A Long, Orange Trip

Just finished reading Nicholas Schou's Orange Sunshine, which tells the fantastical story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a hippie drug ring centered in Orange County ca. 1970. It's a shaggy one all right: lots of characters, not an especially neat story line, but some riveting episodes.

I first read about this outfit in Peter Conners's White Hand Society, which focuses on Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. (Leary is a key figure in the Brotherhood story.) What I learned from this book is that the Brotherhood's members were street-fighting jerks and petty criminals before they turned on. Then they went cosmic, formed a secret organization, and hatched a plan to sell enough drugs to buy an island in the South Pacific.

That didn't quite work out. Instead of retreating to an island, leader John Griggs purchased a ranch in the desert mountains near Idyllwild, only a couple of hours away from Laguna Beach, the center of their operation. That proved to be a mistake. Instead of eluding law enforcement, the move may have helped police get a bead on the operation. Also, Griggs died there after taking a huge dose of synthetic psilocybin. But the book recounts a fair amount of island time. Several members spent years in Hawaii and helped develop Maui Wowie, the strain of weed that was the rage during my high school years. They also packed a boat full of Mexican pot and sailed it to Hawaii without any navigational instruments. That was another wild ride, well narrated by Schou.

Although the title stresses the Brotherhood's signature brand of mind-melting LSD, their hashish business was the most interesting part of the book. Members trekked to Kandahar when that was an even more remote location than it is now. The first trip took several weeks and was full of twists and turns; in fact, the original destination was Turkey, but some fellow travelers convinced them that Afghanistan had the best stuff. Once there, they scored primo hash from Afghans who would have been at home in the Hebrew Bible. The Brotherhood smuggled it back to the states, often in hollowed out surfboards. The LSD, it turns out, was practically given away, all in an effort to enlighten the world, Leary style. When Leary was sent to prison, the Brotherhood paid the Weathermen to bust him out.

Yeah. Pretty wild.

Organized crime is one of my favorite genres, and there's plenty of that here. But what comes through most vividly to me is the utopian impulse behind the operation. Mostly these guys wanted to surf, drop acid, smoke hash, meditate, and get back to the land. The drugs were in many ways more sacramental than recreational. There was plenty of sex, but Griggs tried to emphasize family life, hippie style, especially on the ranch. (At first, the ranch community excluded unmarried members of the Brotherhood.)

On the edge of the operation was Mike Hynson, best known for his role in Endless Summer, which is nothing if not utopian. For you youngsters, Endless Summer was the 1966 film about two youthful surfers traveling the world in search of the perfect wave.

The Brotherhood's operation came crashing down in 1972, when law enforcement rounded up members in a multi-state raid. But several remained at large for years, and some went on to lead interesting post-Brotherhood lives.

Hats off to Nick Schou for his research on this amazing story.

On the Ground

Last week I heard from Sean Stewart, the editor of a new book on the sixties underground press called On the Ground. It joins John McMillian's recent Smoking Typewriters and its precursor, Abe Peck's Uncovering the Sixties, in reviewing the rise and fall of the underground press.

On the Ground complements those books superbly and succeeds on its own as well. Unlike them, it's studded with clips, ads, photographs, and spreads from the Berkeley Barb, San Francisco Oracle, The Black Panther, the San Francisco Express Times, and many other publications. (I've picked the California-based ones, but Sean's focus is national.)

The text features direct testimony from those who founded, contributed to, read, and otherwise helped keep these newspapers alive. We hear from John Sinclair (White Panthers), Paul Krassner (The Realist), Art Kunkin (LA Free Press), Abe Peck, Judy Gumbo Stewart (Berkeley Barb), Bill Ayers, Emory Douglas (The Black Panther), and many others.

The artists include R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gilbert Shelton (Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers), and Bruce Conner, who produced a cover for the San Francisco Oracle. As part of my Grateful Dead research, I'm learning more about both Conner and the Oracle, but I didn't know they were connected.

Sean gives us a minimal structure: ten chapters that a) describe how the work got done and b) track the fortunes of the genre. The headline version is that they got a lot of free stuff from sympathizers, sold a lot of sex ads, used photo-offset printing, worked with the goodfellas who ran (still run?) newsstand distribution, coped with various forms of internal and external strife, got a little carried away toward the end, and finally moved on to other forms of activism and professional life. (Sean concludes with a helpful "where are they now?" section.)

Between the art and the first-person accounts, On the Ground is above all immediate. It allows you to sample the publications, read the insiders' anecdotes, and make up your own mind about these publications.

If you've had your snout in Ramparts for the last few years, you'll see many familiar names. Paul Krassner, of course, was that magazine's "society editor." Jeffrey Blankfort's photographs accompanied its coverage of the Democratic National Convention in 1968, and several of his photos appear in my book. Judy Albert got her nickname from Eldridge Cleaver when he was on the Ramparts masthead. Ron Turner of Last Gasp will publish Warren Hinckle's forthcoming book on Hunter Thompson.

(Of course, fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I don't regard Ramparts as an underground publication. The whole point was that it invited comparison with Time, Esquire, Playboy, etc. Let's call this the Garner Thesis--named after the New York Times critic who thought I scanted the underground press in A Bomb in Every Issue.)

I came upon other familiar names, too. One of Norman Solomon's co-authors, Harvey Wasserman, describes how the FBI's infiltration of his underground newspaper indirectly led his collective to begin the anti-nuclear movement in Massachusetts. Jeffrey Blankfort recounts meeting David Fenton, the youngest photographer to place a photo in Life. (He was 17.) Fenton went on to work for Rolling Stone and then founded Fenton Communications, one of the big rainmakers in political communications today.

Sean avoids big conclusions, though the preface by Paul Buhle tries out a few. For example, he calls the underground press "one of the great wonders of modern cultural politics" (ix). Whatever you make of this wonder, Buhle is certainly right that this volume's unique contribution is its combination of oral history and evocative images, a combination that can be absorbed and enjoyed in a single day or savored slowly.

Dugald Stermer RIP

Dugald Stermer, path-breaking art director of Ramparts magazine, died yesterday after a long illness. He was 74.

I got the call last night from Bob Scheer, who heard about it from John Burton. Sad news indeed. I came to know Dugald while I was working on the Ramparts book. He was hugely gifted, highly respected, even beloved. He deserved all the credit he received--and more--for his work at the magazine, and he was also revered for his teaching and art.

He started at Ramparts in 1964, when it was a two-year-old Catholic literary quarterly that resembled “the poetry annual of a midwestern girls school.” But as Ramparts began running more controversial content, Dugald transformed its look and earned the respect of Warren Hinckle and Bob. Between 1966 and 1968, the trio produced a magazine that, according to the New York Times, restored the lapsed institution of muckraking, put showmanship back into journalism, and gave radicalism a commercial megaphone.

Dugald’s art direction was a critical part of that achievement. Ramparts became the first “radical slick” by combining blockbuster investigative stories with high production values, including color, photographs, and glossy paper. That combination supercharged the magazine’s circulation and heightened its impact. When Dr. Martin Luther King came upon a 1967 Ramparts photo-essay called “The Children of Vietnam,” which documented the effects of U.S. bombing on Vietnamese civilians, he immediately decided to come out against the war. King wasn’t the only one affected by that piece; Dugald told me that laying it out was “just about the nastiest job I’ve ever had.”

Dugald left Ramparts in 1970, and the magazine folded for good in 1975, but his influence in the magazine world lives on—most obviously at Rolling Stone, which was founded by Ramparts alumni Jann Wenner and Ralph Gleason in 1967. With Dugald’s blessing, Jann lifted design elements from Ramparts, and some still appear prominently on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Born in 1936, Dugald grew up in Los Angeles. “I was a beach boy, your basic forties and fifties kid,” he later said. “I liked playing cowboys and drawing pictures.” In his youth, he was something of a hood. “My image was surly, leather-jacketed, the white t-shirt with rolled up sleeves, the Levi’s hanging low. A nasty little teenager. Who worked in a gas station, so I was greasy on top of all this.” But a high school teacher noticed his talent as a cartoonist and encouraged him to attend college. He studied art at UCLA and worked for two years in a Los Angeles design shop before joining a Houston firm.

In Texas, Dugald met San Francisco advertising guru Howard Gossage, who was helping Hinckle juice up Ramparts. Dugald had no magazine experience, but Gossage arranged for an interview. Dugald learned that founding publisher Edward Keating had enough credit for two more issues. But Dugald didn’t want to design corporate reports forever, so he packed his young family into his Volkswagen bus and headed for the Bay Area. He soon became a key player at the magazine. “I was pretty intransigent about what I did, a ‘my way or the highway’ sort of thing,” he recalled. “I learned early that the person who gets there earliest and leaves latest makes all the decisions. Any territory you could defend was yours.” His easygoing manner and workhorse habits tempered Warren’s extravagance and short attention span. Like Warren, Dugald was a rebel, not a radical, and that quality helped keep the magazine from descending into the doctrinaire.

For Dugald, the fact that Ramparts was located in California was crucial. Because the magazine wasn’t based in New York, it was never expected to succeed. For this reason, Gossage said later, the Ramparts staff was like a troupe of dancing bears; their technique was less important than the fact that they could dance at all. But those low expectations allowed Dugald to innovate, and he made the most of his liberty.

Dugald didn’t read magazines or the alternative press, so he had no preconceived notion of what Ramparts should look like. Mostly he was guided by his UCLA professor’s dictum that the best design is never noticed. To emphasize the magazine’s message rather than its look, Dugald set every line of type—the captions as well as the text—in Times Roman. Drawing on local styles, especially those developed by San Francisco printers Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, he produced an elegant design that grounded the magazine’s explosive stories and irreverent tone. “It was a conscious choice to just use one typeface, and make the design very simple,” he told an interviewer in 2009. “It had nothing to do with budgets, although we never had any money … I wanted the magazine, page-to-page, issue-to-issue, to feel like chapters of a book, and, considering our content, to look credible.”

At its peak, Ramparts received the prestigious George Polk Award for excellence in magazine reporting. More established magazines began to emulate Dugald’s approach, and Esquire tried to hire him. But he declined the offer, which would have matched his salary but diminished his artistic control.

Dugald left Ramparts when its new editors, David Horowitz and Peter Collier, engineered Bob Scheer’s ouster. (Warren had already left to found Scanlan’s magazine, where he first matched Hunter S. Thompson with illustrator Ralph Steadman.) Dugald pursued a freelance career, first as a magazine designer and then as an illustrator. He drew a wildlife series for the Los Angeles Times; worked on campaigns for Levi’s, the Iams Company, the San Diego Zoo, Jaguar Cars, BMW, and Nike; and created editorial illustrations for Time, Esquire, the New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, and Rolling Stone. He designed the Olympic medals for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, and the State Department commissioned him to design the 2009 Earth Day poster. In 1986, he was the subject of a solo exhibition and retrospective at the California Academy of Sciences, and he gave the keynote addresses at the International Conference of Natural Science Illustrators in 2000 and the International Conference of Medical Illustrators in 2001.

Dugald taught illustration for many years at the California College of the Arts, where he was a Distinguished Professor and chaired his department. He was appointed to the San Francisco Arts Commission in 1997 and served on the Delancey Street Board of Advisors for over 30 years. (The foundation is a residential self-help organization for former substance abusers, ex-convicts, and the homeless.) He is the author of four books: The Art of Revolution (1970) with Susan Sontag, Vanishing Creatures (1981), Vanishing Flora (1995), and Birds & Bees (1995).

In a 2010 interview, Dugald was asked about his career. “As Howard Gossage used to say, ‘The only fit work for an adult is to change the world.’ He said it straight-faced, and while other people might laugh, I always have that in the back of my mind. I don’t walk around with my heart on my sleeve, but I do feel that using our abilities to make things better is a pretty good way of spending a life.”

Update: Stephanie Lee's obituary ran in the San Francisco Chronicle today. She corrected Dugald's age, included family information, specified the cause of death, and got a quote from Bob Scheer. See also Leah Garchik's item in the Chronicle; she knew him for 40 years.

Update redux: Steven Heller's obituary appeared in the New York Times on December 7. Very fitting. Mr. Heller interviewed Dugald for Imprint. (That's the 2010 interview link above.)

One more time: I attended Dugald's memorial at Delancey Street yesterday. Mimi Silbert hosted, there were touching tributes from family members and friends, and John Burton added some earthy humor. Tim Luddy, creative director at Mother Jones, offered this homage. The Los Angeles Times added this obituary and article on Dugald and his work.

Trampling Out the Vintage

I attended an event at Heyday Books on Sunday and was treated to an unusually interesting couple of hours. About fifty of us squeezed into Malcolm Margolin's parlor to hear Frank Bardacke talk about his new book, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (Verso).

I know a little bit about the UFW from Randy Shaw's book, several documentary films, and my research on Carey McWilliams. But Frank's presentation offered a different and valuable take on the organization and its history. Most of it assorted well with what I thought I knew, but Frank grounded that story differently--and very convincingly. I was impressed with his ability to move from big picture stuff to illustrative detail and back again. And he made it look easy, which is even tougher.

I've known about Frank for a while now. He's featured in a film I always show in my California Culture class called Berkeley in the Sixties. (In fact, I showed it last night.) But I also interviewed him on the telephone for my Ramparts book. This was the first time we've met in person, and I was impressed with him and his presentation, which was personable and forthright. (In his introduction, Jeff Lustig noted that Frank is probably the only person to be kicked out of both Harvard and the UFW.)

As it turned out, I also met Saul Landau at the event. I interviewed him for the Ramparts book but had never met him in person. Saul is another guy with an amazing story, which I'll save for another post. Anne Weills, Bob Scheer's ex and another important figure in the Ramparts story, was also in the house.

Congratulations to Frank and thanks to Malcolm for hosting the event.

The Grateful Dead: Captains of Industry

I had the pleasure of meeting Barry Barnes at the American Culture Association meeting in San Antonio this year. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I attended a dozen or so academic panels devoted to the Grateful Dead, and Barry was one of the speakers. He's a business professor, and he has a new book out: Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead. Check out the Boston Globe article here.

This book wasn't an easy road for Barry. After he presented his book idea at a previous meeting, two marketing guys rushed out a similar title, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. That book received some attention at the Atlantic and elsewhere. But Barry's good standing in the Deadhead community helped him land a deal at Grand Central Publishing, a very respectable division of the Hachette Book Group that's helping him get the word out. Kudos to Barry!

7 Walkers and Friends: Well, That Was Fun

I got a little lucky last night. I knew I wanted to see 7 Walkers, Bill Kreutzmann's band featuring Papa Mali, at the Great American Music Hall. And I heard there might be special guests from Kreutzmann's old band.

So I was delighted to see Mickey Hart come out for the first set along with talking drum virtuoso Sikiru Adepoju. As far as I'm concerned, watching Kreutzmann and Hart drum together is proof positive that I've wasted my life. Utterly. Getting into that groove and staying there for 50 years sounds (and looks) pretty good to me. And guest bassist Reed Mathis from Tea Leaf Green looked like he was having fun, too.

But there was also the extra microphone in the middle of the stage. Could that be for another special guest? The answer came when Bob Weir shambled out a few numbers into the first set. And then Maria Muldaur. It was the first time since 2009 that the three former Dead members appeared together. The first set included "Mister Charlie," "New Speedway Boogie," "Big Railroad Blues," "Bird Song," "Wang Dang Doodle," "Deal," "Sugaree," and a cover of "Fever."

It was an embarrassment of riches for the average fan, who could stroll up to the window, plunk down $25, and amble up to the front of the stage.

I really dug Papa Mali, by the way. No need or desire to compare him to Garcia, but his gator-bait sound crosses very well with the Dead songbook.

My back was killing me, the lingering result of an auto collision two months ago, so I had to decamp after the first set, but I'm looking forward to hearing about the second.

Patrick Atwater: California Dreaming

Patrick Atwater's A New California Dream: Reconciling the Paradoxes of America's Golden State feels custom-made for my Humanities 450 course at San Francisco State University. (Catalog description: "California Culture. Dynamics of California society and culture in recent times; world oasis, flawed paradise, lifestyle crucible, and creative milieu; function in American culture and Pacific relations.")

In this wide-ranging book, Atwater recounts the state's unique record of hatching economic opportunity and innovation. He's alert to the state's remarkable physical geography and what Carey McWilliams called the authority of the land. And although Atwater's identification with California is strong--there's a boosterish quality to his portrait--he also considers the less uplifting aspects of the state's history and its present governance crisis.

Like all dreams, the California one resists precise definition. Perhaps necessarily, it remains a little beneath or beyond consciousness. In some ways, though, the personal history of Arnold Schwarzenegger captures its key points: the immigrant who makes it big through bodybuilding at the beach (cf. McWilliams's "cult of the body"), then Hollywood movies, and then electoral politics. We even know Arnold's modes of transportation--the Hummer and the Harley--which no doubt reflect the state's obsession with mobility. When it comes to self-fashioning, California style, Schwarzenegger is a parade example.

But many of the state's most intractable problems can be framed as conflicts between two or more aspects of the dream. Consider, for example, land-use showdowns. On the one hand, we believe in economic opportunity, and nothing has provided more of that than real estate development. But we've also inherited John Muir's preservationist ethic, which reveres wilderness. Or food: the organic, slow food culture of the North Bay (for example) exists cheek-by-jowl with the latest Frankenfood advances coming out of UC Davis, about 30 minutes east. Paradoxical, indeed.

Atwater gets this as well as anybody. A fourth-generation Californian, he blends his personal experiences and observations with an armchair survey of the state's history and key themes. Along the way, he cites some of California's shrewdest observers, including Carey McWilliams, Kevin Starr, Mike Davis, Richard Walker, Luis Valdez, Joan Didion, Wallace Stegner, Josiah Royce, Jeff Lustig, Henry George, John Muir, James Houston, and Richard Rodriguez.

Atwater never actually delivers on his promise to reconcile paradoxes and dream anew. And despite the book's reading line, this isn't a blueprint. It's a smart, deeply felt, and frankly hortatory essay, but it feels more like a warm-up for a still inchoate project that will make the most of his passion and erudition. May this first effort lead to many more.

Lunch Bucket Paradise

The good folks at Heyday Books sent along Fred Setterberg's Lunch Bucket Paradise, which I finished reading today. As the title implies, this "true-life novel" and coming-of-age story depicts a particular kind of hog heaven: the East Bay suburbs between World War II and Vietnam.

Some of this ground has been covered (though quite differently) by San Lorenzo native Curtis White in his first novel The Idea of Home. Here our first-person narrator is the son of a Scandinavian mechanic at the Alameda Naval Air Station and an Italian (and very Catholic) housewife. The boy's rites of passage are queued up and handled in order: friends (and their scraps), catechism, yard work, Boy Scouts, gigs, girls, warehouse work, more girls, and finally the prospect of conscription.

I'm a little belated--maybe ten years younger than Setterberg's hero--and raised a few miles north in El Cerrito, but I found the world of this novel familiar territory. If you remember Juan Marichal, Doughboy swimming pools, Archie comic books, Brylcreem, Rice-a-Roni, Rainier ale, and the pleasures of discovering James Brown (for me it was also Tower of Power), you'll probably relate to this fictive world, too.

The novel isn't tightly plotted--several chapters were published in serial form, and it reads more like s series of connected but self-contained sketches. Its pleasures are hitched to the coming-of-age theme, first in the shadow of World War II and then in dread of Vietnam. There's also the specific and unmistakable sense of place. Finally, there's the post-war, California version of unterrified Jeffersonianism, perhaps best embodied by the boy's father, a self-educated, free-thinking family man who wants better for his son. It's not exactly the myth of the happy yeoman, but it's pretty close, and for me it has the ring of truth.

Theodore Roszak RIP

We lost another important California writer this week: Theodore Roszak, author of The Making of a Counter Culture. He was 77.

As his obituary notes, that book began as a series of articles for The Nation. It doesn't mention his editor, Carey McWilliams, who helped him develop the work. Professor Roszak, who met McWilliams only once in 1964, told me that he considered McWilliams a gentle, friendly, avuncular, and remarkably generous older man who listened carefully and astutely assessed his strengths and weaknesses.

Like many Nation contributors, Professor Roszak was grateful for McWilliams's hands-off editorial style. "He didn't intervene, interfere, or climb all over the work," Roszak recalled. Instead, McWilliams supported him and let him develop his thesis in a four-part series. "It was exactly what I needed at the time," Roszak told me. The series formed the core of his 1969 landmark book, which coined the term counterculture.

I'm sorry to say I never met Professor Roszak in person, even though he lived in Berkeley and taught at Cal State East Bay. But I was grateful for his time when I interviewed him on the telephone for the McWilliams biography. And I'm even more grateful for his important contribution to our understanding of the Bay Area in the 1960s.

The Docks

The good folks at UC Press sent me Bill Sharpsteen's The Docks, an in-depth look at the Port of Los Angeles.

I've been fascinated with the California ports for years. I suppose it started with my oldest brother and his work. More than three decades ago, he got on as a clerk in the Southern Pacific railroad yard in Oakland, which serves the third busiest U.S. port on the west coast. He moved up through the ranks swiftly, and over the years, I've heard a lot about the longshoremen, railroaders, and Teamsters who make their living there. At one point, too, I interviewed for a communications position with the ILWU, which, as my brother likes to say, still has it locked up. And I've also been attracted to what Sharpsteen calls "the rough beauty the port exudes in all its gritty, complicated glory."

So I was pleased to learn more about the action in Los Angeles-Long Beach, by far the biggest port complex in these parts. Sharpsteen offers a series of snapshots, interviewing and hanging out with captains, pilots, shippers, longshoremen, chandlers, truckers, clerks, environmental activists, port security--just about every type of person with an interest in what goes on there. And as the book makes clear, a lot goes on there. The volume of container traffic coming through the port is staggering, as are the logistics. The economic and environmental impacts of the ports are, I think, woefully underestimated. And having ingested Sharpsteen's chapter on the Diesel Death Zone, I'm especially glad I didn't buy that loft in Emeryville.

I use the term snapshot advisedly. Sharpsteen is also an award-winning documentary producer, and his approach is to let the reader see and hear what he encounters. Remarkably, most of the book is in the present tense, presumably to lend immediacy to his account. (The most notable exception is an excursus on the ILWU and its history, which lives in the middle of the book.) Perhaps for this reason, The Docks feels like an exceptionally long magazine article.

My first reaction was that this approach somehow diminished the book's authority. Having stuck with the slide show, however, and made it to the history section, I would recommend the book to anyone who shares my interest in this unique subculture.

Larry McMurtry and Literary Life

I came upon the second volume of Larry McMurtry's Literary Life: A Second Memoir yesterday at Mrs. Dalloway's in Berkeley. This morning I inhaled all 175 pages and relished them all.

My interest in McMurtry has two basic sources. First, I met him in Denton, Texas, where he studied as an undergraduate. He returned to give a talk at the University of North Texas while I was a faculty member there. (His brother was in the English department's graduate program at the time.) We ate at Ranchman's Cafe, his favorite steakhouse in nearby Ponder. This was after his heart surgery, which he discussed that evening as well as in this book.

The second link is McMurtry's stint at Stanford University's writing program, where his fellow students included Ken Kesey and many other talented authors. The writing program figures in Philip Fradkin's biography of Wallace Stegner, which I wrote about for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, as well as in my Grateful Dead research. (The Dead were closely connected to Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.) Without dwelling on the program, Stegner, or Kesey, McMurtry conveys a way of understanding all three that I found instructive and appealing. I also learned that McMurtry (like Kesey and the Dead) was and is a big fan of Kerouac's On the Road, especially the scroll version that was released in 2007.

About his own work, McMurtry is modest. "I was a midlist novelist who had gotten lucky with the movies, that's all," he writes at one point, although in this particular passage he may have been trying to capture how his New York colleagues regarded him. At another point, he notes that he aspired to, and finally did, become "a man of letters."

Between his long list of books, essays for The New York Review of Books, screenwriting credits (including an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain), bookselling and collecting, and his stint as American PEN president, McMurtry really has led an admirable and unique literary life. What a great pleasure to spin through this slender volume and learn more about that life. "The commonwealth of literature is complex," he writes toward the end, "but a sense of belonging to it is an important feeling for a writer to have and to keep."

Catherine Mulholland RIP

Catherine Mullholland passed away this week. Her grandfather, William Mulholland, built the Los Angeles Aqueduct and was the subject of her 2000 biography, published by UC Press. She was 88.

Carey McWilliams figures in her obituary, which requires a quick clarification. McWilliams doesn't say or suggest that William Mulholland was in cahoots with the business syndicate behind the Owens Valley water caper. McWilliams does, however, call Mulholland "the engineer responsible for the Owens Valley fiasco" (Southern California, p. 191).

I can see why Catherine Mulholland was "sobered and perplexed" by McWilliams's account, which one of her teachers recommended to her. And though I can also see why she objected to Chinatown, which was based on McWilliams's work, the obituary is slightly misleading on this point as well. In the film, the character of Hollis Mulwray essentially plays her grandfather. But Mulwray is by no means a villain or unsympathetic character. To the contrary, he's one of the chief victims of his father-in-law's ruthlessness.

Catherine Mulholland spent most of her final years discussing her grandfather's work and legacy. I'm certainly not the only person who welcomed the publication of William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles. It received favorable notices in both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, which also named it the best nonfiction book of the year.

Secret Exhibition

I came upon Rebecca Solnit's Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era this week. Turns out this was her first book, published by City Lights.

I'd heard about some of the artists through the Grateful Dead research; one of them, Wally Hedrick (photo), was Jerry Garcia's mentor. But this was my most substantive introduction to the folks who came to the Bay Area to study and teach at the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute).

Solnit's discussion helped me understand how these artists set the stage for the Beat and hippie scenes in San Francisco. Garcia was 15 years old when he began studying at the art school. That was the same year he got his first guitar and discovered marijuana. It was also the year the San Francisco art scene received national attention via an Evergreen Review cover story. It's easy to see how this scene would shape Garcia's attitudes about art and life.

John Geluardi: Reppin' the 510

Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I edited Cannabiz, John Geluardi's book on the medical marijuana business. That snappy little read was an eye-opener for me, largely because I was so accustomed to the policy and law enforcement angles on the weed meme. John convinced me that the big story belonged in Forbes and Fortune. Not unlike Indian gaming 15 years ago, medical marijuana is on the glide path to big bucks and mainstream acceptance.

John's back with the cover story in the current issue of the East Bay Express, the alternative weekly based in Oakland. It features my adopted city of Richmond--by coincidence, perhaps, the opening setting in Cannabiz. I moved here a year ago, and my little house stands a couple miles from the El Cerrito neighborhood of my misspent youth.

John's article, "The Man Behind Richmond's Renaissance," is a nice turn of events for this often overlooked city. As the article notes, what little media attention Richmond has attracted is usually related to its violent crime. And now that I think about it, the only bit of popular-culture status Richmond has secured for itself is the (largely negative) portrait in "Coach Carter," the Hollywood film starring Samuel L. Jackson as Richmond High basketball coach Ken Carter. (I played with Kenny on the 1977 Contra Costa County All-Stars; another teammate was Stan Van Gundy, now head coach of the Orlando Magic.)

John's piece indicates that Richmond's fortunes are beginning to improve, and much of the credit is going to city manager Bill Lindsay. Check it out, I say.

David Gans at SF State

A couple weeks ago, David Gans graciously agreed to visit our California Culture class at San Francisco State and talk about the Grateful Dead. David hosts at least three radio programs on the Dead (Sirius XM, KPFA, and his syndicated show) and has been writing about the band for decades.

The course materials and discussions prepared us well for his remarks. We had already covered Kerouac, Kesey, and the San Francisco counterculture generally. But our Q & A followed by David's performance of his original song, "Who Killed Uncle John?" was especially successful this time. You just can't beat live conversation and music, and the student reception was gratifying. Here are some excerpts from their informal responses:

"I felt like David Gans was the best guest speaker ever. He had such a genuine passion for what he was talking about, and he was a true authority."

"David Gans' presentation last week was a lot of fun ... It was satisfying to me to see his success in pursuing a career in an area that he truly felt passionate about."

"I really enjoyed David Gans' visit to our class ... You should definitely continue to invite him to your classes. His song at the end, 'Who Killed Uncle John?' was the perfect way to end the class!"

"That was awesome hearing what David had to say about the band. I really enjoyed it."

"Plus he brought his guitar! Awesome!"

"I thought he was a wonderful guest speaker. It seemed to me he was really connected with music in such a deep way ... He explained how people used to get together and just listen. It made [music] a shared experience instead of an individual one."

"Man, what a really great experience. Having absolutely zero knowledge or interest in the Grateful Dead, Gans' eloquent and insightful expanse of knowledge of the Grateful Dead and the culture and circumstances surrounding them truly opened my eyes to a margin of music history that I never thought I'd be able to relate to or care about."

"I enjoyed hearing about the Grateful Dead, but my favorite thing that happened while he was there was his song. It was so amazing! Thanks for bringing him. :)"

"His discussion was incredibly interesting ... Even David's own music was extremely motivating, and I cannot wait to listen to his radio show on KPFA. Thanks again for having him come speak."

"Meeting David last week was as engaging as it was enthralling. He is literally a link to a very unique and integral part of California history."

"'I served the man who served his art' was a very powerful line in David Gans' song. I enjoyed the sentiment of the line as it symbolized his loyalty to the artist. This loyalty was contradicted by the notion of all the other individuals in Garcia's life who seemed to slowly drain the life out of him."

"David's song, 'Who Killed Uncle John?' was such a great experience. Before last class, I had no idea who David Gans was, but as I told my friends about him, many knew just who he was. He was even on iTunes!"

Grateful Dead Scholarship

I traveled to San Antonio for a popular culture conference last week, but the only sessions I saw were on the Grateful Dead--more than a dozen in all, plus extracurricular activities. We heard presentations from a wide variety of fields: philosophy, psychology, sociology, literary studies, business, and musicology. Extraordinary.

Nick Meriwether, who heads up the Grateful Dead archive at UC Santa Cruz, invited me to submit an abstract when I visited campus last year. I began with Warren Hinckle's 1967 Ramparts article on the hippies, then segued to the utopian impulses that I think help account for the Dead's success, then brought it back to Warren and Rolling Stone. I don't think anyone at the conference was surprised by my utopian stuff, but I suspect they were less familiar with the Ramparts back story.

But what makes such conferences successful are the informal exchanges during and between the presentations, and this conference was very productive in that department. I discovered that Jay Williams of Critical Inquiry had offered a similar analysis but with a bohemian (not utopian) focus last year. Helpful, especially when our conversations turned up many other points of contact.

Nick distributed Dead Studies, which included a transcript of Ralph Gleason's 1967 private communication with historian and musician Frank Kofsky. (The communication is from the Dead archive.) Gleason resigned from Ramparts after the Hinckle article appeared, and later that year he launched Rolling Stone with Jann Wenner. His communication discusses the San Francisco music scene and the differences between the hippies and politicos. He talks at some length about Bob Scheer, who was the managing editor at Ramparts and had almost captured the Democratic nomination in his East Bay congressional district the previous year. (Bob was also a friend of Bill Graham.) That communication was invaluable to me; it grounded my ideas in the firsthand, contemporary observations of a key player.

The musicologists at the conference were awesome. Among other things, they offered guided listenings to some classic Dead jams. And on top of everything else, the Grateful Dead scholars as a whole are a fun group. Not unprecedented in the annals of academia, but very welcome.

Update: John Swansburg of Slate posted a piece on the conference. It looks like he appreciated the possibilities here. I've never been a big believer in reading the comments section, but the presumptions in the batch I saw were striking. I caught several whiffs of what my dissertation director called an intellectual sin: contempt prior to investigation.

Earth Day: The One That Got Away

After the Ramparts book came out, I developed a list of high-profile ways that the magazine changed America, as per my subtitle. The best example is probably the Martin Luther King story; he came out against the Vietnam War for the first time after flipping through Ramparts at an airport. On the radio, you don't want to spend a lot of time on set-up or explanation, so that one's a keeper. Everyone gets it.

The one that got away was Earth Day. I didn't get this story into the book, but as Tim Redmond's piece reminds us, Senator Gaylord Nelson, a liberal Republican from Wisconsin, got the idea for a national teach-in on the environment after reading Ramparts on a flight from Santa Barbara to Oakland. The beaches of Santa Barbara had been soaked by a massive oil spill the year before, so the moment was right. The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970, and 20 million people participated.

The Ramparts editors couldn't quite accept the compliment. Their May 1970 cover showed the Isla Vista Bank of America in flames as a result of student anti-war protests. The caption declared that the incineration of the bank "may have done more for the environment than all the teach-ins put together." That one alienated even some longtime supporters.

The Information Age!

As my little bio says, I teach California Culture at San Francisco State University, and I'm currently reading student essays. It's not as fun as it sounds, especially since the enrollment is sizable (about 70 students), I teach two other courses, and I have no teaching assistants or graders for any of them. In short, almost 2,000 pages of student writing per semester plus other prep, and you don't want to hear about the money.

But the purpose of this post is to report a shift in student norms when it comes to reading and writing. The unspoken assumption seems to be that books are yesterday's news, even in humanities classes. Everything you need is at your fingertips, so why read anything else?

The way this plays out in the essays is instructive. I typically ask students to come up with their own paper topics so they can decide what matters to them. Several chose to focus on Chester Himes's novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go. The protagonist's name is Bob Jones, but two of the essays I read yesterday called him William Clinton. Curious, I googled the book title with that name and found that the Wikipedia page for this novel does indeed list William Jefferson Clinton, our 42nd president, as the novel's hero. Which means that at least two students wrote entire essays about this book without reading or even consulting it.

I'm not in the mood to scold or draw sweeping generalizations from this little sample, but three things come immediately to mind. First, not everything reduces to its information value, and novels are an obvious reminder of this. The whole point is to enter an imaginary world and see what happens in it--and to you. No reading means no reading experience.

Second, attending a state university is like a trip to Yosemite. Both places are public resources that offer potentially rich experiences, but everyone has the right to a shallow one. Taking a humanities class and refusing to read any books--I can only imagine how glancingly these students regarded the books they DIDN'T write about--is a little like going to Yosemite and hanging out by the snack shack.

Third, of course, is the lesson provided by the gag itself. Someone thought it would be funny, I suppose, to place President Clinton's name in that slot, and Wikipedia's editors haven't corrected it yet. I'm sure they will, but there's a larger cultural issue here. Having decided to privilege information over imagination, we also neglect to check the quality of the information. This isn't a shot at Wikipedia, which I often use and have contributed to, but rather a comment on the bargain we've made as a culture.

When the emphasis falls on free, fast, and easy, we often get cheap. Lots of people I know understand this concept when it comes to food, but their digital utopianism is as unexamined as ever. Maybe we should all read You Are Not a Gadget, which considers this question in more depth. I think the author's name is Chester Alan Arthur. (I just used Wikipedia to check the correct spelling.)

Jonathan Rowe RIP

My colleagues and I at the California Studies Association were shocked and saddened to hear that Jonathan Rowe passed away suddenly last week. He was 65.

I met Jon on the CSA steering committee. Our 2007 conference on the crisis of the California commons intersected with his work at the Tomales Bay Institute in Point Reyes, where he also hosted a public affairs program on KWMR.

Over the next few years, I appeared on the program twice to discuss my books. I also guest-hosted when Jon was out of town, joined his local pick-up basketball game, and visited him and his family at their home. He was damn good company.

I'm not familiar with every aspect of Jon's work, but he was extraordinarily productive and versatile. He grew up in Boston, was trained as a lawyer, and worked for Ralph Nader early on. He also served as a congressional staffer and wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, American Prospect, Washington Monthly, and many other publications.

Jon did all of his own thinking, wrote beautifully, and was a shrewd observer of people and politics. "The Language of Strangers," his 2008 piece on community journalism in West Marin, is a minor masterpiece.

You can also see Jon's genius and originality in the Senate testimony he gave a few years ago; some of it appeared in the June 2008 issue of Harper's magazine under the title, "Our Phony Economy."

Jon's friends are putting together a website with more of his work--190 articles now and counting.

Last weekend, Jon went to the gym and came home feeling bad. That night, he had a high fever and went to the hospital. He died the next morning. Frankly, it's hard for me to fathom, but I wanted to make sure I honored Jon by calling attention to his life and work.

87 Harrington

Thanks to the efforts of Nicholas Meriwether, Grateful Dead archivist at UC Santa Cruz, I'm scheduled to deliver a paper on the Dead next month in San Antonio. In addition to working the keyboard, that means reviewing the literature I ingested last year and taking a few informal field trips on the side. This week I visited one of Jerry Garcia's boyhood homes in the Excelsior, a working-class (formerly Irish-Catholic, now largely Asian and Latino) neighborhood that I pass several times a week on my way to San Francisco State University.

Harrington Street is one block long and connects Alemany and Mission on the south side of I-280, which links downtown San Francisco and Daly City. 87 Harrington, which sold for $60,000 in 1994, will never be mistaken for a national historical landmark. But visiting it helps me understand the comment often attributed to Garcia: "San Francisco is San Francisco, the rest of the country is Daly City."

California Women and Politics

I attended the California Studies dinner last night in Berkeley and was treated to the perfect blend of expertise and conviviality that I associate with these monthly events. Bob Cherny and Mary Ann Irwin discussed their new book, California Women and Politics (University of Nebraska), and as usual, I learned a lot in the most pleasant way possible.

The book, a compilation of essays, covers various aspects of women's activism and political participation from the Gold Rush through the 1920s. But many of the essays focus on the Progressive Era, when California women won the right to vote, and the talk last night paid special attention to the ways women put that right to immediate use. The chapters cover, among other topics, the temperance movement, Phoebe Apperson Hearst's philanthropy, settlement work, environmental activism, women's clubs, and trade unionism.

Bob and Mary Ann's presentations were followed by questions and discussion, and this is where these dinners really stand out. Those on hand last night included Bob's colleagues at San Francisco State, Charles Postel and Bill Issel; host and Berkeley City College historian Chuck Wollenberg; author and Berkeley blogger Frances Dinkelspiel; UC Berkeley historian Mark Brilliant; UC Berkeley oral historian Lisa Rubens; and Jewish historian Ava Kahn. Most have presented their own latest work at these dinners, and just listening to their exchanges is a form of higher education.

Kudos to Matt Bokovoy, this book's editor at the University of Nebraska Press. He originally signed the project during his tenure at the University of Oklahoma Press. When he moved to Nebraska, his successors at Oklahoma wavered in their commitment to the book, and he was able to pick it up again.

Ironically, attending the dinner last night meant that I missed two episodes of Saving the Bay, an excellent documentary (narrated by Robert Redford) on Bay Area history. It includes comments from many regulars at these dinners, including Bob, Chuck, Dick Walker, Malcolm Margolin, and Gray Brechin.

Figures of Speech

I just returned from a book event in Oakland for William Bennett Turner's Figures of Speech: First Amendment Heroes and Villains. Superb book, important topic, and an author who blends deep expertise with a clear, personal prose style. Bill not only teaches this material at UC Berkeley, but he also has argued First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court. (Believe me, I'm only scratching the surface of his credentials.)

Bill's event brought out a remarkable cross-section of supporters, including Elizabeth Farnsworth, Carl Pope, Peter Sussman, Wendy Lesser, and Leah Garchik. And probably a dozen more notables that I didn't even know about. Which is one of the reasons I like living in the Bay Area.

Full disclosure: I acquired this book for PoliPointPress, but I didn't do much editing on it. Bill had most of the book ready to go before we even met for coffee across the street from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall.

Southern California

This morning I came upon an adroit piece in the Los Angeles Times on Carey McWilliams's Southern California: An Island on the Land. The article, by Christopher Hawthorne, is part of a Reading L.A. project that began with books by Morrow Mayo and Louis Adamic. (McWilliams knew both men and was especially close to Adamic.)

I left a comment on the L.A. Times' website, but I forgot to add my favorite point about this book, which is that it directly inspired Robert Townes's Oscar-winning original screenplay for Chinatown.

Ramparts Book Review in "The Sixties"

I just read a review of A Bomb in Every Issue published in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. The reviewer, a graduate student in journalism named William Gillis, credits the book on many fronts but also found shortcomings. This feels like a teachable moment, so here goes.

Mr. Gillis's first criticism is that I "failed to exhaustively comb the documentary record." He then lists two articles absent from the bibliography. One is by Adam Hochschild, who specifically asked me not to cite the article Gillis mentions because it wasn't edited to his liking. (Adam asked me instead to cite a related article that does appear in the bibliography.)

But there's a larger point here about audience: specifically, a trade versus an academic audience. I included citations only when I quoted written sources. Otherwise the notes section would have exceeded what my publisher wanted for a trade book. That doesn't mean I neglected other material. And if I quote Jann Wenner, and you can see from the back matter that I interviewed him, it's not hard to infer that the quote comes from the interview.

"The incomplete nature of the author's research," Mr. Gillis claims, "is evident in the account of the CIA's investigation of the magazine." Specifically, I didn't mention that "the CIA also had the Internal Revenue Service investigate (and sometimes audit) the tax records of the magazine's staff and contributors." Mr. Gillis seems to have missed the relevant passage in my book: "The day after Hinckle's ads appeared [CIA officer Richard] Ober received the magazine's tax returns from the IRS. It audited them along with [Ramparts publisher Ed] Keating's personal returns from 1960 to 1964" (p. 78).

Mr. Gillis also argues that I failed to make good on the book's ambitious subtitle, which claims that Ramparts magazine changed America. The problem, he claims, is that I rely on "the oral testimony of two men who were college students during that period." One of the two men (I think) is Jeff Cohen, who later founded Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which today publishes Extra! and produces "CounterSpin," a syndicated radio program about media bias. (Later, Jeff appeared on CNN's "Crossfire" and became Phil Donahue's producer at MSNBC.) The other man I quote is a former Black Panther. For some reason, Mr. Gillis omits any mention of the very next passage in the book, which shows that a Ramparts article directly caused Dr. Martin Luther King to speak out against the Vietnam War for the first time.

This material is in the middle of the book, but the final chapter is specifically devoted to the question of how Ramparts changed America. I won't rehearse the arguments here; the main point is that readers of this review won't know that these arguments exist. Throughout the book, but especially in the final chapter, there is ample testimony and evidence--from people like Jann Wenner, Adam Hochschild, Lowell Bergman, David Weir, Peniel Joseph, Tim Weiner, etc.--that Ramparts helped change American media, society, and governance. Now that I think about it, I'm amazed that Mr. Gillis could write that sentence about the two college students.

Mr. Gillis concludes that my arguments for Ramparts' influence "might also explain the book's most glaring flaw: the author's overemphasis on Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panther Party." Mr. Gillis immediately concedes that the connection between the magazine and the party was important and quotes Peniel Joseph to that effect. (I do, too.) The problem is that I devote too many pages to Cleaver and the Panthers.

Again, I think the review ignores an important part of the book's coverage. Mr. Gillis doesn't mention Betty Van Patter, the Ramparts bookkeeper who many suspect was murdered by the Panthers. Her death was an important turning point for several major figures at Ramparts, including David Horowitz and Peter Collier. You can't understand the full Ramparts story and legacy if you ignore Betty Van Patter, and that means telling some parts of the Panthers story.

You get the idea. I appreciate Mr. Gillis's compliments about the worthiness of the topic, the book's readability, and some of my major claims. And he's entitled to wish for a more academic version with different proportions. But most reviewers try harder to get their facts straight and to measure a book against its own aspirations.

Citizen Journalism Night at The Booksmith

Rose Aguilar and I will appear at The Booksmith on Tuesday, Feb. 1, at 7:30 p.m. The topic is citizen journalism--or rather, lame journalism and what to do about it. There will probably be references to Ramparts along the way, but I mostly want to talk about what's ailing the media ecology today.

Rose brings a lot of experience and expertise to this topic. She hosts "Your Call" on KALW, of course, and her media roundups on Friday keep her attuned to the overall performances of reporters, authors, analysts, pundits, etc. She's incredibly well informed, versatile, and indefatigable. I can't wait to hear her thoughts on this.

This is a Melissa Mytinger production, so hats off to her. But I also want to give it up for The Booksmith more generally as one of my favorite bookstores. Lots of cool titles and superb events plus a piquant location.