L’ancien président Eisenhower décède à l’âge de 79 ans.

Yoko Ono et John Lennon se marient à Amsterdam et font un  « bed-in » comme lune de miel en faveur de la paix. Ils resteront au lit durant une semaine et leur intimité sera filmée pendant une semaine , le film nommé « Honeymoon » sera projeté à Londres au new cinema Club.

L’agence Ugly offre dix livres de récompense à tous ceux qui leurs apporteront des photos de mannequins très laids.

Le zoo de Vincennes a reçu 25 000 lettres de soutien contre le massacre des bébés phoques au Canada.

Escapin’ through the lily fields
I came across an empty space
It trembled and exploded
Left a bus stop in its place
The bus came by and I got on
That’s when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land

- Grateful Dead, lyrics from “That’s It for the Other One”

During the early 1960s novelist Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters lived communally in California. Members included Beat Generation hero Neal Cassady, Ken Babbs, Carolyn Adams (aka Mountain Girl), Wavy Gravy, Paul Krassner, Stewart Brand, Del Close, Paul Foster, George Walker, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt and others. Their early escapades were documented in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. With Cassady at the wheel of a school bus named Furthur, the Merry Pranksters traveled across the United States to celebrate the publication of Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion and to visit the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City. The Merry Pranksters were known for using marijuana, amphetamines, and LSD, and during their journey they “turned on” many people to these drugs. The Merry Pranksters filmed and audiotaped their bus trips, creating an immersive multimedia experience that would later be presented to the public in the form of festivals and concerts. Grateful Dead wrote a song about the Merry Pranksters’ bus trips called “That’s It For The Other One”.

During this period Cambridge, Massachusetts, Greenwich Village in New York City, and Berkeley, California, anchored the American folk music circuit. Berkeley’s two coffee houses, the Cabale Creamery and the Jabberwock, sponsored performances by folk music artists in a beat setting. In April 1963, Chandler A. Laughlin III, co-founder of the Cabale Creamery, established a kind of tribal, family identity among approximately fifty people who attended a traditional, all-night Native American peyote ceremony in a rural setting. This ceremony combined a psychedelic experience with traditional Native American spiritual values; these people went on to sponsor a unique genre of musical expression and performance at the Red Dog Saloon in the isolated, old-time mining town of Virginia City, Nevada.

In the summer of 1965, Laughlin recruited much of the original talent that led to a unique amalgam of traditional folk music and the developing psychedelic rock scene. He and his cohorts created what became known as “The Red Dog Experience”, featuring previously unknown musical acts — Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Charlatans, The Grateful Dead and others — who played in the completely refurbished, intimate setting of Virginia City’s Red Dog Saloon. There was no clear delineation between “performers” and “audience” in “The Red Dog Experience”, during which music, psychedelic experimentation, a unique sense of personal style and Bill Ham’s first primitive light shows combined to create a new sense of community. Laughlin and George Hunter of the Charlatans were true “proto-hippies”, with their long hair, boots and outrageous clothing of nineteenth-century American (and Native American) heritage. LSD manufacturer Owsley Stanley lived in Berkeley during 1965 and provided much of the LSD that became a seminal part of the “Red Dog Experience”, the early evolution of psychedelic rock and budding hippie culture. At the Red Dog Saloon, The Charlatans were the first psychedelic rock band to play live (albeit unintentionally) loaded on LSD.

When they returned to San Francisco, Red Dog participants Luria Castell, Ellen Harman and Alton Kelley created a collective called “The Family Dog. Modeled on their Red Dog experiences, on October 16, 1965, the Family Dog hosted “A Tribute to Dr. Strange” at Longshoreman’s Hall. Attended by approximately 1,000 of the Bay Area’s original “hippies”, this was San Francisco’s first psychedelic rock performance, costumed dance and light show, featuring Jefferson Airplane, The Great Society and The Marbles. Two other events followed before year’s end, one at California Hall and one at the Matrix. After the first three Family Dog events, a much larger psychedelic event occurred at San Francisco’s Longshoreman’s Hall. Called “The Trips Festival”, it took place on January 21–January 23, 1966, and was organized by Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey, Owsley Stanley and others. Ten thousand people attended this sold-out event, with a thousand more turned away each night. On Saturday January 22, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company came on stage, and 6,000 people arrived to imbibe punch spiked with LSD and to witness one of the first fully developed light shows of the era.

By February 1966, the Family Dog became Family Dog Productions under organizer Chet Helms, promoting happenings at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium in initial cooperation with Bill Graham. The Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore Auditorium and other venues provided settings where participants could partake of the full psychedelic music experience. Bill Ham, who had pioneered the original Red Dog light shows, perfected his art of liquid light projection, which combined light shows and film projection and became synonymous with the San Francisco ballroom experience. The sense of style and costume that began at the Red Dog Saloon flourished when San Francisco’s Fox Theater went out of business and hippies bought up its costume stock, reveling in the freedom to dress up for weekly musical performances at their favorite ballrooms. As San Francisco Chronicle music columnist Ralph J. Gleason put it, “They danced all night long, orgiastic, spontaneous and completely free form.”

Some of the earliest San Francisco hippies were former students at San Francisco State College who became intrigued by the developing psychedelic hippie music scene. These students joined the bands they loved, living communally in the large, inexpensive Victorian apartments in the Haight-Ashbury. Young Americans around the country began moving to San Francisco, and by June 1966, around 15,000 hippies had moved into the Haight. The Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead all moved to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during this period. Activity centered around the Diggers, a guerrilla street theatre group that combined spontaneous street theatre, anarchistic action, and art happenings in their agenda to create a “free city”. By late 1966, the Diggers opened free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts, and performed works of political art.

On October 6, 1966, the state of California declared LSD a controlled substance, which made the drug illegal. In response to the criminalization of psychedelics, San Francisco hippies staged a gathering in the Golden Gate Park panhandle, called the Love Pageant Rally, attracting an estimated 700–800 people. As explained by Allan Cohen, co-founder of the San Francisco Oracle, the purpose of the rally was twofold: to draw attention to the fact that LSD had just been made illegal — and to demonstrate that people who used LSD were not criminals, nor were they mentally ill. The Grateful Dead played, and some sources claim that LSD was consumed at the rally. According to Cohen, those who took LSD “were not guilty of using illegal substances…We were celebrating transcendental consciousness, the beauty of the universe, the beauty of being.”

Golda Meir becomes the first female prime minister of Israel.

Golda Meir devient la première femme premier ministre d’Israel.

Les médecins présentent les premières échographies.

Le Prince Charles a interprété 14 rôles dans sa revue de collège.

Etimology   

Lexicographer Jesse Sheildower, the principal American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, argues that the terms hipster and hippie derive from the word hip, whose origins are unknown. The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1940, in his stage name”Harry the  Hipster”.Hipster was often used in the 1940s and 1950s to describe jazz performers. The word hippie was in a radio show on November 13, 1945, in which Stan Kenton called Harry Gibson,”hippie”. However, kenton’s use of the word was playing “Harry the Hipster”. Reminiscing about late 1940s Harlem in his 1964 autobiography, Malcom X referred to the word hippy as a term that African American used to describe a specific type of white man who “acted more Negro than Negroes”. 

Althought the word hippie made isolatated  appearances during the early 1960s, the first clearly contemporary use of the term appeared in print on September 5, 1965, in the article, “A New Heaven for Beatniks”, by San Fransisco journalist Michael Fallon. In that article, Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn cofeehouse, using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight-Ashbury district. New York Times editor and usage writer Theodore M.Bernstein said the paper changed the spelling from hippy to hippie to avoid the ambiguous description of clothing as hippy fashions.

 

Le mot hippie proviendrait d’un mot africain (hip, que certains pensent être un terme wolof, hipi signifiant « ouvrir ses yeux »), repris dans le mot hipster désignant les amateurs de bebop dans les années 1940. Une autre origine du terme parfois donnée est une dérivation de l’acronyme H.I.P., désignant un quartier de San Francisco, le Haight-Ashbury Independant Property, occupé par les hippies. L’acronyme serait également un jeu de mot avec hype signifiant « décontracté, branché, dans le coup ». Comme le hipster, le hippie devait être « cool ». Les hippies n’utilisaient pas ce nom pour se désigner eux-mêmes, ils disaient généralement freaks ou heads (les monstres ou les têtes).

 

Today I would like to present you the patchouli: star of the hippy years..

It is on the steep slopes of the Indonesian volcanoes that the patchouli has chosen its home. In the very fertile ground this small bush, less than a metre in height, puts down its roots. Its ordinary appearence does not give any inkling of such an extensive reputation. Only its name heralds the premise of its destiny…

Three times a year the peasants cuts its branches .The green mahogany coloured, velvety leaves wilt very fast. Once dried , there follows a genuine ritual: using machetes, the women cut off the base of the stalks which holf less of the essential oils than the leaves.

Armfuls are then delivered for distillation, a process which captures the perfume in the form of a honey coloured essential oil.

It is the story of a leaf that has the scent of wood. The same force, power and depth. As with trees, it is from the earth that the patchouli derives its strenght. Within the scent is the humid, damp, mossy, fungus half in opposition to the dusty, baked earth dimension. Its perfume symbolises death and birth. A scent decomposing earth but with the promise of fertility, of life born again in depths.

In the composition of a perfume, patchouli diffuses its depth of fragrance. It is enveloping, potent, radiant. But nevertheless, despite its charisma, it has the infinite capacity of combinig with other raw materials, a quality that enables it to blend in many other perfumes.

A mystery. Why is this particular fragrance so valued by perfume makers and lovers? Is is because it embodies transformations and foretells metamorphoses that it pleases both women and men so much?

“Flower Power” was not mistaken in adopting it as its symbolic perfume. It was the first time that a perfume became so directly linked to a cultural and social movement which also corresponded to the death and birth…of society.

Added to that an assertive, even sexy, sensuality and one can understand why the followers of the “Peace and Love”movement used it to such excess!

After this tumultuous teenage outburst, it was put aside but then taken up again into its true calling, perfume making with a acapital P. And it has pursued a brilliant career, not even damaged by the high-jinks on the barricades but becoming one of the greatest pillars of worldwide perfumery as much for women as men.

A strong, sexy pillar in a perfume, time has no hold over it. And its name, like an incantation, chants the everlasting poxer of a leaf.

You will smell patchouli in our 1969 (of course!) and in our

NOIR PATCHOULI.

Aujourd’hui je souhaiterai vous parler du patchouli. En effet, quelle autre odeur est plus associée au mouvement hippie que celle boisée, camphrée, verte, terreuse, de mousse, presque  moisie du patchouli ? Ce n’est pas pour rien que notre parfum 1969 en contient…mais laissez-moi vous présenter cette star parfois délaissée de la parfumerie qui revient sur le devant de la scène aujourd’hui.

Patchouli vient du tamoul qui signifie vert et feuille. Ses feuilles séchées, importées en Angleterre au milieu du XIXe siècle, devinrent des éléments  de base des sachets, pots-pourris et parfums à l’époque Victorienne. Le patchouli est aussi connu pour ses propriétés antimites. En Asie, l’herbe est utilisée pour traiter les rhumes, les maux de têtes, les nausées, les douleurs abdominales : tout un programme ! Il est aussi utilisé au Japon et en Malaisie comme antidote aux morsures de serpents venimeux. Son odeur est réputée agir sur l’équilibre psychique et a un effet bénéfique sur la sensibilité.

Longtemps associé au mouvement hippie, tendance retour de Katmandou, le patchouli a ensuite disparu dans les années 1980 à cause du désastre d’El Nino qui dévasta toutes les plantations d’Asie du Sud-est. Il n’y eu plus de patchouli pendant dix ans.

Aujourd’hui le patchouli est redevenu une des matières premières dominantes de la parfumerie.

Tout d’abord parce que cette senteur est une splendeur, d’une richesse et d’une profondeur rare et parce qu’elle constitue un merveilleux liant dans les parfums. 

Le patchouli peut se révéler sous deux facettes : l’une  très organique exhalant des notes terreuses et humides, la chaleur de l’humus, l’odeur des routes asiatiques et l’autre beaucoup plus pure, une fraicheur camphrée qui rappelle l’odeur du linge propre.

Si les parfumeurs n’ont pas toujours osés le mettre en avant dans leurs créations, aujourd’hui la donne a changée. Depuis Angel de Thierry Mugler et sa concentration de 30% d’essence pure de patchouli, de nouvelles créations en font leur matière phare. On le retrouve dans Bornéo 1834 de Serge Lutens, L’Eau de parfum de Prada, Le baiser du dragon de Cartier, L’Eau de parfum de Gucci, Cerutti 1881 ou encore L’Instant de Guerlain pour homme.

Le patchouli a cette particularité qu’il se porte sur toutes les peaux. Selon Jean-Michel Duriez, nez exclusif de la maison Caron « la sensualité qu’il dégage n’est attachée ni à un genre ni à l’autre. Sans doute parce qu’il se marie tout autant aux notes fleuries, généralement féminines, qu’aux notes boisées, plutôt masculines ».

Après la vague des senteurs transparentes des années 1990, s’apparentant plus à des odeurs de lessives qu’à de vrais parfums, l’air du temps est au retour du vrai, du naturel, du sillage et de l’authentique. Le patchouli avec ses qualités de vraie plante tropicale aux multiples facettes riches et racées face aux plantes de laboratoire a donc tout pour plaire et  continuer de nous faire rêver.

A cette occasion n’hésitez pas à (re)découvrir notre NOIR PATCHOULI !!

Noir Patchouli