Now what, precisely, is Kama Sutra oil? Perhaps it’s apparent, right here within the semi-liberated twenty first century, however to Dick Cavett, again in 1971, it was not. Offered with a bottle of the stuff on an episode of his basic speak present, Cavett exhibited a type of scandalized perplexity. “Is that actual Kama Sutra oil?” he requested, cheeks flushing. “What’s the objective of Kama Sutra oil?” In a collection of follow-up questions, the entendres virtually doubled themselves, till Cavett lastly bought a straight reply. “You make love with it, in fact,” defined his visitor—a 32-year-old hippie by the title of Stewart Model.
Just some seconds—not almost sufficient—of this freewheeling interview seem in a pleasing, if not fairly bizarre sufficient, new documentary about Model’s life and legacy, premiering this week at South by Southwest’s on-line movie competition. Its title, We Are As Gods, comes from Model’s most well-known creation, the Entire Earth Catalog, the multivolume guide whose pages featured “instruments” for every little thing from arts and crafts to, naturally, historical types of lovemaking. (“We’re as gods,” Model wrote in a 1969 mission assertion, “and may as effectively get good at it.”) A part of the catalog’s mystique was, and stays, its foreshortened lifespan. By the point Model was providing thriller lube to Dick Cavett on nationwide tv, he had already shut Entire Earth down. “The concept of succeeding fully after which stopping … appears extra wholesome to us,” Model informed Cavett. Hippie prerogative, mainly: When one thing goes mainstream, disown it.
In We Are As Gods, Model emerges as one of many signature gamers of the technological age, out and in of crucial rooms at simply the proper moments in historical past. Most informal followers of his will know the tough trajectory. What they won’t know are the instruments of Model’s farsightedness. Medicine, for starters. Additionally a present for harnessing boredom. Lastly, knowledgeable networking. Via the catalog, Model linked up with Doug Engelbart, from whom he realized the potential of networked communication, which bought him serious about early social media, and so forth. “The mental Johnny Appleseed of the counterculture,” somebody calls him, seeding the land with thought-trends. Barely in awe of their topic, the filmmakers, David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, painting Model as that uncommon type of tech prophet, a person who by no means appears again. A real, uncompromising futurist.