Groove Tube

[Dave Monroe]

>From Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties
Television and the Youth Rebellion (Durham, NC: Duke
UP, 2001), Ch. 1, "'Clarabell Was the First Hippie':
The Television Generation from Howdy Doody to
McLuhan," pp. 21-60 ...

   "Robert Roberts's piece explaining McLuhan's
importnace to the movement in the East Village Other
crystallized how hippie youth were taking up McLuhan's
idea of tribes:

   We, the electric-age generation, have been the
first to feel the impact of the retribalizing effect
of the new multi-media environment.  We grew up with
television, which fed our brains with millions of
black and white dots electronically arranged and
rearranged into microsecond patterns and images.... 
We are in the age of gestalt and shape.  We are no
longer die-cast parts of a national mechanism.  We are
a tribe.
   We are the new breed of American Indian who smoke
grass and hash and drop peyote as a tribal ritual....
We are the reincarnation of oral, pre-literate man....

"The hippies and freaks of the East Village and of the
Haight-Ashbury were, thus, harbingers of social and
cultural change.  Created by interaction with
television, they were the shape of things to come. 
McLuhan had said so.  They embodied not only the
appearance of a tribe but the cognitive processes and
values described by McLuhan as characteristic of the
electronic age." (p. 40) 

[citing Robert Roberts, "New Size," East Village
Other,
August 3, 1969, p. 4]

And so forth.  Chapters on The Monkees, Yippies, The
Mod Squad, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, et al. 
Hippies as seen on teevee (inc., yes, Dragnet and Star
Trek).  Just thought some of you might be interested,
is all.  Reminds me, it's a long ways away, but I
wouldn't mind doing Vineland next.  It's been a while,
for me, at any rate ...

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