60s Legend Inspires Music Today

It’s Woodstock all over again in Live Oak, Fl this summer. My personal favorite band, 311, will be hosting their first ever multi-day music festival on August 4^th-6^th. The three days full of laid back music will take place at Suwanee Music Park, where camping is allowed and encouraged. More bands will attend the festival including Sublime with Rome, The Dirty Heads, and others. Several activities (besides rocking out to some great music) that are offered at the grounds include: canoeing, hiking trails, mini golf, fresh water fishing, biking, and even indoor activities like yoga, karaoke and stand-up comedy. 

  Woodstock '69

Upon hearing about this, I instantly thought about the Woodstock ’69 Music Festival. The infamous peaceful gathering from August 15^th-18^th of 500,000 people and 32 musical performances on a 600-acre farm in Bethel, NY was definitely an inspiration for many future festivals. The vision of Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, John Roberts, and Joel Rosenman, the four men who essentially planned the festival, turned out to be a greater success than anyone had imagined.

Michael Lang

Taking Woodstock is a good movie to watch to get a taste of what the festival was like. The film is a true story about Elliot Tiber, who was a local resident of Bethel and gave Lang a permit to hold Woodstock there.

Like Woodstock, 311’s Pow Wow Festival this summer, as part of their Unity Tour, is meant to unite and celebrate the community through music and peace. This will definitely be an experience worth taking. If you can’t make it out to Florida, however, 311 will be touring from July to August this summer. Here’s a link to their shows: 311 Unity Tour

311

Let the sun shine in

The Tony Award Winner for Best Musical Revival, Hair, will soon be returning to Broadway!

The cast is currently on tour, playing in Hartford, Ct, but I suggest to anyone who wants to see a good Broadway show this summer, make your way to this one. 

“HAIR tells the story of a group of friends choosing to speak up and sing out in celebration of love, life and freedom. The first great rock musical, it has some of the most rousing and soulful songs ever written for the stage, including ‘Let the Sun Shine In,’ ‘Easy to be Hard,’ ‘Good Morning Starshine,’ ‘Aquarius’ and the infectious title song, ‘Hair,’” writes the HAIR official site.

I saw this play with my family and I can admit that it was a little awkward sitting next to my parents during one nude scene. Other than that, it’s definitely one of the most fun shows that I’ve been to. The best part was getting up on stage at the end of the show and dancing to ‘Let the Sun Shine In.’ 

Legalize it!?

The topic of marijuana has been blazing in the news these days. There are 15 states plus DC that have legalized the use of medical marijuana but some want to go even further with it. Last November, Proposition 19 was proposed to California voters, which offered to legalize the recreational use of pot in certain amounts for adults over 21 years old.

The proposition was not passed but “Richard Lee, the Oakland, Calif., medical marijuana entrepreneur who sponsored Prop 19 said the fact that 3.4 million Californians cast ballots for legalizing marijuana and that Prop 19 came within 9 percentage points of passing were victories themselves,” as found in an article published by the Huffington Post.

Supporters of the proposition vowed to push marijuana legalization in 2012.

The popularity of this drug sometimes called marijuana, pot, weed, ganja, kush, maryjane, reefer, cannabis, herb… whatever you might know it as… dates back from as you probably know, the 60s!

Many agree that marijuana was primarily introduced by the Beat culture. These were the edgy writers, which experimented with drugs and forms of sexuality, incorporated within the hippie generation. Seemingly overnight, marijuana became the most popular recreational drug during this time.

Hippies are known, among other things, for their excessive use of drugs in the 60s, specifically marijuana. So with all this talk of the legal recreational use of pot, are we all just a bunch of hippies deep down?

Whether you are for this law or not, I think this portrays that there is a little bit of hippie in all of us today and that the effects of this generation are very well instilled upon us.

The hippie style is definitely a trend that has come back into today's fashion world. So, how do you dress the part these days?

Free People has everything you need to give you the perfect 60s look! It's a little pricey, but definitely worth it.

Anthropologie is another one on the more expensive side but you can find everything there from clothes to shoes to furniture.

Forever21 is the store we all know and love. You can get a headache just by walking in there, but if you have the time to dig around, you can find some really cute things.

H&M has a lot of clothes with a bohemian/60s inspiration.

Urban Outfitters adds to the list of stylish, trendy clothes with hint of hippie.

"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have." -Andy Warhol

Among many other things, the 60s was one of the most monumental time periods with some famous names like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg. What am I talking about? …ART!

These artists reinvented the way we see our everyday things in a whole new mass-produced way known as pop art. Most of the paintings from this time are prominent all around the world, like these:

Warhol's 'Marilyn Monroe' and 'Campbell's Soup Can'

 

Lichtenstein's 'Sunrise' and 'Gall' 

Oldenburg's 'Clothespin' and 'Apple Core'

   

"I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me." - Roy Lichtenstein 

Today, we can see famous 60s art popping up in galleries all over. As I recently found out in an article posted by the LA Times, the Norton Simon Museum is featuring "Surface Truths: Abstract Painting in the Sixties.” The showcase will focus on a few abstractionists who were notable in the 60s: Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Ralph Humphrey and Kenneth Nowland to name a few. “Their work was minimalistic with little brush work resulting in a magnitude of color, stripes and geometric shapes.”

Other famous 60s works appearing in art museums today include Wayne Thiebaud at the Crocker Art Museum, the Weisman Museum hosted an exhibition of 60 works by Lichtenstein, “Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960s” currently exhibited at the Telfair Museum of Art, and many more.

Movie Review: Across the Universe

"Across the Universe" is about love, war, passion, peace, and music! The story follows a poor artist from Liverpool and the girl he falls in love with, an upper-class American, in the 60s. This musical includes 34 Beatles' originals that go along with the storyline.

The film is directed by Julie Taymor and stars Evan Rachel Wood (Lucy), Jim Sturgess (Jude), and Joe Anderson (Max), with appearances made by Bono, Eddie Izzard, Joe Cocker, Salma Hayek, and others.

This movie goes right alongside with "Forest Gump" in best films made to try to understand the 60s. It was a 2007 Golden Globe Nominee for Best Picture and 2007 Academy Award Nominee for Costume Design. 

To give a brief description of the film, Jude starts the movie off as a young worker from Liverpool who leaves his home in hopes of finding his father in America. In his path of doing so, he comes across Max, who eventually drops out of school and moves to New York City with Jude. Jude also meets Max’s sister, Lucy, whose boyfriend is serving in the Vietnam War. However, sparks fly when the two meet and as their relationship grows throughout the movie.

When Lucy visits her brother, Max and Jude in the city, she finds out that Max is drafted into the army and becomes more involved in the anti-war movement. 

One of my favorite scenes from the movie:

This movie allows you to see an artistic point of view in all aspects of the 60s from the groovy hippies to the fighting soldiers, while following the lives of two very different teens in love and the effects of the 60s on them and their relationship.

There are a lot of moments in this movie that will give you the chills, whether it be from the reality of the 60s or the love between Jude and Lucy. If you haven’t already done so, I would definitely recommend buying this movie because you’re going to want to watch it over and over!

Across the Universe- Official Site 

Jack Johnson has that modern day hippie thing going for him, which I am absolutely in love with. 

If this isn't feel-good music, I don't know what is. Not to mention the video is awesome!