RIP Dennis Hopper Borderline 60s
We hate to be scholarly, but it is one of the Latin phrases we have memorized: Requiescat In Pace, also known as Rest In Piece.
Dennis Hopper passed from this earthly coil recently. He was an influential member of the founding class of the school of popular culture. While his personal life was full of vim and vigor, from a cinematic point of view he helped turn things on its ear and made some money too.
We have a third printing of the screenplay of Easy Rider for sale. That is our brush with greatness, to flip through the pages of a yellowing paperback and think back to the days of our fleeting youth.
Dennis Hopper was one of the actors, he also helped write the screenplay for the prototypical counter culture movie. He has an interview as part of the book, he used the word "groovy" alot. This edition was printed in December, 1969, about as late in the 60s as you can get. A lot was claimed for this movie, that it changed the studio system from the big studios to the independents, that it created a kind of musical soundtrack of contemporary music with the wide selection of musical artists. It won a prize at Cannes, the imprimatur of European approval for the young upstarts, Peter Fonda, Terry Southern and Dennis Hopper. Back in the day when "upstart" had the meaning of rebellious and unwilling to accept the status quo.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, the imposition of a cultural Hegelian Dialectic as it were, we are now living in the Post-Modern period when the former rebel has now become de rigueur leader. It is almost obligatory in the decades since to put on the vestments of a rebel to pay homage. There may be a few rebels, but they are just a few handfuls living off the grid in Taos. And clutching a copy of the venerable Whole Earth Catalog as they fill rubber tires with shovel fulls of sand as they build their Earth-Ship houses off the grid. Even Willy Nelson just got his hair cut. And the fact that it was dutifully reported as newsworthy is itself a story that reflects back to that earlier time.
Blue jeans are not a gesture of solidarity with the working class, but in fact are a kind of reverse Mao jacket of conformity, everything the same in a uniform from the waist down. And within a few more years, in the mid-to-late 70s the spectacle of "designer jeans" created a kind of looking-glass commentary on fashion as the elements of odd-ball expressionism and thrift-shop bohemianism first pioneered by the Beat Generation became remanufactured as a new corporate ethos.
We did not even understand half the lyrics. Steppenwolf was a group that featured one of the signature tunes in the movie, who were named after a Herman Hesse novel, and when they belted out the lyrics to "Born to Be Wild", we did not guess that they would still be singing the same song 30 years later. And that "heavy metal thunder" was the sound a guitar makes. Back then, heavy metal was an obscure phrase from a William Burroughs novel, the Soft Machine, not a musical genre. And we had no idea what they were singing.
"Heavy metal thunder" was just heard in our ears as duh-duh-dah-duh, as many of the lyrics to the songs were back then. There was no print-out or web-page that some devotee had sat down and played a CD over and over. There were only vinyl records, and there were just mostly magazines for young people, and a few books like this. This is a little time-capsule from that long ago era.
Dennis Hopper passed from this earthly coil recently. He was an influential member of the founding class of the school of popular culture. While his personal life was full of vim and vigor, from a cinematic point of view he helped turn things on its ear and made some money too.
We have a third printing of the screenplay of Easy Rider for sale. That is our brush with greatness, to flip through the pages of a yellowing paperback and think back to the days of our fleeting youth.
Dennis Hopper was one of the actors, he also helped write the screenplay for the prototypical counter culture movie. He has an interview as part of the book, he used the word "groovy" alot. This edition was printed in December, 1969, about as late in the 60s as you can get. A lot was claimed for this movie, that it changed the studio system from the big studios to the independents, that it created a kind of musical soundtrack of contemporary music with the wide selection of musical artists. It won a prize at Cannes, the imprimatur of European approval for the young upstarts, Peter Fonda, Terry Southern and Dennis Hopper. Back in the day when "upstart" had the meaning of rebellious and unwilling to accept the status quo.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, the imposition of a cultural Hegelian Dialectic as it were, we are now living in the Post-Modern period when the former rebel has now become de rigueur leader. It is almost obligatory in the decades since to put on the vestments of a rebel to pay homage. There may be a few rebels, but they are just a few handfuls living off the grid in Taos. And clutching a copy of the venerable Whole Earth Catalog as they fill rubber tires with shovel fulls of sand as they build their Earth-Ship houses off the grid. Even Willy Nelson just got his hair cut. And the fact that it was dutifully reported as newsworthy is itself a story that reflects back to that earlier time.
Blue jeans are not a gesture of solidarity with the working class, but in fact are a kind of reverse Mao jacket of conformity, everything the same in a uniform from the waist down. And within a few more years, in the mid-to-late 70s the spectacle of "designer jeans" created a kind of looking-glass commentary on fashion as the elements of odd-ball expressionism and thrift-shop bohemianism first pioneered by the Beat Generation became remanufactured as a new corporate ethos.
We did not even understand half the lyrics. Steppenwolf was a group that featured one of the signature tunes in the movie, who were named after a Herman Hesse novel, and when they belted out the lyrics to "Born to Be Wild", we did not guess that they would still be singing the same song 30 years later. And that "heavy metal thunder" was the sound a guitar makes. Back then, heavy metal was an obscure phrase from a William Burroughs novel, the Soft Machine, not a musical genre. And we had no idea what they were singing.
"Heavy metal thunder" was just heard in our ears as duh-duh-dah-duh, as many of the lyrics to the songs were back then. There was no print-out or web-page that some devotee had sat down and played a CD over and over. There were only vinyl records, and there were just mostly magazines for young people, and a few books like this. This is a little time-capsule from that long ago era.
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