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Countercultural rarity visual overload Keeping it cosmic.

11/01/2026

Halloween hangover: clip from Sc**zo (1976) by Pete Walker, starring Lynne Frederick.

Sc**zo is essentially a British interpretation of Italian giallo, a thriller/horror film genre that blends whodunit murder mysteries with graphic violence, eroticism and surreal visual style.

Lynne Frederick was in a lot of interesting films including FarOutCo fave Phase IV (1974), directed by legendary graphic designer Saul Bass. The year following Sc**zo she married Peter Sellers, when she was 22 and he was 51. When Sellers died in 1980, she inherited most of his estate and became the center of a major tabloid controversy in the British press. The Daily Mirror featured her in a list of disgraced public figures and she was labeled a “gold digger.” Her career never recovered.

10/29/2026

A mini celebration of The Serial, the satirical book (and movie) about the cultural moment in late-‘70s Marin County, California when the ‘60s counterculture became a suburban lifestyle: hot tubs, meditation, organic food, open marriage, encounter groups, permissive parenting, consciousness expansion, personal growth and endless work on oneself.

The Serial began in November 1975 as a weekly column in the Pacific Sun (the oldest continuously published alt-weekly in the US) by Cyra McFadden, accompanied by illustrations by Tom Cervanek. But an earlier San Francisco version of The Serial was penned for the short-lived SF edition of the Sun by Armistead Maupin. It saw five installments and eventually took on a life of its own as Tales of the City.

When the San Francisco edition of the Sun shut down, Maupin wanted to continue The Serial in the paper’s main Marin locale but he wasn’t very familiar with Marin. Enter Cyra McFadden, who was recruited by the Sun’s editor. She focused The Serial on the idiosyncratic lives of a fictional middle-class Mill Valley family, and deftly incorporated references to every ‘70s (counter)cultural trend you can think of, often adopting the jargon of the human potential movement which she overheard constantly in conversations around Marin.

The original version of the book is spiral-bound and large format and makes highly entertaining reading—kind of like an illustrated, smartly written New Age soap opera. My copy includes a handwritten note from McFadden to a friend (last slide) which perfects it. The movie version with Martin Mull and Sally Kellerman (both well cast) came out in 1980—it’s a pretty good time but the book is more interesting. McFadden hated the movie and walked out on the premiere.

McFadden was originally from Montana, the daughter of a traveling rodeo announcer on the cowboy circuit, and made her way to Mill Valley in the ‘60s. She passed away on her houseboat in Sausalito at the age of 86 in 2024

10/25/2026

Clip from Watched (1974), starring Stacy Keach and directed by John Parsons. It’s a counterculture crime drama that feels more like an experimental underground film than a conventional thriller.

Prosecutor Mike Mandell (Keach) becomes personally involved with the people he polices around Haight-Ashbury and Marin (including a commune on Oak Street). He begins to suffer from a mental disorder that periodically transforms him into a separate drug-abusing mobster personality known as Sonny, which complicates his relationships and creates an identity crisis.

10/24/2026

Imagery from classic guides to ‘60s Swinging London 🇬🇧

- Young London: Permissive Paradise by Frank Habicht (the GOAT)
- Birds of Britain by John d Green
- London Scene by Juergen Suess et al.
- Alternative London: Survival Guide for Strangers by Nicholas Saunders
- Len Deighton’s London Dossier (one of my favorite spy authors was also terribly hip)
- Carnaby Street by Tom Salter
- Letterhead from Kleptomania boutique, Carnaby Street

10/17/2026

Imagery from ‘70s issues of Seed, the UK’s pioneering Journal of Organic Living which connected healthy eating with the ecology and counterculture movements of the ‘70s 🥦 🥕🧝‍♀️

Craig Sams, along with his brother Gregory (creator of the original VegeBurger) and father Ken, started Seed in 1971. It was part of a whole constellation of pioneering organic food businesses that each fed each other.

First there was Seed macrobiotic restaurant, which had John Lennon and Yoko Ono as regulars and was allegedly where Marc Bolan met Mickey Finn to form T. Rex. Then Ceres Grain Shop opened, offering restaurant patrons brown rice, beans, miso, tahini and seaweed to cook at home. This led naturally to Harmony Foods, a wholesale business selling bulk ingredients to natural foods stores (much like Erewhon in Boston at the time, before private equity and influencers). Then Ceres Bakery launched, turning the organic grain they sourced into wholegrain breads. Seed magazine advertised all these businesses prominently.

In the late ‘70s, Craig and Gregory launched the Whole Earth Foods brand for supermarket shelves, and later commissioned pop-psychedelic artist Larry Smart (featured here not long ago) to design the branding.

[Soundtrack by Yes, featured prominently in issue 6]

10/10/2026

I had heard the story of the Fleetwood Mac “Munich Incident” of 1970, when the band attended a party at a castle in the forest owned by mysterious “rich hippies” who gave the band large quantities of L*D, which allegedly psychologically “destroyed” guitarists Peter Green and Danny Kirwan. I was wondering who these “Munich Jet Set hippie brats” (as Mick Fleetwood called them) were. It was these two.

Rainer Langhans and Uschi Obermaier came to Munich’s Highfish Kommune from Berlin’s Kommune 1, where Langhans participated in provocations such as the planned “pudding assassination” of visiting U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Ursula “Uschi” Obermaier was a successful model and actress who was originally involved with the Munich art-and-music commune Amon Düül, and later involved with Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger. While living at Kommune 1, the press called them “the most beautiful couple of the APO”—the German extra-parliamentary opposition.

After Kommune 1 disintegrated in 1969, the couple joined Munich’s Highfish Kommune and quickly became its public face. Obermaier’s modeling income became the commune’s principal source of funds. Langhans was a strategist and “practical media theorist” who envisioned Highfish as a pop-media factory, producing photography, fashion, posters, video, underground film and major concerts.

The “Munich Incident” for Fleetwood Mac actually took place over a few days in March 1970 and involved a lot of basement jamming with members of the Amon Düül circle at Kronwinkl Castle. Fleetwood Mac’s surviving members remembered it as the night Green was “taken away” from them. Green remembered it as a voluntary, musically liberating experience that enabled him to break through the blues language he had been playing for years. He also connected the trip with a vision of an angel holding a starving Biafran child, which he interpreted as an instruction to help others, reinforcing his already growing desire to give money away.

After the incident, Green came back to London and released his solo album ‘The End of the Game,’ which many critics disparaged as “directionless jamming” but which sounds pretty great if you’re into Krautrock.

10/04/2026

Imagery from ‘70s issues of Spare Rib, a pioneering UK women’s liberation magazine founded by Rosie Boycott (previously of Frendz underground newspaper, featured here not long ago) and Marsha Rowe.

Spare Rib emerged from the counterculture and borrowed the look of a conventional women’s magazine but filled it with left-leaning feminist and ‘70s New Age wellness content. As the ‘70s evolved it became more punk and a forum for debate among different streams of the movement.

10/03/2026

Footage from ‘W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism’ (1971) by Dušan Makavejev.

The film is far-out and intercuts fictional and documentary elements. The fictional side is an imaginative and satirical narrative about an outspoken female advocate of sexual liberation who seduces a Stalin-like Soviet celebrity figure skater. The documentary side clipped here features Reich’s daughter Eva and footage from Reich’s Orgonon estate in Rangeley, Maine, which is a beautiful place to visit. Makavejev said that the film was “in part, a personal response to the life and teachings of Dr. Wilhelm Reich.”

Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst and protégé of Freud who developed a clinical approach that linked emotional life to the body, a social theory that linked sexual repression to authoritarian politics, and a body of experimental research into what he came to call orgone energy. Among other things he had a deep influence on the ‘60s and ‘70s counterculture, as many of his ideas became foundational to the human potential movement (bodywork, Gestalt therapy, primal scream and encounter groups popularized by Esalen all trace directly back to him) as well as commune and back-to-the-land communities.

I was once pretty obsessed with Reich as a student at the New School, where Reich taught in the ‘40s until he started getting in trouble for claims about his orgone accumulator, which then fueled his paranoia. He was ultimately imprisoned for violating an injunction prohibiting interstate shipment of orgone accumulators, and died of a heart attack at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.

09/26/2026

Pentangle getting more electric than usual on Australian TV circa 1972

This song ‘Reflection’ is an original jam (it just sounds ancient), but many of their songs were traditional ones that they transformed and made their own. Singer Jacqui McShee brought the traditional songs (English, Scottish, Appalachian, American spirituals), though she’s said she didn’t own folk records and was mostly listening to jazz. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn were major figures in London’s acoustic-guitar scene, while bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Terry Cox were essentially jazz musicians.

They often treated an ancient ballad as a jazz standard, with the old song supplying the melody and the harmony while the band supplied an entirely new rhythmic and harmonic environment. Renbourn specifically said that Terry Cox would devise percussion around the internal rhythm of the old song rather than simply putting a rock beat underneath it.

09/25/2026

Early ‘70s shots from the Sausalito hippie houseboat scene by photographer Pirkle Jones.

Soundtrack by David Crosby, from the album he wrote while living on a Sausalito houseboat in November 1970.

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Ossipee, NH
03864

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