The Digger Writings

[Catalog No.: DP001]

where is PUBLIC at?

---

where is PUBLIC at?
where are PUBLIC streets at?
             therefore
                          an erection in the panhandle.

the PUBLIC parks — here you can pitch a tent anytime.
PUBLIC streets on riot with truckloads of arms protecting the private property of super-charging merchants.

the PUBLIC beaches — here you can paddy-cake any old time.

PUBLIC streets where fantasy laws justify the concepts of
                              LOITERING & VAGRANCY.

the PUBLIC schools — here you can be conditioned to PUBLIC
                        opinion in order to express yourself
                        in the PUBLIC consensus.

PUBLIC streets where agents patrol, undercovered in 'hip' costumes.
the PUBLIC transport system — here drivers black and white riders for free.

PUBLIC streets where parking meters tick off legality.
the PUBLIC hospitals — here you can born, healed, passed away away.
          PUBLIC streets where exhausting autos pollute the air and
                                                         mutilate the people.

the PUBLIC housing developments —
                                 here you can live a life now done.

PUBLIC streets where lonliness crowds silent, up-tight sidewalks.
the PUBLIC officers — here is the understanding of PUBLIC service.

Where in the street can two fingers touch

Where in the street can you get out of neighborhoods

Where in the street can you escape the economic net

Where in the street can you trip out your door and smile at sincere

Where in the street can you hitch a hike down the block

Where in the street can you take off your shoes and sing and

dance without disturbing the death called peace

in voice THE D I G G E R S demand an ERECTION!
                                         THE BALLING BOWL

a FREE PUBLIC structure in the panhandle where individuals can swim in vinyl pools filled with vaseline, WAIL LOVE to downcast brows, and carry-on as much as they want until they think it beautiful to stop.

THE D I G G E R S fully understand that the cost of erection can be added to the PUBLIC debt and especially appreciate Captain Kiely's generous offer of men and machines to quicken the rise of the ERECTION and give meaning to its eventual climax.

UP THE BALLING BOWL!

THE D I G G E R S .

---

Public Nonsense Nuisance Public Essence Newsense Public News

The Public is Any Fool On The Street

The Public is Any Fool On The Street

 

PUBLIC INFORMATION FOOLS ALL OF THE PUBLIC ALL OF THE TIME

 

The Public is Any Fool On The Street

 

PUBLIC STREETS CONVEY MACHINES -- ONLY A FOOL WALKS IN TRAFFIC

 

The Public is Any Fool On The Street

The Public is Any Fool On The Street

[graphic rules]

2 (TWO) SQUARE EVENTS
(for any foot on the street)

THE D I G G E R SQUARE
[graphic of a painting frame]
A square frame to view reality
"An informed public is its own worst enemy." -- M. McLuhan
Public enemies watch reality — don't change that dial — an eventful new season of enemy spectacles
FREE FRAME OF REFERENCE to be worn around the neck, carried, displayed
Watch the D I G G E R news!

[graphic lines separating columns]

THE INTERSECTION GAME
[diagram of a street intersection with dashed lines crossing each direction]
Any number of fools can play
Game Board formed by intersection of public streets
OBJECT: Complete all designs within diagram

Lesser Triangle

Greater Triangle

Double Triangle

The Square

STYLE: DON'T WAIT DON'T WALK

(umbrella step, stroll,

cake-walk, sombersault, [sic]

finger-crawl, squat-

jump, pilgrimmage,

philly dog, etc.)

BRING A SQUARE TO DIG THE INTERSECTION GAME

TEST MATCH — HAIGHT AND MASONIC — MONDAY OCT 31 — 5:30 pm

---

Let Me Live In A World Pure
         Let Me Have Around Me
                  The Pure
                         The Pure Heros

there are no more negroes, jews, christians. there is only one minority in America. and we ask:

When will BOB DYLAN quit working on Maggie's Farm?

When will RALPH GLEASON realize he is riding in a Hearst?

When will TIMOTHY LEARY stand on a streetcorner waiting for no one?

When will the JEFFERSON AIRPLANE and all ROCK-GROUPS quit trying to make it and LOVE?

When will NORMAN MAILER fill his brooklyn town house with presses and feed words to a day-tight night-tight generation?

When will OSWLEY STANLEY expose the traffic of alkaline acid and pour his background into LSD-25?

When will the NEW LEFT RADICAL POLITICOS stop laying down limp and liberate the consumer?

When will PABLO PICASSO take the seven thousand paintings he has in storage and give them away with a smile?

When will KEN KESEY swallow the ocean and take us all to Yucatan?

When will MICHAEL BOWEN and friends use, look through, but not package the expansion of human consciousness?

When will ALLEN GINZBURG be blessed by his own seed and golden hairy nakedness?

When will ART-FOR-ART'S-SAKE climb higher than the social responsibility of the civilized past?

When will they all hear the death of LENNY BRUCE?

Our bowels quake
in constipated false alarms.
We are often naked and nameless
in boring rooms with tedious records
and toy tops that make colored sparks
for drug stained eyes,
smelling of weeds.
Ghosts haunt our heads,
demons are loose in our spinal fluid.
Uptite over glass beads
that focus where we are at
for just a little while...
on dirty strings hung
from Victorian gas fixtures.

Somebody cries in a slow motion bag
and blows the mind
of a skinny, drab redhaired girl
freaking out the gathering
sending everybody to the icebox
checking out the seconal supply.

Somebody in the tall, dark highway
is still c r y i n g for Lenny,
and won't come down just yet.

THE D I G G E R S .  

---

A-Political Or, Criminal Or Victim Or Or Or Or Or Or Or

"And so, on the surface of daily life, consciousness forms beings and bodies that one can see gathering and colliding in the atmosphere, to distinguish their personalities. And these bodies form hideous cabals where every eventuality comes into the world to argue against what is beyond appeal. I am not Andre Breton and I did not go to Baltimore but this is what I saw on the banks of the Hudson."

You're born a citizen of a nation.

A citizen of a nation with rulers who legislate rules commanding you to be free.

Free to be conditioned in school until you're sixteen.

Free to be a compulsory soldier.

Free to pay sixty percent of your taxes to the military budget.

Free to get legally married.

Free to work for a minimum wage.

Free to vote when you're twenty-one.

Free to vote for the democratic or republican party of your choice.

Free to buy clothes, food, and property from the 200 corporations which account for 45% of the total U.S. manufacturing in 1966.

Free to obey arbitrary curfews.

Free to have your freedom regulated by officers who are your friends and who protect you.

PROTECT you from obscenity.
PROTECT you from loitering.
PROTECT you from nudity.
PROTECT you from sedition and subversion.
PROTECT you from marijauna, LSD, DURGS. [sic]
PROTECT you from gambling.
PROTECT you from homosexuality.
PROTECT you from statutory rape.
PROTECT you from common-law marriage.
PROTECT you from abortion.
PROTECT you from lonely you.
PROTECT you from demonstrations against your protectors.

So, don't worry about surface reality. Afterall, Terrance O'Flaherty in today's Chronicle, says you're the average fool on the street and have no right to speak for yourself. So trust society. Trust the specialists. And trust the merchants, especially the associates of the Psychedelic Shop, the Artists Liberation Front, and the I/Thou. They have a dialogue with the protectors, who cordially greeted you 8:15 Thursday night, for your own safety and their own private property. Police are your friends. But don't by all means, don't ask George Metevsky [sic] — his answer would be a medley of incoherent shouts of fury.

THE D I G G E R S .

---

Cool Cranberry Horsehaired Mouth Cluttered With Apple Cores

and so, i suffered from an awful frenzy of collapsed assumptions.

Regardless, I tried to pick my nose on the handlebars of willowed macaroons as they tripped towards the vestibule of Tracy's funeral parlor and danced in the middle of the ice block where Super Spade directed jellied traffic to the high way of chewed Bazooka bubble gum and fat city dog kennels.

Needless to say, REVOLUTION NOW -- now spinning -- now now -- invisible -- now floating -- somewhere -- outthere -- waiting to grind someone's brain. Someone questioning Something without getting Somewhere and Somehow losing inner rest while revolution g o e s spinning -- floating -- outthere -- somewhere -- waiting to grind someone's brain.

Never-The-Less, Walter Slezax pumped the pomegranite until the concrete swill of crisp clear delusions squeezed the galaxies between the corniced web of my purple laughing cheeks.

but i did tell the personnel manager and his shirt and tie and parted hair that i would accept three dollars an hour for fifty forty hour five day weeks and fully appreciate the overwhelming opportunity to do what i wanted to get done on all those fast backed saturdays, sundays, legal holidays and two-week vacations where all those wide-haired nipples suck the fun life.

Besides Chemical Heaven IS an old faithful preacher delivering sermons on the impossibility of f i g h t i n g p a r a n o i a w i t h PARANOIA while hecklers mill about a Mercedes Benz waiting to be taught old trips.

SPOON DOON MOON COON HEY SPOON YOU'RE A BUNDLE O' JOY YOU'RE AN UGLY MOTHERFUCKER BUT YOU'RE STILL MY BOY. yea. yea.

FLASH
striking results of guidelines -- between 1960 and 1965 profits went up by 52% after taxes -- dividend payments to stockholders increased by 43% -- the weekly after tax take home pay of factory workers was up by only 21% -- oh yes -- ho hum............

AFTERALL: i need a sick school teacher lover for two weeks to teach me where it's at. somebody ugly anyway. i hate moles. anyone who could compare my age with the calendar of idols and damn my drugged infancy for its bleating canals and cornponed nostalgia. HOWEVER, i don't want to kiss her. but i need to. i need you. i just want to hold you...you. you really gottahold on mi. i say you really got a hold on me. you really do. and so they do. reely. speaking of all these incredulous thoughtsmellsofyodel. and i want to know why i consent to words when so many other possible scenes do really exist for some who are on welfare.

I say what I have seen and believe and whoever says I have not seen what I have seen, I will now tear off his head.

THE D I G G E R S .  

---

Time To Forget

FORGET the war in vietnam. Flowers are lovely.
FORGET America's 3300 military bases. Make music.
FORGET Wichita Vortex Sutra. Words are stronger than flesh.
FORGET planned war with China. Beauty is Carnaby Street.
FORGET the Dominican Republic. Todo Todo Hassan Sabbah.
FORGET police Brutality. The cops are your friends.
FORGET upheaval in negro ghettos. Spades ain't hip.
FORGET the Rumford Act. Show love.
FORGET the National Guard. Positively Fourth Street.
FORGET inmates on deathrow. It's a long time passing.
FORGET hypocracy of business. The merchants are your friends.
FORGET U.S. billion dollar investment in South Africa. Money is.
FORGET HUELGA DiGiorgio. We all live in a yellow submarine.
FORGET organized crime. Eternity is long and, sometimes, wide.
FORGET HUAC. The sun's not yellow, it's chicken. 
FORGET concentration camps for subversives. It's a bummer.
FORGET FSM, VDC, SDS, SNCC, MARK COMFORT. Big Brother and the Holding Co.
FORGET Mime Troupe, Lenny Bruce, The Beard. Strobe lights are groovy.

You're free to forget. So forget! Follow the calm business tactics of the Psychedelic Shop, the I and Thou, and all other marketeers of expanded consciousness (Moe's Bookstore is important, really!) and dig yourself. Touch reality only for sex, only to eat, and only to join the Artist's Liberation Front for your own safety.

Afterall, expanded consciousness is a selfish hippy kissing the system's ass for the greater glory of the lonely dropout, isn't that right, Uncle Tim!

THE D I G G E R S .  

---

TAKE A COP TO DINNER

     COP A DINNER TO

TAKE A COP DINNER

     COP A TAKE

Mr. Answer Man | what is a weapon | worse | ten times | worse, | than the
Hydrogen | Bomb?

Why a cunt | which is | ten times | larger | than the largest | cock |  | extent, | mickey.

Degoutante, | said mickey | kissing cop | to hedge the bet.

Take a cop to dinner.

Racketeers take cops to dinner with payoffs.
Pimps take cops to dinner with free tricks.
Dealers take cops to dinner with free highs.
Business takes cops to dinner with graft.
Unions and corporations take cops to dinner with post-retirement jobs.
Schools and professional clubs take cops to dinner with free tickets to
     athletic events.
The Catholic Church takes cops to dinner by exempting them from
     religious duties.
The Department of Justice takes cops to dinner with laws giving them the
     right to do almost anything.
The Department of Defense takes cops to dinner by releasing them from all
     military obligations.
Establishment newspapers take cops to dinner by propagating the image of
     the friendly, uncorrupt policeman.
Places of entertainment take cops to dinner by admitting them without
     charge.
Merchants take cops to dinner with discounts and gifts.
The Psychedelic Shop takes cops to dinner by catering to them with signs in
     their window.
The I/Thou takes cops to dinner with free coffee and discussions offering
     discriminating insights into hipsterism.
Cops take cops to dinner by granting them immunity to prosecution for
     misdemeanors.
Cops take themselves to dinner by inciting riots.

AND SO, IF YOU OWN ANYTHING OR YOU DON'T, TAKE A COP TO DINNER THIS WEEK AND FEED HIS POWER TO JUDGE THE MORALITY OF SAN FRANCISCO.

n.b. GOURMET GEORGE METEVSKY WOULD REMIND EVERYONE NOT TO MAKE THE MISTAKE OF ARNOLD SCHUSTER WHO SERVER [sic] THE RIGHT COURSE AT THE WRONG TIME.

                                                                           THE D I G G E R S*
*regarding inquiries concerned with the identity and whereabouts
of THE D I G G E R S: happy to report THE D I G G E R S are not that.

AND NOW I LIVE AND NOW MY LIFE IS DONE MY LIFE NOW AND I LIVE DONE

[Vertical text:] INSTANT CONSTANT

elaine esposito thirty-one a world record in human tragedy twenty-five year coma is longest period of human unconsciousness consciously known listed in guinness book of world records marathon begins on 6 august 1941 only child given anesthesia during surgery for ruptured appendix NEVER TO KNOW consciousness NEVER TO KNOW mother or father NEVER TO KNOW incipient encephalitis NEVER TO KNOW the life she clings to NEVER TO KNOW the baffle of medical science NEVER TO KNOW meticulous nursing of mother NEVER TO KNOW immaculate as a baby NEVER TO KNOW eight onces [sic] of special formula through a nasal tube four times a day NEVER TO KNOW desperate effort to rescue her from quarter-century nod NEVER TO KNOW the unstirring figure in the pink bed with the blue bows.

SO WHAT!

COMA

THE ESTATE means it Jesus Christ.
THE ESTATE means it Adolf Eichman.
THE ESTATE means it Julius, Ethel Rosenberg.
THE ESTATE means it Sacco, Vansetti.
THE ESTATE means it Carl Chessman.
THE ESTATE means it Lee Harvey Oswald.
THE ESTATE means it Goodman, Schwerner, Chaney.
THE ESTATE means it Andrew Johnson, Leonard Deadwyler.
THE ESTATE means it Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X.
THE ESTATE means it John Dillinger.
THE ESTATE means it Arnold Schuster.
THE ESTATE means it Dow Wilson.
THE ESTATE means it Lenny Bruce.
THE ESTATE means it Thalidomide Babies.
THE ESTATE means it Six Million Jews.
THE ESTATE means it Hiroshima.
THE ESTATE means it David Carnevale.
THE ESTATE means it Firing Squads, Gas Chambers, Electric
Chairs, Tar and Feathering, Crucifixtion,
Garroting, Hanging, The Rack, Dunking,
Drawn and Quartered, Burned At The
Stake, Economic WARWARWARWARWAR.

And so by THE WAY

YOU ARE BY YOURSELF, ANY FOOL ON THE STREET. NOTHING IS REALLY IMPORTANT. IF ONLY THEY LEFT YOU ALONE. NOT A CHANCE. DEATH IS THE LIFE OF THE ESTATE. YOU AS CONSUMER ARE A FROZEN PRODUCT. YOU LIVE IN THE CEMENT ENVIRONMENT OF THE AUTHORITY INSTRUCTORS. AND IF YOU SAY THE RIGHT WORDS THEY'LL GIVE YOU 20 YEARS EVEN IF YOU DON'T.

THE D I G G E R S .

[Vertical text:] AND LIVE MY LIFE NOW DONE AND DONE LIVE NOW LIFE NOW DONE 

[Catalog No.: DP-19661021]

Delving the Diggers

By George Metevsky
Berkeley Barb, October 21, 1966, p. 3

In the afternoon, at a little before four, they come down Ashbury, cross Oak and gather around a Eucalyptus tree in the Panhandle.

They wear wide eyes, tattered clothes, and talismans around their necks. Some are in their teens, most in their twenties, and a few are closing in on forty.

They talk about anything, smile about everything and do what they want to do with the food that they bring to each other.

They are THE DIGGERS. And everyday at four o'clock they provide anybody with anything to eat.

The first time I noted them I thought it was a picnic. The second time I thought I was hallucinating. The third time I had to stop. And I sat down with them and ate food and discovered that I didn't but I did.

I talked to a young girl with bare feet and hair that fell over her shoulders and whose name began with an N.

"Who are the Diggers?"

She smiled: "I don't know. I'm not a Digger. Are you a Digger?"

"FUCK THE DIGGERS!!!, shouted a kid with a scar and everyone laughed and repeated it.

I asked him whose food it was. He said it was free.

"Yes, but who donated it? Who's laying it on?"

"It's free because it's yours," came a reply.

A yellow micro-bus pulled up onto the grass, the side doors flew open and somebody threw out a thousand apples. A hippy with a blanket for a robe started throwing them into the air yelling: "Food as Medium!" Another stuffed a tree trunk with lettuce. Another fed a bunch of scallions to a great Dane. One poured some stew into a hole in the ground and claimed he was feeding his archetype heritage. Most of them, however, sat around and ate and smiled and gave each other cigarettes.

There was quite an assortment of food. Most of it was good, some of it was hot, all of it was healthy: Shopping bags filled with day old bread, wooden crates of tossed green salad, a ten gallon milk container steaming hot with turkey stew, and apples all over the ground.

A patrol car pulled up to the curb. A sergeant got out and stood in the street and watched. Somebody invited him to dinner, but he shook his head no. And, after a while, he left.

Someone started mouthing a harp, someone else a recorder, then a flute and everybody's bowls became drums beating out a song against the 'Evil Auto' and the noise it makes and the accidents it involves and the war it supports and the air it pollutes and the monopolies it feeds.

The cars gushed up and down the streets of the Panhandle with a steady roar while their drivers stared out of windows wondering what was going on.

Some of them knew. They stopped and passed food to the DIGGERS. Sometimes a cake, sometimes fruit, sometimes a bushel of radishes. A farmer in Carmel dropped off a box of tomatoes via a friend who was on his way to Oregon who promised to bring something back with him.

He was thanked, but warned with a chuckle: "If you have to buy it, the DIGGERS don't want it!"

Everyone was relaxed. Words were used to sparkle eyes, break mouths into smiles, letters into tongued vibrations and meaning in-coherent.

The DIGGER PAPERS reflect this kind of atmosphere. They're mimeographed sheets with words jammed onto them and DIGGERS hand them out once or twice a week on Haight street around six o'clock. Nobody seems to know who writes them, but most agree that the DIGGERS are behind autonomy.

An orange PAPER is headed COOL CRANBERRY HORSE-HAIRED MOUTH CLUTTERED WITH APPLE CORES and begins "and so, I suffered an awful frenzy of collapsed assumptions." The footnote at the end reads: "Regarding inquiries concerned with the identity and whereabouts of the DIGGERS: We are happy to report that the DIGGERS are not that."

And so is the BARB.

[Catalog No.: DP-19661118]

Ideology of Failure

Berkeley Barb, November 18, 1966, p.6

From the time we begin to call our childhood our past we seek to regain its simplicity. Its tense of presence. We tumble into drugs and cleave reality into so many levels of game. We turn our backs on the mess and walk into the woods, but only for a time. A game is a game is a game is a game and we return to the silent -- crowded -- uptight sidewalks with our pockets full of absurdity and compromise between cowardice and illusion.

Wearing hipsterism on our sleeves, we make music with mercenary groups who bleed money from any fools on the street, or we carve leather into sandals for twenty dollars a pair, or shape forms into art while a psychiatrist whispers formulae for a healthy life-lihood into our ear. And we smile all the time and stack a stereo with names we meet at parties and scoff at all the Sanpaku people cluttering up outside. We explode the myth of seriousness and wrap our bodies in a vinyl shield to coat our minds with microcosmic awareness of our own safety. We sophisticate our tastes in order to tap dance by hassles and shove the poignancy of 'bring downs' into impersonal shadows. We focus everything towards the transcendence of daily consciousness: macrobiotic diets, hallucinogens, eastern and western aesthetics, philosophies, etc.

Our salaried hipness blankets us in the warmth of security until we masturbate ourselves into an erection of astral rapaciousness and grab whatever pleasures we might in the name of Love, always quick to contrast ourselves with middle-class man.

If there is a contrast, it is slight. Hip and middle-class (as well as communist, fascist, socialist, and monarchist) values, goals, reactions and attitudes offer different styles, but amount to the same end: personal, national, or racial success. "Rien ne reussi comme le suces."

The Hipster, however, invites the indignation of his allies with a mockery of 'straightness' and his alienation from the social norms of morality and dress. He is the perfection of success -- liberated from the inhibitive life of bourgeoise conformity and established in a packed class of happiness which combines the highest material pleasure with a total lack of commitment to middle-class humanism.

He is hated, feared, and envied. He is a man who can sing about the evils of the world, the beauty of touch, the delicacy of flowers, and scream systemicide while margining profits into war economies and maintaining his comfort on a consumer level of luxury. (Oh, excuse me. I see. He's educating the mass and his pay is only incidental -- compared to the millions of converts he has inspired with his orchestrated love. Ho, hum . . .)

Well, when some of us get to that bracket, either through fame or fortune, we look at ourselves and remember the 'Funk" that pushed us into the Lime, and we react. We may open peace centers with our money and contribute to the cause of freedom, or we may plow ourselves into the corner of "who cares" and paddy-cake fortunes, or we may drop out all over again and go back to the woods, and stare at the preposterousness of doing our thing within the frame of a reality that can incorporate and market anyone, anything, anytime. And then we may begin to understand that if some attempt is not made to manage the world with love, it will run mad and overwhelm everything, including the woods.

And so, we stay dropped-out. We won't, simply won't play the game any longer. We return to the prosperous consumer society and refuse to consume. And refuse to consume. And we do our thing for nothing. In truth, we live our protest. Everything we do is free because we are failures. We've got nothing to lose, so we've got nothing to lose.

We're not fooled anymore by the romantic trappings of the marketeers of expanded consciousness. Love isn't a dance concert with a light show at $3 a head. It isn't an Artist Liberation Front "Free" Fair with concessions for food and pseudo psychedelia. It is the SF Mime Troupe performing Free Shows in the parks while it is being crushed by a furious $15,000 debt. It is Arthur Lisch standing under a blue flag in Hunters Point scraping rust off the tin-can memorial to Matthew Johnson from two to five everyday. It is free food in the Panhandle where anyone can do anything with the food they bring to each other. It is Love. And when love does its thing it does it for love and separates itself from the false-witness of the Copsuckers and the Gladly Dead.

To Show Love is to fail. To love to fail is the Ideology of Failure. Show Love. Do your thing. Do it for FREE. Do it for Love. We can't fail. And Mr. Jones will never know what's happening here, do you Mr. Jones.

[Signed ---george metesky.]

[Catalog No.: DP-19661125]

In Search of a Frame

Berkeley Barb, November 25, 1966, p. 6

There has been talk of a psychedelic revolution (overthrow or return to source). It is yet to be seen. There is perhaps a germinal revolution, barely born, but already torn at and choked by residue from the past. We are at a loss for a frame of reference within which to operate freely, harmoniously and generously.

These questions are dedicated to re-discovering that province bordered by childhood and compromise, death and resurrection.

There is a magazine on the stands called ID. It has a full page ad by Bally shoes, a full page by Town Squire and a nice picture of Big Brother and the Holding Co. It's mod, camp, -- an organ of the revolution. There are tribes of natives that will not be photographed because they believe that the photographer then possesses their spirit. One might laugh, but they are correct. Big Brother had his image lifted while he wasn't looking. Whatever the revolutionary implications of his band are, none threaten Town Squire and Bally and all they stand for. By sponsoring the magazine the merchants simply attached the rock-revolution image to their product the same way they would have attached Loretta Young's in the '40s or Mickey Mantle's in the 50's.

The Charlatans recently filmed a hair tonic commercial. What is their excuse for contributing to an unlovely and crumby state of mind, a lie (people will love you if your hair's combed/breath's bright/tits big)? Is it money? Exposure? Why that's just like Jayne Mansfield. The fame/power/money trip is the old story again, hardly central to making music or beads or flutes or any disinterested act of involvement, of worship. It's a bad habit, or are the boys telling us where they really are?

Why is it necessary to pay two and a half dollars to go to a dance. What's revolutionary about that? Bands don't have to join the union. The unions don't care a damn about consumers, they're out for their slice of the pie. Why join except to get your slice? Why pay rent on a hall? Why not pressure the city into putting on block dances, parking lot dances, FREE dances. Would Chet Helm and Bill Graham oppose that? That would be a revolution; something joyous and free in America.

It seems curious that the first public manifestation of psychedelics was the dances at two and a half a shot. Liberation on weekends. Get rid of your filthy materialistic cash .....give it to me.

Where will Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead et al go but up to bigger gigs, better publicity, managers -- etc. until they are ***STARS***. Where's the revolution? Long-hair? Beautiful clothes? Would our soldiers be substantially different if we dressed them mod? John Wayne in Carnaby St. clothes.

Reaction is not liberation. Why do kids panhandle for dimes instead of tomatoes? Why steal indiscriminately. Why not ask for what you really want (or is it money?)? Why not steal from the victimizers (use your imagination) and leave the victims (use your instincts) alone?

Have we come this far to be caught in the game of opposites? If the society is A are we to be anti-A or can we make the leap to B or out of alphabets altogether? As it is now, the street scene is the subliminal content of capitalism: egocentric, competitive, and material. The reaction to lousy politics is no politics; the reaction to mind-prison Communism has been no communism; the reaction to bullshit ideology has been no ideology ... in all cases the logical obverse; the least imaginative and most obvious recourse.

Safety lies in the imagination, in harmony, in the resolution of contradictions between knowledge and action. We have lots of knowledge but it's useless unless it changes acts or frame of reference. We live in a society which is structured in such a way as not to admit knowledge which will damage it and we grow up with these same dichotomies. nice man like Ralph Gleason writes for an organ of our contemporary consciousness; the factory owner studies the Greeks at night and gives scholarships, Africa's Voerward was a philosopher. What in his knowledge of that discipline prevented him from being a fascist?

An instant behind the professors' lectern innocent people, yellow children of God, are being sizzled by the idea that gives Sonny a yellow Chevrolet. America tells us that there is no mangled foot in the glove compartment, but some shrink stink gets us dizzy at high speeds. The teacher grades the integers of war industry, has to, always will until he stops. The only way to avoid a game is to stop playing it.

The problem is to preserve human consciousness long enough to alter it. We must recognize that tactically (though not as a principle) there is an "us" and "them" and them wants our ass. Not to recognize that is crazy dangerous. The McCarthy period, as its euphemistically referred to showed quite clearly what happened to the loner in the face of centralized oppression: thousands of people were quietly pulled from their jobs while their colleagues stood idly by or replaced them in an effort to hold onto what they had. If they hadn't stood by there would have been something like a general strike and McCarthy would have died glad years earlier than he did. Expect to face the same oppression and expression of fear and outrage that all dissenters through history have faced.

Things are going well but should go better. They can only go better when we investigate our own directions and see which are outmoded reactions from the past and which are true.

The "hip" merchants along Haight Street with notable exception (Psych shop and Phoenix) are talking about ridding the street of "loiterers" (on public streets?) and panhandlers -- the kids that made the scene they are there to capitalize on. "Money doesn't talk, it swears" so do it for free. Do it for love. That way is safety.

One more frame of reference: Man is a herd animal. Ecologically the herd is a protective device. It is also warm and comforting in the dark.

[Signed --Zapata]

[Catalog No.: DP-19661200]

Inner Space

[Letter from the Diggers to Innerspace Magazine, December 1966.]

---

inner space:

any articles by metevsksy or zapata may be considered D I G G E R PAPERS. for now.

the diggers have been giving out, providing each other with free FREE FOOD since the first week of October. and have never missed a day.
diggers have gone to jail for giving FREE SHOWS on the street.
diggers have gone to jail for suspicion of stealing slabs of meat, sacks of potatoes, etc.
diggers have gone to jail for giving out free acid, grass, dope.
diggers have gone to jail simply because someone wanted them there.
but diggers have never gone to jail peace-fully-ably.

everyone tries to find out who sponsors the digger FREE FOOD. the CP thinks it's the SP, the SP thinks it's the CP, SDS thinks it's PLP … they all know it's a conspiracy.
well the diggers despise conspiracy … the old left … the new left … they're indifferent to their tactics and don't even bother talking to them … (SDS NATIONAL COMMITTEE invited D I G G E R S to their national conference: "no thank you, but thanks just the same. you see. it's getting late. and well. the turnips. for chrissake the turnips!"

d i g g e r s are street people: they just don't give a fuck! they live their protest. they have nothing and nothing to lose. they do their thing for free. and you can ask why? and how revolution? and if you did this then maybe … but the diggers don't. no, they really don't. and it's hard for me to understand, but it's true. they're tough. they put down the psychedelic fashion (revolution is killing people and taking their property away. if not literally, then figuratively. but never asking them to buy …), protestors (who keep their leftovers in DOW chemical baggies) guilt-ridden gift-bearers (a favorite: a guy will come up to a d I g g e r and say I think what you're doing is beautiful and sort of palm a ten or twenty across and then have his stomach turned when the throng is brought together to thank the gentle-man and burn his offering to saint george metevsky who really hated all those buildings he nicked with bombs for twenty-three years. all anarchists have a strange fear of buildings … the diggers, if they are anarchists, don't … they've got a FREE FRAME OF REFERENCE GARAGE at 1762 Page St. (the address is not a mailing one for who knows when blue coat will produce his chocolate gun and duel them out … back to the granite.) where free clothes, food, total, all, pans/pots … will be available from Dec. 3.

provos …. no, the d i g g e r s are not that. they're total drug oriented mad ones, who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything of the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like a fabulous yellow roman candle exploding like spiders across the sky, and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and "Awww!" people who have ridden the crest of kerouac's bum's romance and slammed to earth wailing love! and lady, they're wailing for maybes. maybe two fingers can touch. maybe streets won't run into neighborhoods any more. maybe there is something beside acid indigestion and copsuckers and the gladly dead. just maybe.

WHO AM I?: just a guy who overheard a guy named allan talking to a guy they call Mr. D i g g e r about a letter you wrote and thought it would be nice to, seeing he wouldn't …

[In vertical typography:]

the black mask is only as conscious as izzy stone. silly coherents

[Catalog No.: CC-148]

Well, the Time Has Come to Share

[Early 1967]

---

Well, the time has come to share

Diggers are people who share... so be a Digger, there will be more and more and more and you will be more more more more.

The Diggers take part in the invisible government. God is on your side. Take part in the invisible government. Share!

Responsible self government.

Share food in the park every day at four. That's the Panhandle Park at the corner of Oak and Ashbury.

Are you deeply religious? Share.
Are you for peace? Share.
Are you for freedom? Share.
Are you overstuffed? Share.
Are you just out for kicks? Share.

Share your material goods and/or your talent and/or

Be responsible Take part in the
Invisible government

Share daily Panhandle Park 4PM Oak/Ashbury

printed by the communication company (ups)

[Catalog No.: DP-twat-ed1]

Trip Without a Ticket

[Early 1967]

---

guerrilla theater

Our authorized sanities are so many Nembutals. “Normal” citizens with store-dummy smiles stand apart from each other like cotton-packed capsules in a bottle. Perpetual mental out-patients. Maddeningly sterile jobs for strait-jackets, love scrubbed into an insipid “functional personal relationship” and Art as a fantasy pacifier. Everyone is kept inside while the outside is shown through windows: advertising and manicured news. And we all know this.

How many TV specials would it take to establish one Guatemalan revolution? How many weeks would an ad agency require to face-lift the image of the Viet Cong? Slowly, very slowly we are led nowhere. Consumer circuses are held in the ward daily. Critics are tolerated like exploding novelties. We will be told which burning Asians to take seriously. Slowly. Later.

But there is a real danger in suddenly waking a somnambulistic patient. And we all know this.

What if he is startled right out the window?

No one can control the single circuit-breaking moment that charges games with critical reality. If the glass is cut, if the cushioned distance of media is removed, the patients may never respond as normals again. They will become life-actors.

Theater is territory. A space for existing outside padded walls. Setting down a stage declares a universal pardon for imagination. But what happens next must mean more than sanctuary or preserve. How would real wardens react to life-actors on liberated ground? How can the intrinsic freedom of theater illuminate walls and show the weak-spots where a breakout could occur?

Guerrilla theater intends to bring audiences to liberated territory to create life-actors. It remains light and exploitative of forms for the same reasons that it intends to remain free. It seeks audiences that are created by issues. It creates a cast of freed beings. It will become an issue itself.

This is theater of an underground that wants out. Its aim is to liberate ground held by consumer wardens and establish territory without walls. Its plays are glass cutters for empire windows.

free store/property of the possessed

The Diggers are hip to property. Everything is free, do your own thing. Human beings are the means of exchange. Food, machines, clothing, materials, shelter and props are simply there. Stuff. A perfect dispenser would be an open Automat on the street. Locks are time-consuming. Combinations are clocks.

So a store of goods or clinic or restaurant that is free becomes a social art form. Ticketless theater. Out of money and control.

“First you gotta pin down what’s wrong with the West. Distrust of human nature, which means distrust of Nature. Distrust of wildness in oneself literally means distrust of Wilderness.” —Gary Snyder

Diggers assume free stores to liberate human nature. First free the space, goods and services. Let theories of economics follow social facts. Once a free store is assumed, human wanting and giving, needing and taking become wide open to improvisation.

A sign: If Someone Asks to See the Manager Tell Him He’s the Manager.

Someone asked how much a book cost. How much did he think it was worth? 75 cents. The money was taken and held out for anyone, “Who wants 75 cents?” A girl who had just walked in came over and took it.

A basket labeled Free Money.

No owner, no Manager, no employees and no cash-register. A salesman in a free store is a life-actor. Anyone who will assume an answer to a question or accept a problem as a turn-on.

Question (whispered): “Who pays the rent?”

Answer (loudly): “May I help you?”

Who’s ready for the implications of a free store? Welfare mothers pile bags full of clothes for a few days and come back to hang up dresses. Kids case the joint wondering how to boost.

Fire helmets, riding pants, shower curtains, surgical gowns and World War I Army boots are parts for costumes. Nightsticks, sample cases, water pipes, toy guns and weather balloons are taken for props. When materials are free imagination becomes currency for spirit.

Where does the stuff come from? People, persons, beings. Isn’t it obvious that objects are only transitory subjects of human value? An object released from one person’s value may be destroyed, abandoned or made available to other people. The choice is anyone’s.

The question of a free store is simply: What would you have?

street event — birth of haight /
funeral for $ now

Pop Art mirrored the social skin. Happenings X-rayed the bones. Street events are social acid heightening consciousness of what is real on the street. To expand eyeball implications until facts are established through action.

The Mexican Day of the Dead is celebrated in cemeteries. Yellow flowers falling petal by petal on graves. In moonlight. Favorite songs of the deceased and everybody gets loaded. Children suck deaths-head candy engraved with their names in icing.

A Digger event. Flowers, mirrors, penny-whistles, girls in costumes of themselves, Hell’s Angels, street people, Mime Troupe.

Angels ride up Haight with girls holding Now! signs. Flowers and penny-whistles passed out to everyone.

Penny-whistle music, clapping, flowers thrown in the air. A bus-driver held up by the action gets out to dance a quick free minute. No more passers-by, everybody’s together.

A chorus on both sides of the street chanting Uhh!–Ahh!–Shh be cool! Mirrors held up to reflect faces of passersby.

The burial procession. Three black-shrouded messengers holding staffs topped with reflective dollar signs. A runner swinging a red lantern. Four pall-bearers wearing animal heads carry a black casket filled with blowups of silver dollars. A chorus singing Get Out Of My Life Why Don’t You Babe to Chopin’s Death March. Members of the procession give out silver dollars and candles.

Now more reality. Someone jumps on a car with the news that two Angels were busted. Crowd, funeral cortege and friends of the Angels fill the street to march on Park Police Station. Cops confront 400 free beings: a growling poet with a lute, animal spirits in black, candle-lit girls singing Silent Night. A collection for bail fills an Angel’s helmet. March back to Haight and street dancing.

Street events are rituals of release. Re-claiming of territory (sundown, traffic, public joy) through spirit. Possession. Public NewSense.

Not street-theater, the street is theater. Parades, bank robberies, fires and sonic explosions focus street attention. A crowd is an audience for an event. Release of crowd spirit can accomplish social facts. Riots are a reaction to police theater. Thrown bottles and over-turned cars are responses to a dull, heavy-fisted, mechanical and deathly show. People fill the street to express special public feelings and hold human communion. To ask “What’s Happening?” The alternative to death is a joyous funeral in company with the living.

who paid for your trip?

Industrialization was a battle with 19th-century ecology to win breakfast at the cost of smog and insanity. Wars against ecology are suicidal. The U.S. standard of living is a bourgeois baby blanket for executives who scream in their sleep. No Pleistocene swamp could match the pestilential horror of modern urban sewage. No children of White Western Progress will escape the dues of peoples forced to haul their raw materials.

But the tools (that’s all factories are) remain innocent and the ethics of greed aren’t necessary. Computers render the principles of wage-labor obsolete by incorporating them. We are being freed from mechanistic consciousness. We could evacuate the factories, turn them over to androids, clean up our pollution. North Americans could give up self-righteousness to expand their being.

Our conflict is with job-wardens and consumer-keepers of a permissive looney-bin. Property, credit, interest, insurance, installments, profit are stupid concepts. Millions of have-nots and drop-outs in the U.S. are living on an overflow of technologically produced fat. They aren’t fighting ecology, they’re responding to it. Middle-class living rooms are funeral parlors and only undertakers will stay in them. Our fight is with those who would kill us through dumb work, insane wars, dull money morality.

Give up jobs, so computers can do them! Any important human occupation can be done free. Can it be given away?

Revolutions in Asia, Africa, South America are for humanistic industrialization. The technological resources of North America can be used throughout the world. Gratis. Not a patronizing gift, shared.

Our conflict begins with salaries and prices. The trip has been paid for at an incredible price in death, slavery, psychosis.

An event for the main business district of any U.S. city. Infiltrate the largest corporation office building with life-actors as nymphomaniacal secretaries, clumsy repairmen, berserk executives, sloppy security guards, clerks with animals in their clothes. Low key until the first coffee-break and then pour it on. Secretaries unbutton their blouses and press shy clerks against the wall. Repairmen drop typewriters and knock over water coolers. Executives charge into private offices claiming their seniority. Guards produce booze bottles and playfully jam elevator doors. Clerks pull out goldfish, rabbits, pigeons, cats on leashes, loose dogs. At noon 1000 freed beings singing and dancing appear outside to persuade employees to take off for the day. Banners roll down from office windows announcing liberation. Shills in business suits run out of the building, strip and dive in the fountain. Elevators are loaded with incense and a pie fight breaks out in the cafeteria.

theater is fact/action

Give up jobs. Be with people. Defend against property.

[Catalog No.: CC-137]

Been Worried Lately?

[March 3, 1967]

---

Been Worried Lately? Been Uptight? Been Paaaraanoid?

then...

Call your Miss America cutie out of a Prell shampoo shower
Get your townsquire, teenqueen, mod and rocker boots and bells,
Rev up the hundred plus horses in your absolutely mod Camaro
And run down and see the Buddha Baby-Love Incarnate-Tinsel
Topsy-Calm Eyed-Mantra Singing-Electronic-Miracle Hippie
Angels: standing in line two blocks long waiting to be processed by the ticket window at Winterland which will spit them into the LOVE CIRCUS for three and a half bucks a head.

We've got no time for suckers!

How much did the Digger's film festival cost?
How much did the Birth and Death ritual cost?
How much did the New Year's Whale cost?
How much did the Invisible Circus cost?
Even the Be-In. How much did that cost?

FREEFREEFREEFREEFREEFREEFREEFREEFREEFREEFREEFREE

Whose trip are you paying for? How long will you tolerate people (straight or hip) transforming your trip into cash?

Suckers Buy What Lovers Get For Free!

Your style is being sold back to you. New style, same shuck, new style, same shuck, new style, same shuck.

The Diggers will not pay for this trip. As you buy a ticket you kill the Digger in yourself.....yourself

THE D I G G E R S

communication company
in UPs printed.

[Catalog No.: CC-138]

The Diggers Do Not Sell

[March 3, 1967]

---

The Diggers do not sell. | The Diggers do not buy.

If you want to help the Diggers, if you want the Diggers to help you, phone: 861-8502 431-1655 626-2926

"Freedom" means everything free.

The Diggers are setting up a farm. They need help.
The Diggers need places for people to sleep. The churches should offer sanctuary.
The Diggers need food to feed people.
The Diggers need clothes to give people.
The is the Diggers' thing: no money; everything free.
The Diggers are practicing the Cardinal Virtues because that's the right thing to do.

3/3/67

printed by the communication company, a member of the underground press syndicate

[Catalog No.: CC-126]

Trip Without a Ticket Free Store

[Ca. March 24, 1967]

---

TRIP WITHOUT A TICKET

property of the possessed

Cole & Carl Streets

The first mention of the Trip Without a Ticket free store was in the Berkeley Barb, March 24, 1967:

[Catalog No.: CC-255]

Free Legal Services

[Spring 1967. Every Monday and Wednesday at the Trip Without A Ticket free store]

---

FREE
LEGAL SERVICES

Daytime — Diana 626-5285
Nights — 849-1355 | SM-2-6903 | 931-1229

Also — 901 Cole Street — Mon & Wed 7:00PM

FREE LAWYERS

(your cases handled free)

Comm Comp

[Catalog No.: CC-233, CC-266]

Gentleness .. is No Vice

[April 2, 1967]

---

GENTLENESS in the Pursuit of Extremity is No Vice

a play in infinite acts by the people

Setting. Haight Street Sunday April 2nd 1pm

The streets belong to those who live in them
Those who live on Haight Street are neither loiterers, vagrants, nuisances nor undesirables. They are the tenants of the street; angels of the corners, minor saints of the intersection..

PLAY YOUR PARTS: cowboys, indians, monks, troubadors, minstrels, poets, super-nova lovers, keristas, sexual buddhas, kalis, matreyas, soldiers of fortune beggars* starstuddedmessengers teeny-boppers

PLAY YOUR PARTS

The acting out of various life styles & social art forms --- replete with bells, symbols, flutes, incenses and all various sundry props OF OUR LIVES on (REPEAT:ON) hhhhaight sssttreeet. To take possession of the street NOT AS AN ACT OF CHALLENGE, HOSTILITY, SHOWDOWN, WAR, BUT AS AN EXTENSION OF OUR OWN LIVES

WE NEED IT TO PLAY ON.

Each player carries the responsibility to keep aggression and/or hostility absent. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE
YOUR OWN LIVES
EXERCISE THAT RESPONSIBILITY BEAUTIFULLY

there will be toys & props other than those you bring
digger angels spread their wings over the world toy-shop
children thrive in kindergartens especially when they run them
become your own teach
play play play your part

cast of charaters
hippies, provos, diggers, anarchists, beatniks, spades, shop keepers, loiterers, panhandlers, pimps, hookers, Hell's Angels, Old Europeans, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, onlookers, tourists, existentialists, Protestants, civilrights groups, musicians, clergymen, and other interested parties.

SUN
DAY
Spring
April 2nd
one o'clock

the diggers

communication company (ups) printed this

[Catalog No.: CC-004]

Survival School

[Ca. April 1967]

---

Survival School | how to stay alive on Haight Street

for newcomers & others

free!
classes & discussions conducted by experts, professional men & experienced street kids

Every Monday night at 8
The Scene | where it's really at & what it is
Drug Lore | how to keep from getting killed for kicks
Policemanship | how to avoid getting busted & what to do if you are

Every Tuesday night at 8
Sex Lore | how to avoid gangbangs, rape, VD & pregnancy
Health & Hygiene | how to stay alive & well
Street Wisdom | how to avoid beatings & starvation, how to survive without money

Every Wednesday night at 8
Haight Street Seminar | experienced hippies & others rapping, answering questions, filling you in, telling it like it is, so you needn't be a helpless newcomer very long

a series of three classes designed to save you from becoming a psychedelic casualty -- six months' worth of knowledge in a mere three days, & all free

no cheap moralizing, no bullshit, nothing phony, no lies, no beating around the bush, no salestalk, just straight information you can trust

-at-
THE TRIP WITHOUT A TICKET
901 Cole Street

THE COMMUNICATION COMPANY

[Catalog No.: CC-028]

Carte de Venue

[April 9, 1967]

---

Carte de Venue & Street Menu

1 P.M.
Dance of the Sorcerer's Apprentices (brooms provided)
Haight & Ashbury
$0.00

2 P.M.
Street Dance Music by The Dead
Haight/Ashbury
$0.00

3 P.M.
World Salad Balling Bowl
(bring vegetables for the salad) Panhandle
$0.00 5 P.M.
Rites of Passage through Artificial Barriers
up Ashbury to Haight
$0.00

7 P.M.
Free Time

EVERYTHING IS FREE

the diggers

Note: Confrontations with the police don't seem to work out any better than meetings with the proper authorities. None of the above is worth getting busted for. If The Man blows his cool again, why not add to his embarrassment by splitting? Laughing as you go. If I were a cop who had been called away from whatever I was doing to play filth with a bunch of hippies, I'd be pretty bugged if they did me out of my fun by obeying my orders. | C.A.

abetted by the communication company (ups) 4/9/67

[Catalog No.: CC-032a]

about time we started doin our own livin' and dyin'

[April 20, 1967]

---

about time we started doin ' our own livin' and dyin'

And so, six months ago you watched two guys bring a milk can full of turkey stew into the panhalde and start the diggers. two weeks later free food in the panhandle at four o'clock was advertised in the berkely barb and it never missed a day.
somebody asked: Why free food?
and anyone answered: free clothes.
the first free store opened in a six car garage on page street and it was small and the crowd knew each other and someone had written winstanley on the door and then the rains came and the roof fell in, the landlord was harrassed by the police and said please… and someone said it was nice while it lasted.
and the diggers grew.
at 520 frederick street the second free store formed. and everything was regular again. free food all time.
lieutenant korelac headed a panty raid on the joint charging one of the two guys with maintaining and operating an opium den.
and the place folded with hot dog bike trash trying to show
somebody their cocks.
1775 became the second wave greta garbo and things happened like birthdays in the street, benfits for the diggers were thrown all over the place with no admission, cover, or any charge, and free food was back in the park.
soon a pipsqueak prelate offered the diggers his church ladies' kitchen, and an office and all sorts of help.
and the two guys and the friends they had made sort of faded.
the diggers changed hands and money suddenly became a necessity.
1775 needed rent money. people needed bail money. lawyer money. sound equipment money. gas money. and the diggers took donations. let's buy armenian hall! let's buy a bus! let's buy property somewhere.
and free food got plenty scarce.
newspapers ran articles on the diggers and their mythical hero
hogansand the stage got a little bigger.
a new breed slipped in and sat in the office getting sixteen dollar rewards for runaways, cashing 175$ checks into theirpersonal bank accounts, and didn't do a fucking thing for nobody! ever!
factions grew: turner was going to have tobacco killed and apache wanted to confront the cops and nobody cared anymore. somebody quietly opened a trip without a ticket on cole street and someone else put the page street back together as a children's arts and crafts workshop and the street filled to a bulge and sunday dance concerts in the park are getting to be a drag.
1775 is now a closed shop complete with tenure and seniority.
848 was abandoned to the selfishness of sidewalk bike riders.
and free food hasn't been around for a long time.
jackson king of ksol annouces that chester anderson lays down
techniques of surviving the haight scene without becoming a casualty … the chronicle still calls the people the love generation.
well love is a slop-bucket and we are the children of awareness
but our courage has yet to manifest itself within our floating
community … we put down the merchants, the bullshitters, the hustlers and we sit around and it's all the same and there's nothing new under the sun and free food seems a long time gone because we're playing the game of the 1930's we're the new cry babies and james dean's tears have finally taken root in a shallow weak kneed series of cabals which expect some one to take care of their livin'. some revolution

[Singed "X"]

printed 4/20/67 by the communication company (ups)

[Catalog No.: CC036a/b]

Hopi Report

[April 29, 1967]

---

Saturday -- April 29 -- Santa Fe, N. Mexico

SATURDAY — APRIL 29 — SANTA FE, N. MEXICO

The Hopi counselors had come to the home of a son to listen to Dick Alpert, PhD, the I Am Church, and peyote sectarian hippies advise them of the benefits of a Be-In this June at the Grand Canyon.

Alpert, PhD, explained that the national publicity of such an event would certainly reveal to the public the injustices of reservation life and give way to redress at the hands of the Federal Gov't. He referred to the prophecy of the Hopi which states that the sons of the white-evil-man will be brothers to the Indian. He called for spiritual unity among brothers and spoke of 10-20,000 warm bodies soaking up the magic sun of Arizona.

Ginsberg recalled 'The Gathering of the Tribes' in S.F. and how colorful — how perfect — how warm and full of love — but cautioned the fact that many were stoned and a few were zonked.

Thomas, interpreter for the Hopi People of the Third Mesa, said no. No, because you mean well, but you are foolish. You are foolish because you don't think of the Inidan. — We are a small people — You fathers crush us. You are a tribe of strangers to yourselves — You gather and you disperse — You are not together — You are not one with each other. — There is no need for us to invite brothers to our home — There is no need to advertise in all underground papers of a Be-In in Hopi Land — There is no need to organize the discovery of one's self into a false tribe of 15,000 seekers. If you want to come to Hopi Land you will. If you want to understand the Indian way you will come to us and be silent and watch with closed eyes and we will not have to invite you nor will you have to invite each other — it will be.

Larry Bird spoke of the hunt and how the hunter is the target. He said it was a time of coming together with oneself as nature is adjusting to the unnatural acts of money man. You cannot look beyond yourself and not see nothing. (Besides the temperatures in the Canyon are 120 degrees throughout the summer and there is no water and the Arizona cops are already arresting 150 hitch-hikers a week and slamming them into small town jails forever.)

Princess Morning Star (spokeswoman through descent of small L.A. tribe) spoke of the Omnibus Bill, whose author is anonymous, and how it will go through Congress and, finally, terminate the land rights of all Indians on and off reservations. She asked for help — help from those who pay taxes and vote and whose fathers have made the laws to negate nature and the timelessness of time. And then she gave Larry Bird three eagle feathers from her headpiece and said her heart felt that he would help his people like few others. Larry Bird said nothing.

Grogan talked from his youth and sought awareness — He questioned the motives for a Be-In at Hopi Land. No, we have a community. We have many communities. And these have grown out of a natural explosion — Now we must follow the organic steps toward our own development as a tribe.

At this point some of us are fed up with cities and the psychology of its streets — We are hungry for our own rituals and lines of life. But there is no need, on behalf of the people, to organize a Be-In, publicize a Be-In, construct a Be-In — Let the Oracle and EVO and the ad-men keep that artificial symbol of solidarity to themselves.

The young people of this world who are ready will feel it beautiful to leave the cities this summer and go to Hopi Land and other Indian communities and no one will have to tell anyone anything — They will go because it is time for them to go. And some of them will homestead land in Idaho or New Mexico and we will never hear from them until they want us to. The great Be-In—Pow-Wow in San Francisco was a shuck! It was as empty as the news copy it engendered. It was removed from the people and organized by merchants. It was a mere celebration of figures who have chosen to be our leaders and a glorification of their stage hands. Only the people can do it — only the people will do it. On June 21 — Summer Solstice — the people are going to celebrate their lives in the community of San Francisco. The people will develop their own rituals — they will learn that a street has brothers and a city has tribes. The people will look to no one but themselves. They will build their courage and leave Be-Ins to the college students, ad men, and news media. They will look to the college students, ad men, and news media. They will look to their brothers not men who claim to be their leaders. And they will never tell anyone what they saw.
—————
The Hopi, Larry Bird, Ginsberg and Grogan left. And a little while later — Alpert, PhD, and his friends (all of whom either own or work in tourist shops in New Mexico) decided to have a Be-In anyway. On June 21 at Raton Pass near Taos, N.M. Then they smiled at each other and began wording invitations to rock groups and press-releases to the media and Alpert, PhD, talked about his trip to India — he leaves June 15.

[signed with feather swastika]

[Catalog No.: CC-222]

There is a Great Deal to Be Silent About

[May 29, 1967]

---

THERE IS A GREAT DEAL TO BE SILENT ABOUT

Contemporary history is a money conspiracy -- the key to the atom. The facade of present seeming normalcy shows signs of weathering; each day the cement crumbles a little more -- the consequence is an increasing self-division -- portents of chaos everywhere as we grow aware of our own nakedness and impotence, our nothingness -- time is shrinking into itself. Only the present seems to hold possibility. Was are no longer the heroes of history. Long term goals (and institutions) have lost their relevance. Work is time spent in thrall. An accumulation of ends, with all goals immediate. Children are tearing down the false front of dignity and entering existence through acceptance of lone-ness and of ever-present possibility of sudden death, hoping to find potential for freedom and authentic identity -- a new barbarian race flashing on pagan energy searching for rituals and tribal touch. As we fly from banality. And approach the essence of horror. New determination to pursue experience to its furthest reaches. Mad exuberance and hunger for sensation are a constant goad. A demonic circle. A response to existence in last century. At the bottom of personality, looking up. Outside of meaningless rat race rigged up by and for the straights. Effort wasted in game which kills time, deadens awareness, and brutalizes feeling. Masks thrown off and one enters the inescapable truth and squalor of own being. Beyond the possibility of defeat. Ideology of failure. Movement directed beyond reach of compulsion. Flow with real tides of existence which reach into an underground beyond guise, hate or love. All real things are to be faced in all moments of agony and joy. Everyting else is a deception. Know that you are alone and learn to live. All contacts immediate and intense. Politics is an arena where words are juggled in a gigantic hoax based on the premise that two follows one, wise in the ways of perversity -- words are colors by which the lie is hidden and the fraud is truth. Sharpen senses to continue and improve dialogue with existence. Chaos is real world -- shifting, changing, slipping out of grasp. Meaning only found beyond experience. Basic impulse always religious -- a cold light on our own incompleteness. Like a debauched child's face.

[signed with a feathered swastika]

printed 5/29/67 by the communication company (ups) chicken little was right.

[Catalog No.: DP-ltr-from-Fr-Harris]

Digger Bread

[June 1967. These two sheets were included in a letter from Father Leon Harris, the Episcopal priest who welcomed the Diggers to the All Saints Church on Waller Street starting in 1966. It's likely that this sheet was written by Walt Reynolds. Walt and his wife showed up at the All Saints Church in June 1967 with 400 lbs. of whole wheat flour. They taught the Diggers how to bake bread in coffee cans which became the signature mark of Digger Bread. The story of this encounter and its reverberations through the counterculture is here: Digger Bread & the Free Baker(ies).

This recipe is incomplete. At the bottom of the first page is an arrow to continue, but the only other page is numbered "4" and is comment about the recipe. It is likely that this was handed out at the Free Bakery that Walt set up at Resurrection City in 1968.

Below the transcription is a scan of a complete recipe for Digger Bread that appeared in the first issue of Mother Earth News (1970).]

---

Digger Bread

For two loaves you will need two coffee cans. The same cans are used for measuring and then for baking. Any of the common 1, 2 or 3 pound sizes, with the three indented rings, will do. The 1 pound size makes a nice slicing size, and the 2 pound size a family size. Watch out for the 3 pound size -- that loaf weighs almost four pounds.

WET MIX -- first mix this up:

•  1/2 can lukewarm water (but not over 85-degrees, as the yeast will be killed.)
•  1 cake or pkg. of yeast. (The cake works faster -- even if the recipe is doubled or tripled, this is still enough.)
•  1 Tablespoon of flour.
•  1 Tablespoon of honey or sugar.

Mix all of these in the can. If you wish you may add a couple spoonfuls of honey, molasses, brown sugar or dextrose. A well cooked potato put through a blender and incorporated into the water at this stage can take the place of the milk below.

DRY MIX -- Mix this while the wet mix stands.

•  1 level can of whole wheat flour. (Note on flour: The bread will be as good as the flour is fresh. Co-op flour is the most reliable and reasonable that is readily available. White flour will not work. Rye flour must be mixed ==>>
•  [abrupt end of recipe]

[second sheet:]

--4--

This is as delicious and as healthful a bread as there is. And the recipe is almost foolproof -- you can make mistakes in all directions and most likely the bread will still turn out. It is the bread that was baked by the youngsters in San Francisco at the All Saints Episcopal Church during the "Summer of Love" and given away at the rate of 1,000 lbs. per week.

GOOD BAKING. PEACE.

---

One interesting thing to note in that last paragraph is the use of the term "youngsters" which is something Walt Reynolds would likely have said. The other is the amount of free bread that was produced at the All Saints Free Bakery. Again, something Walt would have known.

Below: the recipe for Digger Bread published in the first issue of Mother Earth News, January 1970. Note the similarity to the beginning portion of the recipe above.

[Catalog No.: CC-244]

Digger Farm Needs

[Spring-Summer 1967]

---

Digger Farm Needs

Hammers
Nails - all sizes
2x4's 1x6's random widths
and lengths of all sizes
Lumber
Pinch bars
Level
Saws
Skillsaw
Generators
Rulers
Squares
Tar paper
Doors
Hinges
Cement
Cement blocks
Lime
Sand
Trowels - mason tools
Shovels - garden tools
Hoes
Rakes
Wheel barrows
Tents
Mastic for tar paper
Seeds
Water hose
Pails
Pick-up truck
Motor oil
Kerosene
Rabbits
Rabbit pellets
Hay
Windows
Plywood
Tractor
Manure spreader
Plow
Disc
Harrow
Spike tooth harrow
Sleeping bags
Camping equipment
Typewriter
Office supplies & equipment
Any other materials or tools for homesteading gardening & farming

[Catalog No.: DP-009a/b]

Fuck You Hippie

[Ca. Summer 1967]

---

here is your answer
here is your answer
here is your answer
here is your answer
again
from City Government
from City Government
Sunday
april
december

today
yesterday

merchants

[the middle half of the front side reads as a character composite spelling out the words FUCK YOU HIPPIE. The characters of the phrase are interspersed with single words such as:]

$$money is your answer
fuck success
fuck money
from City Hall Government is work here
bust is your answer

[at the bottom of front page is a word flow diagram with lines connecting words and phrases typed over the page]

HERE IS YOUR ANSWER
don't let it flow
work —> success —> money
control —> suppress —> no freenow
busts —> harassment —> jail
war on hippies —> fuck you hippie
fragmentation —> splitting

[reverse side:]


Hippie - here is your answer from the sick sick sick sick rotten paranoids:

DON'T pick up hitchikers, in fact, grimacing and giving the finger to hitchikers

Get a JOB, and DON' T quit often because you'll get a bad reputation

DON' T talk to strangers

DON'T walk around at night, especially in unsafe neighborhoods

KILL for peace

Stay in SCHOOL so you can graduate and get a good JOB and make $$MONEY$$ (don't worry about being creative)

DON'T make love
DON'T do L.S.D.
DON'T do grass
DON'T do alcohol
DON'T walk around nude
DON'T walk around with no shoes
DON'T stand on street corners waiting for nothing
DON'T gamble
DON'T house and feed people under eighteen years of age

They'll tell you how they watch movies
They'll tell you how they watch T.V.
They'll tell you how they watch go-go dancers
They'll tell you how they watch ball-games
They'll tell you how they watch magazines for clothes and hairstyles
They'll tell you how they watch rock bands
They'll tell you how they watch spontaneous demonstrations on Haight Street

And they'll tell you that they work from nine to five and that their jobs aren't bad and that their pay is O.K. and that their boss is all right (he gives them a five dollar bonus every year at Christmas) and that their two-week sightseeing vacation was a groove.

Are you ready for all that sickness? Read those again, because they conflict with all actions of people coming together and being joyous. And the Hippies say unto you — take your sickness and tightness and impersonalness and work and rules and rationalizations and unwillingness to change and experience and stick them in your own head and brains and owned mouth and owned ears and owned ass, in your unspeakable cocks and cunts. We want to be and to create now and CREATION AND BEING ARE FREE. We want to be and to create and to express now, and that means FREENOW

There is now there is now NOW there is … there is (on a small physical scale)

FREE clothes
FREE food
FREE shelter
FREE cars
FREE farms
FREE medical advice
FREE lawyers
FREE printing presses

[Catalog No.: DP-010a/b]

Hippie Here Is Your Answer

[Ca. Summer 1967]

---

Hippie — here is your answer from City Government:
(and they are our brothers and sisters)

For the last six months , or has it been six thousand years the city government has invited us to talk- talk talk- talk while they have thrown this sick shit on us. The Park Department demanding identity cards and viciously busting people for panhandling, breaking away from their parents, taking de-conditioning drugs, etc. The Building Department condemning houses used as free space for hundreds of people. (Their rationale being that if there are any more than five people living in a house it is no longer a home but a hotel, and a license is needed-also that it might cause outbreaks of Bubonic plague.) The Health Department enforcing restaurant and public assembly laws in places where free food is given.

Well city government, we're tired of your whimpering, controlled voices. ("I'm an ordinary man with an ordinary job," "I'm just obeying orders," "It's not only my job," "It's not my decision," "I'm not the one to interpret the law — I don't like being here and I want to end this as quickly as possible.") We can't and don't want to pound ourselves into your impersonal bureaucratic categories. We have found that you have no eyes no ears, no features, no feelings — that you are completely anonymous and unflowing. We don't want to live in your static, dead world, so we are creating a sub-culture of Free Forms.

The free families are coming together now to create these forms, and they need the open beach street and park spaces to come together. The city has to close the street and the hippies have to get together and get free space so that they can do their thing Free. If fusion is suppressed by harassment and arrest and other established sicknesses, the energy for uniting of the families will be fragmented into chaos and violence.

+Hippie here is your answer from radio and tv:

CENSORED vocalization (can you imagine that you can't say FUCK? If you say that little sound, the sick ones press a little button to make sure that it doesn't go through the delicate communication lines.)

EDITORALIZED film clips that spread prejudice and death, not understanding! or awareness! Programming, tasteless middle-aged minds (witness Michael McClure's half-hour television program. He was told that he would be the sole narrator of a documentary on H-A, uninterrupted by commercials. It came on at ten-thirty with commercials and with a second narrator who imposed such words as "CRIMINAL" "DEGENERATE" and emphasized merchandise objects rather than the spirit and true values of the people) can you imagine where these people are at?

+Hippie-here is your answer from magazines and newspapers:
from LIFE, TIME, RAMPARTS, LOOK, NEWSPEAK
reporters that filter and try to freeze the Hippie free-spirit into the sick concepts of leadership, structure, control, efficiency, etc. (where are these people at? hee hee)

[reverse side:]

And now you see I.B.M. secretaries with bells around their necks, wearing machine-psychedelic dresses
(CAN YOU IMAGINE WHERE THEY'RE AT?)

Hippie - here is your answer from the merchants:

The store's business is better than ever — SELLING SELLING SELLING "authentic" Hippie belle and beads, misrepresenting our beliefs and fucking up our values —

FREENOW

SELLING to susceptible tourists to our new brothers and sisters who are still prisoners in the dungeon of the Establishment — still chained to the system that tries to buy and sell love and happiness — the confused system of frustrated, tangled minds —

[another character map made up of $$$ signs and the words: IT SELLS with interspersed lower case words throughout:]

deductions
bonds
economize
profits
proceeds
stocks
shares
expenses
etc.

(where in the Hell are they at?)

AND IT SELLS!!!!

Store merchants, what are you going to do with the money?

Rock bands merchants are travelling all over the United States, having radio, television, and newspaper interviews, and making more money than ever — WHOOPEE!!!

Rock bands, what are you going to do with the money?

Dance merchants, what are you going to do with the money?

Drug dealer merchants — you are facing the same problems as the dance merchants. Gangsters are buying their way into the rock dance and drug scene. Are you going to give us a way to distinguish between you and the gangsters and Establishment merchants?

AND WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THE MONEY?

The Hippies have a lot of ideas — what we need most now most of all is space — FREE space. The only thing you merchants can do with money is buy land from the Establishment and set it free — buy land, and invite people to be free on it.

[end]

[Catalog No.: DP-017a/b]

Inmates

[Ca. Summer 1967. This appears to be an early version of "Mutants Commune" which appeared in the Berkeley Barb, August 1967.]

---

INMATES

break out of the mental institutions
break out of the mental institutions

break out of the break out of the mental institutions of political systems
(police, power, coercion, manipulation, control)
break out of the mental institutions of economic systems
(money, compulsory consumption, efficiency, property, monopoly)
break out of the mental institutions of education systems
(language conditioning, censoring, diploma-con, self-righteousness)
break out of the mental institutions of military systems
(violence, force, terrorism, national guard)
break out of the mental institutions of religious systems
(sacredness, secretness, sin, and guilt)
break out of the mental institutions of language systems
(mass syntax , mass morphology, mass phonology, mass semantics)

free you are open people not to be closed into the mental institution systems
revolve your head and nervous system, do acid, spinspiril. do yourself. create free forms.
do your free thing.
freeall
freall
f real 1

MILITARY institutional systems are horizontal and vertical heirarchies frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (soldiers) giving you the alternatives of either killing and burning people to death or going to jail for not obeying the established authorities — the general idols

EDUCATIONAL institutional systems are horizontal and vertical heirarchies frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (students) giving you the alternatives of either successful mental programming and physical conditioning or jail until you're 16 and guilt forever after for not obeying established authorities — the teacher idols

ECONOMIC institutional systems are horizontal and vertical heirarchies frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (workers) giving you the alternatives of either becoming a workable tax paying efficiency freak or going to jail for vagrancy (no money) for not obeying established executive idols

POLITICAL institutional systems are horizontal and vertical heirarchies frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (citizens) giving you the alternatives of either voting for war, monopolies, police, and the national guard or politics is death for not obeying established president idols

RELIGIOUS institutional systems are horizontal and vertical heirarchies frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (members of the multitude) giving you the alternatives of either believing in their gods or being condemned to doo-doo land for not obeying established idol orders

[reverse side]

digger food novas have been doing since sept 66.
nova or novas doing food thing one or two or many days in same or different place with same or different facilities. the days no nova does…..no free food in park

music novas
doing together exploding and re free forming or free splitting

novas are constellations of people who voluntarily free form — the alternative to groups that are hired to function in the mental institutional systems. novas are freely open to all all the time in all ways forever. move. flex. pulse. expand. inpand. grow.

closed seniorized heirarchical institutional systems physical and mental are death.

kings, presidents, generals, mothers, teachers, executives, and other authority icons and idols are death. nova and novas are born free and die free as doing is done. be. be. be free. freely choose nova or novas. find natural identity in nova, not in the planned obsolescence of mass images and plastic formulas.

FUCK the poor boy image always getting bargains and always getting over payed.
FUCK the middle boy image grey in cortivans going to college to get ahead.
FUCK the rich boy image always saying that's the way it always was and will be and one can't fiux it.

flow through novas
birth — do your thing—death. birth—do your thing. death cibernation obsoletes vertical and horizontal heirarchical people slots— credit, debts, and bankers are death. The account books are closed. dead

slot and cubicle existence is obsolete? flow open. nomads—create and recreate the novic architecture in each envir9innent

break out the confining walls—build grow relate in the electro-magnetic communes.

decentralize language—the establishment controls attitudes and opinion by using mass language and mass images censored through the mass media — API newspapers UPI images | Luce magazine syndicate images | NBC t.v. CBS images | ABC radio WOR images | Hollywood movies images

decentralize language—consciously communicate on non-verbal levels. telempathy-mime, hand gestures, body movements, babble sounds, telepathy.

decentralize language—each community should have a language that is continually and rapidly fluxing. language created from own environment and situations. any crowd-be-in |any cop-Guerrins | free form-nova |communication company-c.c. |Maverick-straight Oracle

— A novas of diggers

[end]

 

[Catalog No.: DP-018]

term paper

[Ca. Summer 1967]

---

term paper:
the relationship between poetry and revolution has lost its ambiguity — gregory corso's poem POWER was the sole reason behind the
concept of the Diggers: autonomy.
The issue is no longer the status of an american minority, but the status of America. the diggers are a rebellion against commodities and the hierarchy of commodity values.
Through FREE diggers expose the lie of the oppressive rationality of commodities and affirm their human superiority.
THE ROAD OF EXCESS LEADS TO THE PALACE OF WISDOM. when it is no longer bought with money, the commodity lies open to criticism and modification.
affluence is by no means natural or human, it is simply an abundance of goods. the cops' job is to make sure that a commodity maintains the magical property of having to be paid for instead of becoming a mute, passive, insensible, submissive thing. how do men make history starting from the pre-established conditions to persuade them not to take a hand in it/
WATTS DROP-OUTS DIGGERS FREE
freedom now is for the first time not freedom from poverty, but freedom from material abundance.
WE demand the control of abundance, not just the changing way it is shared out, but the
redefining its every orientation, superficial and profound alike. this is the first skirmish in an enormous struggle, infinite in its implications….
THE BLACKS, isolated for so long in their struggle, are not alone any longer a new consciousness is forming in america — the consciousness of not being the master of one's activity, of one's life, in the slightest degree. WE all refuse modern capitalism and communism and ism and ismismismsimk WE express a disgust for affluence and its price WE are the advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values
INTEGRATION for the BLACK man is absurd because intergration ne plus ultra of all intergration promised is intergration into a system of isms
WE are the products of modern induotry and are repulsed by the material paradise. Commodities are universal and as the world of commodities is based on class conflict they are hierarchic and we all live within that universal hierarchisation.
the Diggers have proven the communal possibility of living without having to earn wages or hire yourself to the highest bidder. other groups should pool their resources and
stick with it for the holding action….soon there will be organic communes all over the world and anyone is welcome.————
Western society has destroyed itself. the culture is extinct.
Politics are as dead as the culture. capitalism, communism, socialism are political confrontations and are meaningless.
BE SICKENED BY THE ONCOMING MASS STARVATION AND CONCOMITANT REVOLTING DEGREE OF OVERPOPULATION AND THE ACCOMPANYING PRODUCTION OF INCREDIBLE NUMBERS OF USELESS PHYSICAL OBJECTS WHOSE RAW MATERIALS DEMAND A DESTRUCTION OF THOSE PARTS OF NATURE WE KNOW AS BEAUTIFUL
EACH MAN IS INNOCENT BUT THE POINT OF LIFE IS NOT REST BUT ACTION.
DEATH IS REST. EVERYONE WILL HAVE ENOUGH REST FOR ETERNITY
NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTION
THE WORLD MUST BE SEEN CLEARLY
create alternatives…turn people onto their own creative powers….
the public is any fool on the street and power is standing on a streetcomer waiting for no one
AND WE ARE NOT GUILTY
WE ARE LIVING CREATURES
kill voyeurism.
the colombia encyclopedia.

[Catalog No.: DP-19670818]

Mutants Commune

[Berkeley Barb, August 18, 1967]

---

This manifesto is one of the core foundational Digger texts (imho). Written by Billy Digger and illustrated by Billy Batman (both anonymously) it first appeared in the Berkeley Barb in August 1967. In part it was a "long poetic essay about American materialism corrected by Haight-Ashbury culture, including free" (DTF) and reported what had been accomplished in the Free community since its inception the previous fall 1966. It is also a blueprint for creating a new social form of "free novas" meaning the communal groupings that had developed in the wake of the Summer of Love. In that sense it reads like the utopian visions of the 17th century Diggers

---

INMATES fellow mutants

break out of the mental institutions
break out of the mental institutions

break out of the mental institutions.........political systems

[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: police power, control, manipulation, coercion, death]

break out of the mental institutions.........economic systems

[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: money monopoly, property, compulsory consumption, efficiency, money death]

break out of the mental institutions.........education systems

[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: censoring conditioning, righteousness, intelligence censoring, diploma conditioning]

break out of the mental institutions.........military systems

[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: force, violence, terrorism, national guard, death]

break out of the mental institutions.........religious systems

[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: guilt (sin), sacredness, secretness, sin, death]

break out of the mental institutions.........language systems

[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: mass syntax, abcde, mass phonology, mass morphology death, mass syntax, mass semantics]

break out of the mental institutions.........mafia systems

[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: heroin, prostitution, money, sex, gambling, betting, opium, loan sharking]

break out of the mental institutions.........family systems

[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: alimony, divorce, marriage, two-people-family, adultery, death]

FREE YOU ARE OPEN PEOPLE NOT TO BE CLOSED INTO THE MENTAL INSTITUTIONAL SYSTEMS.

mutants revolve your head and nervous system. do acid. do the holy cities. spinspiril. do yourself and bod. create free forms. novas. do free.

freeall
freal
f real l

[end cover page]

1750 ECONOMIC institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (workers)

G.M.  A.T.&T. Dow giving you the wheeler-dealer alternatives of becoming a workable taxpaying efficiency gnome or going to jail for vagrancy (no money) for not obeying established leader authorities?he pop executive idol images.

1919 FAMILY institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (households)

father mother grandparents giving you the "my how you've grown" alternatives of following in the footsteps of dear old dad's and mom's together head or being sent out into the world without any cookies for not obeying established leader authorities?he pop mom-dad team idol images.

1854 POLITICAL institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (citizens)

Rep. Dem. Blk. Panthers giving you the "a vote for me is a vote for you" alternatives of voting for war, monopolies, police, and the national guard or being totally non-represented for not obeying established leader authorities?he pop president idol image.

prehistoric MILITARY institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (soldiers)

army navy air force giving you the "go get 'em" alternatives of burning and killing people or going to jail for not obeying established leader authorities?he pop general idol images.

1860 EDUCATIONAL institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (students)

Harvard Yale Vassar M.I.T. giving you the "rah rah" alternatives of successful mental programming and physical conditioning or jail until you're sixteen and guilt forever after for not obeying established leader authorities?he pop teacher idol images.

1367 RELIGIOUS institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (members of the multitude)

Catholic Jewish Protestant giving you the blessed alternatives of believing in their gods or being condemned to doo-doo land for not obeying established leader authorities?he pop god-representative idol images.

1936 GANGSTER institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (big wheels)

Mafia Cosa Nostra small-time hood giving you the bang-bang alternatives of paying 6 for 5, house rates and rakes or getting beat up or shot for not obeying established leader authorities?he pop good bad guy idol images.

GET OUT OF THE RECTILINEAR BOXED STRAIGHT LINE 1600's STATIC CARTESIAN COORDINATE SYSTEMS. HELP EACH OTHER DYNAMICALLY FLOW TOGETHER AND APART IN POST ATOMIC, POST RELATIVITY FREE FORM ONE TO ONE NOVAS

presidents, kings, generals, mothers, teachers, executives, gangsters, and other leader authority icons, idols, and images are death. nova and novas are born free and die free as doing is done. be. be. be free. freely choose nova or novas. find natural identity in nova, not pre-fabricated identity in plastic formulas and mass planned obsolete images.

•  FUCK the poor boy image always getting bargains and always working overtime. CLASS.
•  FUCK the middle boy image grey in cortivans going to college to get a head. SUCCESS.
•  FUCK the rich boy image always saying that's the way it always was and will be and one can't flux it. ADORABLE.

combine in one to one relations-novas.

novas are constellations of people who voluntarily free form?he alternative to groups that are hired to function in the mental institutional systems. novas are freely open to all all the time in all ways forever. move. flex. pulse. undulate. expand. inpand. grow.

one to one is confronting each thing and situation as itself, as specific, as unique, free, open, flowing, changing, dynamic, on the wing, mysterious, infinite-sided, beyond reference. being. beyond games of power, property, force, guilt, money.

decentralize language—The Establishment controls attitudes and opinion by using mass language and mass images censored through the mass media·

•  API newspapers UPI images
•  LUCE magazines U.S. News and World images
•  NBC t.v. CBS images
•  ABC radio WOR images
•  COLUMBIA movies M.G.M. images

decentralize language—consciously communicate on non-verbal levels. telempathy-mime [sic], hand gestures, facial expression, body movements, babble sounds, telepathy. twitch.

decentralize language—each community should have a language that is continually and rapidly fluxing. language created from own environment and situations.

•  any crowd-be-in
•  any cop-Guerrins
•  free form-nova
•  communications company-c.c.

There exists a lag between the psyche of the leader authorities, controlling the great-grandfather mental institutions, and the psyche of the fuck-leader youth trying to be free in the cybernated-pill-acid-missile technological environment they have no free in.

•  The leader authorities are agents of the death penalty.
•  The fuck-leader youth want to open life.
•  The leader authorities command work and inductions under penalty of jail.
•  The fuck-leader youth want voluntary novas.

THE FUCK-LEADER YOUTH SEARCHER AND MAKER OF VOLUNTARY LIFE IS A MUTANT.

mutation-n. (ME.; mutacion; L. mutation/to change) change under threat of extinction maybe. chromosome flux. a discreet change. abrupt. snap. drop off.

drop out.................. open...................flow

a mutant is a hippie is an automation 1916 1942 computer acid 1943 t.s. 1938 the pill 1952 1942 missile 1945 atom-bomb youth explosion 67. always. infinite. forever. now. ?nd changing·br>
and where are you at mr jones doe Smith? the anonymous mass institution death trip·/p>

•  1854 donkey elephant political institution.
•  1750 industrial revolution factory institution.
•  1267 "who you know" union guild institution.
•  1860 steam heat school house institution.
•  1919 007 betty crocker miss clairol family institution.
•  prehistoric john wayne military institution.
•  1367 bing crosby renaissance church institution.
•  1936 ed g. robinson gangster institution.
•  1620 uncle tom institution.

•  and your creation is niggers (you can't tell a book by its color)
•  your creation is bookmakers (don't take candy from strangers)
•  your creation is Spellmans (god helps those who help themselves)
•  your creation is war (laugh and the world laughs with you)
•  your creation is thalidomide babies (I'll be ready as soon as I put on my face)
•  your creation is juvenile delinquency (children should be seen and not heard)

YOUR CREATION IS MASSIVE STIFF DEATH MASKED WITH EFFICIENCY STATISTICS

and you are right. right in the 1854, 1750, 1267, 1860, 1919, prehistoric, 1367, 1936, 1620, niggers, bookmakers, spellman, war, thalidomide, delinquency, stiff death bag.

and you're afraid to change because you're afraid to face the unfamiliar the unknown                                        LSD

and you hide in your locked houses, cars, and offices, and you create paranoid children.

and now you have unconsciously helped create the mutants, the freaks.

                              and they will tell what you are afraid to tell.

LIFE, TIME, MENTAL AND PHYSICAL INSTITUTIONAL INSURANCE POLICIES ARE DEATH.

                              and they will do what you are afraid to do.

create free
give free
take free
be free
everyways

=====[end of sideways column]

GET OUT OF THE 1860 EDUCATION FORM—

the 1860 steam heat schoolhouse institution is a death form. the grammar school-high school-university mass education-death trip. little classrooms, cramped with sitting, suffocating children.

"Don't talk, children, sit there and listen to me for the next six hours, for the next five days, for the next forty weeks. If you successfully pass through the first eight years imprisonment, you can do four more years in high school. Then, if you are intelligent, fortunate, and have money enough, you can do four more years in a university. Then you can graduate and proudly be imprisoned in offices, factories, and institutions throughout the world until, at long last, you are sixty-five. Then you are free to take off more than two weeks in a row." ("Don't ask stupid questions") ("I'm busy right now")

Amen, brother.

THIS MAY BE

In a free form, the child's natural curiosity could flow. Their growth in certain subjects which interest them would not be stunted by the compulsion to study the same subjects with the same teacher at the same time in the same room with students of the same age.

(IMAGE FLASH ON A SCREEN WITH THE NAME OF THE IMAGE PRINTED UNDER IT. PRESSING KEYS TO LIGHT UP LETTERS UNDER THE PRINTED WORDS)

There are teaching machines that could start to teach two-year olds to read, write, and type. Machines like this could be made available to every child.

If a child wanted to know about the t.v., you could take or send him to an automated t.v. factory, where there would be classes for various levels of instruction. A five-year old could assemble his own t.v. by inserting proper numbered parts in their matching holes. Just like blocks. A ten-year old could solder some parts on the chassis of the t.v. or hand-operate a machine that is now automated. A twelve-year old could alternate various parts to get different effects. A fourteen-old could design different sets around the same principles. A sixteen-year old could start feeling God.

When doctors came to their house, they could inform the children of medical realities. When plumbers come to the house, the kids could go on a plumbing trip.

Along with the decentralized teaching of various subjects in automated factories and from personal contact, there could be the University where all the different elements of the community could be represented. This would offer all subjects to all ages.

In the Haight-Ashbury community, none of these ideas were carried out in the past year. The ideas are still a little too far out to exist under the existing conditions. Most of the education of children came from personal contact with people living in communes. The only developments in the Haight-Ashbury besides personal contact were two free nursery homes and the Huckleberry House for kids under eighteen who split from their parents.

GET OUT OF THE 1919 FAMILY FORM—

The 1919 007 betty crocker miss clairol family institution is a death form. Marriage, responsibility for children, alimony are death. Let's do away with the meaningless, unnecessary bullshit of "I want my kids to have more than I had", "My kids will starve", "I don't have time to listen to your abstract ideas, I have to support my family."

THIS MAY BE

The basic unit of the culture could be the commune instead of a house with one man and one woman in it. The commune would not be owned by one person or one group but it would be open to all people at all times, to do whatever they wished to do in it.

There would be no marriage contracts, but people could still have huge ceremonies when they met someone they dug. And if someone dug a different person every day, he could have a different ceremony every day.

All children, from the moment they were born, would be the responsibility of everyone, not only of the blood mother and father.

<<==>><<==>>

In the Haight-Ashbury during the last year, there was none of the shut-in paranoid one-man-and-woman-and-children family structure. Most people lived in communes because they were open and fun. People taught other people what they knew, whether it was about guitars, printing presses, dope, confronting slumlords, cooking, confronting police, raising children, painting, sex, etc. People became aware of the hassles of living with people, and had their minds blown by being continuously and intimately involved with ten or fifteen people.

Children were confronted with multiple character images rather than just their mother's and father's. For most people, it was more stimulating, more open, more knowledge-giving, more self-expressive than any other family form they had lived in.

GET OUT OF THE 1750 ECONOMIC FORM

The 1750 industrial revolution factory institution we live in is a death form. Really straight people, let's put it down. Let's burn all the dollars under pots and pop popcorn together. Let's put the budget books in the archives for future history freaks who wish to groove on the past. Let money, credit, capital, debts, and banking flow away. For really straight people these ideas are anachronisms.

THIS MAY BE

Production of goods can be done almost totally by machines. Free.

Distribution of goods can be done free.

                 dig this scene:

fifteen people getting stoned and doing their thing in some room in a commune. someone decides to turn on the t.v. and by some weird coincidence he is staring at channel 137. some cat in a clown outfit is in the middle of a riff about how ten people are needed to deliver bread to a few of the free stores. so one cat says, "Let's go down there and goof" and they split./cut

There would be an unlimited supply of some goods. These could be distributed to individuals. There would be a limited supply of others. For example, jet planes. These could be distributed equally to areas instead of to individuals. There would be, say, ten jet passenger planes per county. The only restriction on the use of the plane would be that it had to be broadcast on channel 168 at least a half hour before it was taken. If someone tries to take the plane who doesn't know how to fly it, we wish him lots of luck.

Services can be done free.

People performing these services wouldn't have to hurry, kill time, or be efficient. If you wanted your car fixed, you could notify channel 438 and then start getting the goodies necessary for the party in honor of the car mechanic when he comes over to fix the car.

Division of labor (doing)

So many people have to be farmers . . . so many people have to be scientists . . . so many people have to be mechanics . . . so many people have to be carpenters . . . etc. If all things were free and people were free to do what they chose, people would willingly and happily learn to do the things that necessarily had to be done, in order for those conditions to continue to exist.

Value?his is the hang-up, brother mutants.

People groove on making things, giving them away, and flxing them up. It gives people identity. You are what you do. The problem is that there is only a limited amount of things can be made. Who is going to decide what to do with the limited resources that exist? In the United States today, the Federal Government makes the decision of what will be done with the resources. They do this by appropriating 60% of the budget to the industrial-military complex. The rationale goes that if we don't have the strongest military force, we will be conquered by those who do, the commie bastards, whoever they are. Since 1945, no one could conquer the United States and its allies unless the whole fucking solar system was thrown out of balance.

<<==>><<==>>

In the Haight-Ashbury during the last year, most aspects of a free economic form were accomplished.

PRODUCTION—There are no production plants in the Haight-Ashbury, so there were few things produced from raw resources into finished objects. The few exceptions have been the food grown and brought into the city from free farms, fish brought in from fishing boats, and guitars, jewelry, etc., made out of rocks, shells, and wood.

DISTRIBUTION—Almost every kind of article has been distributed free in the Haight-Ashbury?ars, clothes, paper clips, children, television sets, record players, ice-cream pops, bananas, LSD, cardboard boxes, ecstasy, cameras, leather, eyebrow pencils, birth control pills, fish 'n chips, bubble gum, belly button lint, harmonicas, rosaries, cookie makers, parking tickets, i.d.s., flowers, beds, sunshine, dynamite.

SERVICES—Every service has been performed free. Free food, free clothes, free shelter, free stores, free dances, free lawyers, free doctors, free painters, free sculptors, free engineers, free garbage collectors, free cooks, free actors, free joint-rollers, free house-painters, free clothesmakers, free carpenters, free mechanics, free printers, free chemists, free buses, free firemakers, free sandalmakers, free glassblowers, free electronic bugs, free guitar makers. Few office jobs have been done free. If all things were free, there would be little need of office jobs.

It is beyond doubt that people will produce, distribute, and service things free. The problem under the present conditions is getting the resources and getting the space to use the resources free. The people who run the Avalon and Fillmore dance halls are willing to give free dances all of the time, but they're caught in the bag of paying rent for the space. Most of the musicians who play in the dance halls are willing to play for free, but they need money to pay for their equipment and to pay rent for living space.

(If we may digress for a minute?he idea of property is bullshit. someone gets money for a piece of space on the planet earth because he says he owns it. well, who owns the earth? if one of the flying saucer people landed and took out a piece of stone and said that it said right there that he owned the earth, and that everyone on it had to pay him rent, would you believe it? believe it! and the next time the landlord comes around to collect the rent, tell him not to worry, you already paid the rent to the saucer people.)

The same willingness to always do free applies to lawyers, carpenters, and all the other people mentioned above, but they are hung up in the same space and resources bag. In fact, we are all hung up in the space and resources bag. And now we are going through the phase of doing free and doing money.

There are those who believe free and who do free all the time, but who are still forced to be dependent on other people to freely give them space and resources. There are those who think and say they believe free and who do free once a week or once a month. And there are the liberals and shuck-people who think and say they believe free, but who never do free.

The free spirit will grow when people do more free stores, free dances, free papers, etc. In cities, towns, high-schools, and colleges throughout the United States and the Universe.

                                                                give free take free

GET OUT OF THE 1854 POLITICAL FORM—

The 1854 donkey elephant political institution is a death form. After 113 years of success, the people in this country are where they're at. Straight people, we don't like to have to break your stiff security, but let's dig the cliche "it's time to change" and let's blow our brains and do more than just change candidates?et's change from a political system to a free form. novas.

THIS MAY BE

There are only two functions of government: to protect property and to protect people. In a free form, all property would be freely owned by all. In a free form there would be only one limitation, one restriction, one action that would be forbidden, one action that would be against orders, (one action that is stupid), one action that would be unlawful:

that you cannot cause physical restraint or damage to another person's bod, regardless of age.

As an alternative to breaking up the area of the United States into fifty states, the area could be broken up into a thousand counties that are already demarcated. These boundaries would be used not only for equal distribution of goods, but also for the judging of violations against the one and only law stated above.

If it took you twenty years to build and furnish your house, and someone wanted to destroy it, the physical destruction of the house of which you were a resident would imply your physical destruction. In this case, you would go before the county judging t.v. channel 675 and you would state your case and let the people of the county judge your case to decide whether or not the house should be destroyed. Everyone would have the right to appeal the county judging and appear before the national judging channel 4567.

Any violators of the one and only law would be ostracized to the state of Kansas which would be isolated from the rest of the country. The state of Kansas might be broken up according to the seriousness of the violation. There would be the crime of irresponsibility creating a machine or structure that caused physical damage, i.e., an unqualified person who built a bridge or structure that collapsed or ran amuck. There would be the crime of distributing drugs that cause damage to another person's bod. The crime of psychopathic killing.

<<==>><<==>>

From around September of 1966 until around April of '67, before all the national publicity and the coming of the tourists, in the free community part of the Haight-Ashbury, there were very few power, control, manipulation, and coercion games. When people do free they do free. It has been learned that when you do free, if someone tries to control, manipulate or have power over you, you just split. When you do free, you have nothing to lose and nothing to gain. When you do free, you have something to lose and something to gain. When you live on a power level, you lose your freedom. When you live on a free level, you lose your power.

The only people who try to have power over others are the stiff paranoids wanting self-insurance. The only people who will conform to these power plays are the mass sheep self-insurance people.

Millions of free events on individual and large novas scale have been enacted in the last year. These free actions have generated energies of free joy to tens of millions of people in the United States and the world. Tens of thousands of people have lived here during the last year, free from power games and almost totally free from violence.

Until April, we lived on the street for over a year, and we saw only one fight and heard of only five others (not counting incidents of police brutality). If you're wondering what this riff is about, the point is that it is totally believable that men can live in an almost totally free environment without power games or violent performances.

Free people have offered to do the city dog pound, the city's Farmers Market, and the city's Weights and Measures Department for free. The Board of Supervisors in the city of San Francisco has denied the free spirit of these people and also denied the taxpayers the hundred thousand dollars that would have been saved, if these doings had been done free.

And 3 free stores have been closed by the San Francisco Building Department, dozens of free houses have been closed by the Health Department.

And bands have been busted for playing free music in the parks, and the tens of thousands of busts made by the cops, who protected America the Beautiful from

                             the mutants.

The only alternatives open for these free people are either to ignore the city's political institution or to violently attack it.

GET OUT OF THE PREHISTORIC MILITARY FORM—

The prehistoric john wayne military nationalism institution is a death form. Being drafted into the army against one's choice is death.

THIS MAY BE

If all the institutions were made voluntary, we would become the most revolutionary country in the world. We would become the model for every revolution whose purpose was to free. We would need a military novas, not only to protect free in this space, the United States, but also to help other people to become free if we decided to do this.

There would be a rule that any military movement would have to be agreed upon by the whole country.

<<==>><<==>>

In the Haight-Ashbury, it developed that the Hell's Angels was the military force. And it was really, really strange, fellows, to find out that they would just as well fuck as fight, and just as well get stoned and be friendly as terrorize. Can you dig it?

GET OUT OF THE 1936 GANGSTER INSTITUTION—

The 1936 Mafia, Costra [sic] Nostra gangster ed g. robinson institution is a death form. Horse-betting, card-betting, ball game-betting, number-betting, prostitution, heroin, opium, downer dealing, loan sharking money, money-sex, money-dope is death.

THIS MAY BE

                                      atrophied

Before April, the Haight-Ashbury was a sort of upper-lower class district where nothing happened in the heroin, prostitution, loan-sharking categories. A few hippies distributed their own grass, acid, and mescaline.

Now it is t.v. radio newspaper magazine merchant paradise neon quickly spreading along the walls for looking tourists who have ventured once again into buy-buy land, and in the love-shuck consumer carnival emerges prostitution of a street kind, gangland murders, underworld opium and heroin, and bits of loan-sharking.

GET OUT OF THE 1367 RELIGIOUS FORM—

The 1367 bing crosby spellman renaissance church institution is a death form. Segregated churches of every denomination.

And the congregation parades through the door,
     nylon, girdled life virgins dressed in their sunday best

     Sermons about love of your fellow man
            Blessings                   the collection of money

And the congregation      shuffles out the door,
            to become soldiers.

THIS MAY BE

In the Haight-Ashbury, the origins and endings of the universe are mysterious and unknown, which each individual has to seek out for himself. May each man see the unknown in everything. May each man find his own God.

AND

we all had the experience, when we were in grammar school, of the leader-authority teacher who became so oppressive and stiff that the idea spread around the class that everyone should get up and walk out.

There was the small artistic smart kid who probably originated the idea.
                He would do it.

There was the medium-sized athletic kid who was friendly with everyone in class.
               He would do it.

There was the powerful tough kid.
               He would do it.

And the smart kid would confront the other smart kids and find out that they were afraid to do it because they were afraid the teacher would get angry at them and lower their grades. And besides, why should they do it? They were at the head of the class and had everything to lose. The kids at the bottom of the class goofed and were stupid and had nothing to lose.

And the athletic kid would confront the middle-grade kids, and find out that they would do it if everyone else in the class would do it.

And the athletic kid and the tough kid would confront the lower part of the class and find out that they were afraid to do it because they were afraid they would flunk.

                ?jones brown and carmichael?

The impulse for free had been created by the stiff oppressiveness of the teacher, but it was killed by the stiffness and oppressiveness of their own IDENTITY.

The smart kids didn't want to lose their identity of being the smartest in the class, and they didn't want their parents to know they were naughty in class.

The middle kids did not want to lose their identity of almost being as smart as the smart kids and as tough as the tough kids, and they didn't want their parents to know they were naughty in class.

The tough kids were afraid of getting the identity of being flunkees, and they didn't want their parents to know they were naughty in class.

. . . . So they stayed in class and they stayed not free, and they insisted on keeping their not free identities. And the girls sat there, not knowing what to do, smiling once in awhile.

And the kids got a little older and they saw the city black man hate the middle class white man. The middle class white man threatened the IDENTITY of the black man. The middle class white man was better than the city black man because he had all those cadillacs and color t.v.'s.

And the city black man threatened the IDENTITY of the middle class white man. The middle class white man said he believed in freedom and equality, and all he had to do was to look at that black to know that he was a liar.

And the middle class man hates the rich man. The rich man threatens the identity of the middle class man. The rich man is better than the middle class man because he goes on all those groovy vacations, and has those groovy cars, and that groovy house, and he doesn't have to worry about money after he retires.

And the rich man hates the middle class man because the middle class man threatens his identity. The rich man dangles the jobs in front of the nose of the middle class man and says that he can make it if he works hard enough, but all the rich man has to do is to take one look at those middle class men to know that he's a liar. There is only one job like that for every 30,000 middle class men.

but on / and on / and on / and on / the Niggers threaten the identity of the spicks / the spicks threaten the identity of the limeys / the mockies threaten the identity of the square-heads / the square-heads threaten the identity of the greaseballs / the greaseballs threaten the identity of the guineas / the micks threaten the identity of the dagos

AND

the dealers threaten the identity of the musicians . . . the musicians threaten the identity of the cops . . . the cops threaten the identity of  the merchants . . . the merchants threaten the identity of the politicians . . . the college kids threaten the identity of the high school kids . . . the two-year old threatens the identity of the father

everybody has something to lose—

THEIR FIXED MENTAL INSTITUTIONALIZED IDENTITY.

and all the time they choose to lose their freedom rather than their identity

•  And all that horseshit about leaving your wife, as if there weren't at least one million other women you could groove with.
•  And all that fixed identity horseshit about leaving your blood children as if there weren't at least a billion other kids you could groove with.
•  And all that fixed identity horseshit about leaving your job, as if there weren't an infinite number of jobs you could groove with.
•  And all that fixed identity horseshit about cars, t.v.'s, cameras, equipment, houses, as if you couldn't use them without owning them. 
•  THEY COULD BE YOURS FREE, IF YOU HAD A FREE IDENTITY INSTEAD OF THE STATIC FIXED IDENTITY WHICH YOU CLING TO.

A FREE PERSON HAS NO NEEDS, NO NECESSITIES. HE IS FREE TO CHOOSE ANY ALTERNATIVE.

get a few tabs of acid and go into the mountains with a friend. go during the wintertime. stay in the mountains for a couple of days and get the feel of the country around you. then, on a bright, sunshiny day at 12 o'clock, drop some acid. there will be the warmth of the sun, and the multiple smells, colors, sounds, and patterns of nature. and somewhere around 5 o'clock, you will see that the sun is about ready to go over the horizon. and you will notice that as it approaches the horizon, it gets colder and colder. and you will become aware that if you don't collect wood and build a fire soon, you will probably freeze to death.

and your friend and you will build a fire and you will keep warm and you will find that you have made it through the night.

and you will do this together for a time and you will find that you do not need any help from your friend, and maybe you will venture out into the mountains by yourself, and learn that the stars can give you directions.

and one night you will look up for direction and you will see that the stars are gone. and it will start raining. and you will find a place where you can have shelter from the rain and keep warm, and you will survive the night.

and as you go on you will become aware of the stars, and the clouds, and the animals, and the trees, and the flowers, and the winds, and you will continue to grow more secure in all your surroundings. you will learn where to fish, where to trap, where to pick berries. Your efficiency and skill and security will become greater as they feed each other. then one day you will twist and break your ankle on a rock, and in a flash, you will reflect that you had become too secure and self-confident.

and you'll lie there on the ground not knowing what to do
            you'll lie there on the ground in pain
                   you will be about to die

and then by some magic, a little old man will probably appear and he will show you how to fix your ankle so you will be able to walk alone again. and after a few days, you will go off alone again. a little bit stronger.

and then you will notice that there are more men who travel in the mountains and after awhile you will become aware of where they will be about what time. and you will form a sometimes community with them. and then one day you will probably decide to go back to the city. and in the city you will see sheep running around saying that they need to do that and they need this and they need this and they need that, and you will find that they identify with things and ideas which they do not need to identify with, even though they think they do. and you will tell them that the only things they need are warmth, shelter, a little food, and some clothing. and that if they know they always can have these they can be free anywhere. that if they understand this, they can leave any situation that a free man can fulfill all his needs if he has to.

maybe he's just a country boy.
              and maybe he can become a city boy, if the city
                       people want to be free.

The revolutionaries talk about the unbearable conditions of poverty, ghettos, no jobs, collapsing family structures, brutal police forces, etc. They concentrate on all the unbearable conditions outside to each individual. And the politicians for millennia have been saying "Don't worry, folks, things will be better in the future. Heaven, Paradise, and Utopia are just around the program before your eyes. We are trying, trying, the world can't be free, you know." And descriptions, explanations, and promises are sometimes well intended and true, but they grossly miss the point.

•  You can stick a gun in his hands, and fulfill the IMAGE of a man.
•  You can stick a girl in his arms, and fulfill the IMAGE of a lover.
•  You can stick money in his pockets, and fulfill the IMAGE of success.
•  You can stick a suit on his back, and fulfill the IMAGE of dignity.
•  You can stick a t.v. before his eyes, and fulfill the IMAGE of being informed.

And you can give him a house, a job, radios, cars, refrigerators, telephones and fulfill the image of being affluent

BUT

the only thing that will make him free in nitty-gritty marrow soul is the knowing that he can take care of all his needs himself. Alone. Only then will he have the alternatives of either being with someone or not.

Each individual has to have no needs, no necessities, in order to be free. This is impossible, since he is a living organism. So he has to travel second best. He has to know that he can fulfill his necessary needs of food, clothing, shelter, and warmth. When he can fulfill all those needs alone, he can leave any situation and the identity that goes with the situation, knowing that he hasn't lost anything, that he will survive, and that he is still free.

The world is filled with horrors because people identify with gripping images which they think they need to become. They viciously struggle for objects and situations that will make the image become reality. They rationalize it and set up rules to make leaders who have power.

Power is the ability to execute or throw someone in jail for not obeying established leader authorities. DEATH. It may be that people could INFLUENCE people. INFLUENCE. In fluid. Flowing. A geographical area where all objects, where all groups, were voluntary. nova. Where each individual knew within himself that he could fulfill all his needs without being trapped by identity. BEING.
                                          Amen, brother
                                                     FREE

[end]

2020-07-14. Corrected some spacing and formatting in the text. The original was typewritten in a poetic free form style. Translating to HTML required a modified format.

[Catalog No.: FC-007a]

DO MY THING

[October 1, 1967]

---

...Do My Thing Do My Thing Shame on me...

It's time we caved in the wrong America. We have been betrayed by a mad Senate. Congress has just broken through to the precipice of eternity.

Men Are Out Of Touch With The Earth

We are trapped in disappearance - sighing, screaming with it. Buying and selling pieces of phantom - worshipping each other.

Free Food Is Good Soup.

Longing or inevitability leaps about us enough to cancel all that comes and what comes is gone forever every time. That leaves it open for no regret.

The Road Of Excess Leads To The Palace Of Wisdom.

To be rich today is to possess the greatest number of impoverished objects and doesn't mean anything except too much grass and soft foods and goofy kicks on the cool order

The government of America will rise and fall in episodes of political struggles. And Hollywood whose movies stick in the throat of god will rot on the windmills of eternity. For this is the doom of money - this is the end of the money chant shrieking mad celestial money of illusion - money made of nothing - money of failure money of death and suicide - money against eternity - ownersownersowners with your obsession on property and vanishing selfhood this is really it. Money has reckoned the soul of America

We Are Strange Brothers And Sisters

Ideologies and governments only play an episodic role     The unnatural state of the universe will only disappear with the last traces of hierarchical power    Turn on to your own creativity    Be autonomous    Stop surviving start living

We are the offspring of midtwentieth century broken consciousness     No longer lonesome for our heroes. And we have small minds and mean to use them

[Top right corner, landscape orientation, In faint printing, several lines from one of the Digger songs:]

Gainst Lawyers and gainst Priests,
    stand up now.
For tyrants they are both, even flat
    against their oath,
To grant us they are loath, free
    meat and drink and cloth.
Stand up now, Diggers all!

To conquer them by love, come in
    now, come in now
To conquer them by love, come in
    now!

No power is like to love

Glory here, Diggers all!

[Catalog No.: FC-007b]

Free Food Delivery Service

[October 1, 1967]

---

FREE FOOD

Lion Meat
Soul Vegetables
Blue Chip Dairy Goods

Everymorning Delivered to Your Commune.

Fresh Fish
Ripe Fruit
Solid Greens

Everyevening Feed the Brothers and Sisters in Your House.

It's Free Because It's Yours

Give Your Address and the Number of People in the Commune to the Behind the Counter Cousin at the Psychedelic Shop.

...Must Be Done Now...

[Catalog No.: FC-005b]

RAP SHEET of free services

[October 1, 1967]

---

RAP SHEET [San Francisco, New York, Berlin, etc.]

[Listings of Free Food, Free Stores, Communes, Switchboards, etc. in San Francisco, and other U.S. and European cities.]

[Catalog No.: FC-m-014]

Death of Hippie

[October 6, 1967]

---

OCTOBER SIXTH NINETEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY SEVEN

MEDIA CREATED THE HIPPIE WITH YOUR HUNGRY CONSENT. BE SOMEBODY. CAREERS ARE TO BE HAD FOR THE ENTERPRISING HIPPIE. The media cast nets, create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in. Your face on TV, your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the Chronicle. NBC says you exist, ergo I am. Narcicism, [sic] plebian vanity. The victim immortalized. Black power, its transcendant [sic] threat of white massacre the creation of media-whore obsequious bowers to the public mind which they recreate because they too have nothing to create and the reflections run in perpetual anal circuits and the FREE MAN vomits his images and laughs in the clouds because he is the great evader, the animal who haunts the jungles of image and sees no shadow, only the hunter's gun and knows sahib is too slow and he flexes his strong loins of FREE and is gone again from the nets. They fall on empty air and waft helplessly to the grass.

DEATH OF HIPPY END/FINISHED HIPPYEE GONE GOODBYE HEHPPEEEE DEATH DEATH HHIPPEE

death 1. the act or fact of dying; permanent ending of all life in a person, animal, or plant. 2. (D-), the personification of death, usually pictured as a skeleton in a black robe, holding a scythe. 3. the state of being dead. 4. any ending resembling dying; as, the death of fascism. 5. any condition or experience thought of as like dying or being dead: as, it was death for her to have to see him again. 6. the cause of death: as, the atomic bomb was death to thousands. 7. murder or bloodshed. 8. (Obs.), pestilence: as, the Black Death.

EXORCISE HAIGHT/ASHBURY CIRCLE THE HASBURY [sic] FREE THE BOUNDARIES OPEN EXORCISE

exorcise 1. to drive (a supposed evil spirit or spirits) out or away by ritual charms or incantation. 2. to summon or command (such a spirit or spirits) 3. to free from such a spirit or spirits.

YOU ARE FREE. WE ARE FREE. DO NOT BE RECREATED. BELIEVE ONLY YOUR OWN INCARNATE SPIRIT. Create, Be…..Do not be created. This is your land, your City. No one can portion it out to you. The H/Ashbury was portioned to us by Media=Police and the tourists came to the Zoo to see the captive animals and we growled fiercely behind the bars we accepted and now we are no longer hippies and never were and the City is ours to create from, to be in. It is our tool, part of the first creation which the FREE MAN creates his new world from.

BIRTH OF FREE MAN FREE SAN FRANCISCO INDEPENDENCE FREE AMERICANS BIRTH

birth 1. the act of bringing forth offspring. 2. a person or thing born or produced. 3. the act of being born; nativity. 4. descent or origin. 5. descent from nobility. 6. the beginning of anything, as the birth of a nation. 7. an inherited or natural inclination to act in certain ways; as, an actor by birth.

DO NOT BE BOUGHT WITH A PICTURE, A PHRASE,,,,DO NOT BE CAPTURED IN WORDS. THE CITY IS OURS. YOU ARE ARE ARE. TAKE WHAT IS YOURS…..TAKE WHAT IS YOURS

THE BOUNDRIES [sic] ARE DOWN SAN FRANCISCO IS FREE NOW FREE THE TRUTH IS OUT OUT OUT

truth 1. the quality or state of being true; specifically, a) formerly, loyalty; trustworthiness. b) sincerity; genuineness; honesty. c) the quality of being in accordance with experience, facts, or reality; conformity with fact. d) reality; actual existence. e) agreement with a standard, rule, etc.; correctness; accuracy. 2. that which is true; statement, etc., which accords with fact or reality. 3. an established or verified fact, principle, etc.

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the the [sic] consent of the governed. —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safely and Happiness.

OCTOBER 6, 1967

[Catalog No.: FCm-011]

1% FREE

[February 1968]

---

The "1% Free" Poster

For an explanation of the poster, see: Deciphering 1% Free.

[Catalog No.: DP-19680229]

Free City Bank

[San Francisco Express Times, February 29, 1968]

---

the Free City will be funded by the Free Bank

The Free Bank is:
Rock Bands | Dance Halls
Haight Street Merchants
Hip Lawyers | Industrialists
Music Companies
Any Fool on the Street

GIVING 1 per cent of their gross,
the change in their
pockets, a week's take
a Big Deal, to create a

FREE CITY

The visions are yours. What would you have?

Free Bank
Bill Tumbleweed
302 Cumberland St., S.F.

[Catalog No.: FCm-017]

Abandon the Deathly Clutch

[March 20, 1968]

---

Abandon the Deathly Clutch

the star ram wakes in the green heavens
his head is garlanded with flowers
and he sets his feet on the path of fire
the children walk beside him
offering themselves to each other
they walk through the fire and survive
the inn-keeper fears the flame
and tries to flee
but he has waited too long
the building is become a desert
and the landlord is a stranger to himself

the star ram walks the planet
and his hooves strike fire from the earth
all the seeds that have been planted
bloom
the flowering weed destroys the vaults of marble
the onlooker finds no shelter from the wind
the children build houses together
sharing their tools and their love songs
offering themselves to each other
they walk through the fire
and survive

new consciousness arises

CAN I?

BLOODLIGHT LOVE PLUNGE

YES

WHALE MEAT
WAIL MEET

VERNAL EQUINOX CELEBRATION MARCH 20
SPEEDWAY MEADOWS GOLDEN GATE PARK

[Catalog No.: FCN-022]

Breakthroughs Spread Hope ...

[c. April 14, 1968]

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FREE NEWS: Breakthroughs Spread Hope in San Francisco

Widescale redistribution of goods and services through energy banks in San Francisco ... Free energy banks are being set up for massive redistribution ... Churches now weighing role in spiritual crisis ... Announcements near 24 hour open church possible ... Kennedy-McCarthy headquarters on Market St. to serve as free "stores", S.F. society "Potlatch" to mark opening (further news soon) ... City religious figures to meet to discuss opening church buildings (check with your church for details) ... Sunday to be a day of redistribution, Easter Sunday public giving

Community plans under way S.F. welcome home troops celebrations, Rio carnival via S.F. to prevail ... Festivities will begin at various troop disembarkation points and spread throughout the city (assistance with floats, larger props etc. contact Mrs. June Dunn, S.F. Art Commission) ... Plans for exact time and locations contingent on arrival dates ... Make plans now

Alkatraz Island to be declared (legally) international territory in honor of Dr. King. Plans for international religious retreat among those being considered ... Send ideas to: Mayor's committee for civic renaissance, c/o Mike McCone, Mayor's office, City Hall

Bulk food for free distribution can now be brought to 15 Lafayette St. This location is intended primarily for rice, flour, powdered milk etc.

Second coming attracting international planetary celebrities … Polo grounds, Golden Gate Park April 14 to be public giving ground for the event ... Organizers are asking for participants to bring as much as possible, "to give of yourself" …

Redistribution trucks are touring neighborhoods ... Look for them! "Put in what you can, take what you need'' … Free distribution of goods and services goal …

Electric trams, neighborhood run and operated, will be providing free transportation ... Initial area may be Haight-Fillmore ... The emphasis will be party and participation ... Trams to be decorated by neighborhood ... Send ideas suggestions materials to: Free electric transportation, U.C. Community Design Center, 55 Laguna ...

S. F. International Exposition, the human city ... The June exposition preparations include plans for a free music festival which will include events at the Palace of Fine Arts, the Goldbn Gate Music Concourse, and Stern Grove … Theme will be S.F. sound and beyond! ... "Our exposition will feature human beings rather than technology, it will mark a transition for American cities ... The whole city will be the fairground, the human giving ground, open for manifestations of life" ... Call in ideas etc. to K.C.B.S., K.N.E.W., or K.G.O.

Bulletins about new outbreaks of public sharing issued at once

====

Dating: ca. April 14, 1968. See Berkeley Barb, April 12, 1968, p. 5 for announcement of plans for Easter celebration at the Polo Grounds in Golden Gate Park.

[Catalog No.: FCN-018a/b]

A Modest Proposal

[April 25, 1968]

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Free News: A Modest Proposal

San Franciscans, in the interest of eternity, & out of respect for their mayor, will recommend the following course of action to that office this afternoon, April 25, at 4PM:

1) that city-owned buildings remaining empty be restored to the people for reconstruction embellishment, & refurbishment so that those people might live there freely

2) that all foodstuffs & materials in surplus not accounted for in current welfare distribution be returned to the people for redistribution free through ten autonomous neighborhood free stores whose rent shall [be] paid by the city

3) that presses & trucks be made available for the dissemenation of free news throughout the city so that the people will come to know one another & make channels of access available to each other

4) that the city provide resources for autonomous neighborhood celebrations of the city, the planet, & their own free beings

5) that parks & other public spaces be returned to the people for free life acts: all permit authority to be rescinded

These are visions which will be realized by the people of San Francisco. The mayor's office is invited to share in that vision. Citywide celebration of the summer solstice will mark the entrance of free San Francisco into eternity.

Welcome home.

[This is the proclamation that was read at the May 7, 1968, "Noon Forever" gathering on the steps of City Hall. Five of the Free City participants were arrested. The following is the account of the day's events from The Sixties Date Machine:]

The Free City Collective held a press conference and presented a "Modest Proposal" contaning five requests of The City administration, including refurbishment of empty city-owned buildings for free housing, distribution of surplus food and materials through a network of ten neighborhood free stores, setting up presses and trucks for free news distribution throughout the city, providing resources for neighborhood celebrations, and the opening of the parks for free life acts "all permit authority to be rescinded." After the proposal was read, one of the Diggers began reading a poem on America while wearing an American flag shirt. The police arrested him for violating a law against defiling the flag. A second man was arrested for profanity after shouting "Fuck" (the newspaper account described it as "a four-letter word meaning to make love." Ron Thelin (not named, but captioned in a photo) was arrested for wearing a mask after Judge Albert Axelrod informed that it was a violation of the Penal Code. A fourth man was arrested while trying to prevent Ron's arrest. A woman was also arrested, but no reason indicated. Terrence Hallinan, the Diggers' lawyer, charged that talks with the Mayor's Office had produced no results except for pressure from The City on produce market vendors to discontinue supplying free fruits and vegetables to the Diggers. He also said that the police had ordered the noon poetry events off the Polk street steps of City Hall. The SF Chron article quotes "Peter" aka "William Bonney" as saying that "San Francisco can 'burn or turn into a model for the rest of the cities to follow, with radical alternatives to riots and all those corny numbers.'" The Diggers provided free apples to the crowds. Other days they had provided free oranges and strawberries.

Subsequently, all charges were dropped on all five defendants at a court hearing on May 22 at the request of the assistant district attorney who declared that "there was a lot of confusion as to what went on at that poetry bust." Those who had been arrested included: Ronald Thelin, 30, 1324 Willard St. (arrested for "intent to conceal his identity," Section 650a of the Penal Code); Thomas Baker III, 26 (arrested for wearing an American flag); Charles Perkel, 21, 1360 Fell St. (arrested for profanity); Phyllis Wilner, 19, 110 Pierce St.; Israel Jacton, 1324 Willard St. The article mentions that the Asst. D.A. (Granklin Gentes) at one point "began to fidget nervously with a sheaf of papers" and that after the end of the proceeding, he "walked hurriedly out of court."

Ralph Gleason, writing three weeks later, commented: "The cop caper on the City Hall steps, in which they busted the Diggers for wearing part of a flag, and sundry other things, was dismissed (as any rational human being knew it would be) last week. All it did was weaken the authority of the police. How can they participate in such foolishness? When they go down Haight street three by three and arbitrarily stop and question people, it is cut from the same cloth. Bob Dylan wrote vividly of the effect upon people when they had to obey "authority that they do not respect by any degree." (SF Chron, Mar 27, 1968, p 46)

Source: "Police Crush Diggers' Read-In at City Hall" by Jerry Burns, SF Chronicle, May 8, 1968, p. 1; "Poetry Read-In Charges Dismissed," S.F. Chronicle, May 23, 1968, p. 2. See also the May 8 event. Entry by: e.p.n.

[Catalog No.: FCm-016]

How Do You Want to Live?

[May 1, 1968]

---

How Do You Want to Live

[Psychedelic lettering surrounding the border of the official seal of San Francisco:]

Free City Convention
A Vote For Me Is A Vote For You
May Day, Carousel Ballroom
Market & Van Ness
7 PM
Bring Some Food

---

[The following is the best account in print of the event:] Free City Convention Free For All by Jefferson Fuck Poland. Berkeley Barb. May 3, 1968, p. 9

Even the hellfire preachers loosened up a little, accepting colored chalk from hippies and decorating the sidewalk with their Christer slogans.

One of their wives shyly took an orange.

A gaunt young male preacher climbed onto the Carousel Ballroom stage, switched on the sound, and exhorted the May Day crowd at the Free City Convention.

But there the evangelicals stopped swinging, for he could not bear to share his pulpit with a fellow clergyman: a naked Boo Hoo of the Neo-American Church, chanting ''Hare Shiva, Hare Rama.''

Everyone else grooved: hippies, blacks, Hell's Angels, servicemen. The anonymous organizers had apparently learned from the mistakes of past Be-Ins, whereat vast crowds were centralized around distant platforms of notables, participating passively via loudspeaker. This time it was decentralized for the first three hours, lots of little scenes and happenings.

Like underground television, home-taped programs on closed-circuit TV. A freeman elaborately demonstrates how to· roll a joint, which uniformed soldiers smoke. Somebody lays in bed and raps about the ''ship'' he lives in. People jive, mumble, whatever.

Like the grand council circle of comfortable chairs grouped around a village fire of candles and such, headquarters for conga drums, teenyhip girl on a big acid trip, small white dog attacking the entire legbone from a pig, sparklers, wine, candles burning on a boar's foot complete with fur: the whole pagan bit.

Like the topless chick with painted torso, and at least two nude males. Like the cat who blew me for the TV cameras, and an admiring crowd, but the camera crew couldn't get organized fast enough to catch the scene.

Like smoking pot in a hookah with a gasmask attachment, your mouth and nose immersed in cannabis just like the hospital ether trip. Like integrating the women's john, with a girlfriend for protection: ''Hold my hand, I'm a stranger in paradise.'' Like the wrestling ring.

Later the Sons of Champlin played and everybody danced four hours. During the dance, BARB was too drunk to notice or do much, except for necking with a fine chick from a rural commune.

[Catalog No.: FCN-003]

Masked Lunch

[May 8, 1968]

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Masked Lunch | FREE NEWS

The outcome of yesterday's cops and robbers game (Cops:40 Robbers:0) might suggest to those alive to the nature of the game, the importance of agility and motion.

Noon Today City Hall Steps

---

Entry for the date from The Sixties Date Machine:

The Diggers/Free City event was in response to the arrest of five at the noontime poetry event the previous day (see May 7, 1968 Poetry Bust). Several hundred onlookers were in attendance as "a couple of dozen hippies staged an inevitable 'mask-in' at noon on the steps of City Hall." A large assemblage of masked apparel was in evidence, including "masks, handkerchiefs, veils and even brown paper bags." Terence Hallinan expressed outrage over the previous day's arrests: "If the police treat white middle class hippies reading poetry like this, how will they treat militant young blacks and Chinese this summer?" The article quotes a Digger "spokesman": "We're going to keep doing our thing all over the city, including at City Hall. It would be boss if all men in the city started doing their thing." The names and charges of those arrested yesterday were as follows: Thomas C. Baker III, 26, painter, 1324 Willard St. (arrested for "defiling the United States flag"); Israel Jacton, 1324 Willard St. (arrested for interfering with a police officer); Phyllis Wilner, 19, 110 Pierce St. (arrested for interfering with a police officer); Charles E. Perkel, 21, poet, 1360 Fell (arrested for profanity).

Source: "Hippies Make Faces at City Hall" by Dick Hallgren, S.F. Chronicle, May 9, 1968, p. 3 Entry by:

[Catalog No.: DP-196808-001a/b]

The Digger Papers

[August 1968]

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The Digger Papers | August 1968

The only difference between the Free and the Realist editions of The Digger Papers was the cover. The large graphic of the Hopi Indian Running Man symbol, which dominated the Free cover, was shrunk to one corner. The Realist's logo, return address block, and colophon all occupied the other three corners. The most interesting difference between the two editions, though, was the Memo to the Reader which, from a historian's perspective, provides vital clues to the influences that the Diggers acknowledged.

When Time magazine decided to do a cover story on the hippies last year, a cable to their San Francisco bureau instructed researchers to "go at the description and delineation of the subculture as if you were studying the Samoans or the Trobriand Islanders."

Thus were they supposed to remain--a frozen fad for posterity.

But a few months ago, police rioted on Haight St. Next day, at a town hall meeting in the Straight Theater, the spectrum of reaction ranged from "Let's have another be-in" to "We gotta get guns!" A compromise was reached: bottles painted Love were thrown at the cops.

And yet, the question remains--What is being defended?

This issue of the Realist, therefore, has been created entirely by The Diggers, in an attempt to convey the flavor and feeling-tone of a revolutionary community.

An inadequate list of the brothers and sisters whose work is represented in this document:

Antonin Artaud, Richard, Avedon, Billy Batman, Peter Berg, Wally Berman, Richard Brautigan, Bryden, William Burroughs, Martin Carey, Neil Cassidy, Fidel Castro, Don Cochran, Peter Cohon, Gregory Corso, Dangerfield, Kirby Doyle, Bill Fritsch, Allen Ginsberg, Emmett Grogan, Dave Hazelwood, George Hermes, Linn House, Lenore Kandel, Billy Landout, Norman Mailer, Don Martin, Michael McClure, George Metesky, George Montana, Malcolm X, Natural Suzanne, Huey Newton, Pam Parker, Rose-a-Lee, David Simpson, Gary Snyder, Ron Thelin, Rip Torn, Time Inc., Lew Welch, Thomas Weir, Gerard Winstanley, and Anonymous.

The contents herein are not copyrighted. Anyone may reprint anything without permission. Additional copies are available at the rate of 5 for $l. The Diggers have been given 40,000 copies to spread their word: free.

The 10th anniversary issue of the Realist will be out in June.

Colophon

[Catalog No.: FC-nowsreal]

Nowsreal the film

[Digger/Free City Collective, film 49 min., Summer 1968]

---

NOWSREAL SF FREE

Text can include items other than print media. NOWSREAL is a home movie by the Diggers without a spoken narrative. The film can be read as a statement by the Diggers about the moment between the 1968 spring equinox and summer solstice.

To view the film, here is a link to the NOWSREAL page:

[Catalog No.: DP-196808-015]

Post-Competitive Game of Free City

[June 1968, the first distribution of The Digger Papers 1968]

---

The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free City

[An annotated version.]

[Note: on an August 2017 visit to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library to view a group of papers which Emmett left with Harvey Kornspan in 1968 and which Harvey sold to a book dealer in 2014 who in turn sold them to the NYPL, the text below was [annotated] as it appeared in the draft version that is located with the Grogan Papers. As well, the formatting of paragraphs etc is according to the draft version. [Brackets] indicate text in the draft #1 at NYPL. [RING] indicates occasional differences with the version in Ringolevio. {Braces} indicate text in the Realist/Digger Papers version. /Slash/ indicates end of line in either version. Also note: H2 headings in the web format are ALL CAPS in the NYPL draft version #1. [[Double brackets]] indicate a comment by editor.—ed.]

---

Our state of awareness demands that we uplift our efforts from competitive game playing in the underground to the comparative roles of {free families} [FREE FAMILIES] in {free cities} [FREE CITIES]. {¶} We must pool our resources and interact our energies to provide the freedom for our individual activities.

In each city of the world there is a loose competitive underground composed of groups whose aims overlap, conflict, and generally enervate the desired goal of autonomy. By now we all have guns, know how to use them, know our enemy, and are ready to defend{. }[...]We know that we ain't gonna take no more shit. So it's about time we carried ourselves a little heavier and got down to the business of creating free cities within the urban environments of the western world.

{Free Cities} [FREE CITIES] are composed of Free Families (e.g., in San Francisco: Diggers, Black Panthers, Provos, [substitute "Red Guards" in Ringolevio], Mission Rebels and various revolutionist gangs and communes[.]) who establish and maintain services that provide a base of freedom for autonomous groups to carry out their programs without having to hassle for food, printing facilities, transportation, mechanics, money, housing, working space, clothes, machinery, trucks, etc.

At this point in our revolution it is demanded that the [F]{f}amilies, communes, black organizations and gangs of every city in {A}[a]merica co[-]ordinate and develop[e] Free Cities where everything that is necessary can be obtained for free by those involved in the various activities of the individual clans.

[NOTE: the next sentence stood by itself as a single paragraph. however, there are three different versions as noted below.]

[version on the web:]

Every brother [RING "brother and sister"] should have what he [RING "they"] need to do whatever needs to be done.}

[version in the Berg Collection (item II.2.5):]

EVERY BROTHER SHOULD HAVE WHAT HE NEEDS TO DO HIS THING.

[version in Ringolevio:]

Every brother and sister should have what they need to do whatever needs to be done.

[version in Realist/Digger Papers version:]

Every brother should have what he needs to do his thing.

[Thus the draft version in NYPL conforms to the Realist/Digger Papers version. What I have on the Digger web, however, doesn't conform to either. It slightly conforms to the Ringolevio version but there are significant differences in gender usage between those versions too.]

[THUS I need to figure this out. Where did I get the version of this sentence that I transcribed into the web page.]

Free City:

An outline {. . .} [     ] a beginning /
Each service should be performed by a tight /
gang of brothers and sisters whose commitment should enable /
them to handle an overload of work with ability /
and enthusiasm. 'Tripsters' soon get bored, hopefully /
before they cause an economic strain.

[Note: looking at the draft version in NYPL I would format the above text after the first line (An outline..) as a single paragraph with text flow within indented margins. Thus, the jagged line wraps would be fixed.]

Free City Switchboard { / }[ - ]Information Center

should co[-]ordinate all services, activities, and aid and {direct} assistance where it is most needed. Also provide a reference point for legal aid, housing, machinery, etc.; act as a mailing address for {discolated} [dislocated] groups or individuals and guide random energies where they are most needed. {(The} [(nb. the] work load usually prevents or should prevent the handling of messages from parents to their runaway children {. . .} [...]that should be left up to the churches of the community.)

Free Food Storage and Distribution Center

should hit every available source of free food {—} [(as] produce markets, farmers' markets, meat packing plants, farms, dairies, sheep and cattle ranches, agricultural colleges, and giant institutions (for the un[-]eaten vats of food) {—} and fill up their trucks with the surplus by beg{ging}, borrowing, stealing, forming liaisons and communications with delivery drivers for the left-overs from their routes . . . [...]best method is to work in two shifts: morning group picks up the foodstuffs and the afternoon shift delivers it to the list of Free Families and the poor peoples of the ghettos. everyday. hard work. {¶} This gang should help people pool their welfare food stamps and get their old ladies or a group to open a free restaurant for people on the move and those who live on the streets. Giant scores should be stored in a garage-type warehouse equipped with freezers and its whereabouts known only to the Free Food Gang. This group should also set up and provide help for canning, preserving, bread baking, and feasts and anything and everything else that has to do with food.

Free City Garage and Mechanics[:]

to repair and maintain all vehicles used in the various services. the responsibility for the necessary tools and parts needed in their work is entirely theirs and usually available by maintaining friendly relations with junkyards, giant automotive schools, and generally scrounging around those areas where auto equipment is easily obtained. The garage should be large enough and free of tripsters who only create more work for the earnest mechanics.

Free City Bank and Treasu{ry}[rey:]

this group should be responsible for raising money, making free money, paying rents, for gasoline, and any other necessary expenses of the Free City Families. They should also organize and create small rackets (cookie sales, etc.) for the poor kids of the ghettoes and aid in the repair and maintenance of the machinery required in the performance of the various services.

Free City Legal Assistance[:]

high-style, hard-nosed, top-class lawyers who are willing to defend the rights of the Free City and its services . . . [...]no honky, liberal, {bleeding heart, guilt-ridden} [bleeding heart-guilt ridden] advocates of justice, but first-class case-winners . . . [...]turn on the best lawyers who can set up air[-]tight receivership[s] for free money and property, and beat down the police harassment and brutality of your areas.

Free City Housing and Work Space[:]

rent or work deals with the urban gov't to take over spaces that have been abandoned for use as carpentry shops, garages, theaters, etc.{,} rent whole houses, but don't let them turn into crash pads. Set up hotels for new arrivals or transients by working out deals with small hotel owners for free rooms in exchange for light housework, porter duties, etc. Big warehouses can be worked on by environmental artists and turned into giant free dance-fiesta-feast palaces. {¶} A strong trio of serious business-oriented cats should develop this liberation of space within the cities and be able to work with the lawyers to make deals and outmaneuver urban bureaucracies and slum landlords . . . [...]one of the main targets for space are the churches who are the holders of most real estate and they should be approached with a no-bullshit hard line.

Free City Stores and Workshops[:]

nothing in these stores should be throwaway items . . . space should be available for chicks [[sic]] to sew dresses, make pants to order, recut garments to fit, etc. The management should all be life-actors capable of turning bullshitters into mud. Important that these places are first class environments with no trace of salvation army/st. vinnie de paul charity rot. Everything groov[e]y. Everything with style . . . [...]must be first class. {It's all free because it's yours!} [IT'S ALL FREE BECAUSE IT'S YOURS!] previous sentence ALL CAPS no italic.]

Free Medical Thing[:]

should be established in all poverty areas and run by private physicians and free from any bureaucratic support. The Free City Bank should try to cover the expenses, and pharmaceutical houses should be hit for medical supplies, etc. Important that the doctors are brothers and do not ask to be salaried or are not out to make careers for themselves (witness Dr. David Smith of the Hippie Free Clinic in San Francisco who is far from a brother . . . [...]very far).

Free City Hospital[:]

should be a house converted into bed space and preferably with a garden and used for convalescence and people whose minds have been blown or who have just been released from a state institution and who need the comfort and solace of {their} [their own] [RING "their own"] people rather than the cold alienated walls of an urban institution.

Free City Environmental and Design Gang[:]

gangs of artists from universities and art institutes should be turned on and helped in attacking the dank squalor of the slums and most of the Free City Family dwellings . . . [...]paint landscapes on the sides of tenements . . . [...]fiberglass stairwells . . . make crazy. Tight groups of good painters, sculptors, designers who comfortably construct environments for the community. Materials and equipment can be hustled from university projects and manufacturers, etc.

Free City Schools[:]

schools designed and run by different groups according to the consciousness of their Free Families (e.g., Black Man's Free School, Anarchist's Creative Arts School, etc.). The schools should utilize the space liberated for them by the Free City Space Gang.

Free City News and Communication Company[:]

providers of a daily newspaper, monthly magazine, free {G}[g]estetner and printing of [delete "of" in Ringolevio] notices for other groups and any special bulletins and propaganda for the various families of the Free City. The machinery should be kept in top condition and supplied by any of the various services. Paper can be scavenged at large mills and cut down to proper working size.

Free City Events . . . [...]Festival Planning Committees

usually involves several Families interacting to sponsor tours for the kids {. . .}[,] Balls, Happenings, Theatre, Dance, and spontaneous experiments in joy . . . [...(EG. ]Park Events usually are best set up by hiring a 20-foot flat[-]bed truck for the rock band to use as a stage and to transport their equipment; people should be advised by leaflets to bring food to exchange with their neighbors; banners, props, balloons, kites etc.{,} should be handled by a committee; an electrician should be around to run the generator and make sure that the P.A. systems work{;}[, etc.] hard work made easy by giving responsible people the tough jobs{.}[)]

Co-operative Farms and Campsites[:]

the farms should be run by experienced hands and the Free Land settled on by cottage industrial people who will send their wares into the Free City. {T}[t]he farms must produce vital food for the families . . . [...]some free land that is no good for farming should be used as campsites and/or cabin areas for [add "Free" in Ringolevio] citizens who are in need of country leisure, as well as kids who could use a summer in the woods.

Scavenger Corp{s} and Transport Gang[:]

is responsible for garbage collection and the picking up and delivery of items to the various services, as well as liberating anything they think useful for one project or another. They are to be responsible for the truck fleet and especially aware of the economic strain if trucks are mis-used by tripsters.

Free City Tinkers and Gunsmiths, Etc.

will repair and keep things going in the houses . . . [...]experienced repair men of all sorts, electricians, and carpenters. They should maintain a warehouse [ware house] or working space for their outfit.

Free City Radio, TV and Computer Stations[:]

demand Free time on radio and TV [tv] stations; demand a Free City frequency to set up your own stations; rent computers to call the punches for the revolution or use them in any constructive way possible.

[RING this is the end of "Post-Competitive ..." in Ringolevio]

Free City Music[:]

Free Music
Where is the place that your music comes from
do you know
What determines the rest between phrases
The Interval that grows from the cluster
of sounds around it
Hanging behind the beat
Clipping the front of it
That's the gift
The thing that blows through a body that responds to spirit and a
mind that doesn't lock itself
It's that thing
We're all made of, forget about, and then try to grab again
That thing that's all there and all free

[ & * & * & ]

The fretless infinite string banjo has invented new means of music which it must buy from itself to sing

$ * $ * $

fat man owns the carnival and all the booths play business. he double hypes the want glands, lets you buy in and then displays what's available to the crowd. all of a sudden you got something to lose. he spreads the news and pays for it by telling kids they're ugly blemished smelly unimaginative and dull . . . [....]then sells them cures{,}[.] says to you, "here kid, change the name, change the games, do anything you want, but don't give it away." that game's called vested interest and it can apply to anything.
fat man runs a crumby joint, but it's the only joint right? [¶]
He'll be there until we free the goodies {¶}
Art forms and life forms interact
look at fat mans Life
look at fat mans Time
look at fat mans forms
The record industry, dance-hall promotion rackets and the artist-star-celebrity-hero roles they support and promote are fat man forms and are cramping the number
the dance-light show package hasn't changed since its form crystallized and it became business. it reached the end of its evolution. kids don't dance they watch, because the bands are pro now and you don't play with a pro. when you pay to go to a dance the medium is business . . . [...]the problem is to free the form and the carnival.

Some Ideas for Liberating the Ferris Wheel:

A) Contracts could demand free cuts on all albums

a name group might take one side of an album and divide the other into sets of two tracks each {of} which they would give away. give a brother a piggy-back over the business-shit [business shit] to the ears of our people. two truths don't compete

B) A certain number of records be released in plain white folders.

saving all art and printing costs and leaving free space for local artists to use. Ready mades would cost more.

C) Scrap liner notes and "photos-of-the-band"

print charts of the tunes, diagrams of cheap amps and pick-ups so local wizards can plug in more kids, good poems, clothes patterns{,} recipes.

D) Add 1% to all royalties to be used for free forms

equipment for free rehearsal rooms
sound systems for free concerts
musical communes for non-working cats.

E) Send other bands on your publicity junkets

after all its not just your sound is it[.] its the sound you're all part of. make that clear to people. free fat man's star trip by giving away your [yr] names. how many times can you go to Des Moines?

[end]

[Catalog No.: FPS-002]

Free Print Shop Announcement

[August 18, 1968]

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The Sutter Street Commune Invites You 

to Submit Manuscripts Drawings Manifestoes to our Free Print Shop

Free distribution guaranteed for whatever we print.

In care of the Sign of the Fool. August 1968.

1st, a Free Poem

The Golden Era

August 18, 1968

Golden

Golden

Golden

Days.

Golden Golden Golden City

Whose Windows

Open Only to Each Other

[Catalog No.: FPS-014]

O Diggers O

[January 16, 1969]

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O DIGGERS O | COME TOGETHER AGAIN

At All Saints Church | 6 P.M. | Jan 16th | Thursday at Dusk

Printed by the Free Print Shop

[Catalog No.: KF-v1/n4/p1]

Lousy Dreams

[Kaliflower, May 15, 1969]

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LOUSY DREAMS

A spectre is haunting San Francisco - communal capitalism. People who rob their brothers from 9 to 5 and then come home to love and share with their selected brothers, are they the vanguards of the New Age? THE WHOLE WORLD IS YOUR FAMILY. The things you create have nothing to do with money - DESTROY THE MYTH. Security as a fat bankbook is Out the Window. Security as love and faith in your brothers is coming Thru the Door.

For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others. Do not even the Gentiles do the same? - Matthew 5, 46-47

And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer; but you make it a den of robbers." - Matthew 21, 12-13

MAKE PROPHETS NOT PROFITS

[Catalog No.: KF-v1/n2/p3]

Food Conspiracy Yearnings

[Kaliflower, May 1, 1969]

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Let's get together and buy our food ...

Let’s get together and buy our food in quantity as close to the source as possible (farms, wholesale). So that we can do this indicate how much of the foods listed your commune could buy, so that we have an idea of the quantities needed and can get some prices. We will get the healthiest foods available. Also put down if you know of any cheap sources of non-perishable foods.

[Following this heading, the rest of the page listed a smorgasbord of items that would be candidates for this buying cooperative venture:] Brown Rice, Whole wheat berries, Whole rye, Barley, Cracked wheat, Bulgur wheat, Buckwheat, Cornmeal, Wheat germ, Millet, Oats, Apple cider, Fruit juices, Dried fruit / raisins / dates / figs, Honey, Raw sugar, Molasses, Maple syrup, Paprika, Black pepper, Sea salt, Vegetable oil, Olive oil, Peanut oil, Sprouts, Seeds — poppy / caraway / sesame, Vinegar, Yoghurt, Detergent, Flours: whole wheat / soy / barley / buckwheat / potato / rye / brown rice, Split peas, Soybeans, Garbanzos, Lima beans, Mung beans, Kidney beans, Lentils, Yeast, Coffee (un-ground), Tea, Nuts, Peanut butter, Soy sauce, Carob powder, Cheese, Dried milk, Soy grits, Soy-lecithin.

[Catalog No.: KF-v1/n9/p3]

Silver Wigs

[Kaliflower, June 19, 1969]

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Silver Wigs (A Note From the Sutter Street Commune)

In the fall of 1967 two of us rented a huge flat hoping to lure others into dazzling work and service - the way of karma yoga. In a month we had enough people - five or six - to make the rent feasible. At first we planned a hip arty weekly (The Literary Supplement to the Mohammedan Sun Times), but it never got beyond page layouts. Room and board was set at $45 per person per month, and we never changed that until last April, when we felt we knew and loved each other enough to abolish rent. Now people pay what they can or desire to. We are vegetarian for moral reasons and are determined to coexist with mice and roaches. The mice are friendly and scamp across the floor in waves, bumping into our toe-tips. A roach dancing commune live in our kitchen clock and do Ballets Mecaniques around the second hand. Our evening meal is a kind of communion, and we sit on the floor and eat from wooden bowls with fingers or chopsticks. No one but the greenest new member has any assigned responsibilities, but each man segregates himself to where he can best exercise his talent in the communal context. There are no schedules, as to who washes dishes on what day, and everything gets done. We choose members - even crashers for that matter - as if our lives depended on it.

We gradually withdrew from cigarette smoking, first by restricting it to private bedrooms, then to the porches and backyard, and finally we banned it from the premises altogether. Now all new members have to agree to give up smoking cigarettes entirely (pipes, cigars, and joints OK in moderation). All the billboard faces with smiling teeth are skulls, and for hip people cigarette smoking is the last horrible kiss-me of the establishment, which is a funeral parlor. No free man lets his life and desires be controlled by Washington D.C. or by Madison Avenue. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison founded a new nation in the name of liberty, and we are founding it anew in the same name. Now how can a smoker wear a silver wig?

In June 1968 Richard Brautigan persuaded us to give away the entire edition of a little children's book one of us had printed in New York, and in August 1968 the print shop itself was brought here from New York in a U- Haul trailer. The Free Print Shop came into being. We will print anything free for anyone who cannot afford a commercial printer, provided our clients give our work away free, and provided we think the projects significant enough to spend our time on. In point of fact we have turned down only three or four projects.

Our economic relationship to the establishment is impeccable; it is the relationship of a flea to a pig. Our main sources of income are offhand, casual, "criminal," and/or "immoral," and cause no harm to anyone. At this stage of automation and national wealth, money for food and rent is an artificial need, like cigarette smoking, imposed on the people by the usurpers of our freedom. So we think it especially important that the way we get our money have NOTHING TO DO with our daily genius work - which is free to all our brothers. Earning money "honestly", as by cottage industry, is no advance. It is just going backward to rudementary non-greedy capitalism, which is where the rat-race began in the first place. By all means "do your thing." Then give it away.

Now we number fifteen members, have printed some thirty projects completely executed by ourselves, another fifty from camera- ready copy, publish Kali Flower weekly, bake our own bread daily, maintain a vegetable garden complete with compost pit in our own S. F. backyard, are planning a movie, want to start a country branch, and teeter and titter on the verge of bisexual marriage, each member to every other, playing dumb but dress-rehearsing.

[Catalog No.: KF-NS3]

Deep Tried Frees

[April 30, 1978]

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Deep Tried Frees | San Francisco | April 30, 1978 | Kaliflower N.S. 3

Three hundred thirty years ago, in England in the throes of the Puritan revolution, a mystic named Gerrard Winstanley began issuing manifestoes against the clerical and manorial establishments. He believed that God manifested directly in everyone, that knowledge of Him through Scriptures was second-hand, that the priesthood was superfluous and venal, that since all were equal in Godliness, none should oppress, tyrannize, or reduce others to poverty, that penal, corporal, and capital punishment should be abolished, that private property both tempted the poor to steal and killed them for doing it, that the Earth should be held in common by all who labor it, creating a common treasury from which all could draw according to need (including those incapable of working), that none should give hire or take hire, and that buying and selling should be abandoned, as it had become the art of thieving and oppressing fellow creatures. In a vision, Winstanley heard the words, "Worke together, Eat bread together, declare this all abroad." He [p.2] thought that the best thing a man could do was quit his job and till the earth together with others, on the common lands, which at that time nearly every English village still had. A few months after the publication of his fifth and most radical manifesto, Winstanley decided to practice what he preached, and on April 1, 1649, he and a group of co-workers began tilling common land near Cobham in Surrey. Within three weeks they had been arrested and released twice, had had troops sent from London to disperse them, had gotten an audience with the commander-in-chief of the English army, to explain themselves, had gotten their explanation printed in a London news-sheet, and had written their first joint manifesto, The True Levellers Standard Advanced, "a declaration to the powers of England, and to all the powers of the world, shewing the cause why the common people of England have begun, and gives consent to digge up, manure, and sowe corn upon George-Hill in Surrey; by those that have subscribed, and thousands more that gives consent." During the next year they continued tilling at several different sites and even succeeded in putting up some houses, in spite of lawsuits, arson, and beatings. However the pitch of the harassment increased, until their crops were trampled and their houses torn down, and, when criminal indictments were brought against them, the movement was effectively stopped. They called themselves "Diggers" or "True Levellers" (in contradistinction to a less radical and more popular party of the time called the "Levellers" —i.e., those who wanted to even out class differences).

Twelve years ago a handful of socially conscious actors, inspired by the work and ideas of the Surrey radicals, called themselves "Diggers," and (among other things) began giving out free hot meals in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Besides chicken-neck soup, the latter-day Diggers provided or inspired others to provide free groceries, free clothes, free breakfasts, free crash pads, free medical services, and an assortment of free cultural events, from 1966 on. The Diggers' clients—if such a word can be used—were the growing hip population of San Francisco, and in particular the street people. The Diggers acted with wit and good humor, incredible speed and appropriateness. It is moot whether the times crystallized the Diggers or the Diggers catalyzed the times. They worked anonymously, had their own newssheet and word-of-mouth communication methods, and lasted a year and a half, in a constantly [p.3.] shifting, hallucinatory scene, involving thousands of people. The last event directly sponsored by the Diggers took place in June of 1968, but free events and services in the same spirit, including sporadic hot meals in the Park, continued for several years longer, even as hard drugs moved in and the focus of activities moved off the street into the various communal households. The street, as it were, burned down.

The soil the Diggers of 1966 tilled was not real earth but the garbage and surplus of a wasteful, affluent city. Otherwise their work was remarkably similar to that of the English Diggers: it was not merely an effort to help the poor but to free them from wage slavery and show them what they really deserved and how society in the ideal could operate. It is this political quality that differentiates Digger work from the missions, poorhouses, charities, madhouses, and hospitals, which have been free in every civilized country for hundreds of years, as begrudging institutions of last resort.

<<==>><<==>>

In 1966 I was in New York, putting together a print shop called Carp & Whitefish. By mid-1967 I had one book printed (Marshall's Transit Glory) and another in the works (Whalen's Invention of the Letter). The Marshall book was a fancy little contraption with a drawstring that pulled the pages up from a pocket. It was to sell for a dollar, and I was hoping to distribute fifty or a hundred copies to each of the half-dozen or so bookstores in New York City that specialized in modern poetry. As I was planning to move to San Francisco, either temporarily or permanently, I was eager to unload as many books as possible in the East before I left. But the first (supposedly hip) bookstore I approached placed so miniscule an order, that I resolved to sell the book on the streets myself, and bought a two-dollar City of New York Peddler's License. But I was too busy collating and binding the Whalen book to sell the Marshall book. A month after I got my license I was on my way to San Francisco with both editions.

I arrived in San Francisco in early October of 1967, and by late November had helped organize the commune I now live in. The commune grew rapidly, and early in 1968 the Diggers started delivering free produce to our door. In April, following a Digger rally on City Hall steps, Dave Simpson and Vinnie Rinaldi convinced me to send for my New York print shop and set it up in San Francisco as a free operation. The conversation ran something like this: "I hear you [p.4] have a print shop in New York." "Yeah." "We could sure use a free print shop in San Francisco." "How could I get it here?" (Vinnie:) "I'm willing to go to New York and bring it back." It seemed like a hyperbolic offer, and I doubted whether someone would actually go to that much trouble, but Vinnie did. I knew everything we printed would be free from then on, but thought I had contractual-type commitments with the authors to sell the two books I had brought from New York. In fact, authors' royalties had already been advanced, so that was no worry. In May Richard Brautigan pointed out to me that free was just as good a way to distribute a book as any other, and in reflecting on it, I realized that a book could be given away to its rightful audience in one fell swoop. On June 14, and with the author's blessings, commune members handed out 900 copies of the Whalen book into the audience of a big free poetry reading at Glide Church, just as Philip Whalen came to the podium. Free Wheelin' Frank's book 666 was handed out by the Diggers at the same reading. The Marshall book was given out later at a couple of early gay liberation events.

As early as August of 1967, the "Mutants Commune," a long poetic essay about American materialism corrected by Haight-Ashbury culture, including free, had appeared in the Berkeley Barb. It spoke of the new communal culture as having lasted only from September of 1966 to April of 1967, when it was done in by media, tourism, commercialism, hard drugs, and violence. Certainly by April of 1968 these factors had established themselves on Haight Street to the extent of taking away from the Diggers their main stage and auditorium. Even before then, looking for a Digger was like looking for an honest man: nearly everyone claimed to be one. The term was picked up by the media and little by little abandoned by those who had borrowed it from English history. This group, still rather small and tightly knit, began to think of themselves as the Free City Collective, and in fact their eyes were moving from the Haight to the City. In April the two main Free City projects were daily rallies on City Hall steps (a form of picketing) and the taking over of a Victorian doomed by the Redevelopment Agency, on Verona Street, in what is now the Yerba Buena Gobi. The daily rallies had the purpose of demanding that city-owned empty buildings be restored to the people for them to rehabilitate and live in freely, that surplus welfare food and materials be distributed [p.5] free through ten autonomous neighborhood free stores rented by the city, that presses and trucks be made available for the dissemination of free news, that resources be provided for autonomous neighborhood celebrations, and that no permits be required for holding events in parks and other public spaces. City Hall ignored the Free City demands; and the building on Verona Street was demolished. On May Day a magnificent Free City Convention was held at the Carousel Ballroom—an all-night acid-bathed dance. Then, a few days after the Glide poetry reading, Free City sponsored its last event, the 1968 summer solstice celebration, which was to take place in parks all over the city but ... just didn't. The Diggers had spearheaded free in San Francisco for a year and a half—and they were pooped out—or possibly not really interested in changing roles for the new play they found themselves in. They retired from the scene gracefully, leaving behind a tradition and expectation of free, which still lingers in San Francisco ten years later.

They also left behind a tangible summary of their ideals, the Digger Papers, a twenty-four page collection of writings that came out in August of 1968 in two forms: No. 81 of The Realist and a free version that was handed out on the streets of San Francisco. Paul Krassner gave the Diggers 40,000 copies of the free version for the right to offprint it in The Realist. It is a mélange of original articles and material taken from street news-sheets—a double-barreled blast at American culture, with Free City as a prescription, sketched out as Free City Switchboard, Free Food and Distribution Center, Free City Garage and Mechanics, and so on, through eighteen departments, including one with the hair-raising title of "Free City Tinkers and Gunsmiths." (On the whole the Diggers were non-violent in practice but not in principle.) A few years after it had been distributed so plenteously, the Digger Papers vanished, perhaps because of its unpretty throwaway format. Few people now have even heard of this pamphlet, that for us was once a Bible.

To return to June of 1968, the New York print shop arrived by U-Haul trailer, and we set it up in the basement of the house the commune was renting on Sutter Street. We built the darkroom with plywood supplied by Dave Simpson. It was he who taught us how to hustle for materials. The Free Print Shop opened officially in August, and our first print [p.6] job was a flyer for a Hells Angels raffle of Dirty Dick's chopper, to benefit his widow. In those days we printed for any group or event that was non-profit and had reasonably good vibes. Later our position about free hardened, and we refused to print for any event or activity that was not completely free of charge or that did not state on its poster or flyer that no one would be turned away.

In April of 1969, a seventeen-year-old new member took on as a work project the editing of a free weekly newsletter for local communes—Kaliflower. It became the case of the daughter publication growing bigger than the mother print shop, which turned mainly into a production plant for Kaliflower. Kaliflower was issued weekly till the middle of 1972 with a regularity that amazed even us. During that period we wrote about free frequently and encouraged whatever free activities we could. We witnessed the founding of several free stores, a film series, the Angels of Light, a free bakery, the Medical Opera, and a Garbage Yoga service, from which you could order the household appliances you needed (its specialty was abandoned stoves and refrigerators). In addition, there was a free book store and a lot of individual items and services like blow jobs, piano tuning, and foot massages, offered through the ads in Kaliflower (I wonder if all the free Aquarius kittens ever got homes!). Probably the variety and quantity of free materials and activities offered during the Kaliflower years matched those offered during the Digger years—remembering that the "audiences" were different: street people in the earlier case and communal families in the later case.

We helped initiate the Free Food Conspiracy, whose member communes pooled their members' food stamps to buy food in bulk, which was then distributed to these communes according to need. In our mind it was a watershed operation because, if successful, it would have opened the road to pooling all resources and the possible buying of costly things like land in the country and houses in the city. The Free Food Family, as it later came to be called, the new name expressing homeyness and vague hopes for the future, lasted about a year. It failed because it satisfied neither those communes eager to communalize further, nor those communes unwilling to sacrifice imported cheese and health-food extravagances for a common diet. Simply put, most participating communes actually liked where they were at and felt no need to commit themselves more deeply. The Free Food Family [p.7] actually was a kind of watershed, in that it brought us to the absolute outside limit of intercommunal cooperation in 1972.

Both in 1649 and 1966, in the midst of a drastic social and religious upheaval, free was put forward as an ideal whose time had come—a way of feeding and caring for a swelling number of hungry and jobless people. But the three-year old free of 1969 had a subtly different flavor, not only a different constituency. Among the Kaliflower communes, free was not absolutely necessary for survival (though it made life a lot easier). For us it grew into a way of expressing closeness. Nuclear family members don't usually buy and sell to each other, are in fact communistic, and we wanted nuclear family intimacy among the communes. We wanted a society of communes so unestranged that everyone felt like each other's brother or sister. This became the raison d'être of intercommunal free, and free became the communes' hallmark. So free was carried from 1969 forward, not strictly from hunger. It showed itself to be an ideal with more strings to play than one.

During the time I had edited the Chicago Review, I had slowly come to understand that my calling in life was art, and in those days—my late twenties—I took it for granted that one tried very hard to earn one's living by practicing one's calling. But in truth, only a small handful of all the artists I knew or knew of actually earned their livings by selling their art-work. I asked myself what a work of art was worth. What is a poem worth? When I edited the Review I inaugurated a policy of payment to contributors—$5, $10, $15, $25—token sums, that would, I hoped, make the recipients feel as though their work had value. But after I had written a book, and suffered the humility of seeing it treated by the publisher as a piece of meat, and after I had seen my Marshall books, each one strung with two beads, treated by a bookseller like Greenwich Village earrings, I came to the conclusion that works of art don't belong in the marketplace, being qualitatively different from pork chops and costume jewelry. They are emanations of the spirit and cannot be priced. For what price tag can be stuck on a Moby-Dick?—which has by now fed thousands of publishers, doctoral fellows, full professors, translators, grocers with book-racks, actors, and make-up persons, not to mention the spiritually hungry—as if it were the dining table of a king. When I came to San Francisco the last stone of this fence of reasoning fell into place. Let others keep an [p.8] eye on the market and dollar-up their art-work; as for me, mine was unpriceable—it was to be bestowed. Now this was not an ego trip, but a recognition that my art-work was not mine, but of a spirit seeping through me from the Great Behind. Or at times, it was less like a spirit and more like a river of fire I stumbled into, that would rush into my body, snapping up my arms and out my fingers like incandescent needles. Charge money for that? Rather rent the sky to seagulls.

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The question of livelihood arises: When you give away the work you like to do, how do you earn a living?

Over the span of the industrial revolution, the phrase "earning a living" has gradually lost its meaning. If the technological complexity of our culture were suddenly whittled down to human scale—a hundredth the number of automobiles, no more skyscrapers, freeways, jet airplanes, redevelopment projects, or electric carving knives—there would be vast unemployment, because machines under electronic surveillance would be doing most of the work. (Only the lag between the growing spiral of superfluous technology and its automation keeps so many arms and legs employed.) In fact, there is a good, enlightened sentiment for abandoning the industrial revolution entirely and returning to labor-intensive production—just to keep people busy and happy. In other words, you are not really earning a living at all. You are doing meaningless work or busy-work, and you are paid for it in part to keep you from fomenting a revolution. Why not use the machines, junk the gadgets, and pay people just for being alive? That is a philosophical, perhaps aesthetic, question beyond the scope of today's lecture. The point here is that, on technological grounds, "earning a living" has lost the meaning it had to eighteenth-century farmers, bakers, millers, masons, cutlers, wainwrights, smiths, coopers, tailors, and all the rest of the artisans, which our antecedents were, in fact and in name. If earning a living is a sham, and not a righteous and honorable activity, why waste time doing it, if you can possibly survive some other way? And if you can survive some other way, why not become the skilled craftsperson you've always wanted to be, and give your wares away to whoever needs them?

Buddhists, particularly local ones, make a great fuss about right livelihood. But what does right livelihood mean in a capitalist-corporate-multinational [p.9] nexus of greed? Every aspect of our lives is tainted by excessive profit-making, real-estate speculation, stock-market manipulation, price-fixing, armament-making, hard sell advertising, conspicuous consumption, unfair labor practices, automobile proliferation, urban "redevelopment," chemical pollution of food, air, and water, deforestation, strip mining, chicken farming, genus-cide of mammals for their skins, tusks, fur or meat—the list of et ceteras would fill a book. Even if you have become a simple craftsperson, it is impossible to rent your shop, buy raw materials, or accept payment for your products without implicitly supporting questionable businesses or business practices. Not once in my forty-seven years have I ever been asked, by some soulful shopkeeper, to provide a pedigree of the money with which I paid for something. In this society money protects, by hiding from view, any immoral activity used to gain it. If you really want to practice right livelihood, there are not many choices open to you. You can secede from society and set up an independent community with your friends, along the lines of the Farm in Tennessee (not to grant that they are totally clean either), with its own system of work and trade, or you can become an outlaw, so far as your survival income and work output are concerned, somewhat along the lines of Robin Hood. Being an outlaw means that the very method you use to gain your income and supplies, and the very method you use to give back to the world the products of your work, help subvert the economic system in force, while supplying the justice and compassion it lacks. It is not enough to subvert the economic system—a bank robber can do that—nor to tilt it in the direction of the small and human—as cottage industries and the Briarpatch Network seek to do. A small business may be excellent personal therapy for individuals trying to drop out of the rat race, but its effect on the economic order of things is dubious. There is no economic difference between a hip food store run by a former advertising executive and a straight food store run by a person who would take over Safeway if possible but lacks the know-how or capital. Multinational capitalism is merely small business grown big. All monsters look cute—and harmless—when they're kids. But without a deliberate, built-in dwarfing, kids tend to grow up. Right livelihood, down-homeness, simple living, and other such good intentions are not in themselves such a dwarfing. Free is.

[p.10] Business is an addictive disease like alcoholism. Most cured alcoholics know it is better not to drink at all than to try to drink moderately. Reading the Briarpatch Review has always made me uncomfortable. It is like reading testimonials of a bunch of ex-lushes trying to convince themselves they know how to drink moderately. Or it is like reading sentimental confessions that buying and selling, supply and demand, and the whole system of money, market, and accumulation of capital are really not as bad as they've been made out to be, in fact, if you look at them the right way, they're even kind of cute.

Finally, for many of us in the arts, the guaranteed annual income has already arrived, in the form of foundation grants, CETA, CAC, NEA, or SSI—not to speak of Medi-Cal and food stamps. Some people say that artists are a special and atypical segment of society, but I believe along with Pindar(?), that "when the poets change their modes, the walls of the city tremble"—i.e. that artists are harbingers of what the rest of society will be doing presently. I remember food down to a half-box of rice on the shelf in New York—just seventeen years ago—and I am thankful for no current survival worries; and it strikes me as piggish for an artist with guaranteed subsistence to want, besides that, royalties, admission percentages, and so forth. (Every once in a while, a shiver of paranoia runs down the back of some artist I know, and he or she says, "What if our grants get cut off?" And I say, "What if they do? Then you'll go back to selling your ass, your time, or your art-work, just as you used to." "Won't we have forgotten how?" "Hunger will provide a one-day refresher course.")

Free is just as pertinent a stance as it was ten years ago. Greed and selfishness are plump and healthy, in their corporate and sleek new multinational mink coats. Of course now there are the People's Food System and other such "socialistic" enterprises—for those who like to see the "revolutionary" price of "revolutionary" Rice Krispies lit up on "revolutionary" cash registers.

How different free is from those dubious, dreary financial statements on the last page of the CoEvolution Quarterly, which purport to tell all, but which turn red or black, increase or diminish at the whim or interpretation of the editor. Why does he bother? Why does he want us to think there is really something there to [p.11] scrutinize? Can we audit his ledgers or alter his plans? (The CoEvolution Quarterly is a good example of what we may call reform capitalism. The idea is that if you seem up-front about your financial operations or set aside some of your profits for known worthy causes or set yourself up as a non-profit foundation, you are automatically absolved of responsibility for the economic system you swim so well in and support so faithfully.)

Free makes a shambles of the immutable laws of profit and loss. It makes the scoffers scratch their heads and say, "Somebody has to pay for it somewhere along the line." (The answer is, "You can sell your brand of economics back to the Harvard Business School but I wouldn't take it for free.") Free puts magic back into everyday life. It is the gratuitous act. It reminds us that humor and playful illogic are part of the human condition. Not a hundred New Games Tournaments, that the CoEvolution Quarterly could sponsor, would make up for one of its deadly, contrived financial pages. Free points out that money in our culture has become the end rather than the means, and that when you suddenly off it, people still have to get what they need from each other—where the focus should be.

Free sends a shiver down the spine of those who use the same green measuring stick to measure everything. And the idea that something may be available which they cannot buy frustrates and alarms them. As for the folksy "green energy" folk, those who conceive of money as a big cloud of potential goodness, somewhere away in outer space, moored beside psychic and nuclear, they don't know whether to consider free a friend, enemy, or another kind of energy.

Free strikes a chord in the hearts of the poor—the joy of being invited, rather than prevented, from doing something. Think of going to a movie you've always wanted to see—a good movie—and it's free—and you don't have to worry about whether you can afford it—or if you'll be caught sneaking in—and you tell all your friends—and even if you forget your wallet it won't matter—and there's no harpy standing over a donation box to make you feel guilty—in fact there's no donation box—it's really free—completely free.

Free would strike a chord in the hearts of the well-provided if they let it—the joy of "treating" everyone and showing them the same charming bourgeois manners usually reserved [p.12] for guests and relatives. "Ah, Mr. Street-person, one lump or two?"

Free gives poor people what they otherwise might not be able to afford or enjoy, and if the quality of the free work is good, teaches them what they deserve. (I cannot resist quoting Allen Ginsberg's answer to the question why he doesn't spend more of his time and energy working with humble people, the salt of the earth, rather than with college students and other middle-brow audiences: "But the salt of the earth don't need enlightenment. The most debased people need enlightenment, the matter-habit freaks of Middle Class.")

Free frees the artist from the need to trick, mock, or flatter paying customers, and so gives him or her a most dizzying freedom of expression. Free also removes any excuse to be slick, kitsch, or "professional," forcing the artist to be true. But you have to start out with a little on the ball, because if you are an out-of-touch artist turning out work that no one wants because it is bad or unclear, making it free doesn't help anything, in fact gives free a bad reputation. It is especially important for free art to be smashing, to overcome the common prejudice, that what is given away is inferior or ulteriorly motivated.

Free abolishes a lot of banking, bookkeeping, and bill-collecting, but even more important, it stunts the growth of your project and keeps it small and personal. Free is a built-in safeguard. It keeps your project from developing a mass orientation with hundreds of employees and from accumulating profit to capitalize with; on the contrary, the more you give away, the more you lose. The more successful you are, the more you lose. So you stay small to stay open.

Free fits hand in glove with the two other best remedies for our over-industrialized culture—remedies that any citizen can practice, that you don't need a Red Army to put into effect: keeping small and keeping personal. For an artist, the three remedies together prescribe a few do's and don't's which many of us have been practicing in San Francisco for a decade quite happily. The list sounds strangely like religious advice, and perhaps that is no coincidence. Work anonymously, abstain from mass media, don't be a star, focus on your work and not on your professional identity, serve only the people you can talk to and talk to them, give up ambitions of wealth, fame, and reaching a mass audience.

[p.13] For a long time I have recognized religious overtones in the work of "irreligious" artists, indeed in the work of ordinary school teachers, working people, cafe owners, and even officials of the Redevelopment Agency. Since it is almost universally recognized that religious instruction must be free and available freely at all levels of society (occasionally you find corrupted religious teachers fat as bedbugs, charging for their services, especially in New Age, Aquarian, holistic cults), it would seem logical for anyone whose work sends out these overtones to set it free. And even if you are unsure of yourself, and think there is only a possibility your work in the world may have a religious quality, why not give us all the benefit of the doubt and set it free?

Free may not be as ancient, hallowed, or exalted an ideal as some, but it carries its weight. It will "swell a scene" of ideals and help one get through hard times faute de mieux. In a pinch it can expand to be a project's sole ideal. I had a chuckle a year ago over a remark made by a member of a local free theater group. He said, apropos of a benefit they were thinking of giving for themselves, "Well, the world won't come to an end if we do a paid show." True, the world will keep on spinning as it always has before, but what would come to an end is this theater group, held aloft as they have been for several years now, solely by the ideal of free. An ideal for them or anyone, almost by definition, is a bit difficult to achieve, so you can expect to have problems with free. The main one is that it puts you out of step with the rest of the world, so busy tapping pocket calculators—but all good ideals do that. They put you out of step so everyone will look at what his or her own feet are doing—so don't fret, float.

<<==>><<==>>

It would be instructive—from a tactical point of view—to go over the list of those who oppose free the most strongly.

First of all, there are businesspersons who believe in what they're doing (happily a godawful lot don't). Argue with them if you think it will do some good, but if you want something from them—their usable garbage or a special discount—better pass yourself off as another sucking charity that vacuums up the dregs of their economic system, to keep their sidewalks clean.

Some ordinary working people are hostile to free because if they took it seriously, they would see their own lives as thrown away or worthless or themselves as fools—somewhat like the gold star mothers who supported the Vietnam War.

[p.14] Then there are young entrepreneurs—hip people on the make. They have just come up from where they think you are, they know all your arguments, and it's going to be mighty hard to convince them to go back down to the floor they've just got up from. Sometimes they are as rabidly hostile as new converts. However sometimes, especially if they are dope dealers, just a mite guilty for living off the counter-culture, they may be of some help. Does anyone know how to get money out of Bill Graham?

A lot of artists who jumped on the bandwagon of free in the late sixties and early seventies, because it seemed the hippest thing to do, have abandoned it with disdain, now that it is no longer a fad—as if no principle was more important to them than being "in." Since, by making free chic, Kaliflower encouraged them to stuff their heads with it, I suppose they should be allowed to pull out the old fashions like straw and stuff in the new ones, without being made fun of—at least by us. (But it does tickle the spirit to see these mature men and women who once "loved Kaliflower" flaunting their new punk life-styles—who once wore patchouli now wearing razor blades—who once smiled mindlessly now sneering mindlessly.) As for those fleas of artists, who hop on free because they're not making it elsewhere, and hop off free at every possible gig, and argue about it besides—why don't they find some other old dog to live off and give us a break?

The word "free" has several different meanings. Some people cash in on the ambiguity and others use the word fraudulently. For example there are "free" schools and universities which charge tuition. There are "free" offers of things you must buy something else to get. There are "free" events at which "donations" are expected and practically extorted. It goes without saying that when you accept a "donation" for a "free" service, you are selling something, not giving it away.

Some counter-culture and hip non-profit groups are frightened by free. They more or less understand it and wouldn't bad-rap it, but they are cool and unhelpful; free threatens their own base of economic existence (invariably some form of petty capitalism beefed up by government subsidies direct and indirect). They put free down as ivory-tower idealism and see themselves as revolutionaries practicing economic realism (as a stage on the road to socialism). The tactic here is to make them understand that their realism is as hokey and concocted as anything the dreamers might have thought up. It is especially exasperating [p.15] for them to insist that we relate to them on a pay-as-you-go basis, while at the same time they are ripping off all this free money from the government and elsewhere. Here I could list all the grant-supported dance and theater groups we have never been given free tickets to. The tactic is to persuade them that they are not the Bank of America (yet)—just a bunch of hippies groping their way through the cesspool of capitalism, that any course is bound to be filled with contradictions, and that they should strive to keep open, flexible, and generous, and that if somebody should insist on a free ride out of poverty or scruple, they should just let them get on without kvetching.

In general private foundations and government art councils are horrified by free. They are manned and womanned by gentlemen and ladies who believe in free (!) enterprise or have to look like they do. They like to think they are supplying seed money for a project to get on its feet with, and want the project's beneficiaries to support it. Truth is, the project doesn't really have to be self-supporting, just has to look like it's trying. It makes them feel better to think that a project is struggling to survive but can't quite make ends meet (without their help). They don't like parasites. That they and their families and their foundations are not self-supporting doesn't enter their minds. When applying for grants it would seem practical to play down the free aspects of your work.

Free is not the end-in-all of the universe—just a humble handy practice to set some things in it straight. It never really caught on except in Surrey and San Francisco, and for all I know may need a highly specialized environment to thrive. There are dozens of other remedies, of equal potency, for the world's various ills, and each remedy has its advantages and drawbacks. Use free where applicable. It would be a mistake to stick to it rigidly in a situation or place where it wouldn't work or be comprehended, just as it would be a mistake not to try it out, because of preconceptions about its practicality. For example, a free soup kitchen in Tangiers would probably get all the local soup kitchen proprietors upset and you busted. However a cheap soup kitchen that subtly lost money could probably fly. You can never ignore the local ecology, on the contrary, you have to know it well. You have to know what you can get away with and what strategy will be most effective, to right the wrongs you want to right.

[p.16] You may decide that you have some overriding reason for addressing a (paying) mass audience—knowing you can hardly do so without debasing its cultural aspirations—for every mass address feeds the monolithic media and turns human beings into TV-magazine boobs without a real culture of their own. But nevertheless you may feel that what you have to say is of such overriding importance and must be transmitted so immediately that you are willing to turn a few more brains to mush to do it. Poet, that is a decision for you alone to make—in the company of your conscience (who is hopefully not just a stand-in for your ego). (I know that I myself have stopped reading certain poets in protest of the shoddy, disposable, machine-made quality of their books. It is a paradox of sorts, not reflecting well on the poets in question, that when they were poor and unknown, and glad to accept any publication offer, lovers of their work prepared beautiful, virtually handmade editions of their poetry [cheap, too!], but now that they are famous with a choice of publishers, those whom they have chosen make their books ugly, non-rebindable, uncomfortable to the hand, and inconsiderate of the reader.) But poet, if you do make that decision to blast away—take an afternoon off, take a walk into the sunny Mission, where avocado trees grow fifty feet tall; bring us a copy of your latest book inscribed in your own hand; make believe you wrote the whole tome just for us chickens; apologize for the garish dust jacket; let us know, while sipping a lemon phosphate made from home-carbonated well-water—while we are sipping a cup of artfully acquired Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee—a drug we use only to write last paragraphs with—, that you are sorry not to have served the muse of free but grateful to have served a muse at all.

[end]

[originally posted 1996-02-24. Stylistic typos from first transcription corrected 2020-06-10: em-dash substituted for dual hyphens; spacing fixed; underlined words in original text are now italicized. Printers devices (<<==>>) inserted to denote breaks in original text.]