1968 While selling her designs to Paris boutiques, she took part in the May 68 on the barricades. 1969, she established the first textile design studio in London and sold designs to all the International fashion icons winning international recognition 1976 she moved her studio to Paris.1985 with a notable group of designers, she created Trend Union, 2007 her memoir Technicolor Dreamin’ the 1960’s Rainbow and Beyond was published. 2014 it was published in Spain by La Bahia. 2008 In Her Own Fashion was published by Sterlinghouse.2014. Her novel Forbidden Games www.karenmoller.com
If you are curious about the cultural scene of 1960s/70s: fashion, art, pop music, the sexual and... more If you are curious about the cultural scene of 1960s/70s: fashion, art, pop music, the sexual and feminist and protest movements in London, the heart of hippie Swinging Sixties but also in Paris, New York, San Francisco then consider reading this first-hand account and memoir of that impressionist implosions and cultural revolution by a Canadian woman who became a part of that ever changing scene. She became known as one of the world's best known textile designers and later her international fashion forecasting office in Paris was cited by Time Magazine as one of the worlds best fashion forecasting services. In 2018 her memoir Technicolour Dreamin’ in her own fashion was published in England and this month Chasing the Stars and Hoping to Shag the Moon, the follow up book in on the book shelves, a true dialogue of two graphically brilliant souls, not just a compilation of congenial exchanges but a true confrontation. This rich delving into the past half century will be nostalgic and enlivening for those who lived through those years and inspirational and fascinating for those who didn’t!
the 1968 Paris barricades succeeded as a social revolution, not as a political one; and had a res... more the 1968 Paris barricades succeeded as a social revolution, not as a political one; and had a resounding impact on French society. The effect has been felt ever since.
The 59 Venice Biennale took place on the same week as the Easter holiday which was unfortunate. V... more The 59 Venice Biennale took place on the same week as the Easter holiday which was unfortunate. Venice was unbelievably packed with people in the streets, on the vaporetto and restaurants. For some reason Italy has decided that the hospital masks which we have been wearing on planes and in theater and indoor for the last year or so do not protect us??? I was almost thrown off the vaporetto, for not
Hoppy (John Hopkins) was many-sided. He'd studied physics and mathematics at Cambridge and worked... more Hoppy (John Hopkins) was many-sided. He'd studied physics and mathematics at Cambridge and worked as physicists for the Atomic Energy Commission till he fell in with the CND. Like many people in the Underground, he'd dabbled in almost everything, including music and publishing, before becoming a photographer and major force behind the Underground events.
In 1961 Robert Rauschenberg had an exhibition in that wonderful Gallery Iris Clert, 3 rue des Bea... more In 1961 Robert Rauschenberg had an exhibition in that wonderful Gallery Iris Clert, 3 rue des Beaux-Arts. The gallery was in the forefront of many avant-garde exhibitions, including Arman, Tinguely, and Yves Klein. The critic Pierre Rastany and Yves Klein founded the Nouveaux Réalistes in 1960 proclaiming it as new ways of perceiving the real. Robert Rauschenberg neatly fit the narrow definition set by Pierre, however his particular choice of found objects and rejects of life: vulgar commercial materials, comic books, and ads were very American. I was not particularly familiar with Yves Klein's work the day I met him in Tinguely's studio. Later, when I asked Tinguely about Klein, he smiled and remarked, "Klein's happy intensity makes life into a poem overflowing with good humor. He is magic itself." Yves Klein's mother Marie Raymond was quite remarkable; an early example for me of what was possible for a woman painter. In the Paris prewar period, she and her husband lived a bohemian life style in Montparnasse. She exhibited her Imaginary Landscapes at the 1945 Salon des Surindépendants as part of the avant-garde with Jacques Villon and Frank Kupka and later at the Denise René gallery. 'Marie's Mondays' were gathering of gallery owners, collectors, and later Nouveaux Réalistes, which included Klein, Tinguely, Dufrêne, Hains, Villeglé, Arman, and César. Yves Klein's exhibition in 1958 of Monochrome Propositions at the Gallery Iris Clert consisted of a single blue monochrome in the window, with a number of similar monochromes on the gallery walls. Klein called them as imprints of absence. His next exhibition, le Vide (The Void), he described as 'a concern with emptiness and a disavowal of self.' He removed everything in the gallery except a single empty display case, which he painted a glossy white, and labeled Art. The gallery's window he painted blue and hung a blue curtain at the entrance; republican guards presented blue cocktails. It was not actually the color blue that interested him, but the blue of the void. In its way it was performance art before performances became performance art. That exhibition was a shock for both the critics and the public, for some it was a revelation. Klein claimed that the color blue was his and he took out a patent on a shade of chemically intensified ultramarine blue, a chemical that was suspect of having affected his health and contributed to his early death. Personally, I was intrigued by Klein's theory that he could permeate matter with his spirit and that art was not sensory, but extrasensory. He explained it as, 'The understanding of art is an intimate collaboration on the part of both the creator and the viewer. Art enters into the person and the person enters into the work of art.' This seemed to echo Joseph Beuys theory that his audience experienced a state of mind where an idea could simultaneously be felt as well as understood. Another of their similarity was the way both Klien and Beuys set about creating their identity by blurring fact and fiction. Beuys' story about his plane crashing and Tatars bringing him back to life by wrapping him in insulating layers of felt and fat caused controversy very similar to Yves Klein's photomontage, Leap into the Void showing him jumping off a wall arms outstretched. The fantasy writings by artists one knows are always fascinating to read and Beuys self-consciously fictionalized account of his life, in which the historical events mingle with the metaphorical (he refers to his birth as the 'Exhibition of a wound') are amazing. After art college he filled six exercise books of drawings related to James Joyce's Ulysses, which he calls Ulysses Extension a seminal novel carried out 'At Joyce's request'. Naturally that could only have come through channeling, as the writer was long dead. Beuys was a perfectly fit for the optimistic 60s. His hope for humanity was vast, as was his faith in the political capacities of art to improve the world, 'The revolution is within us and how we chose to live', he said.
Karen Moller grew up in a small town in the mountains of Western Canada. At the age of 20, after ... more Karen Moller grew up in a small town in the mountains of Western Canada. At the age of 20, after graduating from art college, she hitchhiked to San Francisco with a copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road under her arm and from there traveled to New York, Paris, Spain and London. Those free and easy economical years of the 1960s allowed her with little cash and no family help, to create her own hippie boutique and to open London's first textile design studio. You would not have been surprised to see her on the set of Medium Cool as one of those Carnaby Street and Kings Road designers. She was no mere observer but part of the creative energy of Swinging London: the 1960s Pop and Rock world, the London's intelligentsia, and the art and gallery scene. She took part in the feminist, sexual and political protests and helped man/woman the Paris barricades in 1968.
In 1961 Robert Rauschenberg had an exhibition in Gallery Iris Clert, a gallery was in the forefro... more In 1961 Robert Rauschenberg had an exhibition in Gallery Iris Clert, a gallery was in the forefront of many avant-garde exhibitions, including Arman, Tinguely, and Yves Klein. The critic Pierre Rastany with Yves Klein founded the Nouveaux Réalistes in 1960 proclaiming it as new ways of perceiving the real. Robert Rauschenberg neatly fit that narrow definition, however his particular choice of found objects and rejects of life: vulgar commercial materials, comic books, and ads were very American. I was not particularly familiar with Yves Klein's work the day I met him in Tinguely's studio. Later, when I asked Tinguely about Klein, he smiled and remarked, "Klein's happy intensity makes life into a poem overflowing with good humor. He is magic itself." Yves Klein's mother Marie Raymond was quite remarkable; an early example for me of what was possible for a woman painter. She exhibited her Imaginary Landscapes at the 1945 Salon des Surindépendants as part of the avant-garde with Jacques Villon and Frank Kupka and later at the Denise René gallery. 'Marie's Mondays' were gathering of gallery owners, collectors, and later Nouveaux Réalistes, which included Klein, Tinguely, Dufrêne, Hains, Villeglé, Arman, and César. Yves Klein's exhibition in 1958 of Monochrome Propositions at the Gallery Iris Clert consisted of a single blue monochrome in the window, with a number of similar monochromes on the gallery walls. Klein called them as imprints of absence. His next exhibition, le Vide (The Void), he described as 'a concern with emptiness and a disavowal of self.' He removed everything in the gallery except a single empty display case, which he painted a glossy white, and labeled Art. The gallery's window he painted blue, and hung a blue curtain at the entrance; republican guards presented blue cocktails. It was not actually the color blue that interested him, but the blue of the void. In its way it was performance art before performances became performance art. That exhibition was a shock for both the critics and the public, for some it was a revelation. Klein claimed that the color blue was his and he took out a patent on a shade of chemically intensified ultramarine blue, a chemical that was suspect of having affected his health and contributed to his early death. Personally I was intrigued by Klein's theory that he could permeate matter with his spirit and that art was not sensory, but extrasensory. 'The understanding of art is an intimate collaboration on the part of both the creator and the viewer. Art enters into the person and the person enters into the work of art.' This echoed Joseph Beuys theory that his audience experienced a state of mind where an idea could simultaneously be felt as well as understood. Both Klien and Beuys set about creating their identity by blurring fact and fiction. Beuys' story about his plane crashing and Tatars bringing him back to life by wrapping him in insulating layers of felt and fat caused controversy similar to Yves Klein's photomontage, Leap into the Void showing him jumping off a wall arms outstretched. The fantasy writings by artists one knows are always fascinating to read and Beuys self-consciously fictionalized account of his life, in which the historical events mingle with the metaphorical (he refers to his birth as the 'Exhibition of a wound') are amazing. After art college he filled six exercise books of drawings related to James Joyce's Ulysses, which he calls Ulysses Extension a seminal novel carried out 'At Joyce's request'. Naturally that could only have come through channeling, as the writer was long dead. Beuys was a perfectly fit for the optimistic 60s. His hope for humanity was vast, as was his faith in the political capacities of art to improve the world, 'The revolution is within us and how we chose to live', he said. Beuys had remarkable foresight and many of his apparently wacky ideas have now become central to our way of thinking. Unfortunately his commitment to the demystification and dis-institutionalization of the 'art world', which included exploring different media forms to improve and perpetuate open discourse on art and politics never became a reality. I've never forgotten Beuys' words to me "Today I look to the strength and the unused spiritual power of women to lead us forward. Most of the world's suffering has come from male rigidity." That statement filled me with hope and yet there are still too few women leading anything.
People are now inclined to think of Beats and hippies were some-sort of left wing anti-capitalist... more People are now inclined to think of Beats and hippies were some-sort of left wing anti-capitalists but I don't ever remember thinking that way. Sure we wanted to get away from the big business capitalists that wanted people to be a cog on a wheel and stay there like some element of a machine. That brief permissive period of economic stability in the 1960s not only tolerated our alternative culture, but allowed individual hippie capitalism to grow alongside the established one. Money is power and people with entrepreneurial talents took advantage of the extraordinary opportunities available in art, music, literature, and fashion to develop their own talents. People started small music companies that grew, Branson started Virgin records, people like Hoppy started IT and UFO, Barry Miles and John Dunbar created their Indica bookstore and gallery, Jim Haynes opened the Arts Lab, others produced satirical magazines like Private Eye and Pirate radio Stations because the radio we all listen to, some made pots and jewelry and others went into book dealing or created fashion lines as I did. The most astonishing and enterprising of course were Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who created the computers which lead to the Internet and Silicon Valley enterprises. In the 1960s the work ethic separated the grafters who worked incredibly hard, with passion and dedication from the drifters who avoided work and lived off the state, often justifying their laziness by saying they despised capitalism. But capitalism saved the Western world from poverty and brought equality to women more than anything else had ever done. The problem is that capitalism does not give us much in the way of providing our life with meaning so we feel the tend to seek out other ideologies that promise to take us to some imagined better world of harmony and equality, authenticity and meaning. And for that reason the ideology of a Rousseau type quest of the noble savage has always been with us and certainly it was important for the beat Generation. But is that really the answer to todays problems? Is that why people voted for a TV populist reality show President in America and on the other side a populist opposition in the form of Bernie Sanders and his politically correct lackeys?
What's certain is that writing a memoir is guaranteed to engage one emotionally—no one is indiffe... more What's certain is that writing a memoir is guaranteed to engage one emotionally—no one is indifferent to their own history. The initial driving force for writing about the 1960's was the rarity of books written by women about that period. Most of the books of that era tend to be written by men and are about particular subjects, when in fact everything was connected: the 1960's Beats, hippies, art and experimental poetry, Pop music and fashion design, and the political, ecological, sexual and feminist protests. The early Hipsters/Beats came of age in the 1950s and early 60s; the later hippie years from the mid sixties were a heavenly time to be part of the London intellectual and artistic world. The expression Turn on, tune in, and drop out was less an invitation to party, but more a call to experience life more intimately, more positively. Those years were perhaps the longest gap year in history and had a profound effect on many of societies rules. Unfortunately there was not enough political will from the older generation to achieve the more general aims: to improve education and our environment, to clean up our air and water, to end wars and to share our wealth. People my age remember the 1967 Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury, the 1968 barricades, the movies like Blow-up and Woodstock, the songs: The Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel's, We Can Work It Out by the Beatles, and much more. Pick up and magazine or book about the sixties and there we are looking sexy in our miniskirts , as short as was decent, and seemingly thrilled to be alive at such a moment. Social approval of friends replaced the approval of elders. For the first time: rentals no longer required a marriage certificate, contraceptives and abortions were available. Young people today look back on the 1960's with the same kind of nostalgia that we, the sixties generation felt for the arts and fashions of the twenties. Just as my generation looked back at to the 1920s for inspiration the 1960s' pop music, art exhibitions, and fashion are an endless source of inspiration for the present generation. A frequent question in the sixties by outsiders was, " But what is it all for? What are you getting out of it—being a hippie and all? " The answer was simply the breathless exaltation of being part of a movement that aimed to change the world! I would say to the present generation—Why be content with the rules that others impose on us or accept the script that society assigns us? I would add—The great changes in civil rights, relaxing of censorship of books and films, freedom of speech, women's equal pay, right to divorce and freedom of choice for abortion that we help bring about should be guarded carefully. Attempts by today's politically correct thought police to rescind these rights is already materializing.
Lots of people write about the Wholly Communion but few people who were actually there wrote abou... more Lots of people write about the Wholly Communion but few people who were actually there wrote about that night. Here is a brief excerpt of the event from my memoir: Technicolor Dreamin' in her own fashion.
If you are curious about the cultural scene of 1960s/70s: fashion, art, pop music, the sexual and... more If you are curious about the cultural scene of 1960s/70s: fashion, art, pop music, the sexual and feminist and protest movements in London, the heart of hippie Swinging Sixties but also in Paris, New York, San Francisco then consider reading this first-hand account and memoir of that impressionist implosions and cultural revolution by a Canadian woman who became a part of that ever changing scene. She became known as one of the world's best known textile designers and later her international fashion forecasting office in Paris was cited by Time Magazine as one of the worlds best fashion forecasting services. In 2018 her memoir Technicolour Dreamin’ in her own fashion was published in England and this month Chasing the Stars and Hoping to Shag the Moon, the follow up book in on the book shelves, a true dialogue of two graphically brilliant souls, not just a compilation of congenial exchanges but a true confrontation. This rich delving into the past half century will be nostalgic and enlivening for those who lived through those years and inspirational and fascinating for those who didn’t!
the 1968 Paris barricades succeeded as a social revolution, not as a political one; and had a res... more the 1968 Paris barricades succeeded as a social revolution, not as a political one; and had a resounding impact on French society. The effect has been felt ever since.
The 59 Venice Biennale took place on the same week as the Easter holiday which was unfortunate. V... more The 59 Venice Biennale took place on the same week as the Easter holiday which was unfortunate. Venice was unbelievably packed with people in the streets, on the vaporetto and restaurants. For some reason Italy has decided that the hospital masks which we have been wearing on planes and in theater and indoor for the last year or so do not protect us??? I was almost thrown off the vaporetto, for not
Hoppy (John Hopkins) was many-sided. He'd studied physics and mathematics at Cambridge and worked... more Hoppy (John Hopkins) was many-sided. He'd studied physics and mathematics at Cambridge and worked as physicists for the Atomic Energy Commission till he fell in with the CND. Like many people in the Underground, he'd dabbled in almost everything, including music and publishing, before becoming a photographer and major force behind the Underground events.
In 1961 Robert Rauschenberg had an exhibition in that wonderful Gallery Iris Clert, 3 rue des Bea... more In 1961 Robert Rauschenberg had an exhibition in that wonderful Gallery Iris Clert, 3 rue des Beaux-Arts. The gallery was in the forefront of many avant-garde exhibitions, including Arman, Tinguely, and Yves Klein. The critic Pierre Rastany and Yves Klein founded the Nouveaux Réalistes in 1960 proclaiming it as new ways of perceiving the real. Robert Rauschenberg neatly fit the narrow definition set by Pierre, however his particular choice of found objects and rejects of life: vulgar commercial materials, comic books, and ads were very American. I was not particularly familiar with Yves Klein's work the day I met him in Tinguely's studio. Later, when I asked Tinguely about Klein, he smiled and remarked, "Klein's happy intensity makes life into a poem overflowing with good humor. He is magic itself." Yves Klein's mother Marie Raymond was quite remarkable; an early example for me of what was possible for a woman painter. In the Paris prewar period, she and her husband lived a bohemian life style in Montparnasse. She exhibited her Imaginary Landscapes at the 1945 Salon des Surindépendants as part of the avant-garde with Jacques Villon and Frank Kupka and later at the Denise René gallery. 'Marie's Mondays' were gathering of gallery owners, collectors, and later Nouveaux Réalistes, which included Klein, Tinguely, Dufrêne, Hains, Villeglé, Arman, and César. Yves Klein's exhibition in 1958 of Monochrome Propositions at the Gallery Iris Clert consisted of a single blue monochrome in the window, with a number of similar monochromes on the gallery walls. Klein called them as imprints of absence. His next exhibition, le Vide (The Void), he described as 'a concern with emptiness and a disavowal of self.' He removed everything in the gallery except a single empty display case, which he painted a glossy white, and labeled Art. The gallery's window he painted blue and hung a blue curtain at the entrance; republican guards presented blue cocktails. It was not actually the color blue that interested him, but the blue of the void. In its way it was performance art before performances became performance art. That exhibition was a shock for both the critics and the public, for some it was a revelation. Klein claimed that the color blue was his and he took out a patent on a shade of chemically intensified ultramarine blue, a chemical that was suspect of having affected his health and contributed to his early death. Personally, I was intrigued by Klein's theory that he could permeate matter with his spirit and that art was not sensory, but extrasensory. He explained it as, 'The understanding of art is an intimate collaboration on the part of both the creator and the viewer. Art enters into the person and the person enters into the work of art.' This seemed to echo Joseph Beuys theory that his audience experienced a state of mind where an idea could simultaneously be felt as well as understood. Another of their similarity was the way both Klien and Beuys set about creating their identity by blurring fact and fiction. Beuys' story about his plane crashing and Tatars bringing him back to life by wrapping him in insulating layers of felt and fat caused controversy very similar to Yves Klein's photomontage, Leap into the Void showing him jumping off a wall arms outstretched. The fantasy writings by artists one knows are always fascinating to read and Beuys self-consciously fictionalized account of his life, in which the historical events mingle with the metaphorical (he refers to his birth as the 'Exhibition of a wound') are amazing. After art college he filled six exercise books of drawings related to James Joyce's Ulysses, which he calls Ulysses Extension a seminal novel carried out 'At Joyce's request'. Naturally that could only have come through channeling, as the writer was long dead. Beuys was a perfectly fit for the optimistic 60s. His hope for humanity was vast, as was his faith in the political capacities of art to improve the world, 'The revolution is within us and how we chose to live', he said.
Karen Moller grew up in a small town in the mountains of Western Canada. At the age of 20, after ... more Karen Moller grew up in a small town in the mountains of Western Canada. At the age of 20, after graduating from art college, she hitchhiked to San Francisco with a copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road under her arm and from there traveled to New York, Paris, Spain and London. Those free and easy economical years of the 1960s allowed her with little cash and no family help, to create her own hippie boutique and to open London's first textile design studio. You would not have been surprised to see her on the set of Medium Cool as one of those Carnaby Street and Kings Road designers. She was no mere observer but part of the creative energy of Swinging London: the 1960s Pop and Rock world, the London's intelligentsia, and the art and gallery scene. She took part in the feminist, sexual and political protests and helped man/woman the Paris barricades in 1968.
In 1961 Robert Rauschenberg had an exhibition in Gallery Iris Clert, a gallery was in the forefro... more In 1961 Robert Rauschenberg had an exhibition in Gallery Iris Clert, a gallery was in the forefront of many avant-garde exhibitions, including Arman, Tinguely, and Yves Klein. The critic Pierre Rastany with Yves Klein founded the Nouveaux Réalistes in 1960 proclaiming it as new ways of perceiving the real. Robert Rauschenberg neatly fit that narrow definition, however his particular choice of found objects and rejects of life: vulgar commercial materials, comic books, and ads were very American. I was not particularly familiar with Yves Klein's work the day I met him in Tinguely's studio. Later, when I asked Tinguely about Klein, he smiled and remarked, "Klein's happy intensity makes life into a poem overflowing with good humor. He is magic itself." Yves Klein's mother Marie Raymond was quite remarkable; an early example for me of what was possible for a woman painter. She exhibited her Imaginary Landscapes at the 1945 Salon des Surindépendants as part of the avant-garde with Jacques Villon and Frank Kupka and later at the Denise René gallery. 'Marie's Mondays' were gathering of gallery owners, collectors, and later Nouveaux Réalistes, which included Klein, Tinguely, Dufrêne, Hains, Villeglé, Arman, and César. Yves Klein's exhibition in 1958 of Monochrome Propositions at the Gallery Iris Clert consisted of a single blue monochrome in the window, with a number of similar monochromes on the gallery walls. Klein called them as imprints of absence. His next exhibition, le Vide (The Void), he described as 'a concern with emptiness and a disavowal of self.' He removed everything in the gallery except a single empty display case, which he painted a glossy white, and labeled Art. The gallery's window he painted blue, and hung a blue curtain at the entrance; republican guards presented blue cocktails. It was not actually the color blue that interested him, but the blue of the void. In its way it was performance art before performances became performance art. That exhibition was a shock for both the critics and the public, for some it was a revelation. Klein claimed that the color blue was his and he took out a patent on a shade of chemically intensified ultramarine blue, a chemical that was suspect of having affected his health and contributed to his early death. Personally I was intrigued by Klein's theory that he could permeate matter with his spirit and that art was not sensory, but extrasensory. 'The understanding of art is an intimate collaboration on the part of both the creator and the viewer. Art enters into the person and the person enters into the work of art.' This echoed Joseph Beuys theory that his audience experienced a state of mind where an idea could simultaneously be felt as well as understood. Both Klien and Beuys set about creating their identity by blurring fact and fiction. Beuys' story about his plane crashing and Tatars bringing him back to life by wrapping him in insulating layers of felt and fat caused controversy similar to Yves Klein's photomontage, Leap into the Void showing him jumping off a wall arms outstretched. The fantasy writings by artists one knows are always fascinating to read and Beuys self-consciously fictionalized account of his life, in which the historical events mingle with the metaphorical (he refers to his birth as the 'Exhibition of a wound') are amazing. After art college he filled six exercise books of drawings related to James Joyce's Ulysses, which he calls Ulysses Extension a seminal novel carried out 'At Joyce's request'. Naturally that could only have come through channeling, as the writer was long dead. Beuys was a perfectly fit for the optimistic 60s. His hope for humanity was vast, as was his faith in the political capacities of art to improve the world, 'The revolution is within us and how we chose to live', he said. Beuys had remarkable foresight and many of his apparently wacky ideas have now become central to our way of thinking. Unfortunately his commitment to the demystification and dis-institutionalization of the 'art world', which included exploring different media forms to improve and perpetuate open discourse on art and politics never became a reality. I've never forgotten Beuys' words to me "Today I look to the strength and the unused spiritual power of women to lead us forward. Most of the world's suffering has come from male rigidity." That statement filled me with hope and yet there are still too few women leading anything.
People are now inclined to think of Beats and hippies were some-sort of left wing anti-capitalist... more People are now inclined to think of Beats and hippies were some-sort of left wing anti-capitalists but I don't ever remember thinking that way. Sure we wanted to get away from the big business capitalists that wanted people to be a cog on a wheel and stay there like some element of a machine. That brief permissive period of economic stability in the 1960s not only tolerated our alternative culture, but allowed individual hippie capitalism to grow alongside the established one. Money is power and people with entrepreneurial talents took advantage of the extraordinary opportunities available in art, music, literature, and fashion to develop their own talents. People started small music companies that grew, Branson started Virgin records, people like Hoppy started IT and UFO, Barry Miles and John Dunbar created their Indica bookstore and gallery, Jim Haynes opened the Arts Lab, others produced satirical magazines like Private Eye and Pirate radio Stations because the radio we all listen to, some made pots and jewelry and others went into book dealing or created fashion lines as I did. The most astonishing and enterprising of course were Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who created the computers which lead to the Internet and Silicon Valley enterprises. In the 1960s the work ethic separated the grafters who worked incredibly hard, with passion and dedication from the drifters who avoided work and lived off the state, often justifying their laziness by saying they despised capitalism. But capitalism saved the Western world from poverty and brought equality to women more than anything else had ever done. The problem is that capitalism does not give us much in the way of providing our life with meaning so we feel the tend to seek out other ideologies that promise to take us to some imagined better world of harmony and equality, authenticity and meaning. And for that reason the ideology of a Rousseau type quest of the noble savage has always been with us and certainly it was important for the beat Generation. But is that really the answer to todays problems? Is that why people voted for a TV populist reality show President in America and on the other side a populist opposition in the form of Bernie Sanders and his politically correct lackeys?
What's certain is that writing a memoir is guaranteed to engage one emotionally—no one is indiffe... more What's certain is that writing a memoir is guaranteed to engage one emotionally—no one is indifferent to their own history. The initial driving force for writing about the 1960's was the rarity of books written by women about that period. Most of the books of that era tend to be written by men and are about particular subjects, when in fact everything was connected: the 1960's Beats, hippies, art and experimental poetry, Pop music and fashion design, and the political, ecological, sexual and feminist protests. The early Hipsters/Beats came of age in the 1950s and early 60s; the later hippie years from the mid sixties were a heavenly time to be part of the London intellectual and artistic world. The expression Turn on, tune in, and drop out was less an invitation to party, but more a call to experience life more intimately, more positively. Those years were perhaps the longest gap year in history and had a profound effect on many of societies rules. Unfortunately there was not enough political will from the older generation to achieve the more general aims: to improve education and our environment, to clean up our air and water, to end wars and to share our wealth. People my age remember the 1967 Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury, the 1968 barricades, the movies like Blow-up and Woodstock, the songs: The Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel's, We Can Work It Out by the Beatles, and much more. Pick up and magazine or book about the sixties and there we are looking sexy in our miniskirts , as short as was decent, and seemingly thrilled to be alive at such a moment. Social approval of friends replaced the approval of elders. For the first time: rentals no longer required a marriage certificate, contraceptives and abortions were available. Young people today look back on the 1960's with the same kind of nostalgia that we, the sixties generation felt for the arts and fashions of the twenties. Just as my generation looked back at to the 1920s for inspiration the 1960s' pop music, art exhibitions, and fashion are an endless source of inspiration for the present generation. A frequent question in the sixties by outsiders was, " But what is it all for? What are you getting out of it—being a hippie and all? " The answer was simply the breathless exaltation of being part of a movement that aimed to change the world! I would say to the present generation—Why be content with the rules that others impose on us or accept the script that society assigns us? I would add—The great changes in civil rights, relaxing of censorship of books and films, freedom of speech, women's equal pay, right to divorce and freedom of choice for abortion that we help bring about should be guarded carefully. Attempts by today's politically correct thought police to rescind these rights is already materializing.
Lots of people write about the Wholly Communion but few people who were actually there wrote abou... more Lots of people write about the Wholly Communion but few people who were actually there wrote about that night. Here is a brief excerpt of the event from my memoir: Technicolor Dreamin' in her own fashion.
American Book Review
CHASING THE STARS AND HOPING TO SHAG THE MOON by Karen Moller
The Unendin... more American Book Review
CHASING THE STARS AND HOPING TO SHAG THE MOON by Karen Moller The Unending Conversation by Alain Arias-Misson
One first remarks the speed, the staccato give and take of this odd dialogue about books and friends— characters, hundreds it seems, from fiction and from real life, equally intimate (“I learned about life from books”, says Karen), anecdotes of the famous and the obscure ("Known Knowns and Unknown Knowns" as Cyclops calls them, comfortable among the latter), rub elbows with them. Karen Moller, with her famous designer past and many friends from the contemporary French art world, such as the eccentric and visionary Filliou and that ultimate avant-gardiste the flying Yves Klein to the British pop world of the Beatles and the larger-than-cartoon, declamatory American poets, Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, ranges over social and feminist and literary history and fascinating stories within stories of friends and great novels with irrepressible zest and the freshest of prose; practical, clear-eyed, with remarkable self-awareness and minimal encroachment of the ego, she is the Mrs. Pepys of this stroll through the cultural landscape. While Cyclops, often lost in obscure personal histories, indistinguishably autobiographical and fictitious, explores the murky back-streets of provincial English towns in a growling jive that owes as much to Dickens and Joyce as to the Goon Show in search of a mythical mother who may have been the widow of the legendary WWII hero Captain Crabbe, who may died in his attempt to attach a device underwater to the hull of a Russian warship that brought Khruschev to Britain for MI5, rapping next with the peculiarly luminous Piero Heliczer, paradoxical Jewish "Nazi" child star who practically invented Warhol’s famous « ritual happenings », sharing canned meals with the would-be American Jean Genet-- Gregory Corso— on the floor of Madame Rachou’s Beat Hotel in Paris in the late fifties, or digging for herbs and edible weeds with the lyrical German painter Hundertwasser in the latter’s refuge in the French province, after Heliczer was ejected for wandering nude in the village center and playing his flute at 5 in the morning.
No, do not look in these pages for a leisurely plod through their cultural landscape of the last half-century with marvelous mountain lake views like the Scottish Tour of Keats and Burns… Karen and Cy on their own Grand Tour of the cultural explosion of the Sixties and its repercussions throughout the next half century, mix and scramble pop music and feminist politics, personal anecdotes, the front page Profumo/Christine Keeler sex scandal and London’s notorious landlord Ranchman, and innumerable great novels which they appear to live in and mix with the like of Kafka’s K or Beckett’s Watt with the same intimacy as all the fantastic characters whose paths they cross in « real life ». Indeed the boundaries between real life and the life of fiction are often blurred and unless you read closely you may not know which landscape you are currently strolling in with them. What they do have in common with Keats and Burns, like them from modest origins, is a powerful demotic and literary urge, with a narrative that runs from Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol’s factory to the recondite poet-monk dsh (Dom Sylvester Houédard) and the redactor-poet Tom Phillips!
For it must be said that Dickens and Austen and Kafka and Joyce and Beckett and Nietzsche and Dostoevsky can be found at every corner of their streets and in their London taverns and on many fine promenades, and their company with Karen and Cyclops is quite delightful! Not that they are of one mind! Collisions take place between these two inexhaustible conversational ramblers, as should be expected when they examine every nook and cranny of each others’ fascinations and obsessions with the century— for example when a woman’s keen eye and an old ex-Beat’s latent paternalism clash (oh yes, this is one of Karen Moller’s sharp perceptions, here and in her previous memoir of high fashion and hippie and Beat culture— the girl who took off from small-town Canada with Kerouac’s « On the Road » under her arm to conquer the world--and did— the fashion world!) was quick to realize that the males of this intoxicating new culture celebrated their sexual freedom while ogling the females as common property— was this so different from Islamic ideology (another one of Moller’s furious grievances and celebration of truly heroic Islamic women writers such as the Somali, Hirsi Ali, and the Iranian, Nafisi, watch out for the fireworks there!)? Sparks also fly in the conversation regarding Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir and novelists like Bronte and George Eliot. My take was that with Karen’s disconsolate realization of her old friend’s surviving macho-ism, Cy beat a wise retreat in their correspondence, after some preliminary waving about of the banner of patriarchy!
If this is a book about books—it is far from bookish! While the passionate dialogue of these kindred spirits ranges across the literary and art world, tantalizing footsteps of their own are traceable across these pages. Karen Moller, growing up in the mountains of Canada, skiing to school as a child, who “wanted to be a boy while all the other girls wanted boyfriends,” whose father wouldn’t pay for her education because girls just got married, so she escaped to art college in Calgary on her own and paid for her classes by waitressing. Then off to Paris to study with André Lhote, “sitting around in Café Flore when I first arrived in Paris, hunched over a coffee, a Gauloise cig hanging out of the corner of my mouth”, helping Robert Filliou with the performance of his Collage of the Immortal Death of the World , a backup model for Yves Klein’s notorious body paintings, querying William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel, next stop, London, where her boutique soon became a fashion hotspot, her clothes modeled by Twiggy, partying with the Beatles, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, the artists and poets of London. A fierce feminist protesting for women’s rights, she tossed bricks at the police from a rooftop in the Paris ‘68 riots. She went on to become one of the most famous fashion forecasters in the world with her company in Paris, her designs sold to every major fashion house from Paris and London to New York and Tokyo, her picture splashed across the cover of Nova Magazine as the “New Woman”. Finally, having made her fortune by sixty, she decided to devote herself to writing and has since written four books!
Her friend of sixty years, Cyclops, an orphan of Dickensian atmospherics from Portsmouth, started life working at a baby powder factory, then an English brewery where the employees conversed hilariously in imitation Dickensian mannerisms, next hawking folk at Billy Mannings Fairground to shoot with his prepared guns-- then decided after reading Colin Wilson’s The Outsider that this wasn’t a life and took off for Bohemian Paris, where he was rebaptized Cyclops because of his eccentric appearance in Paris “in leather coat from the Flea market, Cuban heeled boots, completed with beard and black eye patch”, an underground figure who frequented William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beilies, and was close to the photographer, Harold Chapman, at the Beat Hotel where he met Karen. “My University” he calls it. He joins a circus with his friend, the brilliant Piero Heliczer, who became a close friend of Andy Warhol and created multimedia shows called Ritual Happenings which Warhol largely appropriated. After being expelled from Paris France, at some point Cy unwittingly smuggled spy films out of East Berlin for the CIA, coming close to a dangerous end. Shipped back to London finally from Trieste after glutting himself on the most expensive dishes a fine restaurant could provide for his last supper without a penny in his pocket, he somehow became a highly successful rare book dealer working from a stall in the King’s Road Antiquarius Market, in a style most novel in this traditionally conservative profession—and doubtlessly attractive!
The point is that - here is a true dialogue of two graphically brilliant souls, not just a compilation of congenial exchanges but a true confrontation. This rich delving into the past half century will be nostalgic and enlivening for those who lived through those years and inspirational and fascinating for those who didn’t!
Intuition is essentially the brain on autopilot, processing information without the person's cons... more Intuition is essentially the brain on autopilot, processing information without the person's conscious awareness. By karen moller The dictionary defines intuition as: the ability to acquire knowledge without proof or evidence or conscious reasoning or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired. Steve Jobs believed intuition was different from logic or analysis and that it was more powerful than intellect. Intuition isn't all that rare-most creative people are highly intuitive, which propel them to act in a certain way without knowing exactly why. We navigate through life guided by impressions and feelings and if we follow our intuition to its logical conclusion we usually end up where we should be. Mind reading, that seemingly magical ability to map someone's mental terrain from words, emotions and body language is the stuff of fantasy but it's actually something we do all the time, to a greater or lesser degree. It's difficult to trace back to how we came to know what people are thinking or how we detect infidelity in a lover. Perhaps it is just a look, a word they say out of place that sets our mind wandering until suddenly we know. Intuition is a magical gift, a gift I have always had in cupfulls. It is difficult to explain, all I know is I know-without knowing how I know. If I let my thoughts flow it's amazing how they drift and connect one to another as I absorb surroundings and influences without any conscious thought on my part of what my brain is taking in or is summing up. This gift of intuition made my textile designs best sellers and my fashion trends spot on year after year. I cannot claim I ever planned anything; I never had a career strategy. I just went along taking the next step not knowing the rules, which turned everything into an adventure. Perhaps it is best not to know the rules; not knowing that something is supposed to be impossible means one is more likely to just go ahead and do it. Henry Miller asked, 'What is an artist?' And then answered, 'He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to currents, which are in the atmosphere, in the cosmos; he merely has the facility for hooking on. Everything that we are doing, everything that we think, exists already, and we are only intermediaries, that's all, who make use of what is in the air. The proof is that ideas and great scientific discoveries often occur in different parts of the world at the same time. The same is true of the elements that go to make up a poem or a great novel or any work of art. They are already in the air; they have not been given voice, that's all. They need the man, the interpreter, to bring them forth.' I would add they need the woman to his statement as women are often more intuitive than men. Miller's appreciation of Parisian tolerance, a type of tolerance unknown in America, is worth mentioning. America is essentially against what an artist stands for, individuality and creativeness. In contrast the French actually hold artists in esteem. Miller would set off in the morning with a little notepad, and weave together various events and incidents as he wandered. What he called a sort of unconscious way of writing; letting the rush and flow of words bring out what was unknown to him. A method of writing much enamored by the Beats. According to Miller, 'To put down merely what one is conscious of, means nothing really, gets one nowhere. Anybody can do that with a little practice; anybody can become that kind of writer.' He claimed to write without revising and to record all that was normally omitted in books. Bunkum! We all know he revised the Tropic of Cancer endlessly over two years. In the 1960s everyone I knew was reading and raving about Miller's books. Well, the guys were, I'm not so sure about the gals. Miller was very macho but that didn't prevent him from living off Anais Nin, who became his lover. He accepted money that her husband gave her and he let her pay his rent and the first printing of Tropic of Cancer in 1934.
Chasing the Stars and Hoping to Shag the Moon, 2021
Remembering WILLIAM BURROUGHS by Karen Moller Burroughs was much talked about when Girodias' Olym... more Remembering WILLIAM BURROUGHS by Karen Moller Burroughs was much talked about when Girodias' Olympia Press published his Naked Lunch, a series of loosely connected vignettes that can be read in any order. The story goes that Allen Ginsberg took Burroughs' rather bulky, pasted up manuscript along to Olympia Press and declared, "It a work of genius such as you could never hope to find." Ginsberg later claimed that he'd said, "It's a brilliant iconoclastic work made of jigsaw illuminations harvested over the course of fifteen years of drug addiction," but that may have been just an afterthought of what he wished he'd said. Girodias found it unreadable: bits and pieces were stuck together and having been eaten away by rats it was in a terrible state of disrepair. Allen then gave it to Corso who plunked it down in his usual brazen manner in front of Mason Hoffenberg, a man known for his ability to recognize talent. Hoffenberg thought Naked Lunch impressive and in order to perk Girodias' interest he told him Naked Lunch was American slang for sex in the afternoon. Like Cinq-a-Sept with a mistress? Girodias asked. 'No, more like an orgy.' In truth, the sexual content is sparse and rather horrible and Girodias clearly did not see the commercial potential but encouraged by Hoffenberg and Sinclair Beiles he published it. To say the least Naked Lunch is a difficult book; its erratic plot-less flow could well have been dug up from some ghastly nightmare. The intriguing part is the title, Naked Lunch, which Burroughs explained rather cleverly as 'the frozen moment at the end of every fork.'' Burroughs' cold implacable look at the dark side of sadism, misogyny, sexual brutality, cannibalism, and hanging ejaculations may be, as my friend Cy says, a remarkable insight
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CHASING THE STARS AND HOPING TO SHAG THE MOON by Karen Moller
The Unending Conversation by Alain Arias-Misson
One first remarks the speed, the staccato give and take of this odd dialogue about books and friends— characters, hundreds it seems, from fiction and from real life, equally intimate (“I learned about life from books”, says Karen), anecdotes of the famous and the obscure ("Known Knowns and Unknown Knowns" as Cyclops calls them, comfortable among the latter), rub elbows with them. Karen Moller, with her famous designer past and many friends from the contemporary French art world, such as the eccentric and visionary Filliou and that ultimate avant-gardiste the flying Yves Klein to the British pop world of the Beatles and the larger-than-cartoon, declamatory American poets, Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, ranges over social and feminist and literary history and fascinating stories within stories of friends and great novels with irrepressible zest and the freshest of prose; practical, clear-eyed, with remarkable self-awareness and minimal encroachment of the ego, she is the Mrs. Pepys of this stroll through the cultural landscape. While Cyclops, often lost in obscure personal histories, indistinguishably autobiographical and fictitious, explores the murky back-streets of provincial English towns in a growling jive that owes as much to Dickens and Joyce as to the Goon Show in search of a mythical mother who may have been the widow of the legendary WWII hero Captain Crabbe, who may died in his attempt to attach a device underwater to the hull of a Russian warship that brought Khruschev to Britain for MI5, rapping next with the peculiarly luminous Piero Heliczer, paradoxical Jewish "Nazi" child star who practically invented Warhol’s famous « ritual happenings », sharing canned meals with the would-be American Jean Genet-- Gregory Corso— on the floor of Madame Rachou’s Beat Hotel in Paris in the late fifties, or digging for herbs and edible weeds with the lyrical German painter Hundertwasser in the latter’s refuge in the French province, after Heliczer was ejected for wandering nude in the village center and playing his flute at 5 in the morning.
No, do not look in these pages for a leisurely plod through their cultural landscape of the last half-century with marvelous mountain lake views like the Scottish Tour of Keats and Burns… Karen and Cy on their own Grand Tour of the cultural explosion of the Sixties and its repercussions throughout the next half century, mix and scramble pop music and feminist politics, personal anecdotes, the front page Profumo/Christine Keeler sex scandal and London’s notorious landlord Ranchman, and innumerable great novels which they appear to live in and mix with the like of Kafka’s K or Beckett’s Watt with the same intimacy as all the fantastic characters whose paths they cross in « real life ». Indeed the boundaries between real life and the life of fiction are often blurred and unless you read closely you may not know which landscape you are currently strolling in with them. What they do have in common with Keats and Burns, like them from modest origins, is a powerful demotic and literary urge, with a narrative that runs from Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol’s factory to the recondite poet-monk dsh (Dom Sylvester Houédard) and the redactor-poet Tom Phillips!
For it must be said that Dickens and Austen and Kafka and Joyce and Beckett and Nietzsche and Dostoevsky can be found at every corner of their streets and in their London taverns and on many fine promenades, and their company with Karen and Cyclops is quite delightful! Not that they are of one mind! Collisions take place between these two inexhaustible conversational ramblers, as should be expected when they examine every nook and cranny of each others’ fascinations and obsessions with the century— for example when a woman’s keen eye and an old ex-Beat’s latent paternalism clash (oh yes, this is one of Karen Moller’s sharp perceptions, here and in her previous memoir of high fashion and hippie and Beat culture— the girl who took off from small-town Canada with Kerouac’s « On the Road » under her arm to conquer the world--and did— the fashion world!) was quick to realize that the males of this intoxicating new culture celebrated their sexual freedom while ogling the females as common property— was this so different from Islamic ideology (another one of Moller’s furious grievances and celebration of truly heroic Islamic women writers such as the Somali, Hirsi Ali, and the Iranian, Nafisi, watch out for the fireworks there!)? Sparks also fly in the conversation regarding Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir and novelists like Bronte and George Eliot. My take was that with Karen’s disconsolate realization of her old friend’s surviving macho-ism, Cy beat a wise retreat in their correspondence, after some preliminary waving about of the banner of patriarchy!
If this is a book about books—it is far from bookish! While the passionate dialogue of these kindred spirits ranges across the literary and art world, tantalizing footsteps of their own are traceable across these pages. Karen Moller, growing up in the mountains of Canada, skiing to school as a child, who “wanted to be a boy while all the other girls wanted boyfriends,” whose father wouldn’t pay for her education because girls just got married, so she escaped to art college in Calgary on her own and paid for her classes by waitressing. Then off to Paris to study with André Lhote, “sitting around in Café Flore when I first arrived in Paris, hunched over a coffee, a Gauloise cig hanging out of the corner of my mouth”, helping Robert Filliou with the performance of his Collage of the Immortal Death of the World , a backup model for Yves Klein’s notorious body paintings, querying William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel, next stop, London, where her boutique soon became a fashion hotspot, her clothes modeled by Twiggy, partying with the Beatles, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, the artists and poets of London. A fierce feminist protesting for women’s rights, she tossed bricks at the police from a rooftop in the Paris ‘68 riots. She went on to become one of the most famous fashion forecasters in the world with her company in Paris, her designs sold to every major fashion house from Paris and London to New York and Tokyo, her picture splashed across the cover of Nova Magazine as the “New Woman”. Finally, having made her fortune by sixty, she decided to devote herself to writing and has since written four books!
Her friend of sixty years, Cyclops, an orphan of Dickensian atmospherics from Portsmouth, started life working at a baby powder factory, then an English brewery where the employees conversed hilariously in imitation Dickensian mannerisms, next hawking folk at Billy Mannings Fairground to shoot with his prepared guns-- then decided after reading Colin Wilson’s The Outsider that this wasn’t a life and took off for Bohemian Paris, where he was rebaptized Cyclops because of his eccentric appearance in Paris “in leather coat from the Flea market, Cuban heeled boots, completed with beard and black eye patch”, an underground figure who frequented William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beilies, and was close to the photographer, Harold Chapman, at the Beat Hotel where he met Karen. “My University” he calls it. He joins a circus with his friend, the brilliant Piero Heliczer, who became a close friend of Andy Warhol and created multimedia shows called Ritual Happenings which Warhol largely appropriated. After being expelled from Paris France, at some point Cy unwittingly smuggled spy films out of East Berlin for the CIA, coming close to a dangerous end. Shipped back to London finally from Trieste after glutting himself on the most expensive dishes a fine restaurant could provide for his last supper without a penny in his pocket, he somehow became a highly successful rare book dealer working from a stall in the King’s Road Antiquarius Market, in a style most novel in this traditionally conservative profession—and doubtlessly attractive!
The point is that - here is a true dialogue of two graphically brilliant souls, not just a compilation of congenial exchanges but a true confrontation. This rich delving into the past half century will be nostalgic and enlivening for those who lived through those years and inspirational and fascinating for those who didn’t!