By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A short recollection of youth, art, drugs, class markers, and rebellion, filtered through Los Angeles and the language of style.
The poem is interested less in nostalgia than in the strange social texture of revolt.
A short, wry memory of 1968 counterculture in which 'L.A. was as easy as a movie' and the speaker and his circle 'just visualized and aquired / the speech in the language of painting'. They 'drank jugs of red wine / in canning jars / and Brandy glasses', 'Placed Osly Acid / on our tongues', and 'smoked everything / except cocaine', which 'didn't belong / with the revolution' since it 'was accepted / at the Country Club / where they sniffed it'.
The poem's revolution is aesthetic and chemical rather than political - art and intoxication are its sacraments, and identity is acquired 'in the language of painting', as if perception itself were being remade. Its sharpest move is the class line drawn around a single drug: cocaine is excluded not on principle but on sociology, because it belonged to the 'Country Club' set 'where they sniffed it', making it the establishment's vice and therefore inadmissible to the counterculture. That distinction does the poem's satirical work, exposing how a rebellion polices its boundaries by taste and tribe. The casual, listing tone and 'easy as a movie' frame give the whole an air of nostalgic mischief, remembering a scene that defined itself as much by exclusions as by excess. Preserve source spellings 'aquired' and 'Osly' (for Owsley) as written.