Berkeley Hippie Revival Project

Thank you to all of y’all that popped out and had a good time with us on that street corner. We played till 1 am and had a lot of people joining us. The energy of it all was incredible and just makes me excited for what we have in the future.

If anyone wants a concert to happen again, just let me know, and I will coordinate with some musicians about bringing it out.

BHRP TURN THE FUCK UP

If You Want To Table

If y’all want to do what I do and stand on Sproul to yell at people with art supplies, YOU CAN BE AS WELL!!

Purchase a pack of chalk in the art store for 6 dollars, and send me a photo of the receipt. I will refund you.

Go out to Sproul and start yelling at people to participate in the art project you came up with on the spot.

Art is the perfection of human capability. That means everything is art if you think it the right way.

I started rolling when I was 15; now I’m cracked, maybe you can be as well.

I’m setting this up for next week, Saturday? lmk if that works.

If anyone has a location large enough to host this, also lmk. If not, I’m thinking Glade. We will see.

1950, in Quito, Ecuador, Pachi was born. The middle child of 6, he was roudy. Climbing and camping on Mount Pichincha at 8, fighting in the brawl pit at 12, learning gymnastics at 14, joining the military at 18, and getting into trouble with students and teachers for the whole of his young life, Pachi was a man in pursuit of all worldly excitement.

He once hid in a trench from the cops.

He once humiliated a sergeant.

At 16, he met my grandmother, Loly. They had their teenage love story, breaking up and getting back together several times, and after she moved to New York at 17, he followed, becoming a dock worker for a month and a half before she dumped him, getting kicked out of where he was staying as well. Fuck it, he moves to California, almost getting stabbed out back a busser gig. He then picks up a bunch of construction work, moving back to Ecuador to start a business using the trade knowledge he got. Eventually, he returns to California, gets a wife, a daughter, divorces, finds another wife, gets another daughter, and divorces again.

My grandma had my mom with a different man from Ecuador she married 5 years after Pachi left. She had another daughter with the same man 7 years later. They divorced in the first half of 2005.

I was born October of that year. 

Four years later, my aunt married. At the wedding, I was the ring boy, and I had met my grandfather for the first time. After 40 years of being apart, Pachi had found himself again with Loly at his side, and now with little jit me as well.

As I grew up, he taught me how to build houses, throw knives, drive trucks, and how to love this world in the way I think one should.

“Joventud que no hace temblar el mundo no es joventud.” 

Youth that does not make the world fear it is not youth.

A teacher told him that in high school. He repeated it to me on his hammock. It rests in my heart. I want to run with it as my torch to pass.

I think a lot about what BHRP is and what it could mean for Berkeley:

We are the youth, those alive today with the hearts of change; there is a world to make fearful.

Graeme Gilloch writes in Walter Benjamin Critical Constellations: “the constellation – a figure constituted by a plethora of points which together compose an intelligible, legible, though contingent and transient, pattern.”

When I read the piece for this week, Alexis Rico’s writing (while more straightforward than Benjamin’s) deeply reminded me of the power that comes from a dancing narrative.

“I hear claims that we “have enough clothes already.””

“I don’t own a rosary…”

“Why is that? Perhaps I struggle with letting go…”

That Necklace – Alexis Rico