Recently, I was able to locate the video of Peter Berg’s memorial in 2011. The event took place in the spacious auditorium of the Randall Museum, on Corona Heights near the tip-top of that rocky outcrop that overlooks the expanse of San Francisco at its feet. This is the very location where many of us had welcomed winter solstices in years past. Peter with his conch shell welcoming the sunrise would always be a memory frozen in time.

There were hundreds of souls who showed up to honor Peter’s memory on October 1, 2011. There were bouquets of herbs, flowers, totems, instruments and offerings on the altar at the front of the stage. Someone had prepared a listing of the dozens who had volunteered to speak. Rob (as he was introduced) was near the last. Here are his words. Ever since hearing Rob talk about what he saw as Peter’s contribution to anarchist theory, I had wanted to find the video and get the transcription entered into the historical record. At last, it is done.

Rob Young’s Eulogy at Peter Berg’s Memorial, October 1, 2011

When you guys were doing your thing in San Francisco there were a bunch of us, 200 million of us, that were elsewhere, living in a faraway country called the United States of America. We were growing up good and proud and watching John Wayne, and when I delivered the newspapers, I used to report the latest American victories on the Vietnam fronts to my clients. And then one summer, I was up in Canada at the family cottage, and in the cottage there was a pile of battered old paperbacks with the front covers torn off. And there was one in the stack. I was about 14 or 15 years old, and it was called Notes from the New Underground. And there were some Digger essays in this thing. So, I read them, and they made so much sense to me that I thought I need to leave the country I’m in right now — not being Canada — United States of America and find these people who have written this stuff and learn more from them about that.

And many years passed and through the inevitable circuitous route by which all of you came to be connected with these people, I, too, followed that circuitous route and came to work at Planet Drum for a while. And while I was there, I was going through the mid-20s, tumultuous, horrific period of life, right? There’s three of those. There’s the terrible twos, and then there’s the terrible 20s, and there’s some other thing I haven’t experienced yet, but later in life that some of you know, and I don’t know. (Voice from the audience says, “menopause.”) Menopause. Thank you. Now I have a word for it, and it was a very difficult time for me at Planet Drum. I was trying to work there and trying to sort some stuff out. And one day, Peter and I were walking down the street together, and as we’re walking down the street, I was thinking about how my dad and I used to walk down the street, we’d hold hands. I was ruminating on this, and suddenly Peter just stops and looks at me like he has that sort of “Owl-Hawk” look thing that he does, you know, and he says, “What?” “You want to hold hands with me, or something?”  It’s like holy shit!  And so that’s when I knew he was really something special.

So, he was all about location, you know, where are you and what is home, and where are you? And is your head up your ass, or is in the watershed somewhere? And I want to locate Peter for a second, world historically, right? Because a lot of interesting people … as a person said tonight, this is a high character environment for me tonight, looking at all of you. I want to locate Peter in world historic terms. Peter Berg for whatever all the things he was and is, made a very significant contribution to anarchist thought. Anarchist thought up until that point, things like “Anarchist Communism,” by Kropotkin, Bakunin’s theories and Max Sterner’s individualist anarchism, all that stuff. They always talked about the social structures that were necessary for a liberated society, and they elaborate on them in different ways, but they remained modernist theories, because they were social structures that could zip around the planet and sort of be anywhere. You could have this social structure in Bulgaria, you could step over here to England, and it was nowhere. And then Peter Berg came along and answered two important questions in anarchist theory. Where do you locate those social structures? In the bioregion. And secondly, who is the constituency for those social structures? And that’s all species. And Berg made those two contributions. He has radically advanced and matured anarchist thought by those contributions, no doubt heavily influenced by another very important anarchist, Judy Goldhaft. [Audience acclamation.] So, when he said, “What do you want to do, hold hands?” like I wasn’t sure if he wanted to — that’s my personal thing about his magical stuff. But the other thing is his contribution to anarchist doctrine in the world.

And the last thing I want to tell you is, in July of this year, I was walking through some fields, I live in Eugene, and I was walking with my six-year-old daughter and my four-year-old son, and up above us, three military planes were flying, jets, fighters ripping across the sky. And I looked up and I said, they’re flying in the missing man formation. And my son and daughter said, “What do you mean? What’s the missing man formation?” I said, “Well, when somebody who’s very important dies, the United States Air Force will do a flyover in the missing man formation.” And they said, “Where are they going?” And I said, “Looks like they’re going south. They’re headed toward San Francisco” and I didn’t have the word yet, and my six year old daughter said, “Clearly someone very important has just died in San Francisco.” And the next day, I got a call from Judy. So, even the United States Air Force is compelled by the magic of Peter Berg to honor one of their fellow men in arms when he passed away. Peter, you’re so fucking present, I want you to go someplace else for a little while, because you’re filling up the room. Thank you very much for what you’ve done.

[Transcribed by Judy Goldhaft, Eric Noble, with machine assistance, 26 Sept 2024]

Rob died in 2018. Here’s an obituary.

Many of you have contributed to previous GoFundMe projects of The Digger Archives. This is another fundraising plea to help preserve our tribe’s history. Jesse Cox is a people’s historian of the most authentic variety. Jesse’s writings are a cross between a geographer’s intimate association with the landscape and the be-bop prosy of a Jack Kerouac. We hope to eventually share his stories of our communal past, stories of one of the first communes on Castro Street, stories of the Hearthshire Community in northern California, and — the aim of this GoFundMe — the stories of Assunta Femia, the progenitor of a transgressive gay feminine spirituality.

Jesse is 72 years old and he is struggling with the age-old dilemmas of physical and economic limitations. Jesse still is moonlighting gigs while pursuing a passion for finishing his deep history of Assunta, once Jesse’s love and guiding spirit. Assunta was both shaman and prophetess. Her legacy must be preserved and Jesse is the best person to do it. Read the memorial that Arthur Evans wrote after Assunta’s passing in 2006.

There will be much more shared in the coming days and weeks as we grow this fund. Jesse has his fingers in many pies but Assunta is top of the list.

Thank you, all and everyone!

Here’s the full GoFundMe link: https://bit.ly/GoFundMe-for-Jesse

Recently, I was able to digitize the interviews that Alice Gaillard and Céline Deransart conducted in 1998 in the making of the documentary Les Diggers de San Francisco. Among the dozens of people Alice and Céline interviewed was Arthur Lisch, one of the early San Francisco Diggers who played an important role, especially in his contacts with the liberal religious community in San Francisco. Arthur can be seen in several of William Gedney‘s photos from the first weeks of the Digger Feeds and the Digger Free Frame of Reference free stores. The interview of Arthur did not make it into the final cut of Alice’s and Celine’s film, so its recent discovery is all that more valuable and remarkable.

I say remarkable because there are things in the interview which have shined light on aspects of Digger history that have remained murky until now. Above all, Arthur demonstrates the influence of the original Diggers of 1649 in Surrey, England. Over the years, I’ve heard people say that the English Diggers played a minor influence on their latter-day namesakes. Reading Arthur’s interview will prove that suggestion false. Gerrard Winstanley’s True Leveller (Digger) writings from 1649+ obviously had an immense effect. Up until now, it has only been Emmett Grogan’s account in Ringolevio, along with several of the ephemeral statements in Communication Company street sheets, that testified to this influence. Now, we can see in Arthur’s words, how completely the English Digger ideas were understood and transplanted into the 1960s counterculture. Here is an excerpt from Arthur’s interview, describing the living circle he had inscribed on the earth in the midst of a public park thirty years after the Summer of Love:

“The circle is a latter day initiative that has to do with the Digger philosophy — not just the Digger philosophy, but the original ‘True Leveller’ philosophy. The True Leveller philosophy was even further called the Christ Levellers. And the idea of the True Levellers was that the common land belongs to the common people who choose to come on that land, care for the land, love the land, work the land. So in the sense that the initiative was taken by me 10 years ago, to establish this circle, this is, 30 years later, a Digger initiative — this is a True Leveller initiative. It is, because I say it is [chuckles], and because that’s my intention. It’s a spiritual scientific experiment: to see if a circle is drawn on the earth, if people will come, and if they will fill that circle with care, concern, love, work — activity.”

We can see from this activity that Arthur was creating a vision of the original English Digger notion of the Earth as a Common Treasury for all. Arthur had read and understood Gerrard Winstanley’s writings so completely that he was on a lifelong mission to encapsulate those ideas. He also had obviously read about that period of English history known as the English Civil War because, later in the interview, he talks about the common origins of the Quakers and the Diggers at that time. I think this interview is strong evidence that the influence of the English Diggers on their twentieth-century namesakes was profound. Up until now, Emmett Grogan had been the prime example. Now we can see that Arthur Lisch is another. (Still another example is that of Irving Rosenthal, founder of the Sutter Street (Kaliflower) Commune, but his ‘conversion‘ to Digger philosophy happened two years later.)

Arthur relates his work on the Earth Circle to the poster that the Diggers produced in the Winter of 1968 with the image of two Tong warriors standing on a street corner and the only text on the poster being the I Ching character for the hexagram “Revolution” and the words 1% Free. Ever since this poster appeared mysteriously overnight on walls and surfaces scattered around San Francisco, people were left scratching their heads wondering at its meaning. Peter Berg described the effect of this, what some considered menacing, image. In one of his interviews, Berg said, “The … merchants thought it was a profiteering scheme. They thought 1% Free meant we were the mafia. We’d beat them up if they didn’t give it to us [laughter].” Arthur Lisch describes his own take on 1% Free:

“[T]he initial beginning [of the Earth Circle] goes back to that poster that was made that said ‘1% Free’ … [T]he idea of being “1% free” means that, to me, we can take that initiative, we can take that step, and then things will fall into place around it. This was initially 1% free. It’s not 100% free now, but so many people have come here, worked here, care for the place, they’ve claimed this circle of land in the name of community and the name of the sacred in life, in the name of a higher way of being. … In other words, to see the higher in each other, for each of us to see what is better, what is hopeful, what is possible in each other. And this small circle is dedicated to that.”

Another important piece of the interview of Arthur is something he mentions in relation to Emmett Grogan. “I remember Emmett Grogan writing ‘The Ideology of Failure.’ I think he mentioned me in a little essay about going out to Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, with a sculpture that was installed there where a 14-year-old was shot running across the field by the police. And I went out there every day for a number of months to vigil and to meet with people and to try to make a park, back in 1967. And Emmett mentioned that, and the idea that you need to be anonymous, you need to be not prideful about your work, you just need to offer your work and your activity.”

“The Ideology of Failure” appeared in the Berkeley Barb in November, 1966, a month after Emmett and Billy Murcott began bringing hot stew to the Panhandle for daily free feeds. The article was signed “George Metesky” and it was the second article about the Diggers that was signed thus. George Metesky, of course, was a pseudonym (the real George Metesky was serving a sentence for the bombings he had carried out over a sixteen-year span in New York where he had been dubbed the “Mad Bomber” by local newspapers).

Over the years, I have tried to determine who wrote the early Digger articles that were signed pseudonymously, specifically “The Ideology of Failure” which is a crucial and foundational text for understanding the Diggers. There has never been a clear-cut answer until now. Emmett Grogan was the natural and logical choice (many clues in Ringolevio, not just to his fascination with the Mad Bomber, but key words and phrases he used). But others were proposed as the author — Peter Berg, Peter Coyote, a collaboration between Emmett and Billy, even one very serious suggestion that it was Abbie Hoffman. With this interview of Arthur, the balance has tipped. Emmett Grogan was the author of this piece and most likely of all the Digger “George Metesky” articles.

This whole line of speculation brings up a topic that is close to my heart. Anonymity. The Diggers maintained (at least at the outset) a cloak of anonymity and protecting that veil was one of the games they played with their audience. The famous story of the two reporters attempting to interview the “manager” of the Trip Without A Ticket is an example. Both reporters arrived independently at the free store. The Diggers took each reporter aside and swore each to discretion if they wanted to interview the manager who did not want to acknowledge himself as such. Then the Diggers introduced the two reporters who interviewed each other for some minutes before realizing the caper.

For historians, the question is to what extent we should honor the veil of anonymity or pierce it. Half a century after the events in question, I think there are valid historical reasons to pierce the veil.

This 8-1/2″ x 11″ page was designed by the People’s Red Dragon Architecture collective and published by the Free Print Shop in an issue of Kaliflower, vol. 3, no. 22, September 30, 1971.

“One of my fondest hopes is that we are all learning to share ideas. More and more people are coming to speak with one voice.

“We have come to the point where we all can put our ideas on one page. I hope to see the time when all the people in a group can entrust their thoughts to one pen-hand.

“EVEN people who all live together have not all reached this point as you can see by the different hand on this page. But we do share some things.

“WE all share in what is accomplished through effort and discipline. We all have a certain commitment to the community in which we live.

“MAO says, ‘We are confronted by two types of social contradictions — those between ourselves & the enemy and those among the people themselves. The two are totally different in their nature.’

“PEOPLE must hold together to gain an understanding of what we are alive for. People can visit each other and talk on the phone.

“ANYTHING that reaches more than fifty people is propaganda. If all the folks who get the message have a part in making it up, it’s people’s propaganda, which is GROOVY.”

Fred Moore died in a horrendous car accident in 1997, much too young for such a committed activist and pathfinder. Fred carried out one of the (if not the) first of many anti-military protests on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. In 1959 at the age of 18, Fred sat-in on the steps of Sproul Hall to begin a fast protesting mandatory ROTC training for all entering male students. Future activists who led the Free Speech Movement credit Fred’s act in 1959 as the opening round of the Sixties student protest movements.

As much as Fred’s career as a lifelong pacifist, non-violence advocate, continental walker for peace and justice, and devoted father deserves a clarion call of remembrance, that is not my purpose with this posting. Instead, I want to call attention to Fred’s connection with the Diggers and the philosophy of Free. Fred played an important role in proselytizing the vision of a society free of buying and selling, just as the original English Diggers (1649) and the San Francisco Diggers (1966) had done. Fred also was instrumental in my uncovering a forgotten piece of Digger history.

First, the uncovering story. In 1974, I had been living in the Kaliflower Commune for three years and had started collecting the leftover remains from the Digger movement that had burst onto the scene in 1966 and finally dissipated (at least in the public eye) in 1968 (or thereabouts). We were actively collecting Digger Papers, Communication Company broadsides, Free City News sheets and posters. We had reached out to all manner of folks — Ron Thelin, Peter Berg, Judy Goldhaft, Peter Coyote, Eileen Ewing, Linn (Freeman) House, Vicki Pollack, Siena Riffia, Phyllis Wilner, Allen Cohen … etc. We were begging, and borrowing whatever we could turn up for the Digger collection. We were also interviewing folks. Tape recorders made people nervous so I would write up notes and type a “memcon” when I got back to the commune. The term memcon came from the Watergate hearings, which Irving was avidly watching every day on a black-and-white TV he had bought cheap at one of the used furniture stores in the Western Addition.

I would reach out to total strangers and ask if they had any Digger materials they could share or let us borrow to make Xerox copies. In January 1974, I contacted Fred Moore. I wrote to him at the address in Menlo Park where he was coordinating something called the Information Network. (More about it later…) Fred responded and we had a phone call the following month. Fred said that the only person he knew who had been involved in the Digger movement was a man named Walt Reynolds who had taught the Diggers how to bake bread in coffee cans. Fred had met Walt at Resurrection City in Washington, D.C., in 1968 (the last project that Martin Luther King had planned before his assassination). After our phone call, I contacted Walt and he told me his story. Here is the memcon I wrote at the time about my phone call with Fred and then with Walt: (to view any of the images, click and choose open in new tab)

Fred’s introduction of Walt Reynolds uncovered a whole piece of Digger history that had not been documented. The result was the page on the history of Digger Bread and the Free Bakery(ies).

But wait, there’s more. Fred may have contributed this significant piece of history to the Digger story. But even more importantly, he was an influence on the budding personal computer revolution in the early 1970s. Fred was involved with Lee Felsenstein and the Community Memory project that created the first online computer switchboard (later termed bulletin board). And in 1974, Fred started a project in Menlo Park called the Information Network that was his vision of a society without buying or selling. The following year, Fred and Gordon French put out a call for a group of computer enthusiasts to come together and share ideas, inventions, and technology. This became the Homebrew Computer Club. Much has been written about this moment when some of the long-haired underground computer hobbyists first began experimenting with the new Intel and Motorola microprocessor chips.

Fred’s role in the Homebrew Computer Club has been widely recognized. See, for example, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Or John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. Or Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Or Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.

All of those (and more) sources are replete with the influence that Fred had. But none of them totally explain his philosophy. That’s where this last piece of the puzzle is so crucial. At some point, Fred visited Joseph and me after we had moved out of the commune, and he gave me a document that I think is the missing link between the Diggers and Fred’s inspiration that can be seen in the open source and free software movements. Recently, in our ex-commune member Zoom group, we got to talking about Fred. I pulled out the copy of Fred’s manifesto that he had donated to the Digger archive. It was printed on newsprint but I scanned it several years ago. Nevertheless, both in the hard copy and the scanned version, it is not an easy document to read. The printing is tiny, quite dense. So, I decided for the sake of our Zoom group to transcribe the text. The title of Fred’s vision is “Put Your Trust in People, Not Money” and it lays out the philosophy that is still practiced today in many corners of the World Wide Web. Here it is:

The past several days have brought snow accumulations to the San Francisco Bay Area rarely if ever seen — Mt. Tamalpais, Mount Hamilton, Mount Diablo ring the Bay like crystal jewelry suspended in memory. A friend forwarded an article about Gary Snyder which was a joy to read (“Man. Verses. Nature” by Hillary Louise Johnson, Sactown Magazine, Sept-Oct 2022, https://www.sactownmag.com/man-verses-nature-gary-snyder/). Though the writer mentioned several of Snyder’s best known works, there was one that was notable for its absence. This was a broadside published in 1975 which is a paean to that neighborhood in San Francisco with some of the best weather on the planet. “North Beach” resonates with places of the mind, places where synergy combines to further human consciousness of the natural world.

In thinking about the history of the Sixties, North Beach takes on a significance similar to the outcroppings of limestone that dot the surface of that neighborhood. The truths that the Beat poets uncovered in the 1950s became the ground on which the 60s radicals continued the social assault.

Here then is the (semi-anonymous) manifesto/ode/paean to “North Beach” (published by Canessa Gallery, 1975).

[transcription:]

North Beach

In the spiritual and political loneliness of America of the fifties you’d hitch a thousand miles to meet a friend. Whatever lives needs a habitat, a proper culture of warmth and moisture to grow. West coast of those days, San Francisco was the only city; and of San Francisco, North Beach. Why? Because partly, totally non-Anglo. First, the Costanoan native peoples — peoples living around the Bay for five thousand-plus years. Sergeant Jose Ortega crossed sand dunes and thickets to climb a hill (Telegraph) there around the first of November 1769. Later, Irish on the hill (prior to Quake and Fire) and tales of goats grazing those rocks —

Tellygraft hill, Tellygraft hill
Knobby old, slobby old,
Tellygraft hill

— then Italian, Sicilian, Portuguese (fishermen), Chinese (Kuangtung and Hakka) and even Basque, down from Nevada sheepherding on vacation.

When we of the fifties and after walked into it, walk was the key word. Maybe no place else in urban America where a district has such a feel of on-foot: narrow streets, high blank walls and stairstep steeps of alleys and white-wood houses cheap to rent; laundry flapping in the foggy wind from flat-topped roofs. Morocco; or ancient terraced fertile crescent pueblos.

A tiny watershed divide is at the corner of Green and Columbus. Northward a creek flowed, the mouth of which, on the little alley called Water Street (now some blocks up from the Fisherman’s Wharf coast — all fill) is under the basement of a friend’s apartment. The easterly stream went down by what was the Barbary Coast and Geodetic Survey offices on Battery. Storms come out of a place in the north Pacific, high latitudes, pulse after pulse of weather (storms deflected north in summer). San Francisco, North Beach, like living on the bow of a ship. Over the dark running seas, from November on, breaking in rains and flying cloud bits on the sharp edges of Telegraph hill.

A habitat; midway between two other summer-and winter-ranges, Berkeley and Marin county . Who would not, en-route, stop off in North Beach? To buy duck eggs, drop into Vesuvio, City Lights, get sesame oil or wine, walk up Grant to this or that place. Or living there; the hum of cable-car cables under the street — lit-up ships down on the docks working all night — the pre-dawn crashes of the Scavengers’ trucks. Spanning years from a time when young women would get arrested for walking barefoot, to the barebottom clubs of Broadway now tending tourist tastes from afar.

A habitat. The Trans-America pyramid, a strikingly wasteful and arrogant building, stands square on what was once called Montgomery block, a building that housed the artists and revolutionaries of the thirties and forties. Kenneth Rexroth, many others, lived there; foundations of post-war libertarianism; moves that became publicly known as “beat” in the middle fifties. This emphasis often neglected the deeply dug-in and committed thinkers and artists of the era who never got or needed much media-fame; who were the culture that nourished so much. Many people risking all — following sometimes the path of excess and not always going beyond folly to the hoped-for wisdom. Yet, like the sub-Aleutian storms, pulse after pulse came out of North Beach from the fifties forward that touched the lives of people around the world.

I worked the docks in those days. “Down to Pier 23 to work, Smith-Rice cranes, and Friday a white egret that fluttered down on the pier, dwarfing the seagulls, riffled its wings and feathers delicately a few times then flew off back in the direction from which it came.” 23.Xl. 52

“It is of no particular significance that I sit writing Chinese characters and practice pronouncing them in Japanese; it’s all here: vines in the Mediterranean, taro-patches in Melanesia, the clover yards or Vancouver island – the eye sees, the hand moves, the world moves in and through; like a complex spiral shell. ” — 4. II . 54

And, a Peoples World headline from October, 1958

Outmoded Capitalism
Threatens Humanity
With Multiple Perils

— while walking to Gino and Carlos, another place we met and drank (Jack Spicer gave me a whiskery hug) —

“The necessity to roam at wild . . . large, useless, and nowhere scenes, to follow the city cat-track down, ‘out of my head’ etc. — we need the big gamble of a physical economic urban Void in which you have to dive … ” — 3, XI. 58

That close, loose, circle of comrades, lovers, freaks, and friends (how many we mourn already!) in the rolling terrain of North Beach (virtually the only place in California that didn’t freeze out plants in the cold snap of December 1972, in fact, warmer than any place else in San Francisco except for Noe Valley, and having the most frost-free days per year of any place in the U. S. short of Florida) is the rich soil of much beauty, and the good work of hatching something else in America, pray it cracks the shell in time.

Gratitude to the Spirits of the Place; may all Beings flourish.

Many people know me as the Digger archivist. I have the website, Digger Archives (www.diggers.org), which has been up and running since 1992. Lots of folks have used the primary source materials that are archived there to inspire and get inspired by the fascinating social revolutionaries who took the name of the 17th century Diggers to carry out a program of autonomous collective actions in the Haight-Ashbury starting in 1966. Many people have read the rip-roaring account in the 400-page book Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan, one of the two people who started publishing street manifestos and soon began a series of programs all without charge, including Free Feeds in the Panhandle, the first Free Stores ever, the Free Bakery at All Saints Church, the Free Medical Clinic, the Free City Bank, etc. The name Emmett Grogan became widely known, even to the point that some people doubted such a person existed. What was not widely known was the name of the other person responsible for founding the Diggers. In the Digger Papers, Emmett called him Billy Landout. He was known as Billy Digger to many. Eventually, his true identity became known. Billy Murcott was as elusive as Emmett Grogan was recognizable. Billy never grabbed the limelight. To this day, he tries to maintain the anonymity that the Diggers initially espoused. It was the idea of his friends to set up this GoFundMe page.

In mid-December, 2022, Billy had a stroke that put him in the hospital for two weeks. He’s back home now (on the same Brooklyn street where he and Emmett grew up as childhood friends). He is in rehab and is doing well. All his friends have finally been able to breathe a sigh of relief. What we want to do now is help Bill with his medical bills. Bill never made a cent on his stake to fame as the co-founder of the San Francisco Diggers. He drove a cab until his early 80s when Covid made it impossible. His financial situation is, like so many octogenarians, not prosperous. Please help if you can. Thanks.

https://gofund.me/96bcdae3

The photo gallery for William Gedney has been substantially updated to include the first high-resolution images of the first Digger Free Feeds. Check it out: https://diggers.org/william_gedney.htm

Serendipity is always lurking around the corner to jump unsuspecting into the path of daily routine. This past week the spirit jumped out once more to provide a jaunt into the historical dimension.

I made contact with Lucas Natali who is researching Tie-Dye in the counterculture He is interested in the origins of tie-dye among hippies, culminating in its first public prolific splash of color at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. In searching through my notes on the Diggers and their role in the introduction of tie-dyeing into the Haight-Ashbury scene, I ran across a reference to Luna Moth in one of the bibliographic listings of Peter Berg’s writings. Luna Moth was one of the key people who brought the ancient art of Tie-Dye to life and taught people at the Trip Without A Ticket free store in 1967 how to create the beautiful fabrics that became the hallmark of the counterculture.

The reference in the bibliography of Peter’s writings was to an article titled “Trucking Into New England” and it was included in Jodi Palladini’s (aka Luna Moth’s) book Roll Your Own (co-edited with Beverly Dubin). I had never heard of this piece of writing by Peter so I was eager to track it down. Fortunately, the Summer of Love Archives book collection had a copy. Looking through it at first I was stymied. None of the chapters are attributed to particular authors. I didn’t find any chapter with the exact title “Trucking Into New England” but finally at the very end of the book is a listing of “Credits” and in the smallest print that these septuagenarian eyes can discern was this notation: “Newsletter, pp. 167-9: Peter Berg.” Here is what is on those two pages:

If the Credits were hard on the eyes, this was worse. No wonder I passed it by the first time through looking through the book for Peter’s piece. If you read it (see enlarged images of the individual pages, below) indeed it does sound like a newsletter. The title that was transcribed for Peter’s bibliography is actually the first part of the first sentence: “Trucking into New England with video letters from the planetarian West!”

Here then is a most rare document. Peter’s four-page letter back to Luna Moth is a first-person account of the caravan that the family of Diggers undertook in 1971 heading out from the Red House in Forest Knolls to points easterly and roundabouts. Coyote talked about this in his book. But I had never seen an account written at the time. The “Homeskin” manifesto, yes. But “Trucking …” is not so much a manifesto as a journal account of some of the scenes they encountered. Read it to understand the idea that would eventually lead back to San Francisco and the founding of Planet Drum as one of the Bioregional Movement’s nerve centers.

I will post all four pages below at high enough resolution that even septuagenarians can read the content easily. But here is the one paragraph I want to highlight in this celebration of serendipitous moments:

“Showing tapes the next night was an enormous-sized intimate event. Video tape reflects the real-time surface of life processes and events, and unedited tape stretches past the usual span of filmic attention to make a tattoo on the skin of time. We watched tribal home movies pulling together consciousness from both sides of the continental divide.”

That’s IT! “Tattoo on the skin of time” is a perfect description of Peter’s cinematic sense of everyday “life processes and events.” Not only is it the apt description of the video letters that Peter was filming on the Homeskin Caravan in 1968, but it can also be seen as the underlying aesthetic to describe the other important film project that he produced—NOWSREAL. That was the movie that Peter Berg and Kelly Hart filmed in 1968 in the last three months of Free City, three years before the Homeskin Caravan. I finally have the perfect description for NOWSREAL to use on that page in the Digger Archives—”a tattoo on the skin of time.”

Diane di Prima left our plane of existence this past Sunday (25 Oct 2020). I recently came across the attached document in my researches, and wanted to share it with everyone. This is an early printing of Diane’s Revolutionary Letters, soon after she moved to San Francisco in 1968 and joined in Free City. Free City was the Digger project that wove together dozens of communes that had formed out of the Summer of Love.

These are the first fifteen poems of what eventually were sixty-three published by City Lights. This set of fifteen was originally printed by the New York Communication Company which was inspired by the SF Communication Company which itself was inspired by the Diggers. The NY Com/Co publication of the Revolutionary Letters was then reprinted widely in the underground press (such as the attached excerpt from the underground literary journal Quixote, thanks to Independent Voices).

In Revolutionary Letter #11, Diane mentions going on a free food run with Kirby Doyle to supply the Free City Convention which was held at the Carousel Ballroom on May 1, 1968. This was one of the Digger events that inspired the Sutter Street Commune to set up the Free Print Shop and start publishing the inter-communal newsletter Kaliflower the following year.

These poems seem eerily reminiscent of the present as our democracy is under attack by many of the forces that Diane foresaw half a century ago.

Click to access diane-di-prima_revolutionary-letters_from-quixote-v4-n1-1968-1.pdf