Monday, September 13, 2010

HAWKWIND


When I was a student at Louisiana State some 453 years ago, one thing was impossible to escape.

No, not Mike the Tiger.

No, not parking tickets.

No, not a bunch of Kappa Alphas, in their finest faux-Confederate regalia, re-enacting the Battle of Gettysburg by attempting a cavalry charge up North Stadium Drive armed with beer bongs and astride Trans Ams their daddies bought them before they left for the Ole War Skule. Well, actually, this scene was pretty hard to avoid, but it could be done.


THERE WAS just one thing that couldn't be dodged or ignored. And that was the word "HAWKWIND" spray painted on just about every flat surface on campus.

I would like to think this was the result of a proto-guerrilla marketing campaign by the space-rock band, targeting underachieving Southern universities as a means of growing its redneck demographic. I likewise would like to think that the disyllabic graffiti poet/artist was none other than the trippy hippie dancing chick who performed with the band.

In an ideal world, she crept onto our benighted campus in the middle of the night, clad in a tight, tie-dyed T-shirt and a pair of well-worn Daisy Dukes. Blowing bubbles as she spray painted HAWKWIND here, there and everywhere, m
aaaaaaan.

I'd like to think that.

MORE LIKELY, it was LSU's former student-government president, Ted Schirmer, who preferred the Grateful Dead but went about -- theoretically, I reiterate . . . he's a lawyer now -- tagging everything with HAWKWIND just to piss off the fascist, totalitarian university administration.
Which just wanted to keep the people down, man.

HAWKWIND.

It probably wasn't about space rock and shimmying hippie chicks at all.

HAWKWIND.

It probably was just another protest against the counterreactionary forces of
in loco parental repression.

HAWKWIND.

Crap.

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