The idea here is to write about San Francisco and the Bay Area from the early 1950s until 1967, ending when the Death of Hippie/Birth of Free parade was held there by the Diggers. While that is the idea, trust me it isn't easy to pull together a cohesive narrative about the period. So, I seized upon the thought of populating a bunch of pages with text from the work of many editors from many areas that are provided by the English version of Wikipedia. That text is published under a license that allows reuse with attribution, which can be achieved by a footer on those pages that also links to the original article, so all the associated editing history can ulitimately be discovered if necessary. It makes better sense to me, at this point, to fill a bunch of pages with text and then explore adding and changing what is the best of crowdsourced material into something more personally crafted. I don't know how or when this has been tried elsewhere, but that is what this site started as. The site is not intentionally haphazard or sloppy, it is just unfinished at all times.
High Flying Bird is managed by an independent amateur historian and writer living in New England in the United States. I have other interests which include all sorts of modern music, western civilization, modern politics, philosophy, science and naturalism. I do not have any particular agenda on the site, just a rampant curiosity and a desire to promote same among others. I was alive and listening to the music of the nineteen sixties as it was produced, but a lot of it became more important to me when I rediscovered it in my forties. I read Kesey, Ginsberg and Kerouac and others in the seventies and eighties, and am now finding more to like about them, their writing and their contemporaries. "Losers" and "drunks" are some of the labels I have heard tossed toward Kerouac and Neal Cassady at times; but I can attest I am better inclined to read and listen and agree in spirit with what they were digging than with the censors and military-minded opposite side of the spectrum in the United States in the fifties. And although it is difficult to comprehend some of the seemingly rambling and babbling philosophising that came from the Human Be-In and some articles I've read in the Oracle archives, it is something other than what came before and constantly sought to restrict and enslave minds rather than free them. I hope even a few people who find their way here will find further opportunity to open their minds to the period and discover more about it, rather than dismiss it as a world of "hippies" and psychobable, of hopeless romanticism, of "naive and impractical" lifestyles. The context is a world that existed between 1952-67, seven and twenty-two years after the first nuclear attacks in Japan; that is where the artists and students who sought to portray and express an alternative vision for humans existed. That context should be remembered alongside the relative view that comes with the benefit of distance.
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