
The Mel Lyman Personality Cult Revisited (2011) - apollinaire
https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2011/03/the-mel-lyman-personality-cult-revisited.html
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hash872
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

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jonjacky
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.

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valuearb
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](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.

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blueyes
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...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/my-childhood-in-
a-cult)

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sandworm101
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.

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rpiguy
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.

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ones_and_zeros
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...

