Eighties Survivors by Larry Harvey

The wheel seems to have turned, we feel that way. I have a friend who was interviewed, they said “So you're a ‘Sixties Survivor’, eh?” and he said “Listen, I lived in the Sixties, I survived the Eighties”.

The miasmal mists of the 80's seem to be clearing. Everyone's gradually emerging from the Great Cocaine Decade, where everyone took cocaine and turned their hearts into cold lumps of suet and went out and sold real estate and made money. What a terrible experience it was to be filled with lust even as your heart grows cold. The decade of greed is over. I think now that people are beginning to feel it, it might be possible to find ideals which won't betray us. And I think having gone through what we've been through, we may be coming close to earning it and deserving it. The times are very much changing. I see young people now who not only have the idealism of youth but through life experience are equipped to actually implement those ideals.

Perhaps the 80's served a purpose after all, in the last decade there were a lot of groups, a lot of artists and creatives who went underground and worked in poverty, worked in obscurity. The fruit of that, the seeds sown in that time are beginning to sprout with a force of the blade of grass that buckles pavements in its progress upwards, there is something stirring. Its probably good that people had to labor away alone. Suddenly all these groups are shooting up above the ground and looking round and finding one another again. But with a difference...

The hippies seemed to believe that you could plug your stereo into a redwood tree. It was a time of obscene abundance, food was free, the government gave it to you! Everybody was living off college loans that you didn't have to repay, to be a hippie and form a colony all you had to do was find a woman who got checks from home - and who would do the cooking - Oh those were the days! It wasn't productive of real communalism, it was a fantasy of culture in some ways because it wasn't based on the struggle of really surviving together. It was too easy to survive then. Today, God knows we're all running and struggling to survive but in fact its bringing people together in a way that leads to the real experience. Many of the groups who are joining us today have learned that lesson and as a result I don't think that what we've developed is going to be expropriated and turned into another consumable commodity. We're offering something that can only be experienced personally and with others within the context of a living community.