Personal Blogs

☮️ 🌻 ❤️ 🎵 To help you get into the revolutionary '60s cultural scene - some text and images from a UK underground paper - the International Times (IT). I picked a copy up secondhand (wish I could say I'd been a subscriber, but I was only 3 in '68 😀) and enjoyed dipping in as I went through the 1960s unit of A113.

There was a lot of music content - most were advertisements, but John Peel had a regular column, this week he was extolling the virtues of what must have been Leonard Cohen's first album and the Doors LP 'Waiting for the Sun'.

There was quite a bit of interest in mystical mind expansion...



The personal ads were obviously an earner for the publication - there were a few messages seeking gay male contacts, but most seemed to be aimed at discovering 'adventurous' women - the one from the 'underground photographer' made my skin crawl 😬  

  

There were articles on students in South Africa, anti-Vietnam War protests in London and this reference to events in France...



I was interested in the following bit of drug 'health information' - it was produced by the charity Release which had been started the year before, providing information and legal support to people with drug problems - it's still going! The macrobiotic restaurant advert made me think about how much food culture has changed - and whether that's another area where 'counterculture' in part became 'mainstream'?

 

I became more interested in the cover art as my reading about the counterculture and links with the birth of personal computing developed. The 'spirographic' images and the distortions of the 'Vitruvian man' were 'computer generated' as part of the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA in London.

 

This video footage shows the curator Jasia Reichardt discussing the exhibition on the BBC 2 programme Late Night Line-Up


Finally the back page is this fantastic advert for a classic sixties 'happening'....(£3!!!)





Don't worry if, like me, you'd never heard of this event - some further research revealed that the following message had to run in the subsequent edition of IT..... ☹️