University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

Page 27 text:

Man, age 22. Although born in Berkeley, he has lived here only the last three years. I love the city. A lot of my friends, though, are antsy to move out to the country. They get over-amped here, and a lot of them are kind of in limbo. Like at the age I ' m at, 22, most of my friends have just graduated from college and we don ' t want to get into a heavy work scene yet. So we all do part time work and we ' re all artists on our own time. We ' re trying to do it in our own way without getting into a big hassle and Berkeley ' s the best place to do that. You can do what you want as far as art ' s concerned and you can still find a part time job to keep the money on an even keel. For example, one of the finest glassblowers in all of California, like he enters competitions and he can ' t help but win because he does such beautiful work. He ' s working as a waiter at a crummy restaurant so that he can build up his glass studio. He can ' t do what he ' s meant to do and he ' s waiting on people that have no idea that in half an hour he could blow a vase that would be worth $300. It happens all the time. We get exploited to death because there are so many artists. We ' re going to be really poor in art if we don ' t watch it, so we refuse to be bus-boys full time. We ' re poor, but rich in th e mind. Before 1 came here I lived all over the world, and it ' s nice because all my friends come and visit. You know, everybody goes to Berkeley after a while to see what ' s happening, and it ' s nice to be here to tell them. There ' s always something happening in art in the area, so I take them to the museums. Also, I kind of enjoy tripping down Telegraph Avenue. When my friends come around and I go down there with them, even I am completely amazed by all the changes. Like stores change so fast on the Avenue, it ' s incredible. There was a restaurant which turned into a flower store and now it ' s a clothes store and I think that ' s going to fold soon. One thing I like about the people in Berkeley is that they seem to appreciate the changes in weather. When it rains they go indoors, and when the sun shines everybody ' s out, to the mountains or just wandering on the streets. The houses are so friendly. They have a sense of history because they ' re old and they ' ve been enjoyed by different people — someone ' s built a platform for a bed or knocked out a hole for a window or painted a whole room to look like a cloud. 1 live in a little tiny house with a bright red door with a unicorn on it with a golden horn. Actually, although I ' ve lived all over, 1 was born around here and I lived in the area when I was younger. It ' s a hell of a good place to be from, and it ' s a good place to come back to. Like when you have one thread to go from and have all the threads coming off of it, like a spider ' s web, you can do all these different thread trips and then come back to one main thread to see what ' s happened to everybody else. Berkeley ' s a good sounding board to find out what people are thinking, to reassess your own thoughts and values.

Page 26 text:

Man in mid-20 ' s; born in Berkeley I grew up in this house from about the time I was two and a half until I went off to college, and then my father lived in it by himself after my parents got divorced. He was going to sell it, so a bunch of us who were living in a few different houses, but were all friends, got together and said we wanted to rent it from him. He agreed and we all moved in. There ' s eight of us living here and we all do pretty well together. Before we moved here, all us lived together in different combinations for a couple of years — like two of the people would have an apartment and two other people would go there and crash frequently. A bunch of us lived in a farm workers ' organizing house in Oakland with two or three or four to a room. For a while I was trying to get together a bunch of landlords that I knew vaguely, and people who were into police science and so forth, to try to get together a neighborhood where it was all a non-profit corporation with a school and church and you didn ' t have to pay property taxes and stuff like that. But I didn ' t go very far on it. It was kind of a crazy idea and I realized that I couldn ' t pull it off. It would be overrun if there was actually free rent and that wouldn ' t work too well because it would get raunchy fast. I feel more realistic now. There ' s all sorts of stuff like who cleans up the dishes when somebody leaves them, and how to deal with your daily life. I do painting and hauling and gardening to get my money and just hang out, working on myself, trying to make myself happier. When I first quit school I wanted to change the world. I got into political organizing of some sort, waking everybody up to political consciousness. I had a really good time doing that — it was fun. I could do anything I wanted, go anywhere I wanted and talk to a lot of people, which is what I really get off on. Then I started working with an alternative school, quit rabble- rousing in the high schools and decided I ' d try and create a positive model. I did that for about a year and a half and then I got discouraged at the prospects. For me anyway, I wasn ' t getting as much as I wanted out of it — I found myself going to sleep and waking up worrying about the students, and I didn ' t need that hassle. Then I decided to teach what I wanted on my own, general hippie stuff, you know, sensitivity training and massage and body awareness. It worked OK for a while and then I discontinued the group. Now I ' m into radical psychiatry. I ' m taking individual classes not connected with the University and definitely a Berkeley phenomenon. I ' m in touch with a group of people who ' s into the same kind of thing as I ' m into, which is hard to put into words, but is basically the connections between emotions and your body, sensitivity awareness, and trying to figure out how to be happy. That ' s an orientation toward things which seems to me to be meaningful, rather than who ' s got the shiniest car or who can smoke the most dope or whatever.

Page 28 text:

Woman, age 27. She has been in Berkeley six years. I came to Berkeley in the fall of ' 67, because of grad school first of all. The move was very pragmatic on that level, but part of the choice was my interest in the Free Speech Movement. I was interested because Berkeley was sort of the vanguard of that, even in ' 67. I didn ' t stay here though. I got really claustrophobic around the end of spring quarter in ' 69, and I had to get out; it was sort of a survival measure. For a couple of years I was going back and forth between here and the East Coast, and that changed a lot of my feeling about Berkeley. When I felt like I could get out of here, then it was really nice to be here, but the first two years had a very closed feeling. In some ways, I think Berkeley was more self-contained then. There was a mythology holding it together, and there was a lot of overt action that made you feel you were in a very identified place. All of that made me need escape valves, but things are quieter and less organized and energy is more diffused now. When I first came here there was this great myth of openness and intimacy and people smiling. My house had a fire escape outside the kitchen window and people would climb up there and play their recorder into my kitchen and put flowers through the window and go through all these rituals. Well, at first they seemed to me to be beautiful and spontaneous and warm gestures, but I began to realize how tremendously lonely it made me to go through the Garden of Delights when it was in a way all cardboard. There were all these gestures and no back-up, no fire behind it. I don ' t understand what ' s going on right now since I ' m more inward than at earlier points. I take more time for myself, for creativity. I feel much less pressured from the outside now. When I first came here there seemed to be this great swallowing motion all the time. I remember sitting on Sproul Plaza at three in the morning in October during the Oakland Induction Center demonstration in ' 67 and actually there was this sound, this swallowing sound of people buzzing, talking, getting together for this all night watch to be there at six; people chanting and actually hearing that suction of a great and devouring sense of group identity. It can ' t just be discounted as mass psychology; there ' s really an important ritual aspect to it. Now, there are very few places to get that kind of level of ritual. When I first came here there was the celebration of the summer solstice and beautiful pastoral actions of people meeting together in the parks — you didn ' t know everybody but that didn ' t matter. Even demonstrations sometimes turned into a sort of pastoral action. There was a very conscious seeking of ritual on the part of a lot of people and sometimes it really worked. And when it worked, speaking for myself, it was really important to see that it could happen. It would be a shame if in this new cycle, whatever it is, that all that be lost.