Final Digger Series
1969, Onward to the Planet
Context for 1969
After the Summer Solstice events of 1968, Digger and Free City energies
continued to disperse out of the city into country communal living
situations. Some stayed back.
Peter Berg and Kelly Hart worked on editing the Diggers' homemade film.
NOWSREAL had been shot during the spring of 1968
(from "equinox to solstice") and the Berg/Hart edit was ready for viewing in late 1968.
It was shown at community events and underground gatherings occasionally over the
next decade.
In 1969, the People's
Park movement in Berkeley and subsequent street battles saw the involvement
of many who had taken part in Digger activities. People's Park represented
the idea of creating and defending land dedicated to public commons. As the
Digger impulse first coalesced around free food in the Panhandle — that strip
of public space adjoining and nurturing the emerging Haight-Ashbury in
1966 — so too People's Park was the nesting ground for a countercultural
ecological awareness in
1969.
Also in 1969, Kaliflower
began publication in April, as the first free intercommunal news magazine
distributed by hand to a network of communes that by 1972 numbered over 300.
Kaliflower was published by the Free Print Shop commune on Sutter
Street. Several of the Digger communal households would become regular stops on the
Kaliflower route. Each Thursday, communal members would gather at the
Sutter Street Commune to help bind then deliver that week's issue. Each
delivery route would entail a dozen or so communes. Samurai Bob, one of the
Diggers, became the inveterate Kaliflower deliverer for Marin County which
included stops at the Red House in Forest Knolls and Olema in Point Reyes. [Lew
Welch wrote a poem about his visit to Olema. Peter Coyote reads and
discusses Lew's poem
here.]
All of this is to show how wrong is the traditional narrative of
historians and pundits who claim that the Haight-Ashbury was dead by the end
of the Summer of Love. Police harassment was crucial for driving the
counterculture back underground. For a brief moment, the politics of ecstasy
had bloomed in city streets and parks, even in the face of police harassment
from the earliest stirrings. Far from the tolerance that is now considered a
hallmark of San Francisco's image [for example, the introductory dialogue in
the film San Francisco 2.0 by Alexandra Pelosi] the
history of the Haight-Ashbury shows that public intolerance was instead the
Establishment's initial and ongoing response. Pitched street battles on Haight Street between
the San Francisco Police Department's Tactical ("Tac") Squad and the hippies
during the Summer of Love was a crucial factor that prompted the dispersal
out of the Haight. But the counterculture didn't disappear. It wasn't, as
one writer would have, "sadly ephemeral" [*] The history of
the Haight-Ashbury counterculture parallels the arc of the Digger movement.
The Diggers emerged out of the San Francisco Mime Troupe which had evolved from
indoor performances to outdoor commedia dell'arte shows in the parks. From
the Mime Troupe's outdoor stage in public parks, the Diggers jumped into
the public streets to carry out their notion of agitprop and guerrilla
theater. The Haight (and the nearby Panhandle) was a stage for the Digger
visions of a Free City and alternative society. After the tidal wave of
young visitors and the City's subsequent crackdown, the public face of the
scene collapsed. But instead of fading away, the Diggers shifted their
energies and carried on. Even after the series of posters on this page,
Diggers continued to collaborate in the following decades.
Planetedge
The posters on this page represent the final series of Digger manifestos
published in 1969. Each poster was double-sided. The six images
(below) would be
published as a series of three 17" x 22" posters. The series would
be known as the "Planetedge posters" for the title
of one of the posters in the series. Also included below are two subsequent
posters written by Peter Berg. The Planetedge (and subsequent posters) are
part of the continuum of deep ecology that can be seen from the early Digger days sharing hot stew in the Panhandle while
singing about the evil of automobiles; to the articles in the Digger Papers
warning of climate apocalypse;
and, continuing with the production and distribution of the early Planet
Drum bundles to connect disparate outposts of ecological consciousness. [**] This
arc of social movement would lead to the spawning of the bioregional
movement.
Citations for the references mentioned:
[*] Cole, Tom. A Short History of San Francisco. With a foreword
by Malcolm Margolin. Berkeley: Heyday, 2014, p. 141.
[**] Barb, Oct 21 1966, p 3,
Panhandle free feeds;
Digger Papers, Aug 1968, "Final
City Tap City," "Dialectics
of Liberation";
www.planetdrum.org for the Planet Drum bundles and subsequent writings
on bioregionalism.
|
Last Digger / Free City event, Summer Solstice 1968
-s_rotate.jpg)
-s_rotate.jpg)
Title screen for Nowsreal, 1968
|
