The Mel Lyman Personality Cult Revisited (2011) | Hacker News Reader

The Mel Lyman Personality Cult Revisited (2011)

blog.wfmu.org

13 pointsapollinaire8 comments

I visited their Fort Hill compound in-person years ago. (It was in connection with a job I had at the time, we briefly had business with them). They're still a 'commune', when I entered the basement to speak with their office manager I could hear various residents shouting 'outsider in the building!' upstairs, I guess to alert others. It was spooky.

One thing the article doesn't note is that Lyman had a second branch of his Fort Hill commune in Hollywood, where they established a fairly successful construction company that's in business to this day, working on movie sets and such

The recent book Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan Walsh has quite a bit about the Mel Lyman commune, then and now. It is notable that the commune still persists, even though Lyman himself apparently died in the late 1970s -- maybe.

Antonioni rejected the song Richard Wright wrote for the film, The Violent Sequence, using a previous Pink Floyd song instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aPn4Waz2FM

It was reworked by the band into “Us and Them” which became the emotional centerpiece of The Dark Side of The Moon.

There was a great first-person account published in the New Yorker last year about growing up in Lyman's Family: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/my-childhood-i...

An interesting account. But, like so many others, it follows the stereotypical pattern. Communal living? great. Family and togethernews? Love it. 'Alternative' family arrangments where kids are raised by a variet of adults? Ok, I'm not going to judge. It isn't that much different than divorced couples. Children ebing beaten as punishment? Ok, not good, but this was the 1960s and it doesn't seem any worse than what was happening everywhere else.

But then the familiar pattern emerges. Young women married to older men. Women married against their will. 13 yo girls, children, married off to older men. And then that real definitive core of so many cults: Forget any sense of marriage. The cult leader is just sleeping with a cadre of young girls. Stereotypical cult established. Call CPS. Time to shut it all down.

It’s amazing how many communes depend on a cult-like figurehead just to hold together. So many are formed and dissolve because people start arguing over things like who does dishes.

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19813288

I had a neighbor in Boston a few years ago that was in the inner circle of the Lyman family. They had "real" jobs, etc but still definitely operated on the outskirts of society and the law. Didn't make great neighbors...

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