Art and Life in the Haight Ashbury

     Doubtless the most prominent elements of the artistic legacy of the youth movement of the 1960s are the psychedelic rock music of bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead, the innovating cartoon work from Zap and others, and the graphic design of the concert posters and the underground press, notably the pioneering Oracle.
     The Haight Ashbury itself produced few memorable paintings or sculptures and relatively little of lasting literary value in part because hip artists in the center of the scene sought to make life as a whole into art with street theater, extravagant costumes, community-based music, and a slyly ironic argot. Though the Beat poets had formed the best-known segment of the hip movement during the fifties and several of their principal representatives, born between 1919 and 1935, [1] read at the first Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park Polo Grounds in January of 1967, the culture of the Haight-Ashbury was far less productive of lasting literary monuments than that of North Beach had been.
     The ambition to make everything an objet d’art naturally led to a paucity of distinct objets d’art. The widely shared goals of enlightenment and the transformation of American culture were inconsistent with aesthetic experience as a unique sort of consumption marked off, indeed exalted, by its separation from everyday life and often associated with the privileged. Along with the resistance to limiting art to self-consciously produced objects for a specialized marketplace came a democratic reluctance to glorify a few “geniuses” whose names are a sort of commercial brand and to cultivate anonymous art and art for free in which professional ambitions had no relevance at all. [2]
     Nonetheless the Diggers, the leading formation of the Haight-Ashbury scene, had emerged from earlier literary publications such as Beatitude and Underhound and other specifically artistic formations such as R. G. Davis’ San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Artists Liberation Front. They produced written texts from the beginning. As the Haight neared its crest, The Communication Company, with Claude Hayward and Chester Anderson at its center, assumed the task of publishing for the collective as members of a movement rather than as individual artists or advocates for strictly aesthetic values. Building on the legacy of the Digger Papers that had already appeared, the Communication Company printed hundreds of handbills as well as works of poetry by Richard Brautigan, Michael McClure, and Lew Welch.
     Having acquired “one brand-new Gestetner 366 silk-screen stencil duplicator” and “one absolutely amazing Gestefax electronic stencil cutter,” “Chester & Claude” announced the Communication Company with a manifesto titled “Our Policy.” The document, though printed on new equipment, has a makeshift appearance that reinforces its message. Across the top is inscribed The Communication Company in a hand that betrays nothing of art school polish. Beneath are detailed the group’s goals in a stencil made from a manual typescript, including a section headed “our plans and hopes,” of which only one of the twelve was explicitly (if vaguely) artistic: “to publish literature originating within this new minority.”
     Yet even this ambition is couched in terms associated with radical politics. The use of the term “minority” is surely influenced by the dawning of black consciousness with its demand for the publication and study of African-American writers. The implication can only be that hip writers, like members of ethnic subcultures, have their own experience couched in a unique rhetoric, and that the Communication Company could serve a role in the dissemination of this particular vision parallel to that of, say, the Third World Press of Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti).
     This collectivist emphasis questions the egocentric focus of Romantic theory with its fondness for the “genius” and privileging of individual vision, though it resembles in part such models as IWW culture, Dada, and Situationism and draws from the evolving forms of conceptual and performance art. The first of the “plans and hopes” of the new publisher, however, far from referring g to any of these precedents, is simple: “to provide quick & inexpensive printing service for the hip community.” In the first instance this meant “to print anything the Diggers want printed” and “to do lots of community service printing.” They hope in the way “to function as a Haight/Ashbury propaganda ministry” in the form of a new sort of journal “to supplement The Oracle with a more or less daily paper.” [3] They hoped thereby to counteract the straight press, what they called “The Chronicle’s fantasies.”
     Yet their language suggests that pursuing these goals would require language other than the journalistic norm. Seeking “to compete with the Establishment press for public opinion” would require their being “outrageous pamphleteers,” and “to produce occasional incredibilities out of an unnatural fondness for either outrage or profit, as the case may be.” In the end, the individualist impulse survived with the penultimate ambition “to do what we damn well please,” followed only by a reminder of the reality principle: “to keep the payments up” on the printing equipment.
     Though the authors of “Our Policy” allowed themselves a theoretically unlimited license to fiction and betrayed a fondness for provocation, their aim was congruent with that of the Diggers as a whole: to contribute toward defining, fostering, and protecting the hip youth movement as a whole. Anything less would have struck them as “Art as a fantasy pacifier,” in the words of the handout “Trip Without A Ticket.” This manifesto may be fairly taken to represent the most fully formed statement of the artistic ideology of the Haight, having been originally printed by the Diggers as a whole and then in part revised and later reprinted by the Communication Company.
     “Trip Without A Ticket” compares Americans to psychiatric patients, stupefied by tranquilizing drugs, sleepwalking through the horror of modern life, in desperate need of awakening, of “the single circuit-breaking moment that charges games with critical reality.” Without “the cushioned distance of media” people would cease to be the programmed “normals” required by the status quo and would be transformed into “life-actors” capable of seeing through the culture’s “consumer circuses” and feeling real rapport with the victims of American imperialism.
     The central form through which such eye-opening may occur is theatrical. To create “a space for existing outside padded walls” entails the elimination of the conventional theater building as well as the psychiatric unit. Art becomes an escape plan, with dramatic actions enacted in the everyday world rather than plays behind a proscenium arch, actions that function as “glass cutters for empire windows,” depending on the “universal pardon for imagination” that underlies “the intrinsic freedom of theater.” Only such a new “guerilla” theater can create “life-actors” and generate “a cast of freed beings.” In sum they aimed at establishing a “theater of an underground that wants out” aiming “to liberate ground held by consumer wardens and establish territory without walls.”
     In this way any location “that is free becomes a social art form. “Ticketless theater. Out of money and control.” Several vignettes illustrate precisely what this might look like in practice. “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.”
     Not only is there no ticket; there is as well no script and no barrier between audience and performer. Clearly calling for participatory improvisatory theater set on the stage of the world, this is art without artifacts, beauty carved from the circumstances of everyday life, symbolic action that implies a new world view. With this vision the flotsam of unwanted surplus goods in the Free Store and in the world is transmuted into the tools by which liberation becomes available. “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.” The magic appears when the cash nexus is removed. “When materials are free, imagination becomes currency for spirit.”
     Citing Gary Snyder on the necessity to “pin down what's wrong with the West,” the “Trip” finds models for such community-based ritual not so very distant from California. The specific mythic meaning of the original ritual is less important than the involvement in the moment and attentiveness to the constant stream of sensory detail.
     
"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 parallel imagistic flow follows with the scene translated into the terms familiar to the Haight.


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


     The hip community was influenced by a number of modern trends in art including improvisation, chance, collaboration, found objects, and street art, yet the most characteristic work that arose from the Haight-Ashbury eschewed the pretty in favor of the illuminating. The Haight Ashbury ethos favored the collective expression of the neighborhood and the movement as a whole to the promotion of individual art egos. The very fact that we have few works of poetry or fiction that fully embody the spirit of the age itself embodies the Haight Ashbury ethos. In order to recover some sense of what art meant in that time and place it is necessary to study the ephemera, and central to any such understanding must be the publications of the Diggers and the Communication Company.



1. Ferlinghetti (born in 1919), Ginsberg (1926), Gary Snyder (1930), Kandel (1932), McClure (1932), and Brautigan (1935) all read. The younger generation was represented by rock musicians.

2. The Cockettes founded by Hibiscus in 1969 insisted that one needed no talent whatsoever to perform. The associated Kaliflower Commune was exceptionally long-lived with related individual and groups active today.

2. Anderson was born in 1932, Hayward was younger, born in 1945.

3. Comparable to the daily publications from the Sorbonne’s École des Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1968 and the Occupy Wall Street Journal in 2011.

Hippie

     Even now, at the head of the page, I find the word most annoying. Though I went to San Francisco in the summer of 1967, though for some months I actually lived at the corner of Haight and Ashbury (in an apartment, though I would not be surprised to meet someone who lived in the actual intersection), though I sport beads and a Paisley vest handmade by my lover in my first passport picture, though I remain profoundly influenced by ideas of “hip,” I cannot stand that diminutive term. (The word passed into common usage after Herb Caen began using it in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Caen had also invented the equally obnoxious and derisive “beatnik.”)
     Not that “hippie” has no place. In my own memory, before I saw the word in print, I heard it used to describe young teens who aspired to be hip and were just becoming acquainted with the scene, not so different from the sort of person who might have been labeled a “teenybopper” in the context of musical taste. As such the word had a useful niche, but failed to describe the counter-culture in general. Despite my distaste for “hippie,” I had no good alternative. In the sixties “hip” served for some uses, though sounding slightly broad and old-fashioned. I do recall both both “freak” and “head” (referring, naturally, to “pothead”) having some currency, but neither seems really adequate.
     Born in 1946, I grew up reading the Beats, attending Paul Carroll’s poetry series at Second City, seeking out Old Leftists, and learning about Dada. In university I participated in the literary magazine and attended performance events and shows staged by friends. In spite of loose talk about “the sixties,” during my senior year at an institution with tens of thousands of students, I felt I knew the local counterculture: far-out intellectuals, dopers, artists, radicals, anarchists, yogis, sandal-makers, and singers. Virtually everything innovative seemed linked to this crowd. Forward-thinking professors and faculty artists made alliances with the hip youth. Just as Kenneth Kenniston’s studies indicated that, for the most part, student protesters were the very same who had been at the top of their high school classes, many of those participating in middle and late 60s youth culture struck me as unusually thoughtful and productive. Why, even LSD trips were assimilated only through hours of analysis based in part on Scientific American articles and anthropology studies seen in the light of esoteric Buddhism. I was taken aback just a few years later when I heard of people dropping acid to go to a concert or party.
     Thinking I knew the scene in my major Midwestern university, I was surprised and I believe I recoiled when in the spring of 1967, a crew of slightly younger celebrants tripped across the university quadrangle, blowing soap bubbles in celebration of Buddha’s birthday.
     These new folks seemed to be violating canons of cool, while on the national scene, it was obvious that Peter Max was instantly kitsch, Tim Leary at best an entertaining con man, and, late in the day, cooptation seemed fully accomplished when Hair premiered, claiming to be a “tribal, love-rock musical.” Its tunes can now be heard in elevators while the really radical grass-roots theater has vanished to limbo along with underground movies. In 1967 when I made it to the Haight, the kids who liked rock and roll and smoking pot, however genial, had little in common with the people I had known at college who preferred electronic music, Tibetan folksong, or, at any rate, down and dirty blues. Only a few months later the Diggers, who ought to have known, were to proclaim the death of hippie on Haight Street.
     Still, it certainly seemed as though the movement, however vaguely defined, had something to say about every area of life: not merely art and politics, but also interpersonal relations, cuisine, and living room design. How many apartments did I enter with a huge cable spool for coffee table, beaded curtains, and Indian bedspreads? I remember a slightly older poet’s reminiscences of San Francisco only a few years before I (and a horde of my cohort) hit town. He described how he and his friends would often get stoned and eat “phony-burgers,” made with supermarket hamburger buns, ketchup, onions, mustard, pickles, everything but the meat. A few years later no one would have dreamed of eating Wonder buns; every kitchen held brown rice and vegetables.
     I won’t aim here to define hip beyond a few sketchy outlines. Hip is a form of twentieth century Romanticism, celebrating the unconscious, the natural, the ecstatic while striking a counter-cultural pose with bohemian habits and left politics. Hip participates in the double vision DuBois analyzed in African-Americans, also evident in kitsch, camp, and other modern forms of irony. Susan Sontag located the essence of camp in her 1964 essay as occurring in the gap “between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice,” in other words, between signifier and signified.
     Authentic hipness requires the pose at least of a vision sharper and more piercing than others’. That’s what makes it so annoyingly elitist. One can always take irony around yet another turn. In contrast to this off-putting and esoteric claim, hippie was accessible to all, its wardrobe available not in military surplus or Salvation Army stores, each individual his own invention, but in standardized sets at Sears.

Nova Academy

     For several years in the late seventies, I taught at Nova Academy in San Francisco’s Sunset district. The school had been founded by Merriam LaNova to educate high school age dancers attending the San Francisco Conservatory of Ballet. There the regimen was strict and old-fashioned. Lanova had, after all, danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Her style was icy and stern. Her husband, though a cellist with the symphony, looked like a mobster. Leonide Massine came by on occasion to view my classes, and the Kronos Quartet sometimes practiced in an unused studio.
     The school maintained the façade of an elite preparatory school. The principal always wore a three-piece suit. The older classrooms were decorated as though they were part of some old manor, landed by accident above an urban storefront. One featured a hunting mural on one wall, another had a huge fake fireplace, a third had a ceiling of painted panels that belonged in an Italian basilica.
     The fact was, though, that, along with the dedicated dancers, Nova Academy, like other private schools, found itself accepting many students for a variety of reasons it would prefer not to admit. Some parents wanted their children in an all-white environment; other young scholars had encountered unpleasant disciplinary proceedings their parents were willing to pay to escape. Several foreign students had enrolled in preparation to applying to American universities. The dancers were, in fact, all but invisible in a larger crowd including drifters, misfits, and troublemakers.
     This reality sometimes clashed with the high art pretensions of the dance world. Among the distinguished visitors was Kyra Nijinska, Vaslav’s daughter. Once a dancer with the Ballet Russe, she now painted mystic canvases, but now and then she would come to Nova to conduct a Flamenco class. I could hear the heavy heels stomping above my room. Her manners were odd, and, to the more vulgar students, exceedingly comical. If she perceived a mocking look, she would rise up in indignation and declare, “Do you know who I am? I am the daughter of the Grrreat Nijinsky!” Before long, the students, innocent of any idea of her father’s work (or her own) were greeting each other with this line, suitably exaggerated.
     For some reason, the school seemed to define itself with reactionary tradition. Apart from the anti-Bolshevik feeling of the Russian émigré tradition, propaganda magazines from apartheid South Africa were among the few journals scattered about the office waiting area. The emphasis was, as the principal Michael Badenhausen reminded the students at morning assembly, self-discipline and hard work. But, alas, by mid-morning, the pink-faced principal was three sheets to the wind, sometimes literally lying on his office floor, passed out. If a parent came to consult him, the staff would have to think on their feet. He had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the bush of Upper Volta (as it was then called), and that experience was probably enough to explain his alcoholism, but it was not his only peccadillo. Once a well-built young friend of his appeared at the school, wearing skin-tight jeans with a chain belt and a motorcycle jacket with no shirt. Madam could hardly have approved, but for reasons best known to the two of them, she tolerated his behavior with maternal protectiveness.
     Our pay was little more than welfare, less if one includes food stamps -- $325 a month when I began, then increased to $375. In the middle of my second year of service at Nova, I began to organize. I called the local teachers’ unions who, I must say, showed little solidarity. I set out to do it myself. “They can’t fire you,” I told my coworkers, “You’re protected by state and federal labor law.” Threatening a mid-year strike, we received Lanova’s signature on an agreement giving us $425 a month and a certain position for the coming year. Then, when the term ended in the spring, the entire faculty was fired. (Doubtless individuals the administration trusted who showed proper contrition might be allowed back.) I picketed the graduation exercises in my suit and then put down my sign to enter the hall and take my seat to applaud the graduates. I filed a complaint against the school with the California Labor Commission. It was the least I could do after leading my fellow-workers down a path that proved more dangerous than I had known.
     After months had passed, I received notice of a hearing before an administrative judge. When I entered, the school’s attorney was just saying to the judge, “It’s frivolous, really,” and the judge, in an old-boy manner, responded with resignation, “Well, we must give him his day, anyway.” While I presented what seemed to me undeniable facts, their scurrilous lawyer proceeded to tell outlandish lies: that I was fired because of my obdurate gum-chewing, that Lanova would not have signed the agreement had I not been raising a fist over her in a menacing way. I was at the time young enough to be genuinely surprised at my adversary’s complete dishonesty. Needless to say, the hearing was decided against me, and, as it happened, about that time I received an offer to teach school in the Nigerian bush. Perhaps if I had prevailed over my San Francisco employer, I would never have seen the palace of the Oba of Benin nor would I have drunk palm wine from a calabash with a dozen drowned bees afloat. Doubtless, the time had come to move on.

Hip Poets of Seventies San Francisco

I recently read Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir. While relishing her tales of bohemian life, I found the ambition for fame that she shared with Mapplethorpe utterly foreign to my own experience of the era. I was led to set down these few vignettes of people dedicated to art with little regard for reward. These are random pictures, snapped in passing. Some of these poets are or were good friends, several I barely knew at all. Our celebrity mentality extends even to the arts, but thousands pursue their own visions while also fostering community.


I se that makaris amang the laif
Playis heir ther pageant, syne gois to graif
William Dunbar “Lament for the Makers”

     Five hundred years now Dunbar’s gone who sang for noble Chaucer and all the crew, and fifty years since Rexroth’s young men flamed and cooled in “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Though premature to lament, I wish to set down a few characters, already too much forgotten in the frantic passage of our time.
     The images well up: amiable Randy Fingland, who chattered poetry with absolute conviction and holy indirection, who walked the streets of Berkeley with poetry on sandwich boards and spun out lyric lines with a Dymo labelmaker to set high in Market Street corporate elevators hoping to propel some secretary’s mind to leaps of sudden joy. He conducted what some paper called the “toughest” reading series in the area at the Starry Plough. The reporter may have been influenced by the IRA posters on the wall or the ex-cons from the half-way house around the corner, finding their way with words. “Pay attention, motherfucker, I’ve got something to say.” He published in the smallest editions important work including translations from
     Jack Hirschman whom one often encountered manic in North Beach Vesuvio’s tossing off page after page of polylingual multicolored pages each of which roared like an excited motorcycle.
     Peter Pussydog (Stevens) wrapped his thin body in a suit lit by Christmas tree lights that flashed wisdom to all nearby and, though he trailed cords awkward behind, never slowed. He scandalized KPOO south of market poor people’s radio when he appeared on Poetry for the People and his name inspired weird obscenity fears among the third world managers who ever since their coup were never sure if poets were bourgeois individualists or real people’s artists. (Had they actually listened to his work, they might have had slightly more valid reservations about him.)
     David Moe who plugged in the electric dictionary making everybody’s hair stand on end) outmarketed all other poetry rags by dealing Love Lights in midnight newspaper vending machines with naked people dancing on the cover but only dancing words within. Though this sold well in North Beach after the topless bars closed, the floor of Moe’s room at Project Artaud was littered with broken machines kicked by customers frustrated long before they dropped sad quarters in. If I am not mistaken, he founded the San Francisco Poetry Festival, yet, when he took the stage at midnight, after the big names had performed earlier, offering single words like glittering gems, for all to wonder at, heard catcalls rising from the dark hall. He later wrote the very practical volume How to be God Now.
     Kirby Doyle went from juvenile delinquent to dandy to the street, wrote the eloquent Sapphobones and swigged all the way to Snyder’s Elymakee in the Sierras where we read under full moon midnight. He sought young love and never knew he was missing half his teeth till he found himself lost in Laguna Honda in the end.
     Who was that nameless long-lost greybeard hipster from a SRO hotel who had no teeth at all and mumbled strange poems unintelligible to all and so he had to go on the air and let everybody know?
     Artful Goodtimes who cultivated a lyric gentle waist-length beard and Ecstasy Clare and he taught each other preschool delight. He left in the end for Colorado’s talking gourds and magic mushrooms and, of all unlikely things, elective office, too;
    and Kush (Steven Kushner), that saint for art, who now sits on the myriad visionary exhibits of the Poetry Museum for which San Francisco which will one day be grateful, whose Cloud House storefront had exhibits and readings and tapes, who hoped by to pull down peace with incantations and smoldered sage while Bob Kaufman lay up silent in the back loft, and we took to the streets and we were chased from the opera opening night and challenged by the downtown library (“You can’t read poetry in from of the Public Library!”) so we made do with spray-paint poetry stencils and once I burst my tambourine for very exuberance making a pitch to Mission street mothers in the early morning, preaching the word of poetry under grey San Francisco skies.