Peter Max :: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Continental’s ‘Peter Max’, a Boeing 777, at George Bush Intercontinental Airport

Peter Max (born October 19, 1937 as Peter Finkelstein) is an American Pop artist.

He was born in Berlin, Germany and raised in Shanghai, China and in Israel before his family settled in the United States in 1953. The young artist trained in New York at the Art Students League, Pratt Institute, and the School of Visual Arts. He adopted the name “Max” from another student and aspiring artist in the Art Student’s League (Max Oppenheim, born NYC in 1930).^{[citation needed]} After completing his studies, Max opened a design studio and gained success as a designer for books, posters and products. Max closed his studio in 1964 and began making his signature colorful silkscreens.

Max’s art work, which he called “up art,” was a part of the psychedelic movement in graphic design. His work was influential and much imitated in advertising design in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of Continental Airlines‘ Boeing 777 aircraft (registered N77014) sports a special livery designed by Max. [1]

He owns a collection of 36 Corvettes dating from 1956 to 1989 – one of each year they were made. They are currently in the garage beneath a condo in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn (a former Daily News printing plant), and have been neglected since he bought them for just under $0.5M in 1990, although he still intends to one day paint them [2].

>> from The Official Peter Max Web Site

Peter Max is a multi-dimensional creative artist.  He has worked with oils, acrylics, water colors, finger paints, dyes, pastels, charcoal, pen, multi-colored pencils, etchings, engravings, animation cells, lithographs, serigraphs, silk screens, ceramics, sculpture, collage, video and computer graphics.  He loves all media, including mass media as a “canvas” for his creative expression.

As in his prolific creative output, Max is as passionate in his creative input. He loves to hear amazing facts about the universe and is as fascinated with numbers and mathematics as he is with visual phenomena.  

“If I didn’t choose art, I would have become an astronomer,” states Max, who became fascinated with astronomy while living in Israel, following a ten-year upbringing in Shanghai, China.   “I became fascinated with the vast distances in space as well as the vast world within the atom,” says Max. 

Peter’s early childhood impressions had a profound influence on his psyche, weaving the fabric that was to become the tapestry of his full creative expression. 

It was a childhood filled with magic and adventure, an odyssey the likes of which few people have had, artists included.

European born, Peter was raised in Shanghai, China, where he spent his first ten years. He lived in a pagoda-style house situated amidst a Buddhist monastery, a Sikh temple and a Viennese cafe.  And yet, with all that richness and diversity of culture, he still had a dream of an adventure yet to come in a far-off land called America.

From American comic books, radio broadcasts and cinema shows, young Peter formed an impression of the land of Captain Marvel, Flash Gordon, swing jazz, swashbucklers, freedom and creativity. 

But the American adventure was far in the future. In the decade to follow, Peter would discover many other fascinating worlds that fanned the fires of his imagination.

At the age of ten, Peter and his parents traveled across the vast expanse of China to a Tibetan mountain camp at the foothills of the Himalayas.  Then they journeyed 9,000 feet up to a beautiful, white-turreted hotel in a mountain paradise that seemed like Shangri-La.

After their return to Shanghai, the family left on another voyage of discovery, around India, the continent of Africa, and Israel, where Peter studied art with a Viennese fauve painter.  It was in Israel that young Peter also developed a love and fascination for astronomy.

In 1953, Peter’s family emigrated to America after a six-month visit to Paris.   Though it was a relatively short stay, Peter enrolled in an art school and absorbed the culture and art heritage of Paris.  At the age of sixteen, Peter realized his childhood vision and arrived in America.  

After completing high school, he continued his art studies at The Art Student’s League, a renowned, traditional academy across from Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. Here, Peter learned the rigid disciplines of realism and developed into a realist painter.

When he left art school, Max had become fascinated with new trends in commercial illustration and graphic arts, from America as well as Europe and Japan. He decided to try his hand at it and within a short time, he won awards for album covers and book jackets, which combined his own brand of realism with graphic art techniques.

Max also admired the work of contemporary photographers such as Bert Stern, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn, which led to his photo collage period, in which he had captured the psychedelic era of the mid ’60s.

As the ’60s progressed, the photo collages gave way, to his famous “Cosmic ’60s” style, with its distinctive line work and bold color combinations. 

This new style developed as a spontaneous creative urge, following Max’s meeting with Swami Satchidananda, an Indian Yoga master who taught him meditation and the spiritual teachings of the East.

Max’s Cosmic ’60s art, with its transcendental imagery captured the imagination of the entire generation and catapulted the young artist to fame and fortune. 

Max was suddenly on numerous magazine covers, including Life Magazine, and appeared on national TV. Max’s visual impact on the ’60s has often been compared to the influence the Beatles had with their music.

In the 1970s, Max gave up his commercial pursuits and went into retreat to begin painting in earnest.  He submersed himself in his art for several years, and was only induced to come out of retreat on occasion through special commissions by the Federal government agencies: the U.S. Border murals, the first 10� U.S. postage stamp, and projects for the Federal Energy Commission.

For July 4, 1976, Max created a special installation and art book, Peter Max Paints America, to commemorate America’s bicentennial.  It was the year Max also began his annual July 4th tradition of painting the Statue of Liberty. In 1982, Max painted six Liberties on the White House lawn, and then personally helped to actualize the statue’s restoration, which was completed in 1986.

In the years that followed, Max developed his new atelier, with a primary focus on paintings, mixed media works and limited graphic editions.  Of the thousands of requests that came in for posters, Max was drawn to those that synchronized with his own concerns: environmental, human, and animal rights.

He began a series of works called the Better World series, and created a painting called “I love the World,” depicting an angel embracing the planet, inspired by his backstage experience at the Live Aid concert.

In 1989, for the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, Max was asked to create world’s largest rock-and-roll stage for the Moscow Music Peace Festival.  Soon after the festival, in October, 1989, Max unveiled his “40 Gorbys,” a colorful homage to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Prophetically, a few weeks later, communism fell in Eastern Europe and Max was selected to receive a 7,000-pound section of the Berlin Wall, which was installed on the Aircraft Carrier U.S.S. Intrepid Museum.  Using a hammer and chisel, Max carved a dove from within the stone and placed it on top of the wall to set it free.

In 1991, Max’s one-man retrospective show at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersberg drew the largest turnout for any artist in Russian history. Over 14,500 people attended!

 As a painter for four former U.S. Presidents (Carter, Ford, Bush and Reagan) in 1993, Max was approached by the inaugural committee to create posters for Bill Clinton’s inauguration.  He was later invited to the White House to paint the signing of the Peace Accord.

Max has always been ready to apply his creative talent to important global events and has produced posters for many such events, including Summit of the Americas, Gorbachev’s State of the World Forum, and the United Nations Earth Summit, for which he had designed a series of twelve stamps that became the best-selling stamps in U.N. history.  For the U.N.’s 50th anniversary, Max produced an installation of fifty paintings in different color combinations of the landmark United Nations Building.

A lover of music, Max has been designated Official Artist for the Grammys, The 25th Anniversary of the New Orleans Jazz Festival and the Woodstock Music Festival.

 In the sports arena, Max has been the Official Artist for five Super Bowls, The World Cup USA, The U.S. Tennis Open and the NHL All-Star Game.

Always an optimist, Max sees a fabulous new age for the new millennium, filled with enormous possibilities.  He also sees a need for a greater responsibility to our planet, and he is ever ready to serve as the “Global Artist.”

Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril
by Judith Merril & Emily Pohl-Weary
Between the Lines

Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril
Known as “the little mother of science fiction,” Judith Merril burst onto the New York literary scene in 1948 with a disturbing story about nuclear radiation. Her life was a microcosm of alternative cultural and political movements. Born into early Zionist circles, she ventured as a teenager into the Trotskyism of the 1930s and 40s.From there she became involved with emergent science fiction, resistance to the war in Vietnam, the free university movement and tuning-in and tuning-out. In 1968, Merril moved to Canada to live and work in Rochdale, Toronto’s student-run university, and founded the Merril Collection of Speculative Literature at the Toronto Public Library. It is North America’s largest collection of science fiction and fantasy. The second half of her life was a constant adventure within the alternative and experimental worlds of science fiction, political activism and Canadian literature.

Better to Have Loved journeys amongst the people, places and things Judith Merril loved.

Judith Merril & Emily Pohl-Weary
Judith Merril (d. 1997) was a pioneer of twentieth-century science fiction, a prolific author and editor. She was also a passionate social and political activist. In fact, her life was a constant adventure within the alternative and experimental worlds of science fiction, and radical politics. Better to Have Loved is handsomely illustrated with original art works, covers from classic science fiction magazines, period illustrations, and striking photography. In many ways, it is a history of U.S. science fiction in its early years.

Emily Pohl-Weary
Emily Pohl-Weary is the granddaughter of Judith Merril. When Merril died, she left Pohl-Weary with a partially completed manuscript, a dozen tapes of interviews they had conducted during her last year, and complete instructions about everything she wanted included in the book.

Emily Pohl-Weary’s cultural writing appears regularly in Toronto’s independent weekly, Now magazine, and in other cultural magazines across Canada. She is the editor of Kiss Machine: A Conga Line of Arts and Culture (www.kissmachine.org).

After three years as co-editor and managing editor of Broken Pencil (www.brokenpencil.com), Pohl-Weary now serves on the board and is its fiction editor.

A pop culture junkie, Pohl-Weary is currently editing an anthology called Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks for release in spring 2004 with Sumach Press. She is also completing her first novel, Sugar’s Empty, about a slacker girl who’s haunted by her dead boyfriend.

Excerpt from Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril
I phoned an old friend who was living in Toronto, a mathematics professor named Chandler Davis. He had been teaching at the University of Toronto since he got banned from all U.S. universities because he wouldn’t sign the loyalty oath. He was happy to hear from me and said, “Sure, come along, all of you. We can put you up.”

We stopped to see him and he was eager for news of what had been going on in Chicago and New York. He invited a friend of his to come over, and the friend turned out to be poet Dennis Lee, who was then very much embroiled in starting Rochdale College. Dennis told me all about the plans for Rochdale.

Suddenly I realized, “This is where people who have even more urgent need than I do to leave the States are coming. I should be here too, because I can be of use.”

So I signed up with Dennis as a resource person for Rochdale, went home and packed up all my goodies. Shortly after that, I wrote to him.

Nov. 17, 1968
Milford

Dear Dennis:
I think the last delay is now past. I was foolish enough to drive on the Long Island Expressway in a storm, thereby losing car (not that much damage, busted radiator, but unbelievable situation whereby it costs more than the value of the car – unless virtually new – to get towed off the highway for repairs!) Which complicated all arrangements. Now have definite arrangements, reservations, etc. Will leave here 6pm Friday evening, with local friend driving hired trailer. Depending on customs delay, should arrive in Toronto any time after 3am on Saturday.

If you have not already done so (Chan was going to try to phone you after I phoned him last night), can you send me a formal/proper sort of letter of a sufficiently pompous nature to reassure the customs/immigration people that I am entering Canada as a (staff? faculty? resident?) Member of the College, so as to make sure I don’t flunk out on your immigration point system? I think anything giving the impression I am Honorably Employed and with Assured Residence will do … ???

Sending copy of this to Chan so whatever message you leave there will not need any explaining. See you Saturday – or whenever you get back from wherever you are then – Best, Judy Merril

I returned to Canada as a landed immigrant. I left the repression in the United States and came to the freedom of Rochdale. Of course, it was months later when I paused to think and realized that truly, in my heart, I had immigrated to Canada.

Rochdale, and Toronto at that particular time, meant different things for different people. I think the best illustration I can give of what it meant for me is something that occurred when I was living in the first apartment I had in Rochdale, which was on the third floor, overlooking Bloor Street.

I had been there only two or three weeks when I got a phone call from Peter Turner (who had been Ann’s boyfriend in New York – Ann was, she thought, on her way back to England to register for a psychiatric nursing course. As it turned out, she stayed in Toronto to start the first youth clinic in the city.) He told me he had just gotten his draft notice and wanted to leave the States. He asked if I had room for him. I told him I did.

The day he arrived he was sitting in the living room of the apartment, looking out the window. I was in the back of the living room, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him suddenly jump back, away from the window.

I was surprised, and then I realized what was going on. The taxis in Toronto, or at least the most frequent taxis on Bloor Street, were the same colour and appearance as cop cars in New York. A whole string of them would park or cruise along the street in front of Rochdale. The first couple of days I was in that apartment I did exactly the same thing, because I had taken the precaution of going downstairs, standing out in the street, and realized it was possible to see up into my window.

We had gotten that kind of consciousness in New York, where you would notice what was supposed to be an electric company van parked across the street for several days, and you knew that there was a listening device in there. So every time something that looked like a cop car drove by, I jumped back out of the sight of the window, and now Peter was doing it.

I started laughing and said, “Peter, they’re taxis.”

He sighed with relief.

That situation was, in distilled form, the essence of the difference I felt between the Toronto of 1969 and where I had come from; this felt like a free country.¹

¹From Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril by Judith Merril & Emily Pohl-Weary. Published by Between the Lines. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Flowers and free love. Antiwar marches and acid tests. In the mid to late 1960s, youth across North America and Europe began to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” Fed up with the establishment — parents, schools, police — they went looking for a new way of life. To Toronto’s Yorkville and Vancouver’s Kitsilano district they came, preaching peace, love and non-conformity.

Beatniks: The hippie forefathers

A peek at Canada’s first “Happening,” a Dada-inspired night of beatnik frivolity at Toronto’s Bohemian Embassy club. (TV; runs 3:49)

Haight-Ashbury: The birth of hip

Canadian filmmaker Don Shebib journeys to the epicentre of the hippie world, the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco. (TV; runs 7:02)

Yorkville: Hippie haven

Toronto’s Yorkville. It’s hippie central, full of young kids, drugs, sex and Vagabonds. (TV; runs 14:01)

Hippie life: It ain’t easy

A hippie in Kitsilano talks about getting by, meditating, doing drugs and dropping out. (TV; runs 6:41)

Welcome to the future: Less work, more play

The head of a California commune argues that hippies represent the lifestyle of the future. (TV; runs 5:59)

A sunshine melody: Joni Mitchell

A folksinger (and soon-to-be hippie icon) named Joni Mitchell sings and explains why most of her songs are about happiness. (TV; runs 8:48)

Festivals and happenings: Vancouver’s Human Be-in

Hippies get all decked out and pumped up for the party in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. A whole lot of flowers, music, drumming, dancing and love, love, love. (TV; runs 14:45)

Hippie runaways in Vancouver: Their stories

On-the-street interviews with hippie runaways and the people trying to help them. (Radio; runs 15:11)

City politicians averse to hippies

Vancouver’s mayor defends the recent arrest of several youths caught loitering, calling the hippies “parasites” and “scum.” (TV; runs 6:48)

Yorkville: From hippies to highrises

Are the hippies losing Yorkville to the boutiques and condominiums? (TV; runs 2:35)

Rochdale College: Organized anarchy

The view from inside Canada’s first free university and largest co-operative living experiment. Freedom — some might say anarchy — prevails. (Radio; runs 16:18)

Out of the city and into the commune

Three hippies describe why they’ve started new lives on communal farms in rural southern Ontario. (Radio; runs 4:42)

Where have all the hippies gone?

Some aged hippies, slightly older and wiser, talk about the failure of their commune. (TV; runs 2:24)

LINKS

Topic from Les Archives de Radio-Canada on the same subject

• La génération hallucinée
• 9 Additional Clips about Hippie Society: The Youth Rebellion
  • Joni Mitchell: All Sides Now
  • Seeking Sanctuary: Draft Dodgers
  • Trudeaumania: A Swinger for Prime Minister
  • John and Yoko’s Montreal bed-in

Related Topics from CBC’s Archives

The CBC assumes no responsibility for the content of external links.

Aviva Armour-Ostroff points out the many good things that came out of Rochdale.

Rochdale revisited

A young collective plays with the history of the alt institution

By KATE PEDERSEN

THE ROCHDALE PROJECT directed by Simon Heath, with Aviva Armour-Ostroff, Melissa Good, Ryan Hollyman, Jamie Robinson, Birgitte Solem and Greg Thomas. Presented by Theatre Passe Muraille (16 Ryerson). Opens tonight (Thursday, March 2) and runs to March 19, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinee Sunday 2:30 pm. $10-$30, gala fundraiser March 8 w/ cocktail reception and auction $100. 416-504-7529.

Art is imitating life in the Rochdale Project, a collectively created work based on the notorious and short-lived alternative education centre in 1960s Toronto.

For actor and co-creator Aviva Armour-Ostroff, the experience of making the play has mirrored the experience of the college itself.

Rochdale students spent hours haggling about self-governance in the belief that they could improve on the status quo, though not really knowing how. In the same way, the Rochdale collective spent hours improvising on vague themes and stories, often wondering if it would amount to anything.

It did, and unlike Rochdale, which never quite got it together, faith triumphed over frustration.

“We had to have faith that it was going somewhere, but we couldn’t push too hard to get there or we’d lose things,” explains Armour-Ostroff.

Faith in the process led the collective – which includes Melissa Good, Simon Heath, Ryan Hollyman, Jamie Robinson, Birgitte Solem and Greg Thomas – to a plot featuring a regular girl from rural Ontario named Ruth (Good) who discovers the Rochdale building and its tenants for the first time when a taxi driver arbitrarily drops her at the front door.

Ruth encounters everything Rochdale has to offer, including drugs, riots, suicide, biker gangs and a naked guy.

“It’s a great premise for a television show,” Armour-Ostroff reveals, sounding a bit sheepish. “But we’re all too old to actually play the characters.”

Maybe, maybe not. Younger actors might not catch the thematic connection between the demise of Rochdale College and the challenges posed today by funding cuts and audience apathy to the cultural institutions it inspired.

“A lot of good things came out of Rochdale, including the Hassle-Free Clinic, which started there,” she points out. So did Toronto publishers Coach House Press and House of Anansi. As a matter of fact, so did Theatre Passe Muraille one of Canada’s oldest alternative theatres – where the play’s being performed.

Fortunately, these institutions are more resilient than Rochdale was. The college, decrepit and neglected, closed and was sold in 1973.

The Rochdale collective has been luckier, and efforts to band together to keep the play on the rails financially have been very successful.

“Greg (Thomas) held a fundraising poker tournament,” Armour-Ostroff recalls. “It all added to the depth of the characters.”

It’s been a busy four years both on and offstage, and unlike Rochdale the college, participants in Rochdale the play have experienced only positive changes. Director Heath’s four-year-old son is as old as the project itself; actor Solem has a newborn, and actor Hollyman recently married.

The family feeling makes it hard to face disbanding after the run closes, but Armour-Ostroff has her plans.

“I started producing my own work because I wasn’t getting hired,” she explains. This fall she will produce the Lab Cab Festival at Factory Theatre, followed by another collective production about being housebound, which she’s working on with seven other women.

But for the time being, it’s all about Rochdale.

“It’s amazing to have a history play about people who are still alive,” she says. “Anyone you talk to who’s over 50 has some kind of experience with the building.”

Let’s hope that those same people – and their children, now adults themselves – will sign up for Rochdale the play.

NOW | MARCH 2 – 8, 2006 | VOL. 25 NO. 27

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The former location of Rochdale College on Bloor Street in Toronto.

Opened in 1968, Rochdale College was an experiment in alternative student-run education and co-operative living in Toronto, Canada.

Contents

• 1 Co-operative housing experiment
• 2 Educational ideals
• 3 Drug culture
• 4 The building
• 5 External links
• 6 Resources

Co-operative housing experiment

Rochdale was the largest co-op residence in North America. Rochdale occupied an 18-story student residence at Bloor St. and Huron St. in Toronto. It was situated on the edges of the University of Toronto campus and near Yorkville, Canada’s hippie haven in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Rochdale took its name from Rochdale, a town in north-west England, where the world’s first cooperative society was established in the 1800s.

The college’s modern architecture was uniquely designed for communal living. Some areas were divided into independently-operated communal units of about a dozen bedrooms (called Ashrams), each with its own collective washroom, kitchen and dining room. Each unit was responsible for collecting rent and maintaining its own housekeeping. Other areas consisted of bachelor, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom apartments. On the first and second floor were common areas used for socialization, education, and commercial purposes. The roof was accessible from the 18th floor and was used for sunbathing. Clothing was optional.

Educational ideals

In the late sixties, universities were centres of political idealism and experimentation. Rochdale College was established as an alternative to what were considered traditional paternalistic and non-democratic governing bodies within university education. Conversely, Rochdale’s government policy was decided at open meetings in which all members of the co-operative could attend, participate in debate, and vote.

It was the largest of more than 300 tuition-free universities in North America, and offered no structured courses, curriculum, exams, degrees, or traditional teaching faculty. It became a hot bed of free thought and radical idealism, in many ways resembling a tribal community.

Traditional professors were replaced by “Resource People” of various academic and non-academic backgrounds, who would lead informal discussion groups on a wide variety of subjects, as opposed to structured classes. Resource person of note included authors Dennis Lee and noted Futurian Judith_Merril who founded Rochdale’s library.

Students had complete freedom to develop their own learning process, much of which emerged from the shared community experience. The college included theatres for drama and film, and a ceramics studio. Students decided school policy and made their own evaluations.

Rochdale students were involved with various cultural institutions in Toronto such as Coach House Press, Theatre Passe Muraille, The Toronto Free Dance Theatre, the Spaced-out Library (now the Merril Collection of the Toronto Public Library) and House of Anansi Press.

It was typical of the free universities not to award degrees and the University of Toronto did not offer degrees through Rochdale College, but anyone could purchase a B.A. by donating $25 to the college and answering a simple skill-testing question. An M.A. cost $50, with the applicant choosing the question. A Ph.D. cost $100, no questions asked.

The Rochdale application also described its “non-degree”: “We are also offering Non-Degrees at comparable rates. A Non-B.A. is $25.00. Course duration is your choice; requirements are simple, we ask that you say something. A Non-M.A. is $50.00 for which we require you to say something logical. A Non-Ph.D. is $100.00; you will be required to say something useful.”

Rochdale ran its own radio station called CRUD, with an unusual assortment of music, talk, and static. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission tried to shut the station down a number of times, but the dedication of its staff kept it on the air.

The Rochdale community was very tolerant, so it was not unusual for residents to wander nude or openly use soft drugs within its rooms and corridors.

Drug culture

Rochdale was originally a refuge for the nation’s idealistic in 1968. As nearby Yorkville became gentrified during the late 1960s, however, much of Toronto’s counterculture ended up at Rochdale. This included homeless squatters and bikers who dealt hard drugs.

According to the CBC archives, by 1971 Rochdale had become known as “‘North America’s largest drug distribution warehouse.’ Hash, pot, and LSD are in large supply. The Rochdale security force includes members of biker gangs”.[1][2]

The CBC archives also describe how “[d]ue to problems with cops and bikers, the governing council set up a paid security force to be on 24-hour alert. Ironically, some of these security people were bikers themselves. As had happened in Yorkville, an unofficial alliance with the Vagabonds motorcycle club developed.”

Rochdale’s educational focus and student population declined as the drug business increased.

With the increase in clashes with police, political pressure forced Rochdale to close in 1975. A number of residents refused to leave. On May 30 the last residents were carried from the building by police. The doors to the college had to be welded shut.

The building

The Unknown Student sculpture in front of the Rochdale building on Bloor St.

The 18-storey tower that once housed Rochdale at 341 Bloor Street is now known as the Senator David A. Croll Apartments. Completed in 1968, it is the sister building to the Tartu student residence a short distance west across Bloor street. Designed by the architects Tampold and Wells (who had earlier constructed the Charles Street Apartments at Bay Street and Bloor Street), it is seen as ironic that such as a hub of creativity and counter cultural ideology was housed within such a harsh, yet restained, concrete Brutalism.

As homage to its Rochdale days, the tower features the large and intriguing Unknown Student sculpture out front, which has been affectionately nicknamed by students as Autofellatio.

“Love it or loathe it, Rochdale College is hard to dismiss even 20 years after its closing.” (University of Toronto Magazine, Spring, 1995, p.38.)

External links

• Video clips and descriptions of Rochdale College and Canadian culture from the era from the CBC archives.
• Historic Rochdale documents from Libraries and Archives Canada.
• Documentary and interview with a former resident.
• Architectural description of the building.
• A personal reflection of a former resident
• The story of Rosie Rowbotham, one of the suppliers of marijuana to Rochdale.
• The documentary film “Dream Tower” about Rochdale by Ron Mann.
• Website of Campus Co-Operative Residences Inc. a surviving organization affiliated with Rochdale. Includes a forum for Rochdale alumni.
• The Rochdale College Museum

Resources

• Dream Tower : The Life and Legacy of Rochdale College, by Henry Mietkiewicz
• Merril, Judith; Emily Pohl-Weary (2002). Better to have loved : the life of Judith Merril (paperback) (in english), Toronto: Between the Lines, 282p. ISBN 1-896357-57-1.

 

Santana – StarIQ.com

For over thirty years, Carlos Santana has been proving that consistency and change can make beautiful music together. His guitar still resonates with the same bell-like clarity first heard by many at Woodstock in 1969, yet he continues to explore new musical genres with an ever-increasing circle of creative compadres. The eight Grammy awards he just received for his CD Supernatural reflect the timelessness of his work.

The Roots of Caring

Carlos Santana was born July 20, 1947 at 2:00 am in Autlan De Navarro, Mexico, with the Sun, the heart of consciousness, in the tradition-loving sign of Cancer. No sign is more aware of its roots than this one. It is about connecting to the river of feeling that binds families and cultures into communities of mutual care and concern. Cancers are rarely detached or aloof. While circumstances may occasionally drive them into their protective shells, they tend to be acutely sensitive to themselves and those around them. They’re natural nurturers.

This caring quality is demonstrated on Santana’s web site, which devotes considerable space to charitable concerns. Among them is the Milagro Foundation, described as follows:

“The Milagro Foundation, founded by Carlos and Deborah Santana, provides financial assistance for educational, medical and housing needs of children all over the world. The Santanas believe that life is a miracle (milagro) and that children everywhere deserve the opportunity to lead safe, healthy and educationally creative lives.”

Santana, though, is not parochial. An area of the site called “We Care About” provides contact information for the United Farm Workers, Save the Children, The Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, The American Indian College Fund, Childreach and Larkin Street Youth Services.

The Need to Create

The Sun describes the purpose of our being, but the Moon represents the food we need to sustain ourselves and fulfill that purpose. Santana was born with the Moon in Leo, a sign of creativity and self-expression. This is ideal for an artist whose goal is to open hearts as much as it is to entertain. Those born with the Moon in Leo are frequently comfortable in the spotlight. In fact, they are often needy for it.

A key element to the healthy expression of a Leo Moon is to keep connected with issues larger than oneself. This enables Leo power to be about more than the ego and to apply its gifts of creativity to larger purposes. Aquarius, the sign opposite Leo, reflects this consciousness of the collective. Santana’s interest in social causes, diverse cultures and spirituality provides a healthy outlet for his artistic talents.

Santana recently revealed that he was a victim of sexual abuse during his childhood. He has a close conjunction (union) between controlling Saturn and intense Pluto in Leo at the bottom of his chart (Fourth House cusp). This combination corresponds with possible misuse (Saturn) of power (Pluto) in a familiar situation (Fourth House). Digging up the painful past may be the hardest work there is, but it’s a necessary step for healing and another means to free up creativity.

Gemini Diversity

Santana’s work has been extraordinarily diverse. Mars, the action planet, is in Gemini, the sign of variety and curiosity, in his birth chart. His core of Latin-flavored rock has been extended by playing with jazz artists (Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report, John McLaughlin), blues, r ‘n’ b and hip-hop musicians (John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Lauryn Hill, Neville Brothers) and rockers (Boz Scaggs, Jefferson Airplane). He’s even collaborated with country star Willie Nelson, reggae man Jimmy Cliff, neo-flamenco guitarist Ottmar Liebert, Africans Mory Kante and Babatunde Olatunji, and the unclassifiable Bob Dylan.

Bringing It All Back Home

Cancer and Leo are perhaps the two most personal signs in the zodiac. Santana’s Sun and Moon in these signs show clearly in his warm smile and openhearted approach to his music and his life. He has endured hardship and achieved great public success, yet seems so much more of a person than a personality. As rapidly advancing technology continues to dislodge us from our old, familiar ways, we are blessed to have such a loving model for consistency and change. Viva Carlos!