Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties/Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties (1996)(Rockument)(Disc 1 of 2)[Mac-PC].iso/mac/MAIN/TUNEIN/TUNEIN01.DIR/00383_Field_At the Handle of the Kettle.txt

Text File | 1995-06-01 | 12KB | 79 lines

At The Handle Of The Kettle
by Steve Leiper

   Somewhere between what is and what should be, it's really happening, baby.  But what is it that's happening?
   Is a new civilization being born?  Is the communal spirit leading us to the New Jerusalem, to Christmas on Earth, through love and compassion and sharing?
   Or is it really the same old scene in new delirious dress, the selling of Psychedelia to the Compleat Hippie, a capitalist conspiracy?
   Or worse yet, are we on the road toward a wrong-headed, super spin-out revolution of ruin, building on defiant acts in savage sideshows, where THEM and US fight forever?
   Food, clothing, shelter.  Do they just appear on schedule?
   The "American Way" sez:  if everyone will go out and produce and get it for themselves and keep it for themselves, we will have an abundant society.
Nature is raped, alienation from God and from ourselves sets in, and we growl louder over the poisoned bones, build a variety of prisons and worse-than-useless appendages...Not just in the larger scene, OUT THERE, but in our pads, in our minds.
   The Indian way was to give it away.
   If everybody did their bit and gave the fruits away, all would be taken care of, the community would be harmonious with itself and with God/Nature.
I Ching sez:  "All beings have need of nourishment from above.  But the gift of good comes in its own time, and for this one must wait."
   In the here & now, groups of individuals are acting to feed the peoples, in the open and for free.  As they say, it's free because it's yours.
   In the Hashberry they're known as the Diggers.  In Berkeley, the Provos.
   Curious...and hungry...I made the scene.

DIGGING THE DIGGERS

   Offers of Thanxgiving dinners bobbed up like turkeys, but I specially wanted to dig into the Diggers Meatfeast on Page Street, so there went with new and oldfound friends.  We sat in the storefront window munching melons as other peoples drifted in.  A long feastable of doors took shape in the center of the room.  We talked with a cat whose place it was, he sed it would eventually be a granary, i.e., supply depot for whole grain brown rice, wheat, oats, barley, beans.  "Perfect!"
   People were coming in droves, the room filling up with beautiful people, full of smiles and amazement.  Little kids bounced up from the table after balloons.  Then the food was brought out from the back room on platters held above the reach of the crowd.  The goodies disappeared before they hit the table, in a friendly tussle.
   Fingers made before forks grabbed for slabs of roasted meat, pieces of chicken, loose-leafed lettuce, sprouts of Brussels, globs of sweet potato, chunks of baked taters, nuts, candy, tobacco.  There was more than enough for all in this slow writhing meat feast/dance.
   People flowed around and through themselves, happy, grooving, eating, smiling, turned on, digging each other and what was happening.  Impossible not to feel the spirit, to partake in it, to add to it.  Whatta gas!
   Everywhere kids were saying things like "This is the grooviest Thanxgiving I've ever had!"  and meaning it.  One chick sed "My faith is restored!"  Mine too.  Goodies floated past, in front of smiling faces.
   A friend told me of a trip he had taken in which everything was so right "there was no room for any bad vibrations to get in."  I sed that must be what was happening at that moment.  It was a joyously expanding scene with not a sign of a bad trip.

FLIPSIDE

   Then I wandered, scatting, into the back room, mainly to say to whomever was there the same things I'd felt & sed out front.  When I got there a totally different spirit was present.  It seemed a dark one.  Five or six cats were standing around.  I felt I had intruded, but still tried to continue the flow of what I had felt, "This is too much..." but the words came out meaning something else entirely.  My glance took in the ooze of garbage, a collage of chicken bones, vegetable matter and flesh on the floor, extending up the walls, a solid layer of mire.  The vibrations and the visual scene took me to the flipside of what I had felt in the outer room, and to the brink of cosmic horror.  I glimpsed again a vision from years past, in which I saw that the "conditions at the center were not right", to revolve around it would bring about a chaotic conglomeration of broken & twisted bodies, a scene lasting eternally.
   At that moment I had, as some Diggers have sed, "a healthy respect for eternity," and turned and left.
   As I entered the outer room, I saw many people splitting out to the street, there were shouts, a feeling of paranoia & panic.  Someone had heard a siren and had yelled "Raid!"  Someone else was saying "It's only thunder!"  Had there been a sound, a thunderclap, at that strange timewarp moment?
   One cat, very nervous throughout the feast, sed what he'd been saying since the beginning:  What is this?!  What's going on?"  Someone tried to sing "We shall overcome," a few others joined in, but it petered out.  I left with a cat who had felt the same chilly change come over the scene before the siren & the reaction.  "It's the Land of Yes," he sed, "Where everything is free and there's no hassle for anything."
   Part of a poem by Ann Rivers sez:
"I saw a red blinding
spiral
and I saw nothing
of peace in eternity...."

INTO THE FRAME

"Put us down," a Digger told me.  "Call us a bunch of neo-fascistic reactionaries trying to recover from a college education.  Or whatever.  But don't try to explain what's happening, you'll end up explaining it away.  The people won't do anything when there's no mystery."
   We were rapping over coffee on Haight Street.  The Fire Department had been hassling them at the Page garage.  Seems you can't even melt tar in your backyard to fix a leaky roof.  The garage was shaping up, the facade growing into a bright FREE FRAME OF REFERENCE.
   "What kind of people are we?  We're the kind of people who want, who want more, nothing is ever enough....I'm tired of getting kicked in the head.  They keep telling me I can't live.....
   "We're gonna stage a street happening Saturday, carol singers, motorcycle gangs, the works...I mean what can they do, right?  Two thousand people on the sidewalk, that's what the sidewalk's for, right?....Get outta my way!
   "Main thing we're after is to provide the basics:  food, shelter, clothing, right?  So people can live.  Otherwise they die, naked in the street.
   "All this Love bullshit around here....they don't know what love is.  When that kid got shot at Hunters Point and the cops were firing into the windows of the building where all those kids were lying on the floor...Afterward these Love cats wanted to give Mayor Shelley a rose!  I'm not gonna lie down in the street, I don't believe in that anymore.  If they want riots and molotov cocktails that's what they'll get.  There's THEM and there's US.
   "We don't have heroes.  I'm against everything Bob Dylan stands for.  I dig his music but I hate what he stands for...making millions, selling thru the record clubs.  Bill Graham makes 15 thousand a month and gives away turkeys, isn't that nice, thank you Bill.  Leary got kicked out of the theater he was doing his act in 'cause he wanted more money.  Now he's doing it in a nightclub where they sell drinks.
   "We don't want people coming down off Telegraph Hill donating clothes to the 'bums'.  Or food either, not as charity, we'll throw those apples back in their faces.  One guy in a business suit came down and gave us a ten dollar bill.  We burned it, right in front of him.  We only accept stuff from hip people.
   "We know people with a farm up in Mendocino, and there's a bunch of hip farmers in Ohio who'll send food to us.  But I'm a city person myself.
   "If a Digger wants to do something, he just does it, it's action, it's doing.  We don't have any commitment or schedule." Someone volunteers, sez "I'll do it tonite, and that's that."
   "Every day is Halloween for us, or Christmas, any time we want to throw our energies into a project."

OCCUPANCY LESS THAN 50 FRIENDS

   The Diggers ran afoul of the Public Health Department, in the person of Inspector Chinn, who laid a Notice to Abate Nuisance on them.
   It seems that 50 people or more constitutes public assembly, and there is a whole shelf of health and building codes that can be fired at you.
   The Notice reads:
   "You are hereby directed to vacate the premises until such time that adequate toilet facilities are provided."
   A Digger told us, "They're trying to say we're serving the public.  They want to make a distinction between private and public.  I call them people.  Friends."

HEATERS NEEDED

   The Diggers garage needs wood stoves or kerosene heaters.  Anyone having or knowing where to locate some please go by the garage or leave word in the Psychedelic Shop.

ACROSS THE GREAT WATER

Mean while, in Berkeley, the Provos have been holding forth in Civic Center Park, corner of Center & Grove, every day at 4.  Just bring yr bowl & yr spoon & yr Heart.
   We talked with some of the Provos at their headquarters, behind the Blind Lemon, 2362 San Pablo Ave.  Thanxgiving had come and gone.  The Provos had made the St. Anthony's Kitchen scene, organized a car pool to get there, and sed they came away with an awareness of the difference between the spirit that exists at missions like St. Anthony's and the spirit that lives in Civic Center Park when the lid is flipped from the soup can and the people gather around.

   "There shouldn't be a line between those who give and those who receive," a Provo told us.  It was that kind of division that they had felt at the mission, and just exactly what the Provos and the Diggers are overcoming.
   Where does the food come from?  Contributions, scroungings, gifts of money.  A recent Berkeley Barb story heralded them as being "for love, not lucre," but the man we talked with said money contributions are being accepted.
   "I'm going to go to the slaughterhouses and the bakeries and to farms down in the valley.  If I was from, say, the Catholic Worker, I could get lots of stuff.  But we don't have a front of any kind."
   The name Provo was adopted, he sed, because "I just happened to like it," but he added that it was obviously modeled on the Dutch Provos who hit the public eye during the protests against the recent Dutch royal wedding.
   "The Provos in the Netherlands have power," he sed, "because there are many other people there who support them.  I see the possibility of such a movement really taking hold in Berkeley, but not in San Francisco or, say, Ann Arbor.  Berkeley has a large liberal-radical population.  It's kind of a haven.
   He sed he saw the movement as more individualist than anarchist, but that there really is no ideology, no meetings are held.  "People just show up at the park every day.  We're more political than the Diggers, but 'dropped-out political' to be sure.  Basically we're against the anti-FUN group in society.  Our people bring food and jump-ropes."
   He sed he would like to see someone -- perhaps one of the Scheers--get into the Berkeley city government, so that work might be done that would directly influence the community.
   "We don't expect trouble from the police," he said.  But his accounts of increasing general harassment of beats in Berkeley since January '66, including the issuing of tickets for jaywalking and hitchhiking, seemed to cast a shadow over his optimism.

Copyright © 1995 Stephen Leiper