Overview
Hippie Picaresque moves through the Summer of Love, the magic moment in 1967 when everything seemed possible. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury is heating up the popular imagination, but Norm’ small time drug deals make it too hot for him, and so he takes to the road, leaving his true love behind. He hitches through a real America “just out of reach” to Portland that is decades away from establishing itself as a cool place. His college friend Nick offers shelter and a menu of alternative life styles that can’t compete with the lost highway, and Norm finds himself back on the Interstate, thumb extended toward Seattle. Only to be picked up by two young women headed home to Vancouver in a little sports car pulling a camping trailer. Even with vintage clothes, basement bands, and Kitsalano Beach, Norm discovers that Canada and America are not the same place. The open road calls and he makes his way back across the border to a Seattle crash pad, troubled love, abundant LSD, and a moveable feast of friends.
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Description
Hippie Picaresque moves through the Summer of Love, the magic moment in 1967 when everything seemed possible. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury is heating up the popular imagination, but Norm’ small time drug deals make it too hot for him, and so he takes to the road, leaving his true love behind. He hitches through a real America “just out of reach” to Portland that is decades away from establishing itself as a cool place. His college friend Nick offers shelter and a menu of alternative life styles that can’t compete with the lost highway, and Norm finds himself back on the Interstate, thumb extended toward Seattle. Only to be picked up by two young women headed home to Vancouver in a little sports car pulling a camping trailer. Even with vintage clothes, basement bands, and Kitsalano Beach, Norm discovers that Canada and America are not the same place. The open road calls and he makes his way back across the border to a Seattle crash pad, troubled love, abundant LSD, and a moveable feast of friends.
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About the author
After writing Hippie Picaresque, John Bishop and taught himself documentary photography and film. In 1971-72 he spent 1½ years in Nepal while his wife investigated the socio-ecology of langur monkeys in a Himalayan forest while living in a Buddhist temple village. Forty years later his association with the village continues. It was the subject of his first book (An Ever Changing Place, Simon & Schuster 1976), and of the ethnographic film, Himalayan Herders (1997), which covers 25 years in the life of the village.
He has made (produced, shot, and edited) more than twenty ethnographic films, often in collaboration with folklorists and anthropologists. Rhesus Play (1977) was an investigation of why monkeys play. The Land Where the Blues Began (1979) explores the musical and sociological origins of the blues and was made with folklorists Alan Lomax and Worth Long. New England Fiddles (1984) and New England Dances (1990) present French, Scottish and Irish music and dance traditions in the northeast United States. The Last Window (1989) follows the nationally renowned Connick Studio of Boston making their final stained glass window. Khmer Court Dance (1992), Cambodian Court Dance: The Next Generation (2001), and a documentary still in production about the global resurgence of Cambodian dance after Pol Pot, are the fruit of a long-term collaboration with Cambodian ethnomusicologist Sam Ang Sam and choreographer Chan Moly Sam. Hosay Trinidad (1998) looks at the complex communities that come together for a Shiite Muslim observance in the Caribbean.
As an Associate Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, John Bishop workied with both professional and student dancers and choreographers translating dance to the screen.
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