Including Ephemera, Broadsides, Posters, Street Sheets, Collections, etc. for the
San Francisco Diggers, Communication Company, Free City Collective,
Kaliflower Intercommunal Network, Free Print Shop, Planetedge Manifestation,
Earth/Life Defense Commune, &c.
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Cat. No.: DR-004 Full record BibCit: 3/12/1969. Broadside. Letter size. Collection: SOLA-x. Abstract: Friar Tuck is making an appeal to the community (in 1969) to support a letter to the Beatles to allow the showing of four free films at the Straight Theater on the Vernal Equinox. The letter looks back to 1967, when the Haight was still imagined as “a truly beautiful street” and “a very together community,” and describes the intervening collapse into a street whose “energy has been on a downhill slide.”
Note: Interesting note: Friar Tuck in 1969 was operating under the name "free frame of reference" three years after the first Page Street free store by that name.
Cat. No.: KF-v01-n01-p001 Full record BibCit: 4/24/1969. Kaliflower, vol. 01, no. 01, p. 001. Newspaper. Letter size. Collection: SOLA-o. Abstract: The cover page of the first issue of *Kaliflower* identified itself as “the Inter-Communal Newspaper.” The page announces the paper’s founding vision through the language of Acts: “all who believed were together and had all things in common,” and “they sold their possessions and distributed them to all, as any had need.” From the beginning, then, *Kaliflower* presents itself not simply as an underground newspaper, but as a vehicle for an apostolic form of communalism — daily bread, common property, mutual aid, and the creation of a network of households bound together by love and shared practice.
But the graphics complicate and deepen that scriptural frame. The bridge across the top suggests the paper’s intercommunal function, while the eye, hands, rays, seated Buddhas along the bottom edge, and dense psychedelic patterning give the page the quality of a visionary diagram or devotional panel. At the same time, the repeated erect phallic forms introduce an unabashedly queer erotic charge. This is not merely the generalized heterosexual eroticism common in San Francisco psychedelic posters of the period; it is the opening statement of a visual style that would carry forward through Kaliflower’s three-plus-year run and through numerous Free Print Shop images as well, where phallic imagery, orgasmic energy, and male-to-male sexual imagery became part of the paper’s recurring graphic vocabulary.
The result is a remarkable fusion: early Christian communism, San Francisco psychedelia, intercommunal organizing, and an unapologetically queer aesthetic all appear together on the first page of the first issue. *Kaliflower* begins by declaring that the new world it imagines will be spiritual, economic, erotic, and collective all at once.
Note: The phrase “Free Poem #2” links this first issue of Kaliflower back to the Free Print Shop’s first announcement the previous year, which included “1st, a free poem.” In that sense, the cover presents Kaliflower not as a new departure alone, but as the continuation of the Free Print Shop’s founding gesture: print as gift, poem as offering, and publication as communal circulation. The phrases “Gloria Grahame” and “You Humphrey” appear to invoke the screen pairing of Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart, most famously in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). On the cover, the reference becomes part of the page’s larger collage of devotional, erotic, cinematic, and intercommunal signs.
Cat. No.: KF-v01-n01-p002 Full record BibCit: 4/24/1969. Kaliflower, vol. 01, no. 01, p. 002. Newspaper. Letter size. Collection: SOLA-o. Abstract: This page shows Kaliflower beginning its work as an intercommunal bulletin board. Under the heading “Farm Free Behind Straight,” it gathers requests and offerings: free vegetable deliveries, film equipment, books, a stove, printing, and the beginnings of a communal machine shop. The page translates the Digger idea of “Free” into a weekly mechanism of circulation — not a slogan, but a practical system for moving food, tools, skills, printed matter, and energy among the communes.
Cat. No.: KF-v01-n01-p003 Full record BibCit: 4/24/1969. Kaliflower, vol. 01, no. 01, p. 003. Newspaper. Letter size. Collection: SOLA-o. Abstract: This page presents a message from the Messiah’s World Commune, one of the communes receiving Kaliflower through the intercommunal delivery network. The text calls for Earth People to form communes, hold things in common, raise their vibrations, and help materialize the Kingdom of God on the Earth plane. Its cosmic language differs from the streetwise idiom of the Diggers, but its presence here shows how Kaliflower served as a meeting ground for varied communal experiments, linking spiritual prophecy, common-property ideals, and practical intercommunal communication.
Cat. No.: KF-v01-n01-p004 Full record BibCit: 4/24/1969. Kaliflower, vol. 01, no. 01, p. 004. Newspaper. Letter size. Collection: SOLA-o. Abstract: This page continues the first issue’s fusion of erotic graphics and intercommunal noticeboard. The blue line drawing frames small announcements — the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a Friday Free Center gathering, groceries, sex, and other fragments of communal life — inside a field of eyes, bodies, and sexual energy. Like the cover, it refuses to separate practical communication from visionary and erotic imagery; the page is at once bulletin board, psychedelic drawing, and early evidence of the queer graphic vocabulary that would recur throughout Kaliflower.
