Inherent Vice

[Bekah]

Great post,  Robin -   yes,  I think too that the hippies in LA area  
were more invisible because of the age-old surfer scene there - to  
say nothing of the newer Sunset Strip/Hollywood Blvd stuff.   Life  
was very different in the southland, all sprawled out along the coast  
and moving inland I'd say from about Santa Barbara in the north end  
to San Diego at the south.   North of SB was the Coast Highway for  
hippy hitchhiking and south were the beaches for surfing - hippies in  
both areas of course but the idea of hippies was transplanted from  
the Bay Area,  surfers were native to the south.

Bekah


On Mar 4, 2009, at 8:37 AM, Robin Landseadel wrote:

> 	. . .A statue of a lonely hippie-looking guy wearing only a
> 	headband and a loincloth stands amid the ennui (and the hot
> 	dog cart). His name is “Fernando,” a rugged icon commissioned
> 	by Mayor Sam Yorty in 1968. According to its placard, he is “a
> 	symbol of the first inhabitant of the San Fernando Valley.” If
> 	Fernando could see, he'd see – alas – nothing much out of the
> 	ordinary. Business as usual.
> 	http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/ 
> and_that_s_the_name_of_that_tune/1753/
>
> Sam Yorty, Mayor of L.A. from July 1, 1961 to July 1, 1973. A  
> Democrat who turned Republican in 1972. The man in charge of L.A. &  
> L.A.P.D. during the riots of 1965. It was Mayor Sam who [obviously  
> in the pockets of Big Oil & Big Auto makers] made the L.A. freeway  
> system the monster it is today.
>
> 	. . . In the 1969 mayoral primary, his popularity slipped well
> 	below that of Los Angeles City Council member Tom Bradley.
> 	The ensuing campaign between Yorty and Bradley, managed
> 	for Yorty by Jerry Pournelle, proved one of the most bitter in the
> 	city's history. Yorty painted his opponent as a dangerous
> 	radical, alternately of the black power or communist
> 	revolutionary varieties. While ludicrous — Bradley had spent
> 	much of his career in the Los Angeles Police Department — the
> 	charges resonated among fearful voters, and Yorty was re-
> 	elected.
>
> 	Despite winning another four years, Yorty showed obvious
> 	signs of boredom in his position. He ran again for governor in
> 	1970 but was handily defeated for the Democratic nomination
> 	by state House Speaker Jess Unruh, 1,602,690 (61.4 percent)
> 	to 659,494 (26.3 percent). Unruh in turn was defeated by
> 	Reagan, who secured his second term as governor by a
> 	smaller margin than his 1966 plurality over Pat Brown. Yorty
> 	began to leave all but the most important decisions to his staff. . .
> 	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Yorty
>
>
> 	. . .Yorty was tagged with numerous nicknames, such as "Mayor
> 	Sam" for his folksy demeanor, and "Travelin' Sam" for his globe-
> 	trotting at public expense. Others include "Shoot-From-the-Lip
> 	Sam," the "Maverick Mayor," and "Saigon Sam" by those who
> 	claimed he was more concerned with South Vietnam than
> 	South Central Los Angeles. This moniker was also the result of
> 	his very vocal support of the Vietnam War and the fact he was
> 	spending so much time in South Vietnam. It was said Yorty was
> 	the only mayor with a foreign policy: "Bomb 'em back to the
> 	Stone Age" he said in regard to the Viet Cong in Vietnam. . .
>
> 	. . .Yorty began his career in politics as a liberal Democrat, but
> 	swung to the other end of the political spectrum over the course
> 	of his career, becoming a conservative Republican. His official
> 	switch from Democrat to Republican took place in 1972, when
> 	George McGovern won the Democratic presidential nomination. . .
> 	http://www.accuracyproject.org/cbe-Yorty,Sam.html
>
> Mayor Sam was an evil little punk who consistently mispronounced  
> "Los Angeles" just like these folks do [for obvious comic purposes]:
>
> http://www.firesigntheatre.com/albums/hcyb2.mp3
>
> Unlike Berkeley, with Telegraph Avenue & San Francisco with the  
> Haight as population centers for freaks of all persuasions—L.A. is  
> diffuse:
>
> 	. . .San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named
> 	places in California it was less an identifiable city than a
> 	grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-	
> 	issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to
> 	its own freeway. But it had been Pierce's domicile, and
> 	headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten
> 	years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on
> 	which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or
> 	grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed, would set
> 	the spot apart, give it an aura. But if there was any vital
> 	difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was
> 	invisible on first glance.
> 	The Crying of Lot 49, pages 13/14 [perennial Classics ed.]
>
> L.A.'s Hippies hung out in Laurel Park, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Mt.  
> Washington, parts of Hollywood, a few at campuses in Westwood &  
> Pasadena, a few on the beach. One area of periodic concentration  
> was the Sunset Strip on the weekends [resulting in "For What it's  
> Worth" and, eventually, CSN] though the Renaissance Faire—then in  
> Agoura, a town that resembled San Narcisco in so many ways—was an  
> area of high concentration of Hippie culture. Thanks to the use of  
> rent-a-cops in that sylvan glade, pot smoking, tarot card reading  
> and body painting was out in the open and frequent at the Faire.  
> Everybody's favorite Paranoid, David Crosby, even wrote a song  
> about the Faire:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AFlBoxsAkI
>
> Speaking of paranoid . . . .
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei-erw0P7JQ&feature=related
>
> Unlike the post-People's Park display of muscle in San Francisco &  
> Berkeley, there was no post-Manson crackdown of Hippies in L.A.  
> Business as usual prevailed, Mayor Sam was too concerned with the  
> "Negro Problem" to get overly concerned with those damned Hippies.
>
> On Mar 4, 2009, at 7:06 AM, rich wrote:
>
>> also curious to know what the LAPD did, if anything, post-Manson--did
>> they crack down on the hippies even more (don't recall who the mayor
>> was in 1970, anybody?)
>
>