protests inside university buildings. But IDA and the gymnwere more important as symbols of everything the studentsnfelt was wrong, than as issues in their own right.nLike many things, the Columbia strike was both so sillynand so serious at the same time. While on the one handnthere was the radical students’ admitted lack of a realnagenda, still, the blacks in Hamilton Hall had weapons.nDuring the strike one couple got married amid their fellownstrikers at Fayerweather Hall. “Do you, Andrea, takenRichard for your man?” the minister asked the bride. “Donyou, Richard, take Andrea for your girl? I now pronouncenyou children of the new age.” One evening music professornOtto Luening, 87 years old and bridging a gap of severalngenerations, showed his support by playing piano for thenstudents in Low’s Rotunda. In a slower moment, JamesnKunen (author of the famous account of the strike. ThenStrawberry Statement) asked, “Was the Paris Commune thisnboring?” Then, on April 30, the police violently broke it up.nOf the 712 arrested, 132 were injured. Some were beatennabout the head and one girl was pushed by the cops (saysnKunen) through a glass door. And yet in his book hisnsomewhat dippy tone doesn’t change even after the violence.nThis quote is typical:n”Wed. July 19: I went to Washington, DC, for the richnpeople’s march in support of the Poor People’s Campaign.nYou are supposed to come away from these affairs with anrenewed commitment and sense of purpose. I came awaynwith two girls’ addresses and a slight tan.”nAndy the IconnHe is the great 60’s symbol, epitomizing all its releases, all itsnironies, and all its sickness: if he didn’t sleep around and takendrugs, he watched his friends do so, and in the era of flowernchildren and communes he was unstintingly commercial. Itnwas always I’art pour I’argent. He was the artist as art, thensilent satirist, and when his irony encompassed his paintings,nthen that was just the biggest joke of all. “That Pop Art—Inthought that was just s ” laughs Warhol “superstar” Viva,nwho did not hesitate to say as much. “Oh, I told him ,it wasns , and he’d say ‘Well, gee, I can’t help it.’ We spent a lotnof time deciding which paintings were lousy enough tonthrow out.”nPeople forget that the 60’s were also about money andncommercialism; that this was the golden age of aidvertising;nthat men would give their dates $200 for a cab home — notnin return for services, but just as pin money; that HuntingtonnHartford would walk into the bar Peartrees uptowri andninvite the crowd to come with him to the Bahamas: his planenwas leaving at 10 o’clock. In New York there was even annelement of commercialism applied to the hippies themselves.nYou could rent hippies for, say, your garden party,nand you’d get real hippies, too, recruited off the streetsndowntown. Generally speaking, the worse they acted, thenhappier their renters were.nBut Andy Warhol did not forget: all that free love andndrugs was just hype, after all, and hype exists only tonpromote business. “Being good in business,” he saidnsomewhere, “is the most fascinating kind of art.” He diednwith an estate worth several rnillions.nEmile de Antonio, a Marxist and documentary filmmakern26/CHRONICLESnnnwhose Year of the Pig (on the Vietnam War) came out inn’68, says that “Andy was the ultimate voyeur, in that hennever peeked. His presence was enough so that you did whatnthe voyeur wanted.” In other words, he was the grandnmanipulator. “He had too much control over my life,” wasnValeria Solanis’ excuse when she shot him nearly to death innJune 1968. In a way, it seems almost inevitable thatnsomething like that should happen to him; he was alwaysncourting death, or at least filming it. And in a way he is evennin being shot a symbol for that era: he went all the way outnon some kind of moral limb, sawed it off, and lived to tellnabout it.n”He was not cut out to be his brother’s keeper,” art criticnJohn Richardson said at his funeral, quoting with equanimitynthis famous retort of Cain’s. “The distance he establishednbetween the world and himself was above all a matter ofninnocence and of art.”nBut if Warhol was the ultimate cynic, others are not.nCheryl Terry has mostly good memories. The word shenkeeps using is “fun”: “it was unbelievably fun.” The others Inspoke to agree. Only looking back now from their 40’s andn50’s and 60’s, they remember the downside as well. ArtistnCharles Finch, who was a teenager at the time, came backnfrom a concert in the late 60’s to find a friend of his who’dnbeen tripping had jumped out a window and killed himselfnEberstadt ran into a friend of his en route to a birthdaynparty who was carrying along a paper bag lunch she’dnbought at Bloomingdale’s. When Eberstadt pointed out thatnthe hosts would probably be happy to feed her, she declarednthat she wouldn’t eat one single thing they were serving,n”least of all cake.” He continues: “There was one party Inheard of where somebody put acid in some kind of a punchnand didn’t tell people, and some of them went right from thenparty to the hospital. It was dreadful.”nThere is a creepy irony to reading in Timothy Leary’snHigh Priest how he would scold his daughter that “she’dnruin her eyes” reading in the dimness even as AllennGinsberg lay upstairs, high on magic mushrooms, chokingndown his vomit, and experiencing “Milton’s Lucifer”nflashing through his mind.nViva, now the mother of two daughters and journalist innNew York, who still says all the sleeping around and drugsnshe did in the 60’s were fun, adds that this particular periodnin her life involved “a lot of sexual activity without any realnfeeling behind it, or real passion. It was all experimentation.nI find so much more value in my life right now that I couldnnever go back to it.”nBut perhaps the most perceptive comment was made bynRod Gander, now the president of Marlboro College innVermont. In the late 60’s he was chief of correspondents fornNewsweek, and, among other things, he- covered the 1968nChicago Democratic Convention and ensuing trouble.n”Just the other day a friend of mine was talking to VernonnJordan,” he begins; Jordan had been the right-hand man tonWhitney Young. “And Vernon’s reflection was that duringnthe 60’s we did a hell of a lot of tearing down and rippingnaway the facade, and left a lot of debris, but that none of usnhave been able to figure how to clear the debris. And thenmore I think about it the more I think it’s very apt. Once itnwas stripped away, we didn’t know how to deal with whatnwas left.” <^n