Your daily dose of Hippie culture

Hippie artifact of the day

California

"California" from Blue by Joni Mitchell, 1971 on youtube.

Joni is a painter. (I am a painter, I live in a box of paints) She happened to also have a natural talent for music. We listened to this album over and over. Great dulcimer draws you in, and then you hear some intelligent, witty, thoughtful and personal storytelling. Moving, and fun.

It's only in the last few years that I learned I'll even kiss the Sunset pig referred to a cop on the Sunset Strip. I always figured it was a cultural or literary reference that was over my head. And I met a redneck on a Grecian isle refers to Carey, from another great song on this album.

Genuine Hippie Sez:

Paycheck

Did you ever see the movie Paycheck? It's based on a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick.

The premise of the story is that the protagonist has sold a year of his life-- it will be erased from his memory-- for a whole bunch of money.

What PKD did there was take stuff we already do-- sell our labor for money, sign Non-Disclosure Agreements-- and re-cast it slightly. Instead of selling half his waking hours for forty or so years in order to not die in poverty, the hero sells one year, but not only couldn't he share in the eventual fruits of his labor and experience, he couldn't even retain any memory of it.

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but over the course of the year, our hero has evidently come to the conclusion that it was a raw deal. It's an action film that takes off from there.

But I wonder if maybe PKD thought that selling half our waking hours for forty or so years in order to not die in poverty is kind of a raw deal, too...