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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Seeing the Sixties, March 5, 2003
Hammond Guthrie's road through the Sixties was sometimes happy go-lucky, fun filled and tremendously creative. A multitalented poet, painter and musician finding himself in a decade that encouraged the artist to invent cool new worlds. He portrays his many journeys and places in a newly published memoir "AsEverWas."
There are also darker worlds in Guthrie's life and soul. And their pain and despair get the same clear thorough treatment as the great highs and happenings
that at the beginning, energized his path and pushed him forward.
Hammond starts out in southern California. His mother abandons him. His father is sort of mixed up in the American Intelligence community and is distant. There is a second wife and Hammond actually chooses military high school over family life. The school is filled LA-Hollywood type uncared for rich kids and Guthrie learns about sex, drugs and rock n'roll.
Moving on to San Francisco the author dodges the draft and provides us with one of the best in-print accounts of the method acting involved in pulling it off.
Along the way, he encounters the Diggers, Bolinas, Allen Ginsberg, Carmen McRae, experimental film making, improve theater and the over dosed colorful world of San Francisco's fantastic hip. He also adds to the adventure by taking a beautiful bold wife.
And then on to post-Beatles International Times William Burroughs London and he fully feasts on its experimental artistic community. And then to 'the dope is almost legal' Amsterdam with its Provos and houseboats. And Hammond the painter is discovered by Willem Sandberg, a great presiding maestro of the international art scene.
Up to now the tale told in AsEverWas is filled with endlessly expanding light. The Sixties are nurturing the author, developing his multi faceted talents and preparing for a larger stage and an enthusiastic reception. He is about to become famous. And then (as it was with so many of us) the rug was pulled out from under our feet. Since we were off the ground for much of the time, it took us a while to notice the terrible turn, but it did hit all the more harshly for our tardiness.
Hammond's wonderful wife and pal for life gets attracted to a hard core gang of dope smugglers and there is one in particular that stimulates her fantasies. The remainder of the memoir is an account of the destruction of the marriage and the almost complete spiritual dismemberment of Hammond Guthrie. He blames himself for his wife's alienation and gives up his art as a kind of punishment sacrifice, in order to make amends and win her back. The pair move on to Tangier for a fascinating, weirdly amusing telling of Hammond's efforts to spring his wife's lover from a Moroccan hell-house prison.
It struck me that the end both of Hammond's marriage and his art does so much resemble the collapse of the whole Sixties with it's new found passion for criminality over creativity and for an inexplicable capacity not to see the tragedy of it all.
What gets the reader through it and actually enthusiastic about the book is Guthrie's cool writing style. When he's describing the bitter, the sweet, Burroughs, Richie Havens, his wife, his father, Allen Ginsberg, a Dutch houseboat or a Moroccan cafe, the author is always generous in detail, ironic, gentle and insightful. You see, feel and understand the moods, people and places that shaped an extraordinary decade, even if its ending wasn't up to its promise.
I took a different trip back then--more political and activist, Berkeley instead of San Francisco, Algeria rather than Morocco, it's more like Hammond was a very likable neighbor than a member of my commune. Yet pouring over his life and times teaches me much about my own.
And that rarely happens. For its style and its lessons, Hammond Guthrie's memoir is a rare and important achievement.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A LIFE ARTIST, October 27, 2003
Remember Woody Allen's movie "Zelig" that places the chameleon-like Zelig in all the important places among all the major people of the history of the time? Insert "Hammond Guthrie" as Zelig in all these places from LA to London, from Amsterdam to Tangier and you'll get an idea of the scope of this memoir. In reviewing it, the temptation is to reel off lists of the famous people that the author has known. But one has only to glance at the well-appointed index to see the illustrious names. The spectrum of his contacts - artists, architects, cartoonists, writers, musicians, film-makers and even scientists - boggles the mind. He has a talent for schmooozing with people from diverse cultures and persuasions, famous and infamous. He can be the hipster extraordinaire in L.A, the proper gentleman in London, the cutting edge artiste in Amsterdam, as well as the flamboyant "European with two wives" in Tangier. His adventures there read like a page from Tennessee Williams' *Suddenly Last Summer* or Lawrence Durrell's *Alexandria Quartet* (but with a more engaging spin). Being all things to all people, he had his finger in every pie and his hand on the pulse of everything artistically innovative in the `60s and early `70s. In addition to being a painter, writer, musician and film-maker, he experimented with "...cinematic dissolve and juxtaposition of genre" in his "event rituals," tone poems and overdubbed happenings. There are hilarious episodes, from getting a fake marine ID in Mexico to his elaborate and ultimately successful ruse to avoid the draft. Once he jumped out of a car he'd hitched a ride in when the driver told him it was stolen. He ditched the "supposed narcosi" the driver had given him behind the first bush he came to and "...to avoid the obvious, I ducked into the darkened courtyard of a quasi-subterranean establishment called the Fifth Estate..." where he met some people he would know for the rest of his life. I most enjoyed the odd little serendipitous scenes such as the time when,
still in school, but working for the summer with his high school band buddies at a Lake near Tahoe, Hammond met three Angels who had descended on the town café, much to the perplexity of the waitress who made noises about closing at 9:30 a.m. When a smooth Latin voice intervened on his behalf, Hammond turned around to see "...three of the most ominous-looking human beings I had ever laid eyes on." After inviting them politely (he "knew enough to be very polite) to his band's evening at the local lodge, one of them asked Hammond if he "...drank beer or smoked dope." Says Guthrie, "I told him I certainly drank beer and had `tripped out on LSD once," but hadn't smoked any dope, which was the truth. (Never tell an Angel anything but the truth.") His "outlaw companions" cracked up at this. Then Hammond's benefactor handed him his "senior member of the Hell's Angels" club card saying that "...it might come in handy some day." It was signed, "Zorro." Two years later, Guthrie saw a news article that identified the three "modern-day gladiators" that he'd met in his youth. More years later, flat broke in Barstow, CA "...where tumbleweeds go to die..." a biker wearing Angel colors roared up and Guthrie's "speed-drenched brain" remembered Zorro's "well-worn wallet card." He "...stumbled up beside the hairy behemoth" presented him with the card and asked politely for assistance. Whereupon, "...he sized me up for just a second, smiled as only an Angel from Hell can, and said, "Hop on little buddy and I'll take you anywhere in the country you want to go." Or how about the time that Lawrence Ferlinghetti handed him the original hand-written pages of Jack Kerouac's *Scriptures of the Golden Eternity* or when Ginserg handed him a Tibetan Dorje and "...a numbing energy surged through my arm and my hand spasmed out in front of me like a humanoid dowser's wand!" Guthrie met with William Burroughs in London, who helped in publishing his *Belfast Insert* which was an experiment in "cut/up writing." "Cut/up writing" explains the author, "is an extension of Tristan Tzara's early Dada prose taken to a painter's point of view and then reapplied to the written word. The resulting texts of combined structure and newly formed contents offer an unusual approach to the written space/time continuum." (There is a picture of the cover of Belfast Insert in the very interesting photo section of the book). Of Emmett Grogan, Guthrie says: "I was especially enamored by his consciously plagiaristic use of Adolph Hitler's Mein Kamphian Diabologue at the Roundhouse in London, during the "Dialectics of Liberation" event, a counter-conference of hip dignitaries. At first he was vigorously applauded for his oration and then people cried out in staunch indignation when he revealed the origin of the words." And although Guthrie's heartbreak at the loss of his wife to a drug smuggler was obviously real and excruciating, perhaps the subtext of his reaction was that the event served as an excuse NOT to take the plum of artistic success offered him by Willem Sandberg (his mentor and friend in Amsterdam) and limit himself to painting alone but to remain free and flexible. All these experiences are liberally laced with copious amounts of pharmacopoeia of every kind from grass and hash to hallucinogens to amphetamines so these pages are compressed life. Elegant as champagne and caviar, rich as eggnog and cheesecake, the memoir runs cinematic-like reels through the imagination. Since the author's life is not over yet (his book begins and ends with his decision to kill himself) it's fitting that the very last words on the last page are "to be continued." One can only hope that the words mean just that and that in the fullness of time, we will be treated to the rest of the story. It will be well worth waiting for.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buckle up and settle down, March 6, 2003
Hammond takes you places you want to linger and others that cause you to shudder with fears you might not know you had. Either way, you are right there with him during a time minds and the world were ever expanding. No matter that your life didn't or isn't following Hammond's path; you will discover more of your own recesses along the way. Wherever he landed, he adapted to place and circumstance powerfully, and met up with some incredible people while there. You will laugh, you might cry; try it, you'll like it. It was the sixties, but you haven't read this story before.
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