Sixties Hangover

    "We have all been here before.
    almost cut my hair;"
    the refrain from Crosby, Stills. Nash & Young
    reading more like a law firm letterhead than
    any invocation for real social change.
    Respectability, that first casualty of the eighties.
    What, exactly, was a true child of the sixties?

    Here's a few safe bets:
    Valedictorians were few and difficult to find for their "irrelevant,"
    high school peers. Are you listening Paul and Paula?
    Cutoffs. Hitchhiking to California?
    All is beautiful. Laid back. Beads.
    The sixties were a jukebox that came of age.
    Ponderosa shirts were destined to outlive their owners.
    Thirty-three is perilously close to being afraid.
    Elvis Presley, a blimp at forty, missed the sixties or rather
    failed to live them down.
    The hullabaloo of freedom was taken for granted, then shelved.
    Amid a crescendo of killing only a year and one half of the present
    decade duplicates the assassinations of the "violent sixties."
    Even the cop troupe withered, crooned Eric Burton at Monterrey.
    I think not.

Paul Cameron Brown

Paul Cameron Brown is a Canadian poet known for his extensive work in both poetry and art criticism. Born in western Canada, Brown has had a prolific career in writing, often intertwining themes of human experience and nature. His works have been showcased in various literary magazines and anthologies. With a style that is both reflective and evocative, he has gained recognition not only in Canada but also internationally.

Paul Cameron Brown

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This Way To The Sixties: John Lennon's Death Five Years After

It was a red letter day and all within a decade, the sixties.

Psychadelic and all because the Electric Circus opened up
Walking Yonge Street in the December cold, aging
"hippies", the word itself a joke, reminisced:

National Guardsmen, for one, doing post-mortems on
their rifle butts, record covers carrying the first life-
sized zippers and mashed up rubber dolls; Cher Bono
getting up nerve and a career to name her child
Chastity but walking off with a card.

By the end of the decade they were asking questions.

We had landed on the moon per schedule but who
would have believed in the efficacy of Rock or the
efficency of napham before Vietnam? Frosted hair.
Body paint. The sixties produced a lot of it. With one
bullet, the Beatles, the secular savi...

Paul Cameron Brown

Chain Letter

    I'm sitting in a "sixties bar." No put-on.
    All around old Rolling Stones music is playing.
    I can tell it's a sixties bar by the spiffy waiter recycling sheets for
    tablecloths. The sixties was "into," environment.
    It's the eighties now as Heineken was unobtainable in 1969.
    Someone reminds me in order to run a tab a credit card is needed.
    This seems logical but very out of sorts with the people power complex I'm nurturing.
    Even the jokes above the bar are old hat.
    This confirms with certainty that Madcaps is Nostalgia.
    It's too built up for Sha-Na-Na, fintails or Nancy Sinatra's,
    These Boots Are Made For Walking.
    In my sensible decade that tune is considered sadistic. Obviously,
    the effect is too sophisticated to imagine I'm even ...

Paul Cameron Brown

What Became Of The Sixties?

    The "Haight," in Ashbury lived up to its name.
    Sexual pioneers became commonplace.
    Agribusiness consolidated the back to the land movement.
    Joni Mitchell remortgaged all the tree museums.
    Flower power became a snivelling joke.
    Groovy and way out once again were associated with corduroy pants & fire exits.
    Fascism was taken over and made respectable by Ronald Reagan.
    Jewish mothers and landladies outguessed the War on Poverty.
    Strobe lights were said to cause cultural myopia.
    The Just Society lost another Vietnam.
    Rock music recycled itself in "meaningful dialogue."
    Innocence learned a lot from experience.
    Contemplation of one's navel was resurrected by phenomena
    of the eager and job hunting corporate executive.

Paul Cameron Brown

What Colour Is Love?

    Sixties idols were built to last.
    A 70's idol is shoddy and throwaway by comparison.
    Whatever became of Carnaby Street or bell bottoms?
    The mentality is alive and well (another dreadful anachronism) in smart up-town boutiques.
    The proprietors, though, don't sell little bells to freaks anymore.
    Luxurious Persian rugs, instead, are all the vogue.
    And bail money for vendors hawking copies of Guerrilla on the
    streets of Toronto or Black Panther leaflets in US cities isn't needed anymore.
    Who was Bobby Seale? Who remembers?

    The first generation in history, a new consciousness...
    Remember the Greening of America?
    Escape From Freedom?
    The futuristic think tankers?
    consciousness III?
    Bombers turning into butterfl...

Paul Cameron Brown

Dash Into Realism: Escape Pad From The Sixties

    For one, street argot became tougher.
    You had to distinguish between what you meant by calling someone a mother.
    The Black Panther influence, no doubt, but a rejuvenation of the
    language. Street fighting man. Butchery at My Lai.
    House arrest for Lieutenant Calley so strangely appropriate for the times.
    So middle class and a tribute to "doing one's own thing":
    Rampant, militant individualism, the hallmarks of expression.
    Sit-ins, love-ins, peace-ins. The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test,
    anyone? The sixties were the highwater meritocracy from the
    foremost "me decade".
    Getting right on target for the narcissism of the seventies.
    Or so it was rumoured.
    What's next in the social roller derby?
    Cutbacks, retrenchments, accountabil...

Paul Cameron Brown

Sanguine

"The clock indicates the hour but what does enternity indicate?"
    Whitman

Imagine, being told cubism isn't painting. That
Beardsley didn't die at 26, unheralded as a boy genius
or Corot didn't come to Paris after all.

Imagine, The Louvre without a rooftop, the
intelligentsia sitting down to a ragged table
surrounded by sawdust intellects, Proust not being
able to write his name.

Now that's splendour    -    that's in-depth "feeling".
That's emotion to pull your socks or catch the bus on
a brittle day.

It's easy. Try to "feel" the event. It's 1896. People are
perturbed (or so we are told) because the century's
getting old. Time's rushing by. There's an alarm clock
set to buzz at eternity's gate, Midnight 1900.

In probing the mal...

Paul Cameron Brown