It's the place where my prediction from the sixties finally came true In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.
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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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Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
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Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaver-like tunneling to the top.
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When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.
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In the sixties, normal people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take prozac to make it normal.
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My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.
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This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
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We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship.
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The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.
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All that Swinging Sixties nonsense, we all thought it was pass? at the time.
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In the sixties, the world was normal and people took acid to make it weird. Nowadays the world is weird and people take prozac to make it normal.
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The Sixties, of course, was the worst time in the world to try and bring up a child. They were exposed to all these crazy things going on.
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If you can remember anything about the sixties, you weren't really there.
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The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.
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People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around -- the music and the ideas.
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The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
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I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a learning experience. Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a learning experience. It makes me feel less stupid.
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