Alice in Wonderland

[Purron]

Today DH turned "double nickels". To celebrate, we went to a nice restaurant for lunch then headed to see "Alice". My mom came and we all had a great time! Was the movie perfect? Well, no. Did we enjoy it? You betya! Depp was great as the Mad Hatter. On the way home, DH and I thought about this:

YouTube - Jefferson Airplane -White Rabbit-

Guess we're just a couple of old hippies

 

[Zero]

Well, happy birthday to your DH and thanks for giving me a reason to pull out my oldies and give them a listen. Actually, I've got them all digitized so no "pulling out" but gosh it brought back memories.

After listening to Alice, some Joplin and some Canned Heat, I told the wife listening to the music from the late 60's and the 70's made me feel like getting naked and ... To which she responded, "Good God, puhlease don't." But we both agreed that listening to today's music is about like having moderate constipation.

So a few thoughts, and first comes to mind that my parents really disliked Joplin, Hendrix, Grateful Dead, etc and somehow that made me like the music more. Also that being in a group of near-total strangers in Golden Gate Park sharing some joints and listening to Stone Free on a late 70's boom box was so liberating that the rest of the world seemed far away. And talking to someone about the lyrics of a song started like this; "hey man, what's your bag?", "just doing my own thing man.", "wow,far out, man", "yeah, I been grooving on this chic over there", "hey man, I can dig it." And somehow it seemed like a profound conversation.

After thinking for a while, maybe this is it:

…see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars,…and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.

Can you guess who?

 

[CuppaJoe]

Glad you liked the movie, Purron, we plan to go next week.

 

[Onward]

refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming

OMG. All the hippies ended up on this board!

I don't know who wrote that, but I'd like to know. Maybe Ken Kesey?

I saw Alice last night and thought it was just okay. I'll take Surrealistic Pillow any day!

 

[haha]

After thinking for a while, maybe this is it:

…see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars,…and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.

Can you guess who?

Kerouac?

BTW, I really liked Canned Heat too.Tried to see them whenever they came to LA at the end of the 60s. I rememeber on a warm night sitting at the stage door of the Ash Grove, when it was sold out when I got there.

That night John Lee Hooker opened. His Endless Boogie really seemed endless.

Ha

 

[Zero]

Kerouac is was. He combined the best of hippie, beatnik, hobo and vagabond. If I could choose who I would be if I came back in a second life it would be a toss up between Jack Kerouac or Josephine Baker.

Grace Slick did get credit for penning the lyrics to White Rabbit and I suspect that is true.

 

[CuppaJoe]

Here's a recent thread on what one member called, "the Kerouac lifestyle":

http://www.early-retirement.org/for...untry-drive-roughing-it-44961.html#post829506

 

[Zero]

I drove from San Diego to Yellowstone a few years back and that's still fresh enough in my mind to temper my yearnings for the road.

 

[Purron]

If I could choose who I would be if I came back in a second life it would be a toss up between Jack Kerouac or Josephine Baker.

Both fastinating people. Even so, I'd want to come back as my cat Bob. He totally lives in the moment and doesn't have a care in the world. Lucky guy.

 

[haha]

Kerouac is was. He combined the best of hippie, beatnik, hobo and vagabond. If I could choose who I would be if I came back in a second life it would be a toss up between Jack Kerouac or Josephine Baker.

Grace Slick did get credit for penning the lyrics to White Rabbit and I suspect that is true.

If you come back as Josephine, please give me a jingle.

Ha

 

[Zero]

Josephine could really shake a banana and with much appeal.

 

[RonBoyd]

Josephine could really shake a banana and with much appeal.

YouTube - Josephine Baker's Banana Dance

 

[RonBoyd]

An interesting thought:

Algebra in Wonderland

In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. ... Such loose mathematical reasoning would have riled a punctilious logician like Dodgson. And so, the Caterpillar is sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah — suggesting that something has mushroomed up from nowhere, and is dulling the thoughts of its followers...

She thinks this is the root of her problem: “Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.” No, it isn’t, replies the Caterpillar, who comes from the mad world of symbolic algebra. He advises Alice to “Keep your temper.”

In Dodgson’s day, intellectuals still understood “temper” to mean the proportions in which qualities were mixed — as in “tempered steel” — so the Caterpillar is telling Alice not to avoid getting angry but to stay in proportion, even if she can’t “keep the same size for 10 minutes together!” Proportion, rather than absolute length, was what mattered in Alice’s above-ground world of Euclidean geometry.