The Human Be-In was an event held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park Polo Fields on January 14, 1967. 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.
The Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder appear in this short film documenting the Human Be-In that took place on Saturday 14 January 1967 in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Gary and Allen are chanting individually and together in front of a crowd of thousands.
The Human Be-In was announced on the cover of the fifth issue of the San Francisco Oracle as "A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In". The occasion was a new California law banning the use of the psychedelic drug LSD that had come into effect on October 6, 1966. The speakers at the rally were all invited by Bowen, the main organizer. They included Timothy Leary in his first San Francisco appearance, who set the tone that afternoon with his famous phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and Richard Alpert (soon to be known as "Ram Dass"), and poets like Allen Ginsberg, who chanted mantras, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. Other counterculture gurus included comedian Dick Gregory, Lenore Kandel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jerry Rubin, and Alan Watts. Music was provided by a host of local rock bands including Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Blue Cheer, most of whom had been staples of the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom. The "Underground chemist" Owsley Stanley provided massive amounts of his "White Lightning" LSD, specially produced for the event, as well as 75 twenty-pound (9 kg) turkeys, for free distribution by the Diggers.
The Human Be-In was later recalled by poet Allen Cohen (who assisted the artist Bowen in the organizational work), as a meld that brought together philosophically opposed factions of the San Francisco-based counterculture at the time: on one side, the Berkeley radicals, who were tending toward increased militancy in response to the U.S. government's Vietnam war policies, and, on the other side, the rather non-political Haight-Ashbury hippies, who urged peaceful protest. Their means were drastically different, but they held many of the same goals.
According to Cohen's own account, his friend Bowen provided much of the "organizing energy" for the event, and Bowen's personal connections also strongly influenced its character.
A Human Be-In was put on in Denver, Colorado in July 1967 by Chet Helms and Barry Fey to harness the energy of the famed San Francisco event that occurred in January and promote their new Family Dog Productions venue, The Family Dog Denver. The event attracted 5,000 people and featured performances by the Grateful Dead, Odetta and Captain Beefheart. Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey were said to have also been in attendance.
The Posters from the Be-In by Stanley Mouse and Anton Kelley (signed by many of the participants)
An interview with Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia for the mini-series "The History of Rock 'N' Rolll". I believe this was from Volume 6. This is the unedited interview. A brief tour of the GD Vault with Dick Latvala is an added bonus at the end of the interview.
Jerry speaks about the counter culture, his journey through music and his career with The Grateful Dead. Witty, reflective and exteremly profound.
Two gunfighters separate and experience surreal visions on their journey through the mythical American Wild West.
The film is loosely based on Hermann Hesse's 1922 novel Siddhartha, and 1930 novel Narcissus and Goldmund (wherein two young friends take divergent paths in life, to reunite and share similar perspectives); surrealistically adapted as a musical Western. Lead writer Joe Massot said his inspiration came from when he joined the Beatles in India, when they were studying Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in early 1968. Massot said he arrived to find only George Harrison and John Lennon there, after their bandmates had left the course early, and the two Beatles "locked into some sort of meditation duel ... to see who was the stronger character".
Massot initially asked Harrison to provide the film's soundtrack, following his work on Wonderwall, which Massot directed. According to Levon Helm of The Band, Harrison discussed making Zachariah as an Apple Films project starring Bob Dylan and The Band, in late 1968. The following April, Rolling Stone announced that Cream's drummer Ginger Baker and The Band were to be major players in the film.
This film was billed as "The first electric Western". It features appearances and music supplied by rock bands from the 1970s, including the James Gang, New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, White Lightning and Country Joe and the Fish as "The Cracker Gang". Fiddler Doug Kershaw has a musical cameo as does Elvin Jones as a gunslinging drummer named Job Cain.
Bausch’s powerfully dramatic, dreamlike work, which has come to define the genre of tanztheater, or dance theater, over the last 40 years.
But when Bausch created “Bluebeard,” there was no concept of tanztheater. This mixture of dance, theater, fragmented music and patchworked scenes was new and a turning point in her career — a departure from straightforwardly expressive dance pieces, like “The Rite of Spring,” which she had created after taking over the Wuppertal company in 1973.
When it was first presented “Bluebeard” astonished and angered many spectators, who were disturbed by Bausch’s stop-and-start use of the score and her relentless depiction of male-female violence. Audiences screamed abuse at the dancers and slammed the doors of the theater as they departed in droves.
The Naked Civil Servant is a 1975 made-for-television biographical comedy-drama film directed by Jack Gold and produced by Verity Lambert. It was adapted for film by Philip Mackie, based on Quentin Crisp's 1968 book of the same name. The movie stars John Hurt, Patricia Hodge and John Rhys-Davies. It was originally broadcast on 17 December 1975 on the British channel ITV. In 1976, it was shown on the US channel WOR and later PBS when Thames Television and WOR-TV exchanged programming for one week. For his performance, Hurt won the BAFTA for Best Actor in 1976 and the production also won the 1976 Prix Italia. The title of the book and the film (naked civil servant), is derived from his time working as a nude model in a government-funded art school.
"Power prefers darkness. If it is exposed to light, it erodes."
Here's a transcription of a key part of his replies to the questions around how an anarchist society work, and how to communicate anarchist ideas. There are several comment threads below that present interpretations that are quite different than what he actually said here. He doesn't describe a final, utopian, end-state, and admits that he doesn't know what that would look like, but recognizes the on-going human tendency to question, challenge and dismantle illegitimate 'structures of authority, domination and hierarchy.' Some may disagree that this describes their own understanding of anarchism, but it seems to represent Chomsky's sense of the term.
"It's not a specific set of doctrines but a tendency in human thought and action which tries to detect and discover structures of authority, domination and hierarchy and challenge them - ask them to demonstrate their legitimacy, recognizing that they are not self-justifying. They have a burden of justification. That’s true all across the spectrum of human life, from patriarchal families to imperial systems, and everything in between. Wherever you find a structure of domination, hierarchy, someone giving orders, someone taking them, you have to ask if that’s legitimate. You cannot assume and you shouldn’t assume that it’s legitimate because it’s been like that. That’s not a justification. You have to ask, “is it legitimate?“ When you do, you generally find that it can’t be justified. There are cases where you could make up a justification, but try it. It’s pretty hard. Most of the time the justification is around the way power is distributed, but that’s not a justification. Anarchism is the effort to discover such systems, and when they can’t justify themselves, to dismantle them and to move towards greater freedom, justice, opportunity, individual creativity, cooperative activity, and so on. It’s just a tendency in history and I don’t think it’s hard to communicate to people. I think they take it for granted if it’s brought to their attention. You see it.
Take for example: one of the major achievements of the last 50 years in many societies - in the United States and in many others - has been the expansion of women’s rights. It’s changed enormously. How did it happen? Well, as soon as the structures of oppression were identified, they kind of disappeared. Not instantly of course. There’s still plenty of resistance. It’s a general truth that power prefers darkness. If it’s exposed to the light it erodes. This happens all through history.
Where does this lead? What will the final goal be? I don’t think anyone is smart enough to say that, to see what that will be. This is a constant, ongoing effort to expand the realm of justice, freedom, independence, breakdown of authority and so on, and I don’t see that it should have any limits."
"Hopefully, it would be like your describe it, but I still have a little doubt. And...um...isn't it too demanding, you know? It's easier to be led by authority. I'm, myself, sort of an activist, and sometimes I regret it...uh...all the time. It's terribly time-consuming, uh, it costs me a lot of energy, the outcome is very uncertain, it's not very rewarding, not all the time. It's easier to be led by authorities. So, isn't the idea...too much demanding?"
"That's basically an argument for slavery." - Chomsky
A 25 minute documentary focusing on the characters that inhabit King Street in Newtown, Sydney Australia - aired on ABC TV 9.2.95.
Newtown at the time was a 19th century workers suburb that had been taken over by diverse counter culture, artistic, punk and outsiders in the 1980s. By 1995 it was in full bloom and was about to enter a 5 year decline of gentrification and real estate market ethics.
I highly recommend this film to capture something of the energy and spirit that was the inner city of Sydney in the 1980s and 90s.
The film was raised in a Senate committee hearing regarding its rating, as it features some queer content.
In this video, there are two different dance sequences performed by extreme Wiemar Republic cabaret dancer, actress, and extreme performance artist Anita Berber. Each sequence is from a silent German film - the first from ‘Unheimliche Geschichten' ['Eerie Tales'] (1919) and the second from 'Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler' (1922).
While the second dance sequence is known, I believe that the first has never been noticed before. And it is this first performance that takes us a little nearer to the extraordinarily extreme Berber of the decadent 'Die Weisse Maus' [‘White Mouse’] cabaret in Friedrichstrasse, Berlin.
Sebastian Droste and Anita Berber in 1922
Finally, there is a single dance sequence by Sebastian Droste, Anita Berber’s husband and collaborator, extreme dancer, gay poet and actor. It is a performance that seems to capture something of one of the kinds of perfume exuded in Berlin cabaret clubs during the Wiemar Republic. The fragment comes Hans Werckmeister’s 1920 'Algol - Tragödie der Macht' ('Tragedy of Power'), a film thought lost until a print was discovered in 2010.
Anita Berber, more than almost anyone, epitomises for me the excesses and decadences of the German Roaring Twenties, with its fascination with addiction, morbidity, narcissism, ecstasy and horror.
Addicted to cocaine and morphine, the bisexual Berber's drug of choice was equal parts of chloroform and ether. She would dip a white rose into the potentially lethal concoction and slowly chew off each of the petals. She later segued into a cocktail of cocaine, opium and cognac.
As a stage performer, Berber gave extreme erotic fantasy pieces with dancer, poet and husband Sebastian Droste - 'Suicide', 'Morphium' and 'Mad House'.
She famously appeared, often naked, at 'Die Weisse Maus' ('The White Mouse') cabaret in Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. This was a small exclusive cabaret club of ninety-nine seats, where the audience wore masks for anonymity.
Of her performances there, it has been written:
"After midnight, the guests were ready for the apocalyptic moment when the blouse-less girls pranced up the stage ramp. Anita's girls were powdered in deadly pallid shades and appeared like figures of death incarnate.
But Anita performed with bitter sincerity. Each intrusion annoyed her. She responded to the audience's heckling with show-stopping obscenities and indecent provocations.
Berber had been known to spit brandy on them or stand naked on their tables, dousing herself in wine whilst simultaneously urinating.
It was not long before the entire cabaret one night sank into a groundswell of shouting, screams and laughter. Anita jumped off the stage in fuming rage, grabbed the nearest champagne bottle and smashed it over a businessman's head.'
It was Anita's last evening, she was sacked without notice.'
Berber's relationships were as unconventional and complicated as her stage endeavours.
Berber in the 1920s
She married wealthy young screenwriter Eberhard von Nathusiu in 1919, but soon after began a series of lesbian affairs, including one with the young Marlene Dietrich. At the same time, she explored the world of free-lancing S and M sex. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1921.
In the following year, Berber met dancer and poet Sebastian Droste and understood that together they could create something theatrically bold, new and shocking, such as their production 'The Dances of Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy'. They married in 1923. However, the pair drifted into greater cocaine use and the relationship failed.
Then in 1924, she married American dancer Henri Chatin-Hoffman, whom she'd met at Berlin's Blüthne-Saal. They began performing through Europe and the Middle East with their new production 'Dances of Sex and Ecstasy'. But in Zagreb, Berber publicly insulted the King of Yugoslavia and was imprisoned for six weeks. Returning to Berlin, the pair returned to the cabaret circuit.
Almost appropriately Anita Berber died in 1928, surrounded by statues of the Virgin Mary and empty morphine syringes. Or so the myth went -- in fact she collapsed while performing at a Beirut nightclub. She was diagnosed with a state of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, and died four months later in Bethanien Hospital in Kreuzberg.
There is not a large visual record of this extraordinary Wiemar Republic icon.
While in Düsseldorf in 1925, Otto Dix painted her portrait 'The Dancer Anita Berber', unofficially known as 'The Scarlet Whore of Babylon'.
Berber also appeared in nine silent films in the teens and twenties.
She played Else (with Conrad Veidt) in the 1919 Richard Oswald film 'Anders als die Anderen' ('Different From The Others'), a film based on the work of famed pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirshfeldt.
She also appeared briefly and uncredited as the tuxedo-ed dancer in Fritz Lang's 1922 four hour silent epic 'Doktor Mabuse Der Spieler' ('The Gambler').
In 1925 in New York City, dancer Sebastian Droste met Francis Bruguière (1879 – 1945) a photographer from San Francisco, and together they composed over 60 photographs for a project they titled The Way, part of the promotional material for a proposed Expressionist film starring Droste.
The film never got made, but Droste sent a handful of the stills to Die Dame magazine with an article titled Photography As Art: Remarks on Recent Photographs by Francis Bruguière. Bruguière made his living photographing for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar and as the official photographer of the New York Theatre Guild.
Droste is rarely remembered anymore except in the context of his brief collaboration with Weimar, Berlin’s most notorious cabaret performer.
He was born Willy Knobloch in Hamburg in 1898. His father owned a silk-stocking factory in Chemnitz, and Droste lived a privileged life growing-up. As a teenager he attended an art school where he excelled in languages and dance.
He was drafted into the army in 1915 and fought on the Western Front. When he turned 27-years-old in 1919, he moved to Berlin and changed his name to Sebastian Droste.
He was hired by Celly De Rheidt as a lead dancer in her cabaret show Dance Of Beauty. He became a moderately successful ”naked” dancer, choreographer and poet. His first poem appeared in Der Sturm magazine in 1919, which published 15 more of his pieces in the following years.
He took the name of the near-naked, arrow-pierced saint whose martyrdom he burlesqued in his stage act. In costume or as a civilian, he embodied a dark, calculated glamour inspired the nightmarish contemporary expressionistic German cinema. His drug taking was the greatest factor in the success or failure of a any given night’s performance of his stage act.
In the summer of 1922, he met the decadent, androgynous Anita Berber; both were fame hungry cocaine addicts. Berber’s hair was fashionably cut into a short bob and was frequently bright red, seen in the 1925 portrait of her by the German painter Otto Dix.
Droste was skinny and had black hair with gelled up curls that looked like sideburns. In their act neither of them wore much more than G-strings, or even that, and Berber occasionally wore a corsage, placed below her boobs. She wore heavy make-up with jet black lipstick painted across the heart-shaped part of her skinny lips, and charcoaled eyes.
Their dances, with titles such as Cocaine and Morphium, broke boundaries with their androgyny and total nudity, but it was their public appearances that really challenged the social taboos of the era. Their bisexuality was much gossiped about. In addition to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of the pair’s favorite forms of inebriation was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl, stirred with a white rose, the petals of which they would then eat.
Droste was the perfect partner for Berber. He became her manager and together they produced The Dances Of Depravity, Horror And Ecstasy which was staged in a theatre in Vienna and then toured in 1922 and 1923.
Droste and Berber were combustible in combination. He was as much a hustler as an artist, finding a way to repackage Expressionism and other avant-garde trends in a way that could be absorbed by the club-hopping bourgeoisie. The 1920s were a decade whose excesses were reflected, exaggerated, and grotesqued in the clubs and cabarets of Germany.
Aside from her addiction to narcotic drugs, Berber was also an alcoholic. In 1928, at the age of 29, she suddenly gave up alcohol completely, but died later the same year. According to Mel Gordon, in The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Debauchery, she had been diagnosed with severe tuberculosis while performing abroad. After collapsing in Damascus, she returned to Germany and died in a Kreuzberg hospital on 10 November 1928, although rumour had it that she died surrounded by empty morphine syringes. Berber was buried in a pauper's grave in St. Thomas Cemetery in Neukölln.
This documentary begins with the arrival of a new breed of gentleman criminal out of the ashes of the English Civil War - the highwayman. Heavily romanticised in literature, these glamorous gangsters became a social menace on the roads and a political thorn in the side of the creaking British state - threatening to steal our wallets and our hearts. But underneath the dashing image of stylish robbers on horseback lay a far darker reality.
Then, we take to the high seas in search of the swashbuckling pirates of the golden age of piracy during the early 18th century. Following in the wake of the infamous Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, Calico Jack and others, we see the devastating impact these pirates had during an era of colonial expansion and how, by plundering the vast network of seaborne trade, they became the most wanted outlaws in the world.
Finally, we get a look at urban crime, fraud and corruption in the 18th century, uncovering a fascinating rogues gallery of charmers, fraudsters and villains. Charmers like thief and serial escapee Jack Sheppard, so notorious that almost a quarter of a million people turned up to witness his hanging.
