VIEW MY OTHER ITEMS ON EBAY
Welcome to another Great item from SYOTTOYS and thanks for stopping by, after you have looked at this one, why not sit back, grab your favorite drink and spend some time checking out all the wonderful things I have to offer. just click above. but first look below and BID or BUY. really after you BID OR BUY this item, you should check out my other stuff, i probably have thousands of items up, no need to look elsewhere.
NOTE: I will always combine items to save you shipping cost. but I DON'T end auctions early, and offers will be ignored if they are not reasonable.
DESCRIPTION OF ITEM
i show any problems that i noticed
THIS IS one of several Mel Lyman related items i am listing, i have most of Avatar and all 3 issues of American Avatar, they are all from the 60's Fort Hill commune / community from the Boston area, that grew to the size of about 100 followers of the musician Mel Lyman, you can do some research about him and his group on the internet, but if you are looking at this item you probably know about him/them, there is a great research at trussel, that has so much info and examples of i think everything i am listing. it does not appear that this stuff comes up for sale very often. what i have is nice and clean, and as shown.
here is some more about Mel Lyman--from wikipedia--Melvin James Lyman (March
24, 1938 – March 1978) was an American musician, writer, and founder of
the Fort Hill Community, which has been variously described as a
family, commune or cult.
Early lifeLyman
grew up in California and Oregon. As a young man, he spent a number of
years traveling the country and learning harmonica and banjo from such
musicians as Brother Percy Randolph and Obray Ramsey.
During
a period in the early 1960s, Lyman lived in New York City, where he
associated with other artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers. An
example of which was his friendship with underground filmmaker Jonas
Mekas, which led to the studios of Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner. He
learned the art of filmmaking from Conner and made some films with him.
Musician“Mel Lyman played harmonica like no one under the sun / Mel Lyman didn't just play harmonica, he was one. – Landis MacKellar”
In
1963 Lyman joined Jim Kweskin's Boston-based jug band as a banjo and
harmonica player. Lyman, once called "the Grand Old Man of the 'blues'
harmonica in his mid-twenties", is remembered in folk music
circles for playing a 20 minute improvisation on the traditional hymn
"Rock of Ages" at the end of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival to the riled
crowd streaming out after Bob Dylan's famous appearance with an
electric band. Some felt that Lyman, primarily an acoustic musician, was
delivering a wordless counterargument to Dylan’s new-found rock
direction. Irwin Silber, editor of Sing Out Magazine, wrote that Lyman’s "mournful and lonesome harmonica" provided "the most optimistic note of the evening."
WriterIn 1966, supported and funded by Jonas Mekas, Lyman published his first book, Autobiography of a World Savior, which set out to reformulate spiritual truths and occult history in a new way. In 1971, Lyman published Mirror at the End of the Road,
derived from letters he wrote during his formative years, starting in
1958 from his initial attempts to learn and become a musician, through
the early 1960s as his life widened and deepened musically and
personally. The last entries are from 1966 which simply express the
profound joys and deepest losses which defined and gave his life
direction and meaning in the years ahead. The key to the book and the
life he lived afterwards are stated simply in the dedication at the
beginning "To Judy, who made me live with a broken heart".
The Lyman Family, The Fort Hill Community and the AvatarIt
was his relationship with Judy which brought him to Boston in 1963.
Again, Lyman became acquainted with many artists and musicians in the
vibrant Boston scene, including Timothy Leary's group of LSD
enthusiasts, IFIF. Lyman was involved for a very short time and, against
his wishes, so was Judy. Knowing LSD’s power, he felt she was not ready
but, “the bastards at IFIF gave her acid… I told her not to take it. I
knew her head couldn’t take it.” Lyman’s fears turned out to be
justified and she left college and returned to her parents in Kansas.
Lyman was by all accounts very charismatic and later, after Judy had
left, a community or family naturally tended to grow up around him. At
some point thereafter Lyman began to realize himself as destined for a
role as a spiritual force and leader.
In
1966, Lyman founded and headed The Lyman Family, also known as The Fort
Hill Community, centered in a few houses in the Fort Hill section of
Roxbury, then a poor neighborhood of Boston. The Fort Hill Community, to
observers in the mid-to-late Sixties, combined some of the outward
forms of an urban hippie commune with a neo-transcendentalist
socio-spiritual structure centered on Lyman, the friends he had
attracted and the large body of his music and writings. Members of
Lyman's Community briefly included the young couple Mark Frechette and
Daria Halprin, two non-actors who had been discovered and cast by
Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for the lead roles in his second
English-language feature, the 1970 film Zabriskie Point.
Although
Lyman and the Family shared some attributes with the hippies — prior
experimenting with LSD and marijuana and Lyman’s cosmic millennialism —
they were not actually hippies either in appearance (female members
dressed conservatively and male members wore their hair relatively short
by the standards of the era) or beliefs (while Lyman and other Family
members had fathered children by different women, polyamory was eschewed
in favor of serial monogamy).
By
the Spring of 1967 the Fort Hill Community had become an established
presence in Boston and it, along with members of the wider community in
greater Boston and Cambridge, came together to create and publish the
Avatar. It contained local news, political and cultural essays,
commentary and more personal contributions, writing and photography,
from various members of the Fort Hill Community including Lyman. The
paper and magazine set new standards in content and design later adopted
by more mainstream publications. Throughout the first year of its
existence it created what became a national audience and many more
people visited Fort Hill at that time, some eventually staying and
becoming part of the community.
Rather
than the gentle and collectivist hippie ethic in other publications of
the time, Lyman’s writing in Avatar espoused a philosophy that
contained, to some readers of the time, strong currents of megalomania
and nihilism and to others a powerful alternative voice to the
prevailing ethos.
“I
am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble / and then I am
going to burn the rubble / and then I am going to scatter the ashes /
and then maybe SOMEONE will be able to see SOMETHING as it really is /
WATCHOUT”
After
working very intensely on each issue, in the Spring of 1968 the Family
gained complete editorial control of Avatar for the final issue of the
paper. Later they founded their own magazine, American Avatarwhich
continued the editorial directions of the newspaper. Lyman’s writings
in these publications brought increased visibility and public reaction
both pro and con. His writings, along with others in the publications,
could be poetic, philosophical, humorous and confrontational, sometimes
simultaneously, as Lyman at various times claimed to be: the living
embodiment of Truth, the greatest man in the world, Jesus Christ, and an
alien entity sent to Earth in human form by extraterrestrials. Such
pronouncements were typically delivered with extreme fervor and liberal
use of All Caps.
Later developments, and Lyman’s deathOn The Dick Cavett Show in
1970, Mark Frechette said Lyman's group was not a commune: "It‘s a
'community', but the purpose of the community is not communal living.
... The community is for one purpose, and that's to serve Mel Lyman, who
is the leader and the founder of that community."
In 1971, Rolling Stone magazine published an extensive cover exposé on the Family by associate editor David Felton. The Rolling Stone report
described an authoritarian and dysfunctional environment, including an
elite “Karma Squad” of ultra-loyalists to enforce Lyman’s discipline,
the Family's predilection for astrology, and isolation rooms for
disobedient Family members. Family members disputed these reports.
“The
only difference between us and the Manson Family is that we don't go
around preaching peace and love and we haven't killed anyone, yet. – Jim Kweskin (perhaps in jest)”
The Rolling Stone article
and the earlier trial of Charles Manson, who seemed to share some
traits in common with Lyman, raised the Family’s profile and – whether
fairly or not – established Lyman in the public mind as a bizarre and
possibly dangerous person.
However,
in 1973, members of the Family, including Frechette, staged a bank
robbery. One member of the Family was killed by police, and Frechette,
sentenced to prison, died in a weightlifting accident in jail in 1975.
Unlike
the Manson Family, Lyman’s did not explode in a dramatic denouement.
Rather, the Family took a lower profile and carried on, quietly building
on the relationships formed in the turbulent early years. Lyman died in
1978, age 40; the location and cause of death has not been publicly
revealed.
After
Lyman’s death, the Family evolved into a smaller, more conventional
extended family. The skills acquired in refurbishing the structures of
the Family compound led to the founding of the Fort Hill Construction
Company. Although some former Family members have rejected Lyman, current members still revere him.
LOCATION-- box ( NEWSPAPERS medium size (top of box in bag))