Amcult Exam 2, Lecture 16 And 17

Front 1

the beginning of 1966

Back 1

Beginning A Year of Promise
They smoked dope on the streets
People were happy
The 1st head shop “The
Psychedelic Shop” had
opened, signaling the
beginning of the
psychedelic revolution
The year began with
everything going well

Front 2

enter the diggers in 1966

Back 2

Enter The Diggers
As we discussed, the Diggers were formed from members of the San
Francisco Mime Troup.
By May of 1966 the Mime Troup was being outcast by the city:
• The newly formed SF Arts Resources Development Committee
held its first meeting without inviting members of the Mime
Troup who crashed it and were arrested.
• The Mime Troup was cut off from receiving city funding because of
its “bawdy” performances
• The SF Recreation and Park Commission denies a permit
application from the SF Mime Troupe
By August of 1966 Mime Troup members created The Diggers as a
“revolutionary free” response to “artistic repression.

Front 3

the first breaking point of 1966

Back 3

The First Breaking Point
The first true turning point came when on September 27, 1966 a white policeman
shot and killed a Black youth in the Haight and riots broke out.
The following evening, National Guard troops
arrived in the area to enforce an 8:15 p.m. curfew.
The Berkeley chapter of Students for a
Democratic Society organized protests against
the curfew in solidarity with black militants.
The hip merchants, however, posted flyers around the neighborhood advising
their fellow Hashburians to stay indoors, consistent with their understanding
of the Buddhist third way of nonconfrontation.

The Diggers disagreed with both camps.
They posted notices of their own, advising hippies to follow their inner
impulses, and stay home or traverse the streets heedless of the state's
curfew, the New Left's call to protest, and the proprietors' counsel of
nonconfrontation.
As anarchists, their primary interest lay in fostering resolute selfsovereignty.
Two later pronouncements described the Diggers as the “F-Leader Youth"
and warned that "any man who wants to lead you is The Man. Think: why
would anyone want to lead me? Think: why should I pay for his trip?"

Front 4

when LSD became illegal

Back 4

LSD Becomes Illegal
(And so does Love)
On 6 October 1966, the date when LSD became a controlled substance,
members of the Haight organized a Love Pageant Rally to reaffirm the drug's
potential as a positive stimulus to the expansion of consciousness.
"Without confrontation," the
hippies said "we wanted to
create a celebration of
innocence. We were not guilty
of using illegal substances. We
were celebrating transcendental
consciousness. The beauty of
the universe. The beauty of
being."

Thousands showed up for the event, read a "declaration of independence" after
which many placed a tab of acid on their tongues and swallowed in unison.
Music was provided by the Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding
Company. Kesey and the Pranksters were also on hand in the legendary bus.

Front 5

2 things that Bill Graham was worried about with the acid tests

Back 5

1) Kesey was espousing his “Never trust a prankster”
philosophy which began to worry everyone about what he
might try at the event
2) The following day Winterland was to be used as a
rally for Jerry Brown, hip governor of California who
was running for President. Who knows what dire tricks
Kesey might leave in the hall?

Front 6

freeing the streets

Back 6

Free the Streets
The Diggers decided that the idea of
regulating pedestrian traffic (i.e. no
jaywalking) was actually a state plot to benefit
commercial interests.
On October 31 the Diggers decided to free
the streets.
They set up their yellow, wooden Free Frame of
Reference at the corner of Haight and Masonic.
With two puppets from the Mime Troupe (each
standing about eight feet high) they warmed up
a crowd of about five hundred with a skit, "Any
Fool on the Street," in which the puppets passed
repeatedly through the Frame while carrying on
an absurd, boisterous argument about which
side constituted the "inside."

With the assembled throng now primed for participation, the Diggers
proceeded to the next stage of their plan. They invited the assembled crowd to
stroll the crosswalks, in disregard of traffic law, creating as many geometrical
figures as possible. Traffic came to a standstill.
The traffic jam brought the expected police response, with five squad cars
and a paddy wagon worming their way into the intersection to unsnarl
traffic. According to the Barb, a New Left newspaper in Berkeley that
sometimes covered events in the Haight, someone noted that the police
presence "kinda creates a road-block, doesn't it?"

Front 7

the death of money at the rebirth of haight

Back 7

The Death of Money and
Rebirth of the Haight
In December the Diggers put on their Death of Money rebirth of the Haight
parade
The Digger's handbill for this event consisted only of the term NOW! in bold red
letters. The framing came more from the props that they distributed in a carefully
ordered sequence
As a crowd of thousands assembled (it is unclear how they knew where and
when to gather), a procession entered the street. First came members of the
Hell's Angels, with one of the Diggers, Phyllis Wilner, standing up from the
bike's passenger seat, wailing, "Free-eeeeeeee!" and holding one of
the NOW! signs.

Behind this leather-clad escort came a mock funeral procession, dressed in
animal-head costumes designed and bearing a coffin holding the "remains"
of the "Dead Old Haight": oversized replicas of currency and coins. The
leading mourner carried a staff topped with chrome-plated dollar signs. The
mourners sang a dirge that fused the lyric of a popular song, "You Keep Me
Hangin' On," to the melody of Chopin's Funeral March in B-flat

At a later point, the Diggers distributed recorders and pennywhistles, to
provide accompaniment for the chanting of a mantra conceived by Beat
poet Michael McClure, and two hundred rearview mirrors, which
participants used to reflect sunlight on the surrounding buildings, creating a
psychedelic light-show effect. Several Diggers also distributed flowers,
streamers, joss sticks, and the NOW! signs.
All went as planned until the police arrested two Angels and Wilner, for
standing on a moving motorcycle. The Diggers turned the procession in the
opposite direction, marching first to the Park Precinct station and then to the
downtown lockup, where they used the "coffin" to collect bail money for the
incarcerated Angels. This gesture helped cement an alliance between the
Diggers and the motorcycle gang.

Front 8

human be in

Back 8

The Human Be-In was an event in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967.[1] It was a prelude to San Francisco's Summer of Love, which made the Haight-Ashbury district a symbol of American counterculture and introduced the word "psychedelic" to suburbia.

In an attempt to counteract the growing negativity, the Tribal Elders of
the Haight decided to stage a Human Be-In in Golden Gate park. It
would be called “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In” and
would be held January 14
It would feature many of the San Francisco bands as well as all of the
Haight’s Tribal Elders.
In order to make it as inclusive and non-devisive as possible all groups from
across the Bay Area were invited: the artists, writers, the HIP merchants,
musicians, political groups from Berkeley, the Diggers
Only the Diggers didn’t show up.
At the end of the meeting, after the activities were planned, the Berkeley
politicos stood up and said: “Okay… so what are our demands going to
be?”
In reality, although the Human Be-In may have been presented as a
“Gathering of the Tribes” and designed with great spiritual and
noble intentions, it was little more than an extremely successful free
concert.
But that wasn’t how it was perceived by the rest of the country.
Older people in the mainstream saw it as evidence that America’s
youth were out of control, and America’s youth saw it as evidence
that they (young people) were in control and San Francisco was the
place to be.
The message had been sent out: Come to San Francisco.”
The Summer of Love was about to happen.

Front 9

Problem with "The summer of san francisco" song

Back 9

1) The timing was off. The song wasn’t released until June,
the migration was well under way by then.
2) The intent was wrong. The song was written to publicize
the Monterey Pop Festival.
3) Most real hippies, or freaks, HATED the song.
Compared to the music they were used to hearing
“San Francisco” was just pop pabulum.

Realizing that things were getting out of hand the
Diggers tried to bring this to everyone’s
realization with publications of their broadsides
that said things like:
“Pretty little sixteen-year-old middle class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s
about and gets picked up by a seventeen year old street dealer who spends all day
shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3000 mikes & raffles off
her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the
night before last.
The politics & ethics of ecstasy.
Rape is as common as BS on Haight Street.
By the time the song was released the Haight was
already jammed with young people, who couldn’t
take care of themselves. And following them were
people like Charles Manson who was also lured to
the Haight by the publicity and who saw the young
migrants as easy picking.

Front 10

the Monterey Pop festival

Back 10

In June, John Phillips from the Mamas and the Papas lead other
promoters in creating the first rock festival.
Not only was this the first festival featuring just about every band
imaginable, it also introduced the world to:
Janis Joplin
Jimi Hendrix
THE MONTEREY POP FESTIVAL

There was another group of individuals who had been paying attention to all the
news that was coming out of the Haight, and they also descended on the Monterey
Pop Festival like buzzards:
Record executives, producers, managers, and all the
other agents of the “business” of music.
Every single band that performed at the festival that wasn’t already under contract
was signed. With one exception:
The Grateful Dead
Where once the bands had served a community service doing free concerts,
supporting the community, being part “of” the community, they were now
professionals in the capital business of music.

Front 11

the 4 signs of the fall of 1967

Back 11

CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT
By Fall of 1967 the signs were everywhere:
1) It would be 1 year since LSD was made illegal
2) The music had been co-opted by the Monterey Pop
Festival 5 months earlier
3) The Summer of Love Human Be-In had been 2
months earlier and failed to change anything
4) The Grateful Dead were busted on October 1

Finally, after actually having been exploited by the media
for almost two years, the Haight was getting the idea that
they had, in fact, become exactly how the media had
interpreted them.
They had lost their authenticity and had become a mere
fabrication that they had assisted the media in creating.

Front 12

what's all it mean with social drama

Back 12

What’s it all Mean?
Anthropologist Victor Turner described the various units
of a community’s life as social processual elements of
social drama.
Within this Turner saw four phases:
Breech:
The infraction of some law, custom, morality in a public way.
Crisis:
A momentous juncture or turning point
Redress:
A way to limit the spread of the breech, often through ritual
sacrifice
Reintegration or recognition of schism

Front 13

the first press release of the death of hippie

Back 13

THE DEATH OF HIPPIE
The first Press Release:
The media casts nets, creates bags for the identity hungry
to climb in. Your face on TV, your style immortalized
without soul in the captions on the Chronicle. NBC says
you exist, ergo I am…
And the reflections run in perpetual anal circuits and the
FREE MAN vomits his images and laughs in the clouds
because he, 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 on the grass.

FOLLOW THE LEADER
After the initial gesture begun by the Psychedelic Shop, all the
merchants of the Haight began to give away their merchandise
in preparation for the ceremony, and what would be an exodus
from the Haight.
Big Brother and the Holding Company were closing down the Matrix
At the same time a Wake for Hippie was held at All Saints Church

Front 14

the death

Back 14

THE DEATH
Mourners danced around the flames until they sank
down to a level where they could actually jump over
the flames
The coffin was carried to the panhandle section of
Golden Gate Park and set ablaze on a funeral pyre.

Front 15

haight's response to the death

Back 15

The Haight’s Response
The Haight, through the death, responded in a very
clear, direct, and extremely rare manner to Turner’s
phases:
Breech: the influx of all the thousands of people
Crisis: The Summer of Love - articulated the problems very clearly
Redress: Literal self-sacrifice
Reintegration: self-reincarnation or magic rejuvination