North Bay Utopian Communities

North Bay Utopian Communities

http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/09.a21.11/feature-utopian-communities-1138.html

We revisit the many fascinating cults and communes that have flourished in the North Bay's illustrious utopian history.

By Leilani Clark

09.21.11

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Morning Star

Founded: Lou Gottlieb, bassist for folk trio the Limeliters, bought 32 acres on Graton Road near Occidental in 1962. After retiring from showbiz, the grizzly-bearded musician declared the ranch open land, inviting anyone and everyone to live there for free. In 1966, it became a super-mecca for Diggers, dropouts, the "technologically unemployable" and wild children of all ages.

Beliefs: "Open-land" and "voluntary primitivism" were Morningstar's philosophical lynchpins. People built tree houses, frolicked and cooked in the nude, took drugs and grew vegetables that fed not only the residents but provided supplies for free-food programs in San Francisco.

Unraveling: Where Gottlieb saw utopia, authorities saw safety and health violations. The Sonoma County Health Department and the sheriff began staging raids on the "Happiness People" after neighbors complained about open fires, open-pit toilets and rough living conditions. By 1971, the county had bulldozed the shelters and campsites, and Gottlieb left for India, deeding his property to God.

Remnants: Gottlieb died on the land in 1996, and caretakers have allowed the site to return to its natural state. "The land has just been resting very quietly. That's what Lou wanted," says Ramon Sender, a San Francisco writer and former resident who's archived Morningstar's history at www.badamamama.com. In 2011, Gottlieb's heirs announced plans to sell the property. A group called Friends of Morningstar is raising money to buy the property for placement in a land trust, says Sender.—L.C.

Wheeler Ranch

Founded: Bill Wheeler opened his 320-acre Coleman Valley Road ranch to the displaced folk of Morningstar in the late 1960s.

Beliefs: Wheeler espoused the same open-land ideas as Gottlieb. The community became home to errant flower children, runaways and soldiers AWOL from Vietnam. "What was important to us was that there was a lot of art, there was a lot of music and there was a lot of creativity," Wheeler told the Bohemian in 2003.

Unraveling: Once again, the county stepped in after complaints were lodged by neighbors against the freewheeling nature of the ranch. In 1973, bulldozers razed the tents, lean-to's and rough-hewn houses that had sprung up across the property and the uprooted community disintegrated.

Remnants: Wheeler still lives on the pastoral property that once played home to nearly 400 free spirits. He tells the Bohemian that everything from the days of the ranch was bulldozed or burned to the ground by the county, leaving nothing at all behind. Rumors that the ranch site eventually became the Ocean Song Farm and Wilderness Center are unfounded, though "we enjoy a great friendship," says Wheeler.—L.C.

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Dennis Banks Visits an Ailing Russell Means

Dennis Banks Visits an Ailing Russell Means

http://www.nativenewsnetwork.com/dennis-banks-visits-an-ailing-russell-means.html

Levi Rickert

September 6, 2011

SAN JOSE, NEW MEXICO - In its glory days, the American Indian Movement served as a major catalyst for the resurgence for American Indians throughout the United States.

During the 1970s, Dennis Banks, Ojibwa, and Russell Means, Lakota, emerged as two of the American Indian Movement's most recognizable leaders. Some could argue they have been the most visible and vocal American Indian leaders during the past half-century.

Together they fought for American Indian rights. Both men led the American Indian Movement's 71-day siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Both men were indicted and put on trial and were tried together in St. Paul, Minnesota in a trial that lasted some eight months. Both men were freed when the Federal Judge Fred Nichol dismissed charges against them and accused the US Department of Justice and the FBI with misconduct because of their tactics used in their attempt to prosecute both men.

Over the ensuing decades, both men have remained fighters for American Indian rights.

Both men were together again in New Mexico last week Thursday, as Means is in the fight for his life. In July he was diagnosed with esophagus cancer and elected not have surgery which would have required removal of a major portion of his tongue.

Banks flew to Albuquerque and traveled to visit to see Means at his rural home near San Jose, New Mexico.

"He is a fighter. He is in the battle with cancer and seeking alternative healing,"

Banks told the Native News Network Friday evening.

"He is still very strong - strong-minded, and robust as ever,"

Banks continued.

"We both talked about establishing a health agenda. We both have had serious health issues,"

said Banks.

Means is relying on American Indian spiritual healers to assist him with his treatment.

Accompanying Banks on the visit was Paul Collins and his wife, Carol. Paul Collins is an internationally-acclaimed artist who met both men at Wounded Knee in 1973. At the time, Collins was there painting a series of portraits, which resulted in "Other Voices- A Native American Tableau."

After many years as an American Indian activist, Means became a Hollywood actor. Since 1992, he has appeared in "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Pathfinder," "Natural Born Killers," "Windrunner: A Spirited Journey," "Thomas and the Magic Railroad." His served as the voice of Chief Pawhatan in "Pocahontas" in the hit 1995 Disney movie.

Also, during 1995, Means released his autobiography, "Where White Men Fear to Tread," co-written with Marvin J. Wolf.

On Saturday, Banks was back home in Minnesota and will try to go back to spend some extended time with Means.

Marijuanaland: Dispatches From an American War

Marijuanaland: Dispatches From an American War

http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/books-mariann-g-wizard-jonah-raskins.html

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / September 29, 2011

[Marijuanaland: Dispatches From an American War by Jonah Raskin (High Times Books, 2011); Paperback, 154 pp. $12.95.]

Jonah Raskin has written about marijuana (cannabis) politics and culture since the 1970s. A professor at Sonoma State University in northern California, he teaches communication law and American literature and coordinates an undergraduate internship program. Jonah has authored 12 books, including biographies of Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Jack London, and Field Days, about farm workers, organic farms, and farmers' markets.

Outside academia, he created the story and characters for the stoner movie Homegrown, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Kelly Lynch, Hank Azaria, Ted Danson, and Jamie Lee Curtis. He's a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Reader, Village Voice, and the International Herald Tribune. Jonah also was active in the Sixties with the Youth International Party (YIPPIE).

I knew much of this before reading Raskin's latest, Marijuanaland, but didn't know he'd spent some growing-up years in the "Emerald Triangle," the three California counties -- Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity -- that together produce some of the most legendary smoke grown, in great quantities and with the openness and civic pride of public harvest events much like Texas' annual watermelon, peach, and other agricultural fests.

Jonah's dad, a retired attorney who'd been a youthful rum runner in the waning days of alcohol prohibition, grew a personal pot patch after retiring to northern Cali, where young Jonah shared the sacred herb with his parents and others over the years.

In some ways, then, Marijuanaland is a personal memoir, a coming-home story by the smart young fellow who went to the city and became a hot-shot college professor, returning to his roots. As with most everyone who tries to go home again, there is some bitter with the sweet as he sees the effects of long-time-passing on parts of the once-immortal wilderness of youth.

Raskin connects the nickname "Emerald Triangle" with the equally-famed "Golden Triangle" of southeast Asia, where much of the world's heroin originated before globalization really got rolling. He doesn't mention the maybe-mythical "Bermuda Triangle," where Atlantic and Caribbean meet Outer Space.

My own limited northern Cali exposure, however, made the connection clear to me. In Mendocino County, I visited the House of Hathor (chapel of the Egyptian cow-headed goddess); saw endless acres of blooming pink azalea forest, like a far planet in an old Star Trek episode; and lounged around quaint, politically-correct Mendocino-by-the-Sea, where there are no cell phone towers, the main grocery store is an organic co-op, and human carnivores are rare. Off-shore drilling is a constant threat to the spectacular coastline.

In Humboldt, mountainous roads wind through log-cabined communities where everyone knows everyone else, or give glimpses of hand-hewn estates clinging to impossible slopes. Forested hills go straight up and down, crossing coldwater creeks, and up and down again to rocky strands where the tide comes in fast through narrow inlets. Whalers and rum runners used these coves and foundered on these cliffs; crabbers and kelp-collectors use them still.

Vast Trinity County, northernmost of the three, remains virtually untouched by development. Mining, lumber, and ranching interests dominate the economy but leave most of Trinity unpopulated.

Since the 1970s or so the whole tri-county area has been the Hippie Heaven of the Western World, far as I know; where straight people try to act hip so as not to feel gawky. It's a place where community runs deep. It's a place where an outlaw can just about disappear.

Passage of California's medical cannabis law, Proposition 215, in 1996, wrought many changes in the Triangle. Enormous profits in sales to cannabis dispensaries -- themselves springing up on every corner, spurring zoning and licensing battles statewide -- attracted a new class of growers, without local or even counterculture roots and devoid of ethics, wreaking environmental chaos in the primeval forest.

At the same time, increasing heat along the U.S.-Mexican border and completion of the infamous "border fence" south of San Diego pushed some enterprising Mexican pot growers to move to el Norte, cutting shipping and distribution costs and bringing their product closer to the consumer, growing in the national forests and other parkland in slash-and-burn fashion.

That both of these unpleasant results of partial cannabis legalization are due to its partiality is evident to serious observers. Demand for cannabis far exceeds its therapeutic or strictly medical use. The one inexorable law of capitalism is that demand produces supply; a law not subject to legislative or even popular repeal. California activists succeeded in 2010 in placing Proposition 19 on the November ballot, to legalize, tax, and regulate cultivation and sale of recreational cannabis in California despite continuing federal prohibition.

Marijuanaland, subtitled Dispatches from an American War, begins just as the campaign for Prop. 19 began in earnest and meanders through a year in the cannabis growing cycle, looking at marijuana-influenced culture, politics, economics, medicine, and law in the Emerald Triangle. Raskin visited with pot growers young and old, activists for and against legalization, newspaper editors, sheriffs, medical patients, healthcare providers, and friends-of-friends along the way. His quest ended as Prop. 19 went down to defeat and plants that had survived arbitrary annual raids on sun-drenched hillsides were harvested.

I've long known that the so-called "drug war" is a war of violence waged against certain drugs and people, but at first saw the subtitle as a kind of subculture marketing tool, like the full-color center section photos of spectacular plants, cured buds, and proud-but-headless growers in classic High Times magazine style.

But in the Triangle, the drug war is more than feds vs. heads. It's long-time growers torn between a comfortable, rather smug "outlaw culture"; the prospect of lower profits and more competition balanced against legal status (a potentially enormous cost savings; many growers keep a lawyer on retainer). It's sheriffs carefully timing raids to fall after most ganja has been harvested; who clearly know the folly of prohibition but love the shiny toys -- helicopters, spy equipment, and such -- the drug war offers its troops. It's small town newspaper editors who think marijuana is evil and oppose legalization but pay the printer with half-page ads from pot defense lawyers.

As debate over Prop. 19 rose, some elected officials proposed copywriting trade names like "Emerald Triangle" much as wineries protect the names of their cultivars. In others, officials called for repeal of Prop. 215 and stronger enforcement.

Activists hedged their bets, favoring legalization for some growers but not others, especially not the newcomers from south of the border. There was deep division as well on specifics of Prop. 19, with some seeing it as a step forward, away from the current chaos, and others seeing the tax-and-regulate provisions as a cop-out, unworthy of support.

Some were suspicious because the initiative was first launched and supported not by a "traditional" marijuana advocacy group but by cannabis dispensary innovator Richard Lee of "Oaksterdam" (Oakland); others, sick and tired of "traditional" advocacy careerism, wanted change in their lifetimes.

Throughout the Prop. 19 campaign, public and private meetings throughout the Triangle revealed sharp divisions between those who felt themselves inundated with profit-seeking outsiders, local growers with or without vision and confidence, patients afraid of losing access to their medicine, and other interest groups.

Prop. 19 lost in the counties of the Emerald Triangle by as much as 3-1. A record cannabis harvest was hanging in the drying barns as votes were counted. Prices fell despite the defeat. Today, while marijuana is sold and smoked rather openly almost everywhere in California, the Drug Enforcement Administration continues to raid California's legal medical cannabis providers and sheriffs continue selective enforcement against growers in rural areas.

If "the Garden of Eden is within you," so is the Garden of Evil. The drug war, Raskin shows, is being fought in the hearts and minds of straights and stoners alike, where activists elsewhere like to envision a liberated zone.

Marijuanaland makes the pitfalls of partial legalization, profit-based politics, and widespread misinformation painfully clear. In the latter category is the book's perpetuation of the myth that "Cannabis indica" is a separate botanical species from "Cannabis sativa," the latter somehow inferior as a smoking herb.

From a botanical standpoint, this is hogwash; there is no agreement on whether indica is even a legitimate variety of C. sativa, but there is total agreement that C. sativa is one species much as Homo sapiens is; that is, any pot plant can (theoretically) breed with any other; since the plant is polymorphous, it has every evolutionary reason to remain one species, indivisible. Those who think otherwise contribute to outrageous retail prices for cannabis consumers; "indica" is but a marketing tool.

Raskin writes humorously of Triangle parents who work hard in the trade, make good money, and provide their kids every advantage in an area where non-marijuana-related income is limited. Whether the kids flee rural isolation for the city, "never to return," or become low-achieving slackers content to smoke Dad's weed and rodeo their ATVs through the forest, they're bound to disappoint, at least for a while. Some things never change.

But the real crux of generational conflict on legalization is that some older users still think they're part of a minority and fear change. Crying, "What about the children?" gains no traction against certain facts: the harm to children of having a parent jailed cannot be overstated.

Wherever cannabis use is decriminalized, use by teenagers drops substantially. And with 40+ years worth of kids like Raskin nurtured by pot-smoking parents in hundreds of communities all over the USA, demonstrably no more are bad apples than other youths of similar age and economic circumstance. The kids are, pretty much, alright.

The question America faces today is whether to cling to a world of scarcity and individual competition or find a new model of plenty and social cooperation. A huge majority of second- and third-generation "hippies" and perhaps of 20- and 30-somethings are creative, self-assured, resilient, tolerant, and determined to build the sustainable future we have utterly failed to leave them. The cannabis plant, in its entirety, offers a strong material basis for that future.

To move beyond even the present tug-of-war between state and federal authorities on voter-approved medical legalization, activists must launch more rigorous educational efforts and more successfully urge people out of the "emerald closet" of silent complicity. We must re-vision a world in which human beings love one another, respect the earth, and strive to relieve suffering in all living beings. Marijuanaland will offer many clues to the thoughtful on what is needed.

Cannabis is more than just a mildly naughty weed that makes flirting more fun, or a powerful medicine for pain and alienation. It isn't just an endlessly renewable source of nontoxic fuels and fibers. Or the most nutritious food known to man. It is also a plant teacher, and until human beings recognize that there is other intelligent life on earth and heed its wisdom, we will bar ourselves from the Garden.

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John Carlos and the Moment That Still Matters

John Carlos and the Moment That Still Matters

http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/sport-dave-zirin-john-carlos-and-moment.html

Troy Davis, John Carlos, and
the moment that still matters

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / September 28, 2011

On September 21st, the day that Troy Davis was executed in Georgia, 200 very angry Howard University students pumped their fists in front of Barack Obama's White House and chanted "No Justice, No Vote." At that moment, I understood why an image from 1968 still resonates today.

It was 43 years ago this week when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists on the Olympic Medal Stand and, along with supportive silver-medalist Peter Norman, created a moment seared for all-time in the American consciousness.

This week also marks the release of John Carlos's autobiography, The John Carlos Story, which I co-wrote. When John asked me to write the book, I felt compelled to do it because I've long wondered, "why?" Not why did Smith and Carlos sacrifice fame, fortune, and glory in one medal-stand moment, but why that moment has stood the test of time.

Of course, much of the book details why John Carlos took his stand. It was 1968. Dr. King had been assassinated. The Black freedom struggle had become a fixture of American life. In the world of Olympic sports, apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia were regulars at the games. There were scant black coaches. Avery Brundage, an avowed white supremacist, ran the International Olympic Committee.

John Carlos in particular, in the 1960s, went from being a Harlem high school track star -- walking down the street talking both smack and politics with neighborhood regulars like Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell -- to being a scholarship athlete at segregated East Texas State. The gap between his sense of himself as a man and going to the South and being treated like a boy drove him politically toward his medal stand moment.

The answer to "why do so many of us still care" was tougher to decipher. In 2010, I appeared on a panel on the history of sports and resistance with Carlos, after which a long line of young people born years -- even decades -- after 1968 patiently waited for his signature on everything from posters and t-shirts to hastily procured pieces of notebook paper. Why? And why have I seen street-corner merchants from Harlem to Johannesburg sell t-shirts emblazoned with that image?

The most obvious is that people love a good redemption song. Smith and Carlos have been proven correct by history. They were reviled for taking a stand and using the Olympic podium to do it. A young sportswriter named Brent Musberger called them "Black-skinned storm troopers." But their "radical" demands have since proved to be prescient.

Today, the idea of standing up to apartheid South Africa, racism, and Avery Brundage seems a matter of common decency rather than radical rabble-rousing. After years of death threats, poverty, and being treated as pariahs in the world of athletics, Smith and Carlos attend ceremonial unveilings of statues erected in their honor. America, like no other country on earth, loves remarking on its own progress.

But it was the Howard students, chanting, "No Justice, No Vote" to an African American President on the night of a Georgia execution, who truly unveiled for me why the image of black-gloved fists thrust in the air has retained its power. Smith and Carlos sacrificed privilege and glory, fame and fortune, for a larger cause.

As Carlos says,

A lot of the [black] athletes thought that winning [Olympic] medals would protect them from racism. But even if you won a medal, it ain't going to save your momma. It ain't going to save your sister or children. It might give you 15 minutes of fame, but what about the rest of your life?

Carlos' attitude resonates because for all the blather about us living in a "post-racial society," there are reservoirs of anger about the realities of racism in the United States. The latest poverty statistics show that the black poverty rate of 27.4% is nearly double the overall U.S. rate. Black children living in poverty has reached 39.1 percent. Then there's the criminal justice system, where 33% of African American men are either in jail or on parole.

The image of Carlos and Smith evokes a degree of principle, fearlessness, and freedom that I believe many people find sorely lacking today. They stood at the Olympics unencumbered by doubt, as brazenly Free Men. We are still grappling with the fact that they had to do it and the fact that it still needs to be done.

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Biker ethos kick-started Folsom scene

Biker ethos kick-started Folsom scene

http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=6057

Tony K. LeTigre

09/22/2011

Around the beginning of September when the black and blue flags go up, everyone knows it's that special time of year again: two months of sunlight and a whole lot of leather.

On September 25 Folsom Street between 7th and 12th streets will be cordoned off for the Folsom Street Fair, as it has been for 27 years now, since "Megahood" started it all in 1984.

Many of Folsom's attendees simply enjoy the fair for what it is today, without pondering its evolution through the years, or the South of Market neighborhood conditions that led to its creation.

The gay male leather culture that hangs on today in SOMA and peaked in the pre-AIDS era has its roots in motorcycle clubs and marooned sailors and waterfront bars of the 1950s like Castaways and the Sea Cow. The first leather bars popped up in the Tenderloin, and were usually short-lived and subject to police harassment: The Spur Club, Why Not, and The Hideaway were all raided and closed between 1959-62.

Author, anthropologist and leather historian Gayle Rubin, in her essential 1998 essay "The Miracle Mile," traces the roots of today's gay male leather culture back to sailors and bikers: queer men who confounded the prevailing notion of homosexuals as effeminate and easily identified sissies.

"If gay male leather can be said to have a core meaning, it would have to be masculinity," Rubin wrote, adding that the motorcycle, more than anything else, symbolized that masculinity.

"Homomasculinity" was the word coined by Drummer magazine editor and pop-culture polymath Jack Fritscher to describe the gender expression of masculine-identified leathermen.

Gay motorcycle clubs started with the Satyrs in L.A. in 1954. The Warlocks and the California Motorcycle Club, both San Francisco-based, soon followed. The first CMC Carnival in 1966 marked the inception of a social institution for the emerging leather scene, continuing to the birth of the Folsom Street Fair.

"Leather culture was constructed on a discreet circuit of bike runs, bars, back rooms, and the annual autumn orgy of the CMC Carnival," wrote Fritscher in his essay on the first Folsom, "Leather's Burning Man."

Rubin identified the opening of the Tool Box on Harrison Street in 1962 as the catalyzing agent of the leather scene "South of the Slot," as SOMA was called in the old days.

Tool Box featured Chuck Arnett's legendary mural epitomizing the homomasculine ideal of the gay leather set and garnered national attention, including an infamous Life magazine spread in 1964 that crowned San Francisco the nation's "gay capital."

The Life exposé largely conflated "homosexual" with "criminal pervert," but made some astute observations, including the objection of "homophile groups," like the Mattachine Society and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, to the military's practice of dishonorably discharging known queers from its ranks. (In case you thought the now repealed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" started with Clinton.)

A police raid on a dance at California Hall on New Year's Eve in 1965 has since been branded "San Francisco's Stonewall" for the way it galvanized not only the nascent gay rights groups but also mainstream public sentiment through media coverage and the judicial system against police prejudice and abuse of power.

Fair nights in the valley

So began the feast of the kings, a latter-day Bacchanalian orgy when, in the words of San Francisco recording artist Donald Currie, "Gays took over, and we turned the city into a bathhouse."

Febe's opened on Folsom Street in 1966 and long reigned as the leading gay biker bar. Mike Caffee's iconic "Leather David" served as the bar's logo. One elegist in the 1996 treasure trove Gay by the Bay recalled Sunday afternoons at Febe's as "a massive grope-a-torium where anything happened."

The Stud, eldest surviving statesman of the scene today, opened the same year as Febe's. It started as a leather bar with a Hells Angels crowd but had morphed into a hippie haven by the time of Woodstock, complete with dance floor and psychedelic blacklight mural.

All through the 1960s and on into the superlative 1970s new bastions of the leather kingdom sprang up: Bathhouses and sex clubs (The Barracks, The Plunge, The Sutro Baths, The Catacombs), shops and galleries (A Taste of Leather, upstairs at Febe's; a leather shopping mall called Big Town; Fey-Way Studio, the first gay art gallery), groups and events (The Warlocks' "Witches Christmas," CMC Carnival, the Satyrs' annual Badger Flat Run).

And a plethora of bars joined the scene. To name just a few: Off the Levee, Ramrod, the No Name Bar (known by many names over the years, presently Powerhouse), the Trocadero (where Sylvester performed), the Bay Brick Inn (a lesbian pleasure palace), Folsom Prison, the Black and Blue, the Red Star Saloon.

A spreadsheet maintained by the GLBT Historical Society lists 211 different names of gay bars, bathhouses, and related businesses in SOMA, past and present, though some are multiple names for the same location.

The SOMA scene, in particular the bars grouped on and around Folsom Street in the vicinity of the present-day street fair, also acquired nicknames, sociological markers of a legend-in-the-making: The Miracle Mile, Valley of the Kings.

The former name was bestowed by the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, the latter by "Mr. Marcus" Hernandez, first Emperor of San Francisco and longtime B.A.R. leather columnist before his death in 2009.

"Valley of Kings conveyed an image of powerful, cocky, independent, and sexy masculinity," Rubin expounded. "It contrasted with Marcus' nickname for Polk Street, 'The Valley of the Queens,' in reference to the older and sometimes more effeminate population of gay men associated with the area."

The Castro was "The Valley of the Dolls," in reference to its "hordes of young and beautiful men" (in Rubin's words) as well as its pharmaceutical drug culture, "dolls" being old-school slang for pills.

Circa 1971 the bandana or "hanky" code entered currency as a discrete way for leathermen to communicate their orientation and kinks. The first International Mr. Leather conference was held in Chicago in 1979, spinning off locally the Mr. San Francisco Leather Competition, as well as the Mr. Drummer Contest sponsored by Drummer magazine.

Mr. Drummer led to the inception of San Francisco Leather Pride Week, as Rubin discussed in her heartfelt essay "Elegy for the Valley of the Kings."

Miracle on Folsom Street

At the same time that the Miracle Mile was coming into its own, an antithetic current was flowing through the neighborhood, a trend of "slum clearance and urban renewal."

Folsom Street Fair co-founder Kathleen Connell, together with LGBT historian Paul Gabriel, penned an in-depth history, "The Power of Broken Hearts" available at http://folsomstreetfair.org/history, that documented the SOMA anti-gentrification movement.

Connell and Gabriel chronicled how neighborhood activists organized against ruthless developers and government agents that regarded the neighborhood as an example of "urban blight" and traced the way that movement led to the genesis of the Folsom Street Fair.

In 1980, while working for the South of Market Alliance, a neighborhood advocacy group, Connell met and befriended fellow gay activist Michael Valerio, who was also the assistant director for Tenants and Owners Development Corporation.

Valerio and Connell found common ground in their support for low-income families, artists, senior citizens and the gays in SOMA, and in their desire to incorporate their "gay selves" into their work.

The neighborhood was threatened by the encroachment of high-rise development, and the gay men's community was under attack by a new plague first identified in 1981: AIDS. Connell and Valerio decided to launch a SOMA fair as the best resistance against the powers that would destroy (or displace) them.

"In addition to community preservation, we were making a big statement about the AIDS crisis, and trying to raise funds as there were no social services to speak of at that time," Connell told the B.A.R.

From their efforts came "Megahood," the first Folsom Street Fair, in 1984. "South of Market Sizzles in September" promised a headline in the June/July 1984 edition of the South of Market News, a neighborhood paper whose hype helped insure a good turnout.

In the beginning Folsom was not explicitly a sex or leather event, but the gay leather scene was a significant presence from the start. Drummer endorsed the first fair, albeit with some misgivings.

"Leatherfolk anxiety ran deep in Orwellian 1984, rightly suspicious of event producers purposing leather for fundraising parallax to the way Harvey Milk started the Castro Street Fair to sign up voters," Drummer editor-in-chief Fritscher recalled.

Up Your Alley Street Fair, which started in 1985 on Ringold Street, was a dedicated gay leather event from the beginning. Ringold is an alley south of Folsom between 8th and 9th onto which a number of the leather bars exited. It wasn't the fair's home for very long.

Connell's history recalled, "Ringold is a residential alley, and the neighbors, while tolerating dead-in-the-night activity, did not take kindly to this sudden explosion of leather and fetish men and women on their street. They successfully petitioned the city and the SFPD to rescind the granting of a license for a third year."

If the move seemed a setback at first, the fair survived and then some. Around 12,000 people - mostly gay leathermen - attend Dore Alley, as locals now know it, the last Sunday in July.

Panic at the bathhouse

The Folsom Street Fair sizzled, but the SOMA leather scene fizzled. It was AIDS, of course, that killed the party. The "Gay Cancer" triggered a wave of homophobic panic and revulsion directed at leathermen in particular. Feast abruptly turned to famine.

The Castro survived to become the international attraction it is today, but the Folsom scene fell into permanent disrepair. The Castro's core was politics, which were fanned to a blaze by the AIDS crisis; but the core of Folsom was sex, and sex lost its infrastructure when the bathhouses closed.

Bars closed, too. Tool Box had been torn down in 1971, a victim of redevelopment. A large fire in 1981, starting at the former Barracks, destroyed many homes and a number of key establishments. By the mid-80s, as the effects of AIDS intensified, leather bars began dropping like dominoes.

When Febe's closed in June 1986, "Even the TV news covered it," as recollected in Geoff Mains' 1989 novel-elegy Gentle Warriors, which provides a poignant look back at the Miracle Mile's heyday in the form of a "last motorcycle ride" through the ailing bar district.

Partly due to the toll of AIDS, the producers of Up Your Alley merged with those of the Folsom Street Fair in 1990, and it was around this time that the official posters and promotional images for Folsom became overtly "leather-ized," as they had not been previously.

One of the many casualties of AIDS was Michael Valerio. He had gone on to form other community organizations and win various awards before succumbing to the disease at the age of 40. The B.A.R. printed his obituary in 1995.

The bathhouses remain closed today: the legacy of public policy-makers swayed by hysteria and a virus we've learned to manage but not eradicate. A prowling sex fiend must cross the Bay Bridge and head to Steamworks in Berkeley for a club with private rooms. It seems the state of affairs of the mid-80s persists in the mainstream LGBT community to this day, a watershed shift away from open and unbridled sexuality.

What does this mean for a demographic whose defining trait is sexual orientation?

"I understand the panic back in the day, but now most sex clubs don't have proper cleaning facilities - aside from bathroom sinks," said B.A.R. leather columnist Scott Brogan. "I think that's much less healthy than having a private room with a bath that you can wash up in - or the public showers at the baths."

Queer scholar Greg Jones, 36, who has written on bondage and sadomasochism in ancient Greece, recalled, "When I first moved to the city in 1998 people were still smoking pot and giving each other blowjobs in the back of the old Hole in the Wall. But the last time I tried to get frisky there the bartender came round and scolded us.

"Now there are signs in bars, literally posted every 5 feet - especially during Folsom Weekend - that yell 'No sexual activity!'" added Jones.

(Wicked Grounds Cafe now occupies the space of the original Hole in the Wall, which has moved a couple blocks away to 1369 Folsom St.)

Former Lone Star Saloon manager Steve Hoffman, 46, said proprietors are caught between patrons who want Folsom to live up to its lascivious past and health and law enforcement officials reacting against that same reputation.

"I can see the customer's point of view, but I definitely understand the owner's perspective too, because if you let people have sex in the back room and get busted, you lose your liquor license," Hoffman explained.

Just such an incident caused the closure of My Place, formerly the Ramrod (1225 Folsom St.) The space re-opened as Chaps II in 2008. (The original Chaps was located where the DNA Lounge is now.)

No one would suggest that sex itself is seriously endangered. But what about the leather community?

"It's obvious the leather scene isn't as strong as it used to be," said Hole in the Wall bartender Miguel Chavez. "And bars can't survive if they cater to people who only go out once a month."

That explains the re-branding of Chaps II as Kok in spring 2011. Lone Star changed management and most of its staff in 2010, alienating some. (Hoffman hasn't been there since the change.) Most recently, the Eagle Tavern closed last April after nearly 30 years, ending a long tradition of Sunday afternoon beer busts that drew a diverse crowd including fetishists of all flavors. [See story Page 1.]

(El Rio now hosts a beer bust called "The Eagle in Exile" on the first Sunday of every month - 3158 Mission St. at Precita.)

Hoffman said that "leather" today has broadened into a catch-all term for kink in general, encompassing a profusion of fetishes – bears, military gear, sportswear, golden showers, exhibitionism, varieties of bondage and discipline. Furries, anyone?

The Leathermen's Discussion Group, which meets the 4th Wednesday of every month above Blow Buddies (933 Harrison St.), held a panel discussion in July with historian Rubin as a panelist that asked, "Is Leather Dead?"

"The leather community has become more privatized, and its ability to occupy public space in the Folsom has become more limited and occasional," Rubin wrote on the subject. "However, the Folsom is still a magnet, a piece of sacred ground, and a powerful symbol."

Brogan attended the July discussion and described it and Rubin as "a blast."

"The hanky code and leather uniforms in the old days were ways of letting people know what you were into," Brogan added. "It's true that things are much more open and accessible these days. Some might say too much so, but I believe things evolve naturally and there isn't anything to do about it except to enjoy the ride."

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Fists raised across generations

Fists raised across generations

http://socialistworker.org/2011/09/27/fists-raised-across-generations

When Howard University students raised their fists for Troy Davis on the night of his execution, they were invoking the spirit of John Carlos and Tommie Smith.

September 27, 2011

ON SEPTEMBER 21, the day that Troy Davis was executed in Georgia, 200 very angry Howard University students pumped their fists in front of the Barack Obama's White House and chanted "No justice, no vote!"

At that moment, I understood why an image from 1968 still resonates today. It was 43 years ago this week that Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists on the Olympic medal stand and, along with supportive silver-medalist Peter Norman, created a moment seared for all time in the American consciousness.

This week also marks the release of John Carlos's autobiography, The John Carlos Story, which I co-wrote. When John asked me to write the book, I felt compelled to do it because I've long wondered, "Why?" Not why did Smith and Carlos sacrifice fame, fortune and glory in one medal-stand moment, but why that moment has stood the test of time.

Of course, much of the book details why John Carlos took his stand. It was 1968. Dr. King had been assassinated. The Black freedom struggle had become a fixture of American life. In the world of Olympic sports, apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia were regulars at the Games. There were scant Black coaches. Avery Brundage, an avowed white supremacist, ran the International Olympic Committee.

John Carlos in particular, in the 1960s, went from being a Harlem high school track star--walking down the street talking both smack and politics with neighborhood regulars like Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell--to being a scholarship athlete at segregated East Texas State. The gap between his sense of himself as a man and going to the South and being treated like a boy drove him politically toward his medal-stand moment.

The answer to "Why do so many of us still care?" was tougher to decipher. In 2010, I appeared on a panel on the history of sports and resistance with Carlos, after which a long line of young people born years--even decades--after 1968 patiently waited for his signature on everything from posters and T-shirts to hastily procured pieces of notebook paper. Why? And why have I seen street-corner merchants from Harlem to Johannesburg sell T-shirts emblazoned with that image?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE MOST obvious is that people love a good redemption song. Smith and Carlos have been proven correct by history. They were reviled for taking a stand and using the Olympic podium to do it.

A young sportswriter named Brent Musberger called them "Black-skinned stormtroopers." But their "radical" demands have since proved to be prescient. Today, the idea of standing up to apartheid South Africa, racism and Avery Brundage seems a matter of common decency rather than radical rabble-rousing.

After years of death threats, poverty and being treated as pariahs in the world of athletics, Smith and Carlos attend ceremonial unveilings of statues erected in their honor. America, like no other country on earth, loves remarking on its own progress.

But it was the Howard students, chanting "No justice, no vote!" to an African American president on the night of a Georgia execution, who truly unveiled for me why the image of black-gloved fists thrust in the air has retained its power.

Smith and Carlos sacrificed privilege and glory, fame and fortune, for a larger cause. As Carlos says, "A lot of the [Black] athletes thought that winning [Olympic] medals would protect them from racism. But even if you won a medal, it ain't going to save your momma. It ain't going to save your sister or children. It might give you 15 minutes of fame, but what about the rest of your life?"

Carlos' attitude resonates because for all the blather about us living in a "post-racial society," there are reservoirs of anger about the realities of racism in the United States. The latest poverty statistics show that the Black poverty rate of 27.4 percent is nearly double the overall U.S. rate. The percentage of Black children living in poverty has reached 39.1 percent. Then there's the criminal justice system, where 33 percent of African American men are either in jail or on parole.

The image of Carlos and Smith evokes a degree of principle, fearlessness and freedom that I believe many people think are sorely lacking today. They stood at the Olympics unencumbered by doubt, as brazenly free men. We are still grappling with the fact that they had to do it and the fact that it still needs to be done.

First published at TheNation.com.

Longtime fugitive US hijacker caught in Portugal

[2 articles]

Longtime fugitive US hijacker caught in Portugal

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HIJACKER_FUGITIVE_CAPTURED

Sep 27,  2011

By SAMANTHA HENRY

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- A 1970s militant who escaped from a murder sentence in New Jersey and carried out one of the most brazen hijackings in U.S. history was captured in Portugal after more than 40 years as a fugitive, authorities said Tuesday. After decades of stagnancy, there was a sudden break in the case when police matched his fingerprint to a resident ID card.

George Wright, 68, was arrested Monday by Portuguese authorities in a town near Lisbon at the request of the U.S. government, said a member of the fugitive task force that had been searching for him for nearly a decade.

Wright was convicted of the 1962 murder of a gas station owner in Wall, N.J. Authorities say Wright and three associates had already committed multiple armed robberies on Nov. 23, 1962, when he and another man shot and killed Walter Patterson, a decorated World War II veteran and father of two, during a robbery of the Collingswood Esso gas station in Wall.

Wright received a 15- to 30-year sentence and had served eight years when he and three other men escaped from the Bayside State Prison farm in Leesburg, N.J., on Aug. 19, 1970.

The FBI said Wright then became affiliated with an underground militant group, the Black Liberation Army, and lived in a "communal family" with several of its members in Detroit.

On July 31, 1972, Wright, dressed as a priest and using the alias the Rev. L. Burgess, hijacked a Delta Air Lines flight from Detroit to Miami accompanied by three men, two women and three small children from his communal group, including Wright's companion and their 2-year-old daughter, according to Associated Press reports at the time.

When the plane landed at the Miami airport, the hijackers demanded a $1 million ransom - the highest of its kind at the time - to free the 86 people on board. After an FBI agent delivered a 70-pound satchel full of money - wearing only a pair of swim trunks, per the hijacker's instructions - the passengers were released, according to AP accounts.

The hijackers then forced the plane to Boston, where an international navigator was taken aboard, and the group flew on to Algeria, where the hijackers sought asylum.

The group was taken in by Eldridge Cleaver, the American writer and activist, who had been permitted by Algeria's Socialist government to open an office of the Black Panther Movement in that country in 1970, after the Algerian president at the time professed sympathy for what he viewed as worldwide liberation struggles.

The hijackers had identified themselves to the passengers as a Black Panther group, police said at a news conference, according to AP reports at the time. They said the hijackers smoked marijuana continuously during the flight.

Algerian officials returned the plane and the money to the U.S. at the request of the American government, and briefly detained the hijackers before letting them stay. Coverage of the hijackers' stay in Algeria said their movements were restricted, and the president ignored their calls for asylum and requests to return them the ransom money.

The group eventually made its way to France, where Wright's associates were tracked down, arrested, tried and convicted in Paris in 1976. France refused to extradite them to the U.S., where they would have faced far longer prison sentences. According to news reports at the time, the defense hailed the light sentences they were given as "a condemnation of American racism" after the jury found "extenuating circumstances" in their actions, apparently agreeing with the defense's assertion that the hijacking had been motivated by "racial oppression in the United States."

But Wright remained at large, and his case was among the top priorities when the New York-New Jersey Fugitive Task Force was formed in 2002, according to Michael Schroeder, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, who worked with New Jersey's FBI and other agencies on the task force.

The Department of Corrections brought along all its old escape cases nine years ago when the task force began operating, Schroeder said, and investigators started Wright's case anew, never taking a prolonged break from working on it for the past nine years.

They looked at reports from the 1970s, interviewed Wright's victims and the pilots of the plane he hijacked. They had age-enhanced sketches made and tried to track down any communications he may have made with family in the U.S.

The address in Portugal was one of several on a list of places they wanted to check out. But Schroeder said there was nothing about it that made it seem especially promising. "It was another box to get checked, so to speak," he said.

That changed last week, when details started falling into place with the help of authorities there.

"They have a national ID registry," Schroeder said. "They pulled that. That confirmed his print matched the prints with the DOC. The sketch matched the picture on his ID card."

By the weekend, U.S. authorities were on a plane to Portugal. And Monday, Portuguese police staking out his home found him.

Schroeder said he has not been told what, if anything, Wright said when he was caught.

Wright made an initial court appearance in Portugal on Tuesday, according to Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney. He was arrested for purposes of extradition on the state of New Jersey's homicide charge, and would serve the remainder of his sentence on that charge if returned to the U.S.

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US fugitive hid in Portugal hamlet

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/H/HIJACKER_FUGITIVE_CAPTURED

Sep 28, 2011

By BARRY HATTON

ALMOCAGEME, Portugal (AP) -- He lived the sweet life for decades. But nobody knew he was on the run. After breaking out of a New Jersey prison 41 years ago, George Wright settled in a picturesque seaside town in Portugal.

He married a local woman, raised two children and grew old in a pretty house on a cobbled street near a stunning beach. Locals knew him as Jorge Santos, a friendly man from Africa who did odd jobs and spoke fluent Portuguese.

He kept his true identity secret: convicted murderer, prison escapee and accused hijacker.

Wright's decades-long flight from justice ended when the 68-year-old American was taken into custody by local police Monday at the request of the U.S. government. On Tuesday, he appeared before a judge in Lisbon, the capital, for an initial extradition hearing.

Residents of this charming coastal town were coming to terms Wednesday with the fact that a man they knew and liked had been living a lie.

"I never imagined George was in trouble," gas station attendant Ricardo Salvador said.

Most assumed Wright was African, not American. His Portuguese identity card said he was born in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa. A photocopy, shown to The Associated Press, bore the name Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos, an alias U.S. officials said Wright used. It was issued in 1993 and expired in 2004.

Salvador and other residents said Wright had business cards that gave his first name as Jorge or George, and many called him by the latter.

"He was a very nice guy," Salvador said as he took a break from pumping gas on a sunny autumn day in Almocageme, 28 miles (45 kilometers) west of Lisbon. "He used to wave as he drove past and I'd shout out, 'Hey, George!'"

In his younger years, Wright was a darker character.

He was convicted of the 1962 murder of gas station owner Walter Patterson, a decorated World War II veteran shot during a robbery at his business in Wall, New Jersey.

Eight years into his 15- to 30-year prison term, Wright and three other men escaped from the Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, New Jersey, on Aug. 19, 1970.

While on the run, the FBI said Wright joined an underground militant group, the Black Liberation Army, and lived in a communal family with several of its members in Detroit.

In 1972, Wright - dressed as a priest and using an alias - is accused of hijacking a Delta flight from Detroit to Miami along with four other Black Liberation Army members and three children, including Wright's companion and their 2-year-old daughter.

His capture drew reactions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ann Patterson, daughter of the murdered New Jersey gas station owner, told the AP she wants Wright sent back quickly. "I'm so thankful that now there's justice for Daddy," she said. "He never got any kind of justice."

Rui Santos, who works at the Almocageme village council, said he was "stunned" by the news. "I'd never have thought it possible," he said outside a newsstand.

He said Wright approached him in the mid-1990s and offered to coach local kids at basketball, though the project never got off the ground.

Until his arrest, life was quiet for Wright in this hamlet of a few hundred residents, where neighbors said he lived for at least 20 years. Speaking Portuguese with a slight foreign accent, he worked at a series of odd jobs, most recently as a nightclub bouncer, said two neighbors who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared being stigmatized for speaking out.

Wright also once had a stall at the beach and ran a barbecue chicken restaurant.

He married a Portuguese woman, identified by neighbors as 55-year-old Maria do Rosario Valente, the daughter of a retired Portuguese army officer. They had two children - Marco and Sara, now in their early 20s - who used their mother's last name when they registered for swim classes at the local pool.

The family lived in a neat whitewashed house with terra cotta roof tiles, a yellow door and a small front garden. At the front gate, a black mailbox in the shape of a barn carried the words "U.S. Mail." A gray VW Passat station wagon that neighbors said Wright drove was parked on the narrow dead-end street.

A woman who answered the door confirmed she was Maria do Rosario Valente and said she had no comment about the arrest.

About a mile (1.6 kilometers) away was the breathtaking Praia da Adraga beach, a sandy cove surrounded by steep rocky hillsides that has a natural rock tunnel where ocean waves blast through.

A fingerprint contained on Wright's Portuguese ID card as required by law was the break that led a U.S. fugitive task force to him, according to U.S. authorities.

Wright's capture was among the top priorities when the New York-New Jersey Fugitive Task Force was formed in 2002, according to Michael Schroeder, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, who worked with New Jersey's FBI and other agencies on the case.

"They have a national ID registry," Schroeder said of Portugal. "They pulled that. That confirmed his print matched the prints with the (Department of Corrections in New Jersey). The sketch matched the picture on his ID card."

Schroeder said the task force had been aware for at least several months of the possibility that Wright could be in Portugal. "Once the investigative group had a strong belief that George Wright might be in Portugal, we proceeded to take the next steps immediately. But those steps take time," Ward said.

Wright was being detained in Lisbon while the extradition process continued, but Portuguese police refused to release any details about the case.

U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said she couldn't speculate on how long extradition might take.

Back in 1972, Wright and his alleged accomplices released the hijacked plane's 86 passengers in exchange for a $1 million (euro730,000 million) ransom - delivered by an FBI agent wearing only swim trunks as ordered by the hijackers. They then forced the plane to fly to Boston, where an international navigator was taken aboard, and the plane was flown to Algeria.

The group was taken in by American activist and writer Eldridge Cleaver, who had been permitted by Algeria's socialist government to open a Black Panther Movement office in 1970. The Algerian president then professed sympathy for what he saw as worldwide liberation struggles.

At the request of the U.S. government, Algerian authorities returned the plane and the ransom to the United States. They briefly detained the hijackers before allowing them to stay. But their movements were restricted and the Algerian president ignored their requests for asylum.

Wright and the others left Algeria in late 1972 or early 1973 and settled in France, said Mikhael Ganouna, producer of a 2010 documentary about the hijacking, "Nobody Knows my Name."

Wright left the group after breaking up with a girlfriend, and no one knew where he went, Ganouna said.

Wright's associates were all eventually tracked down, arrested and tried. They were convicted in Paris in 1976, but the French government refused to extradite them to the U.S., where they would have faced longer sentences.

One of them, George Brown, lives in Paris but isn't worried about being extradited because he has already served his sentence, Ganouna said.

Over the years, the New Jersey Department of Corrections task force on fugitives reviewed reports from the 1970s, interviewed Wright's victims and the pilots of the hijacked plane, had age-enhanced sketches made of the fugitive and tracked any possible links to his family in the U.S.

An address in Portugal was one of several leads they wanted to check, but Schroeder said there was nothing special about it.

"It was another box to get checked, so to speak," he said.

That changed last week when details started falling into place with the help of Portuguese authorities.

By the weekend, U.S. authorities were on a plane to Portugal. On Monday, Portuguese police took Wright into custody.

William May, the pilot of the Detroit-Miami flight hijacked in 1972, said Wright was the group's leader.

"It's been 40 years," May said. "I'm surprised there was even any interest in finding him still."

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Christiania – a small community with big ideas

Christiania – a small community with big ideas

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/24/christiania-community-big-society-40-years

Amid all the incoherent 'big society' talk, consider Christiania, a democratic Danish community celebrating 40 years of autonomy

• David Goldblatt

• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 24 September 2011

Christiania, the community created in the heart of Copenhagen, is celebrating its 40th birthday this weekend. There is much to celebrate and even more to be learned.

In 1971, the Danish defence ministry closed its huge 18th-century fortress and left it to rot. Locals first tore down the fences to create a playground for their kids and were then joined by squatters and alternative characters of every kind. They took over the place and founded Christiania; a democratic and autonomous free city that would make its own laws and raise its own taxes. The Social Democratic government of the time declared it a "social experiment" and allowed it to continue.

Since then, and after much travail, Christiania has grown to be a community of over 1,000 people. They have renovated the old buildings and built new and wondrously eclectic ones for themselves; established and run their own rubbish, recycling and sewage systems; maintained a system of common property, collective responsibility for dealing with crime and a politics of intense democratic discussion; kept cars out and pioneered the cargo bicycle; and become a key hub of the city's musical and cultural life.

It might not be everyone's idea of utopia but the informal waiting lists to join the community are very long. While some come and go, many are staying for the duration. As one resident put it to me, when reflecting on growing old in Christiania, "The people that I live with here are my pension." Christiania is now considered by most Copenhageners to be an essential part of the urban fabric and is among the city's biggest tourist attractions.

The celebrations of these remarkable achievements will be all the more intense because as recently as this spring many observers were predicting Christiania's imminent demise. The Danish rightwing coalition government appeared intent on forcing massive new conventional housing developments on the community, putting roads through this car-free zone and permanently closing down the open trade in marijuana that has flourished on the infamous Pusher Street (and which accounts in part for both the tourist trade and some locals' affections).

Then, over the summer, the government and Christiania cut a deal: no developments, no roads, and the chance for the community to buy the place at a sub-market rate while maintaining both their system of communal land ownership and a high degree of autonomy from the Danish state.

In itself this was a remarkable political victory, worthy of celebration and testament to the real pragmatism of Danish politics. But more than this we should be celebrating Christiana as a fragment of the alchemist's stone of urban and social policy; how can we transform our lives as atomised, alienated individuals into the pure gold of real functioning social capital and social networks of collective action and decision-making.

Christiania may be a one-off, the product of an unrepeatable combination of circumstances and opportunities. Even so, it has a lot to teach us. If you really want to emotionally engage and energise people – the raw materials out of which social solidarity is made – then give communities access to land, property and other assets before the developers get there. It is simply incredible what energy, skills and visions people can collaboratively mobilise when they have the chance to experiment with their communal and living space.

Once that's happened, have the courage to back off and let things happen. In some ways politicians and government agencies have become such a neurotically overactive presence in policy-making; Christiana was born of a judicious amount of benign indifference and tolerant disapproval. The same goes for the private sector too. Christiania's complex networks of social enterprise, collective service provision, self-help and exchange have had the space to evolve and grow independently and keep money, energy and work local.

The incoherent conversation we are currently having about the "big society" would be enriched by thinking about small societies as well. They needn't look or feel like Christiana, bohemia is entirely optional; but if the 40th birthday party is true to form it would be no bad thing of one or two did.

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Pranksters on the Road

Pranksters on the Road

http://www.cornellsun.com/section/arts/content/2011/09/23/pranksters-road

September 23, 2011
By Patrick Cambre

I would be willing to wager that nearly everyone at Cornell, or of collegiate age, has been in some sort of social setting with that guy or girl who reminisces on the freewheeling, youthful spirit of the 1960s. He or she might tell you about the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, about the CIA's experiments with LSD, or maybe they'll tell you about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The thing is, usually you don't know that they're talking about, and neither do they. They weren't there.

Magic Trip, a new documentary by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood, takes viewers onboard the bus "Further" with Ken Kesey and the Pranksters on their journey from La Honda, California to the 1964 New York World's Fair and back again. As you might expect from a group this irresponsible, the original 16mm footage of the trip was lost and needed restoration. Likewise, audio tape recordings and voiceovers had to be brought back into sync with the original footage. 

Despite all of the challenges presented with bringing film like this to the screen, Magic Trip manages to look crisp and colorful. It is evocative of the hipster-handicam style long before there were handicams or hipsters. Making a point of comparing the black and white world of the 1950s to the world of the 1960s, the film features striking shots of this fluorescent school bus and its colorful inhabitants against the beige desert, or the grey background of New York City. Filmmakers looking to make a historical film that looks good by modern standards should take note, as this is how it's done.

 The audio is hit-or-miss, however. One of the best scenes of this movie is a long audio recording of Ken Kesey as a graduate student during an LSD experiment at Stanford. The recording plays behind a trippy animated sequence synchronized to Kesey's words. This is the high point, so to speak. On the downside, most of the video clips have audio that is completely out of sync or missing altogether, and at times it removes the viewer from the weird realm that the directors spend so long trying to draw them into.

It seems that the directors' hope for this documentary was that the footage would somehow reaffirm Kesey and the Pranksters as psychedelic revolutionaries and forerunners of 1960s drug culture. Most people, however, will get the sense after watching this film that they only watched a small group of people take lots of LSD and drive across the country for two hours. Great fiction writers follow the principle of "Show, don't tell," yet this film and the voiceovers constantly tell the viewer that what the Pranksters were doing was revolutionary and unprecedented without really showing it.

Yet somewhere in the film, a different picture emerges of the Pranksters. Neal Cassady, bus driver and inspiration behind Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On The Road, sits behind the wheel and speaks a constant, manic, speed-induced nonsense. Stark Naked, one of a few interesting Pranksters with nicknames, stands stark naked on the back of the bus under the influence of tremendous amounts of LSD. Kerouac himself is featured sitting on a couch during a Prankster party, somewhat amused but visibly annoyed at the band of lunatics his work has spawned. While Tom Wolfe may have captured Kesey and the Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the movie brings in a visual element to this story that cannot be ignored. For all of the effort made to make them appear as revolutionaries, most of the Pranksters appear on film as a group of weird kids.

Understandably, Magic Trip focuses more on Ken Kesey as the pensive, de facto leader of the psychedelic movement. Coming from a traditional all-American background, wrestling and playing college football at Oregon, to writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962 and beginning this trip two years later, Kesey is deserving of the study Magic Trip represents. Seeing Kesey move "beyond Acid" is equally interesting, and provides for a nice final few scenes of the film.

So while Magic Trip may not be the most effective cultural study of the 1960s, or even the psychedelic movement, there is enough previously-unseen footage of Kesey and his cohorts out of place in America to make this film worth a look. Kesey once said he was "too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie." Fans who want a closer look into this transition period will enjoy Magic Trip for the long, strange trip it chronicles.

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Make it a mad Monday for Christiania’s Big 4-0

Make it a mad Monday for Christiania's Big 4-0

http://www.cphpost.dk/in-a-out/157-event-calendar/52188-make-it-a-mad-monday-for-christianias-big-4-0.html

Thursday, 22 September 2011

David Sauriol

For 40 years Christiania has been a fixture of Copenhagen cultural life, and on September 26 it will be having a massive birthday celebration. Cake, music, and a spirit of revelry will take place under a warm, enveloping cloud of marijuana smoke. Alternative culture and bohemian pathos will be celebrated by the approximately 1,000 Christiania locals and anyone else looking for a good party. Forty years old, but hardly middle-aged, Christiania will showcase the independent spirit that has made it a hallmark of Copenhagen life. 

Back in 1971, in the pursuit of some green space for their children to play, Danish hippies knocked down the fence on the corner of Prinsessegade and Refshalevej and went into the disused navy base that would become known as Christiana. Under the leadership and ideals of journalist and activist Jacob Ludvigsen, the residents of Christiania formed a mission statement citing unaffordable housing as the reason that Christiana was needed. That moment began an immigration of all types of 'new age thinker' and a new society blossomed in the 'freed land'.

Christiania began the open sale of marijuana - fuelling both an alternative culture and an increase in the quality of the drug. In a display of Denmark's tolerance this sale was allowed largely unhindered until 2004 before sanctions were brought in to moderate it.

And Christiana's liberal conceptualisation of property ownership, and by extension property tax, also led to tension with the authorities, and for a long time it looked like the city council might actually sell the land to developers. However, in the end it agreed to sell Christiana to its members, who are now in the process of purchasing their land and gaining legal legitimacy. In honour of this development, the 40th birthday is sure to be that much more special and a celebration of both Christiania's past and its future.

The celebrations on Monday will kick off with a free breakfast. There will also be cake, a film in the afternoon, and of course loads and loads of free music. Among the main performers over the day are:

Car Park North

As one of Denmark's leading rock bands, their electronic rock, catchy choruses and assertive songwriting will ensure a great show.

The Floor is Made of Lava

Bringing a modern approach to rock, their riffs are simple and take you back to the 1970s and the era in which Christiania was born.

Clemens

Called by many the godfather of Danish rap, Clemens is an outspoken, multi-faceted artist. His music has sampled and taken from old school rap, rock, and dub step.

Lucy Love

Referencing the likes of Lady Sovereign and classic electronic legends Kraftwork, the queen of the Danish grime scene's stage show is dynamic and her costumes lavish.

Any of these four acts are enough on their own to fill up any venue in Denmark, so this promises to be a wild birthday celebration. Come down, have fun, and join the free city as it blows out, in cannabis-scented breath, 40 candles. 

Christiania's 40th Birthday

Corner of Prinsessegade and Refshalevej, Christianshavn; Mon 10:00-late; free adm;

check www.christiania.org for details of events on Sat & Sun

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Peace, Love And Capitalism

Peace, Love And Capitalism

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/1010/entrepreneurs-own-words-peace-capitalism-gerry-durgy.html

I'm no hippie, but buying Woodstock was still one of the best deals I ever made.

Edwin Durgy, 09.21.11

We're not entertainment people, we're not music buffs, and we're not groupies or leftover hippies or anything like that. We're businesspeople, and we thought that buying the original site of the 1969 Woodstock festival would be an opportunity to perhaps contribute to the economic welfare and development of the area that I grew up in.

Going back as far as the 1930s, when my family came here, Sullivan County was a vacation mecca, with hundreds of hotels. By the mid-1990s the area had fallen on hard times, and today that industry is all but gone.

I don't want to sound corny, but if these communities are going to last in this country you can't have everyone run off to the cities and abandon the heartland. Our idea was to draw upon the fact that the Woodstock event in 1969 was held in Sullivan County and the land that it was held on had developed into some sort of shrine. For years, although the site was undeveloped, scores of people would come to visit and"pay their respects." We thought we could memorialize the site and at the same time resurrect the tourist business by bringing some responsible management to the site.

We started in 1998 and 1999, a couple years after we'd sold out of the cable business--running music festivals on the anniversary weekend of Woodstock with musicians who'd played at Woodstock and others who were more popular then. We had tens of thousands of people show up during those two events. The consensus after they were over, after talking to a lot of those people, was they'd love to come back, but these 50-, 60-, 70-year-olds were really looking for a little more comfort. We set about designing what we considered to be a world-class outdoor amphitheater.

There was an awful lot of detail in putting together something that would be different and unique from anything else that is out there--the acoustics, the sight lines, the seating and the contour of the lawn. We have 4,500 seats and room for another 10,500 people on the lawn. That lawn is tapered so that when you're performing on the stage you can look everyone in the eyeballs.

The artists really, really like the operation. We built special rooms for them--dressing rooms, lounge rooms. We fed them very, very well. We took extra-special care with the parking. These folks come in with their big tractor-trailers full of music gear and stage equipment and all that other stuff--this is some thing I didn't learn in the cable business. Fast-forward here, we're wrapping up our sixth season right now at Bethel Woods. We didn't want to call it Woodstock. We felt we were creating not only something respectful to commemorate what occurred 40-plus years ago, but also a new experience for those who would return for a visit or for those who would visit for the first time.

We have a maximum capacity of somewhere around 16,000 or 17,000 people. They come up here from all over the world--from Europe, the Far East. We've met people from Japan. There's a big monument on the grounds where the original stage was in 1969, and people come out there just to stand on that ground. It's an amazing thing. It's like some sort of a mystic calling. Several people have said,"We've come here to feel the vibes."

So far it's working. The best part is the letters that we get thanking us for"giving us Bethel Woods." So there is a lot of satisfaction. But most importantly, it's hard to say about anything that it's good for everybody, but this is good for everybody.

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Sixties-L is now on Facebook...

Sixties-L is now on Facebook!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sixties-L/175130659231077?sk=wall

or just search for Sixties-L

Best, the modr8r

Aspen's Two Old Hippies gets expansion fever

Aspen's Two Old Hippies gets expansion fever

http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20110926/NEWS/110929892/1077&ParentProfile=1058

Nashville location is an extension of local guitar shop

asalvail@aspentimes.com">Andre Salvail
September 26, 2011

ASPEN — Two Old Hippies, an Aspen bastion of acoustic guitars, flower-power threads and just about all things groovy, has taken its act on the road.

Owners Tom and Molly Bedell have opened a 8,000-square-foot outlet in the Gulch, a recently redeveloped retail, office and residential district near downtown Nashville, Tenn. Monday marks the one-week anniversary of the launch in the artsy mixed-uses district.

It's an extension of the Aspen shop, albeit one that is eight times larger than the sister store, with much more room to navigate. There, you'll find the same types of items: expensive Breedlove-brand acoustic guitars, novelty items with some sort of '60s connection, even clothing inspired "by the art of John Lennon." Only there's a lot more of it in the sprawling store, which also features a Volkswagen van painted in trippy colors.

Molly Bedell said she and her husband realized a year and a half ago that it might be time to take their business concept elsewhere.

"You know the nature of (retail) in Aspen; it's just short-lived in terms of tourism and all the shoulder seasons," she said. "We said, 'It'd be really nice to test this concept that we have in a year-round market.' "

They thought of New York or California, but had friends in Nashville, so they visited the Tennessee capital about a year ago and started scouting potential locations. Bedell found the right spot in March and began negotiating what would be a 10-year lease with an option to renew.

"This (property) was an old print shop. Then it was a bakery before us. It's in a very old building with a long rectangular space. We almost completely gutted it and started fresh. We kept a few rooms. It has a lot more of everything because it's so much larger but it still has the same feel and flavor of the Aspen store. It's very eclectic; just think 'a lot more guitars.' "

Two years ago, Two Old Hippies took over the Monarch Street space formerly held by guitar shop The Great Divide. The Great Divide line is still sold at Two Old Hippies and is slowly being phased out.

The Nashville shop features a room they call "The Vault," which Bedell describes as home for Breedlove and Bedell guitars where customers can try out the various styles.

"It's been great. People are absolutely loving it. They've never seen anything like it," she said of the new location.

Bedell said she enlisted the help of Nashville designer Leah Sohr to get the building ready. "We both think and see things the same. We had so much fun, with everything from making custom jewelry cases and fixtures to all the paint selections," she said.

The company's website holds that Two Old Hippies not only is about retail and business, but also a philosophy. "Two Old Hippies is inspired by the values of our generation, steeped in the beliefs that we are one human race, that all living things have equal value and purpose, that we have stewardship responsibility for our Mother Earth, and that the more love we give — the more we get!"

Further, the unique enterprise represents "a lifestyle — an attitude — a connectivity among how we live, work and treat one another."

An expansion of that lifestyle and attitude in another city is possible, she said, but her next venture may be something a bit different: a shoe store in Nashville, across the street from Two Old Hippies. She's got her business plan together, and plans to call it Two Old Soles.

By the way, the Aspen store, despite the rollercoaster tourism seasons, is doing well, Bedell said, and still figures prominently in the company's plans. The local store employs five workers, and the Nashville store has 11.

Bedell said she's lived in Aspen for 30 years and will remain a resident here.

asalvail@aspentimes.com

Six ways to get acquainted with Marshall McLuhan’s legacy

Six ways to get acquainted with Marshall McLuhan's legacy

http://www.postcity.com/Eat-Shop-Do/Do/September-2011/Five-ways-to-get-better-aquainted-with-Marshall-McLuhans-legacy/

By Evan Andrew Mackay

Sep 22, 2011

A hundred years after the birth of Marshall McLuhan, "prophet of the Information Age" and Canada's most baffling icon, his legacy is being celebrated this year around the world with McLuhan 100, especially in Toronto, where he made his home and his mark on the world. In preparation for Monday's event at the Toronto Reference Library, McLuhan 100: Toronto's Future in McLuhan's Global Village, here are six ways to get a better understanding of McLuhan.

1. Only got a minute? Review that history minute you must have seen on TV a while back.

2. Got three minutes (or 93)? Famous for being as quotable as he was misunderstood, McLuhan did a cameo in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, which might make you laugh as well as think. Allen attended one of McLuhan's Monday Night Seminars at University of Toronto (as did Pierre Trudeau, John Lennon and Yoko Ono).

3. If you have a bunch of minutes, have a look at the CBC archives, which have several TV and radio clips of McLuhan.

4. If the weather is right, you could do the McLuhan Walking Tour after downloading the audio tracks to your cell phone or MP3 player.

5. Or, if you're still stuck in the Print Age, you can read about McLuhan in the summer issue of The Walrus and the autumn issue of U of T Magazine.

6. If you have lots of time, you can have a go at some of McLuhan's books (for a guy who declared that "the age of writing has passed," he sure wrote enough of them). The good thing is that if McLuhan is to be believed, you'll only have to read the right hand pages.

McLuhan 100: Toronto's Future in McLuhan's Global Village, Toronto Reference Library, Sept. 26

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McLuhan's message is in the multimedia

McLuhan's message is in the multimedia

http://www.montrealgazette.com/Bill+Brownstein+McLuhan+message+multimedia/5439558/story.html

By BILL BROWNSTEIN, The Gazette
September 22, 2011

Richard Kerr took a most circuitous path to Marshall McLuhan. But 36 years after first connecting with the Canadian philosopher, visionary and, to many, prophet of the information age, Kerr is paying an appropriately unorthodox yet inspired tribute to the man, in the year when McLuhan would have been celebrating his 100th birthday.

In conjunction with Pop Montreal's Art Pop program, Kerr, an experimental filmmaker and professor at Concordia's Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, has created Marshall McLuhan: (My) Teacher . Classroom to Studio, which runs until Sunday at the festival's headquarters on St. Urbain St. The homage has three distinct elements: a 60-minute McLuhan video monologue, which Kerr recorded in 1975; a four-screen digital projection; and a selection of Kerr's renowned motion picture weavings - recycled film frames mounted and meshed into dazzling abstract installations.

"This is not a theoretical tribute - I'm not big on theory - but rather a humanistic response to the man," says the animated Kerr, holding court in his Concordia office/workshop in a Guy St. high-rise.

Kerr is an unlikely prof, but one most students would dream of having. He doesn't stand on convention, but he does encourage students to always follow through on their creative impulses.

A career in academia wasn't initially in the cards. He dropped out of high school in Kitchener-Waterloo - "actually, I was asked to leave" - to focus on a burgeoning junior hockey career. But when his dad died a year later, he gave up on the hockey and began working odd jobs to help support his family.

Six years later - at 22 - he resurfaced to attend Sheridan College's School of Art and Design in Oakville. "I thought I was going to a trade school to learn to make car commercials for a dealership in Kitchener-Waterloo," Kerr recalls.

"But my life changed forever that first week of school. The dean came into our class and asked for a volunteer to videotape Marshall Mc-Luhan, who was doing a lecture at the school. I had heard McLuhan's name before, but, honestly, it didn't mean much to me. I took the assignment mostly because it gave me something to do."

No matter that Kerr hadn't operated a video camera before. "The only thing I knew was to keep focus and not to move the camera around."

It didn't take Kerr long to realize he had something in that video. He chose not to erase it, and stored it for future use while learning as much as he could about McLuhan, who died five years later.

"He was such a great performer who took on people (in his lectures)," Kerr says. "And he was really funny."

True enough. On the video Kerr shot, McLuhan began his lecture by announcing that he likes to start by "heckling" his audiences before they can heckle him. "We say what's new. This is, of course, the remark of the guy who walks into the antique shop," McLuhan cracked. "When you ask what's new, you don't really expect to be told anything, do you?"

McLuhan proceeded to regale the students with his theories on humour, noting that it is invariably based on grievances and that catharsis is relief.

Then the man considered by many to possess one of the sharpest minds of them all dropped a nugget about a couple who had been desperately trying to have a baby. Finally, they got their wish, except the baby was born without legs or arms. "But the parents prayed really hard," McLuhan relayed. "And eventually the child grew arms and legs."

Sadly, this child later ran into the street and was run over by a car. "And the moral of the story?" the deadpan McLuhan asked, before answering it himself: "Stop when you're a head!"

"McLuhan had an offbeat sense of humour," says Kerr, who has a fairly offbeat sense of humour himself. "It took me five or six years to realize the impact that video shoot had on me. I absorbed as much as I could from him. I asked people questions. That's the way I educate myself."

Kerr conceived of his project not just as a tribute to McLuhan, but as a means to convey to his own students something about their professor's background.

"I was always curious, so I assume they are somewhat curious as well. McLuhan was an iconoclast, constantly questioning structures. And the first thing I do when I have a new class of students is flash a sign that reads: 'Question authority.'

"Marshall McLuhan, for me, opened the classroom door, which led directly to the studio. As a naive and unformed student, I volunteered to document a talk he gave at Sheridan College. Coincidence led to opportunity, which turned to epiphany. My encounter with McLuhan formed my understanding of the arts and shaped the ensuing 30 years of studio practice."

Operating from the famed McLuhan aphorism that "the medium is the message," Kerr uses footage from that 60-minute address along with two scrolling texts in the borders - "in one showing an asynchronous transcript that weaves around McLuhan's dialogue, and in another, reinforcing McLuhan's talking points like a ticker on cable news." What emerges is an intriguing and unique insight into McLuhan.

"What I most admired about the man is how he stood tall when he was being persecuted by colleagues. Creativity frightens a lot of people."

Though Kerr has accumulated an impressive body of work in the experimental and documentary fields - one that has been showcased internationally - he balks at being called an artist.

"I'm just a teacher/practitioner - that's it," the grinning prof explains. "Now this show represents 30 years of residual thinking on meditation. Think of it all as McLuhan residue."

Prior to moving to Montreal and teaching at Concordia in 2000, Kerr taught at the University of Regina for 10 years. "The whole family moved en masse here, but we didn't realize how complicated it would be. I really wasn't on balance here."

He was even less on balance when his N.D.G. home burned down six years ago. "The firemen blamed our dog, but my jury is still out on that one."

Thanks to his two children, who found the home on the Internet, Kerr has since uprooted to Bromont, while his wife stays in Kingston (where she teaches at Queen's) during the week.

"I was wiped out financially after the fire," Kerr says. "But now I've found bliss in the mountain. I never would have imagined I'd end up there. Then again, I never would have imagined how any of my life would have turned out."

Richard Kerr's exhibition Marshall McLuhan: (My) Teacher . Classroom to Studio runs until Sunday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. at Pop Quarters, 3450 St. Urbain St. Free. 514-842-1919.

Due to scheduling and travel conflicts, Drawn and Quarterly bookstore has had to cancel Sunday morning's reading by Art Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly. As scheduled, Spiegelman will be presenting his lecture What the %&*! Happened to Comics?, Saturday at 3: 30 p.m. at Concordia University, H-110, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W. General admission tickets ($20) are available through Pop Montreal by calling 514-842-1919. VIP tickets ($150) are available through SBC at 514-861-9992 or info@sbcgallery.ca.

bbrownstein@ montrealgazette.com

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