A review by Pam Hanna
About half way through this book, I got the bright idea of listing all the people mentioned in it that I knew personally, had met, or knew of. When the number reached 50, I stopped counting. It’s easier to count the people in it that I DON’T know – on the fingers of one hand. Three of my oldest and dearest friends are featured here, one pictured on the cover. So I can’t be unbiased and objective about these "tribal tales from the heart of a cultural revolution." I lived them and I loved them, so for me it’s a manifesto.
It enters you into a movie of life in those days in Taos. A rainbow of different voices speak. And the voiceover of the narrator is sure and true. Most delightful was remembering things I’d all but forgotten – like the Oriental Blue Streaks (a band), Da Nahazli (a hip school), Old Martinez Hall (a place) and the summer solstice at New Buffalo (a happening). Here in these pages, I’ve found people and places I haven’t thought about for a long time – Feather, Preacher, Pabla, Teddy the Juggler, Hotsy Totsy, the Stagecoach Hot Springs, the General Store, peyote meetings on the mesa, Little Joe and Henry Gomez. It all comes back in color and glory and story and song and it's food for the heart.
"I was always on the hunt for a mythological explanation of the world," says Keltz. "We were reverting to an old form – tribalism – but in a very new way. We would not be a tribe because of lineage, race, language, or tradition. We were a rainbow of people becoming a tribe because we had a collective belief in an alternative to materialism, greed, military power and an unpopular war fought using our brothers, schoolmates and boyfriends."
Not that there weren’t some down times and hard times and foolish mistakes and even dangerous blunders. The author makes that clear. We were feeling our way, making it up as we went along. We knew that the only way to change the world was to change ourselves. And we did that. None of us who lived through those times are the same people today. It was colored funny and fun and scary and serious.
I caught some inaccuracies, – but those are all in the memories of individual voices here. And there were some incidents and people and communes left out (it’s a BIG tapestry). But none of them are egregious errors or deliberate slights or misrepresentations as those often found in other chronicles of this time. Somebody said, "If you remember the ‘60s, you weren’t there."
When you’re living the life from day to day, it can seem ordinary. You chop wood and haul water, you cook oatmeal for the kids, you gather watercress and rose hips by the rio, but when you step into the world of this book, and the author does her magic, the patina of years transforms it into a whole round thing – like a soap bubble in the sun.
I learned a lot about what I’d missed out on – the hippie New Mexico oracle, "Fountain of Light" and the hippie-made Bicentennial silver and gold concha belt that was worth many thousands (but priceless really) and destined for the Bicentennial 1976 exhibit at the Smithsonian – but was stolen. I slept through all that but it sure is nice to know about it now.
There’s no index in this, so you can’t look up any nouns, but after reading the whole thing, I think I understand why Iris didn’t do an index. The story, the saga, is greater than its individual parts and greater than the sum of its individual parts.
Says Keltz, "We were the critical mass that could change the direction of our capitalistic society" and, "…we were unafraid of our inconsistencies, a people who embraced paradox as the slippery road to a glorious future."
Friends who have this scrapbook have told me that they skipped around, reading only about themselves and their friends, but I recommend doing as the White King advises. "Begin at the beginning; go right on until you come to the end; then stop." That way, you know what to go back to and look at again – photos, drawings, dialogue - whatever. Even if you don’t know a single person, place, or idea in this book, I believe the work stands on its own merits as a valuable historical chronicle. Sounds like marbles rolling, doesn’t it? Rolling through this scrapbook, this album, this experience. Splendid stuff.
..... Pam Hanna
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