A recent post by Mike Steeden made reference to a song by Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit,” which was written and sung by Grace Slick, and has become one of the enduring icons of the Sixties Counterculture.
This video by an old associate of studio arago, Minnie Bloom, is a video collage-poem that uses texts and images from the underground press of the period–Berkeley Barb, East Village Other, Great Speckled Bird, NOLAExpress, Buddhist Third-class Junk Mail Oracle, among others–with links to current social and cultural unrest. “White Rabbit” is key to the piece, especially from about half way to the end.
A companion video collage-poem, also by Minnie Bloom, is “fifty years go by.”
The phrase “Sous les paves, la plage” (Beneath the paving stones, the beach!), slogan of the May 1968 Uprising in France, was a reference by the Situationists to the vast yearning for a freer, less “paved” society to replace the one created by the image-consumerist-dominated one of the time (which is still running things, of course).
We don’t live in the past, but we drag it around with us wherever we go, even if it’s to the beach.
We haven’t heard from Minnie for a while. She writes on countercultural themes under various pseudonyms, but none have turned up lately. We hope she is alive and well and busy analyzing the world beneath the Corona stones.
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