Tuesday 31 January 2012

Hells Angels


Enough of PO-MO, that and a steady diet of hamster essays had me reaching for Hawkwind's Space Ritual, the live double album from 1973, this morning. Somethings clearly wrong. Still, it was refreshingly out there to hit the spot.
I'm going to talk about the Hells Angels to the second year on Friday. The subject is 'context' and they need to discover their options. By the time you get a third through Hunter S Thompson's 1966 book, his first, the part where he's beginning to realise he's more into this than he thought, it's clear the Angels have become figures of some importance, in fact not unlike the followers of Achilles in The Iliad. Now that's not what my mother thought, it's not what Mick Jagger thought either if you watch Gimme Shelter. However, the context in which the Altamont free festival was suddenly (there) considered a disaster and the 'end' of the sixties had more than a whiff of conspiracy about it. It seems, If you consider it in context, and read the Kool Aid Acid test at the same time, the Angels were integral to the whole scene in a more spiritual way than mum could possibly have contemplated. We should definitely think about our need for filthy outlaw gangs more constructively.

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