Just Grab Your Hat and Take That Ride

Related Content

• Robert Frank: Beat-Gen photographer
  July 16, 2009
• Timothy Liar
  June 1, 2006
• The Day-Glo Effect
  December 30, 2004

More About

• Peter Orlovsky
• Books and Literature
• Book Reviews

Like this Story?

Get the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Make sign up easy with:

The oxymoron of conventional wisdom repeats the canard that hippie-era communes were simply safe houses for sex, drugs and rock & roll. While communards enjoyed fleshy and sensory pleasures, they also worked as hard as — maybe harder than — most squares. Author/photographer Roberta Price lived at one, Libre in Colorado, for seven years, an adventure detailed in her fascinating memoir Huerfano. Her new book, Across the Great Divide: A Photo Chronicle of the Counterculture, is a visual tour of Southwestern communes. One of them, the Reality Construction Company, explains the communal raison d'etre in its name: Young people were reinventing life from the ground up. We see groups of freaks toiling in the sun, building domes and rock houses, raising children, milking goats. In one of the most striking images, poet Peter Orlovsky chops wood in the nude, revealing his laborer's musculature as well as Price's smart eye. Accompanied by a slide show tonight, she'll discuss her days as a 20th-century pioneer woman amidst her fellow rural space explorers.
Sat., Jan. 22, 5 p.m., 2011