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Photo by Lisa Law
I wrote about Nico, the odd, deep-voiced chanteuse of the Velvet Underground here. The photo I posted is actually a cropped version of an original by "rock" photographer Lisa Law. Nico has her feet (precariously) on the ground, as though she fell from the sky (or a tree). So even in my original interpretation of the cropped version, I was right that her movements showed the instability of someone wavering between free fall and stability.
Here is what Lisa Law, the photographer who took the black and white photo of Nico writes about her experience with mind altering paraphernalia. She was in good compaly with Nico.
Psychedelics assisted me in seeing that we are all one, not just us humans but everything on the planet, the animals, the trees, the water, the air, the earth, the plants. God is always present. It is a very humbling, unifying, heeling feeling that affected the way I looked at the rest of my life.Below is a much better photo of Nico. The freedom one associates with floating, swimming or being in water with all our senses in tact (which is how I like being near or in water) is not there. She is overwhelmed, and has a defiant, but frightened look, goading the water to come get her, as she probably does the heroin she used to smoke (shoot), and yet is petrified at the same time. Her behavior is not one of bravery, but of recklessness, as she well knows. Even Lou Reed writes in his heroin song: "Heroin, be the death of me."
The first time I took LSD, Owsly's purple liquid, I knew life would never be the same.
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Photo by Michael Ochs
All people want stability and beauty, amongst many other human (humane) necessities. Hippies are no exception. Law lived in a hippie commune called the Castle in San Fransisco, which she describes as a mansion. Below is a short transcript from her interview with journalist Tom Lyttle. I cannot find the date of the interview, but it looks like it is in the 1990s. The online version is a pdf article and is clearly a copy of an original. It is also available as an html online. This excerpt is from page eighteen if the article:
If the Factory [Warhol's New York studio] was a place that the beautiful people hung at...then the Castle was the West Coast version of that. Word traveled fast and in the two brief years that we were there, everybody came by to visit and hang out, partake, party, sing, make love, eat, write songs and dance their hearts out. Tom Law and John Phillip bought it with Jack Simons for mere $100,000 and had to sell it at a loss. John Getty owns it now.Vultures like Law and Warhol collected their beautiful people only to desecrate and destroy them later. This is what Wikipedia says about Nico, after her initial glamor and beauty wore off:
Nico was a heroin addict for over 15 years. In the book Songs They Never Play on the Radio, James Young, a member of her band in the 1980s, recalls many examples of her troubling behaviour due to her "overwhelming" addiction...Shortly before her death, Nico stopped taking heroin and began methadone replacement therapy while also embarking upon a regimen of bicycle exercise and healthy eating.
Despite her career in music, she was deaf in one ear, which made it difficult for her to understand what others were saying.
On 18 July 1988, while on holiday with her son on the Spanish island of Ibiza, Nico had a minor heart attack while riding a bicycle and hit her head as she fell...[She] died at eight o'clock that evening. X-rays later revealed a severe cerebral hemorrhage as the cause of death.
Nico was buried in her mother's plot in Grunewald Forest Cemetery in Berlin. A few friends played a tape of "Mütterlein," a song from [her album] Desertshore , at her funeral.
Mütterlein
By Nico
Dear little Mütterlein
Now I may finally be with you
The longing and the loneliness
Redeem themselves in blessedness
The cradle is your homeland-dress
A gracefulness your glory
In ecstasy your heartbreak transforms
And reaches inside of the victorious tide
Beauty alone is not enough.
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Photo by Lisa Law
Bob Dylan also stayed at the Castle. Above is a photo of a corner of his room by Lisa Law, beautiful and ordered, with a Tiffany style lamp, a patterned cloth on the table, and some small carved animals. He has a view.
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Photo by Lisa Law
Above is the Castle where the hippies hung out. Beauty is clearly not wanting, including a sports car, meant for the rich and famous but why not for hippy squatters as well?
Drudge has an article about drug use (abuse) in contemporary teens from in the suburbs, and links to this Daily Mail article. Not crack or marijuana for these pampered adolescents, but heroin. These are the children of the sixties.