20/20 haynes sight

Generations of hippies, anarchists, punks, non-conformists and free spirits have evolved into the 21st century, blissfully unaware of the influence exerted on contemporary culture by such cultural creatives as American expatriate Jim Haynes (www.jim-haynes.com). A pioneer on the Edinburgh, London, Amsterdam and Paris art scenes for almost fifty years, Haynes has made a blissful life's work of embodying humanistic concepts such as "Think global, act local" and "Make Love, Not War."

Since the 1960s, Haynes has been creating and directing avant-garde theaters, alternative newspapers, book publishing companies and underground film festivals. While Haynes had a creative hand in some of the artistic scenes that electrified the swinging sixties, he has been based in Paris since the mid-70s, when he accepted a teaching position at the experimental University of Paris VII at Vincennes. "I taught media and sexual politics and tried to inflict as little damage as possible on my students," he recalls. "In over twenty years, I never failed anyone."

Shortly after moving to Paris, Haynes began hosting epically international Sunday night dinners at his atelier, (the painter Pierre Matisse's former workshop) for anywhere from 50 to 100 guests, who pay a small fee to cover food costs. (See www.jim-haynes.com for more details.)

Testament to Haynes's karmic impact on our global hipoisie/intelligentsia/demi-monde is his autobiography Thanks For Coming! (Faber & Faber). Dedicated to over 3,000 of Haynes's friends and bedmates-- including Germaine Greer, John Lennon David Bowie and Xavier Hollander (a.k.a. The Happy Hooker), the book's a compulsively readable flashback on a life spent whooping it up on the wilder shores of art, sexual behavior and commerce.

Haynes and I met one evening in September to discuss his past, present and future projects, long time concerns, and how it feels (at seventy) after fighting in the trenches of alternative culture for four decades. Dressed in khakis and an Oxford cloth button-down, Haynes looks a good ten years younger than his age and presents a far more conventional image than his colorful past would suggest.

"The belief behind everything I do is that people are beautiful and they should be brought together, and we have to create environments that bring them together," Haynes says with a broad smile. He started in Edinburgh by opening Britain's first paperback bookshop, stocking "obscene" books such as Lady Chatterly's Lover and the works of Henry Miller-- who was then still banned in the U.S.A. Edinburgh's enthusiasm for the readings there, coupled with a desire "to create platforms or mediums for kindred spirits to transmit information about what we had discovered to others," inspired Haynes to form the Traverse Theatre Club, where he produced and staged plays by Berthold Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter years before they were seen by Broadway audiences.

In 1962, Haynes also co-organized the first International Writer's Conference at the world's longest-running cultural festival, the Edinburgh Festival. Among others, Haynes invited great U.S. writers Norman Mailer, William Burroughs and Mary McCarthy to speak. When his energies outgrew Edinburgh, Haynes moved to London and started a theater there, staging Joe Orton's Loot, Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol film festivals, and Yoko Ono's first in an epic line of happenings.

"The style in the 1960s," Haynes maintains, "was the most revolutionary attitudinal statement made, as far as I know, since we've been on the planet, and that is do your own thing: accept and respect everyone else's right to do theirs'; I think that I got caught up in, and maybe even contributed, to certain philosophical rumblings that made life for me, and for others, exciting and fun."

Ever in search of "social animation," Haynes resigned from his London theater directorship and helped found the International Times (IT), just when that parafictional fantasy (1960s reality) burst into psychedelic, leggy London bloom. Pink Floyd played their tunes and projected slides at IT's launch party; The Soft Machine motorcycled around the stage at the start of their set. Guests included Paul McCartney disguised as an Arab, avant-garde filmmakers such as Michaelangelo Antonioni, and 2500 other lucky ones.

Fulfilling the prophecy of its title, IT soon became an international counter-cultural Bibles. IT also served as the prototype for the now-ubiquitous urban listings magazine format. IT's success notwithstanding, Haynes itched to create a multi-media arts space, the first of its kind in the Old World, where people could perform whatever they wanted to, where they could try our new ideas or even fail; where they could shake off, relax and come together." He chanced upon a boarded-up Covent Garden warehouse and started squatting.

Occupying and renovating the space with like-minded cultural pioneers, Haynes created the Arts Lab. A cinema, theater space, dance studio, video workshop, café, art gallery, crash-pad, etc. that drew young artists (a young David Bowie used to practice his mime and other performances here) as well as thousands of people ranging from Indira Gandhi to John Lennnon to rehearse for free, to participate in happenings, and to become friends with Jim Haynes.

"It was like an enormous party night after night," Haynes says, and it sounds like one indeed, what with John and Yoko, Germaine Greer, Mick Jagger, Jean Shrimpton, R.D. Laing and other sixties cultural enzymes hanging out, taking in performances, hooking up and eating dinner into the early morning. Closed after two years due to financial trouble, the demise of the Arts Lab freed Haynes to pursue his great mind/body/spirit project: free love.

"My drugs of choice have always, only been love and affection," he explains with a shrug. (A serene survivor of sixties overload, Haynes drinks no alcohol, never smoked or did any drugs.) To continue his campaign against sexual confusion and guilt Haynes started Suck, "the first European sex paper," in 1969, along with collaborators such as feminist superstar Germaine Greer. "We wanted to enlighten people about sexuality in all its aspects, to demystify it through educational and amusing homosexual, heterosexual, transgendered articles and graphics," Haynes relates. Under the motto, "Suck turns words into flesh," the paper printed the first gay guide to Europe, oral sex tips and articles with titles such as, "Women Need Whorehouses." Published in socially tolerant Amsterdam but immediately banned in the U.K., Suck brought Scotland Yard to Haynes's door and became instant cult literature on the Continent.

Amsterdam set the scene for further celebration and demystification of sexuality. Haynes organized the world's first erotic film fest there: The International Wet Dream Film Festival. This infamous convention sold out two years in a row, cutting a professionally acceptable swath for erotic films that were neither pornographic or exploitative. One year, ticket holders were treated to a five hour North Sea cruise, complete with chamber orchestra, "love room," filled with water beds and potted palms and food for everyone. "It's a fact that sexual expression in no longer subject to the taboos it once was," Haynes stresses. "It's okay to write about sex, to do it, talk about it, whatever. And in 2005, movies are shown on television and in mainstream cinemas that would have put people in prison for ten years during the sixties."

After moving to Paris in the 70s, Haynes started teaching at the University of Paris and wrote, published and distributed books. With fellow American expatriate and Citizen of the World Gary Davis, Haynes began producing-- in seven languages-- World Passports. Challenging the world's immigration authorities, however, involved a certain degree of risk. When the French police warned Haynes that if he continued, he'd be deported, he chose to stop.

What does this counter-culture pioneer have to say to those of us in 2005 who yearn for a renaissance of blissful social spirit and sixties zeitgeist? "Most of the people I knew in the sixties felt it was possible to build utopia in our lifetimes," Haynes recalls. "And, at the end of the sixties, it was revealed that it was not going to happen. For some, disenchantment and cynicism followed. But others, and I mean many, many men and women, realized that we could build it for ourselves by living our ideals," he says. "By banishing fear of the other, fear of the unknown, and instead, sharing our lives fully with everyone; I'm a now person," he stresses. "The key to living in bliss is in thinking about what and where your energies should be placed now, for there is no going backward. Just go ahead consciously and carefully do what you have to do."

An irrepressibly hospitable man, Haynes now finds his bliss in bringing diverse people together, and in feeding them at legendarily entertaining and exciting dinner parties at his house. "Almost every Sunday evening, there is a dinner party in my Paris atelier to which anyone may come," he says, in his trademark Southern drawl that bears traces of a British accent. "The first fifty or so people to call are welcome. During the dinners people meet people from all corners of the world." (All share the expenses. Any extra goes to help various friends and projects.) To come, Haynes invites readers to call on Saturday or Sunday when you're in Paris to book a reservation. (tel 01-4327-1767).

Haynes is right about the cosmopolitan gatherings he hosts. On one recent Sunday night, I met a few filmmakers from Burkina Faso, Scottish newspaper correspondents, Polish jazz musicians and John Calder, who secured his place in literary history by publishing U.K. editions of works by Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs and great post-war French authors such as Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon (Nobel Prize 1985) and Nathalie Sarraute. I also met a London massage therapist and some Parisian regulars; there were 85 guests in all.

As the saying goes, "Better dead than mellow," and Haynes's manner bears none of the earmarks of an ex-hippie on spin cycle. I tell him that he reminds me of Buddha, who when asked to sum up the experience of his life and thought, simply replied, "Now." It seems appropriate to ask the sixties-enhanced Haynes the same question about his life and thought before turning off the tape recorder.

After a thirty second pause, Haynes starts laughing and looks straight in my face. With a huge Buddha smile, he exclaims, "Wow."