San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
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When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro.
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There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
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Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume the hellish cycle is complete.
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Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.
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The world of the commodity is a world updside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.
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People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.
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The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.
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People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are
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Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.
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In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a ...
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To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.
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As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.
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