domestic chores. Nothing wrong with that! As a matter of fact, the sequence of Towards Tomorrow: Utopia, showed prior to Drop City, showing domestic life with Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changing is tender and beautiful, albeit traditional. But, alas! They don't change the times! They perhaps can aspire to change themselves and that is a good start. Reminds me of that Sufi story of the youngster than prays to God to get strength and change the world, but ends up his life as an old man asking humbly for strength to change himself!... Watch the scenes here (minute 3' on) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb-DbSGg4Qg.
The founders dropped the world and looked for a renewed and better universe constructed from the disposed and wasted droppings of the old. This is very much in the Christian tradition -in my view, the greatest relief for the wronged: "I will build my Church with the stone disposed by the master mason", says the Christ. The thinking of those years is tidy, the symbolism, neat. The books of the time, in all the attractiveness of the aesthetics of the 60s talk of "living and non-living forces of nature" with exquisite delicacy. The radical choice of life of the founders of Drop City is as much radical as their search - those hippies took part for something and rejected something else,
took a modern choice, exhibited clear, sharp, exclusive ideas: this is better than that... The contradiction with our postmodern lives is flagrant - flows with the gaudiness of iodine tincture down the skin.
The original hippies of Drop City persevered also in finding new perspectives, new ways of looking at reality and its connection with something beyond. The filming we have today of Drop City were recorded in 16 mm. The presence of cameras those days is typical: you used it in the hope of finding a secret angle and then shared it with the rest. There were something religious in it!
The fall and end of the community came in with fights, the socking death of a 23 year-old girl and appalling stampede. The whole sweet castle of dreams crumbles down like made of cane sugar. The Beach chronicles the disaster in a faithful way. One can ask: The builders looked for everything that is human and that the alienating society had taken away, did they get it at least? Did they get something at last? The answer is no, and here the failure becomes irredeemable: it is the people of Trinidad and surroundings who is terrible concerned with the wretched lives of the adults and the precarious conditions of the children, while the hippies steadily dropped and flew away. Dropping droppers, how ironic!There was a moment when the cooking of outsiders was more valuable that any painting or any art. The moment when the search for humanity has stopped and the evil grass has occupied the darkest corners of the heart.
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