Art of the Dead

I just got my copy of Philip Cushway's Art of the Dead (reading line: A Celebration of the Artists Behind the American Rock Poster Movement). It includes short pieces by Steven Heller, Peter Coyote, Greil Marcus, and Mickey Hart. Quotes from the artists and others are sprinkled throughout the full-color reproductions of the posters.

Art of the Dead features the "Big Five"--Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, and Wes Wilson--but it also includes information about (and work by) ten other artists. It compares the posters to 19th-century Japanese woodblocks and poster art from the Belle Epoque with examples from each.

I've been looking forward to this book's arrival. I wish it had even more discussion, but I've already learned a lot and will continue to scour it. I'm persuaded by its claim that the Dead's iconography was a big part of the band's appeal, and it documents a special form of mutual appreciation between the poster artists and the band, much of it based on the band's evocative name. It also suggests a link, at least in some cases, between the poster art and the light shows that were also emerging from San Francisco's fertile avant-garde arts scene.

Cushway recalls hanging out with Rick Griffin in New York in 1989. Griffin asked if Cushway wanted to check out the Dead show that night in New Jersey. Cushway writes, "I said I would, although I was initially reticent (sic)--it was a hot day, we had no tickets, and from experience I knew what an incredible hassle this could end up being." But he didn't realize whom he was with; they ended up sitting on stage. "Later that day, when Jerry Garcia came to meet us backstage, it dawned on me. In Garcia's eyes, he was a fan and Rick was the star."

Love it.

Mother Jones's Mitt Romney Story

Lots of talk, of course, about Mitt Romney's 47% speech, and now the inside-baseball stories are starting to come out. The New York Times has a piece on Mother Jones, and the Washington Post has another on how the magazine landed the story.

Although Ramparts magazine, from which Mother Jones sprang, isn't mentioned, I recalled Adam Hochschild's comment about its formula for success: "Find an expose that major newspapers are afraid to touch, publish it with a big enough splash that they can't afford to ignore it ... and then publicize it in a way that plays the press off against each other."

I was surprised that the Times thought its own readers would need that much background information on Mother Jones, which has been around since the mid-1970s. Interesting, too, that the article quotes Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos and our author at PoliPointPress.

Nicholas Lemann's remark about Mother Jones is also instructive. Lemann, dean of Columbia University's graduate school of journalism, said it helped that "Mother Jones seems to live in a zone where it’s respected. It’s obviously ideological. But it’s respected."

I don't want to get too fussy about this quote, which was almost certainly part of some larger point. And yes, it's important to note that Mother Jones is respected. But I really do wonder who's NOT ideological in Lemann's sense. Only news organizations that maximize profit for shareholders? Or that subset plus the BBC and minus Fox News? In far too many discussions of the media, the ideology of the modern media corporation doesn't count as an ideology at all.

West of Eden

I've been dipping in and out of a book I received from PM Press earlier this year called West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California.

The title maps directly onto the main theme of my California Culture course at San Francisco State University. But the connections go well beyond that. Three of the book's editors--Iain Boal, Janferie Stone, and Cal Winslow--served on the steering committee of the California Studies Association during my tenure there. And the volume is dedicated to the late Jeff Lustig, who founded that organization, contributed a chapter to the book, and died this summer. (As the book's dedication notes, Jeff was the "dean of California Studies.") The blurbs are from Rebecca Solnit, Dick Walker, Mike Davis, and Peter Linebaugh. So yes, lots of contact points for me here.

West of Eden covers a lot of ground, but I wanted to mention one felicity that surfaced for me last week. My Grateful Dead research recently led me to the topic of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, the subject of a David Bernstein book published by UC Press in 2008. That book included a great deal of material on the center's co-founder, Ramon Sender, who also helped Stewart Brand organize the Trips Festival. That's an important chapter in the Dead's history, but most of the Dead literature passes quickly over its avant-garde element, including the Tape Music Center's contribution. As Stewart Brand later said, the Trips Festival was the beginning of the Grateful Dead and the end of almost everything else--except light shows, which were also featured there.

I also learned that almost immediately after the Trips Festival, Sender moved to Lou Gottlieb's Morning Star ranch in Sonoma County. There they started a kind of commune, which the book describes in some detail. (The book also includes an interview with Sender, who mentions his visit to Rancho Olompali shortly after the Dead lived there.) Brand went on to produce the Whole Earth Catalog, which raised the profile of such communes and sought to give their residents (and other readers) the tools they needed to flourish.

The back-to-the-land movement coincided with the Dead's move to Marin County and the huge success of Crosby, Stills & Nash, who were also living in Marin and hanging out with the Dead. The Dead, in turn, began downplaying the experimental music associated with their Haight period and started producing albums like American Beauty and Workingman's Dead. And the rest, as they say, is history.

There's much more to say about this book, and I'll probably post about it again as I get to know it better. Just wanted to celebrate those happy accidents that cluster around my favorite research projects.

Bear House

I took a small contingent by 6024 Ascot in Montclair today. Turns out the house, which was owned by Owsley Stanley, can be had for a mere $1.4 million. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that Stanley was the Bay Area's top producer of fine LSD in the 1960s as well as the Dead's sound engineer. He frequently housed members of the Grateful Dead here circa 1972.

These photographs don't do justice to this unique property. The home, which dates to the 1920s, began as a log cabin that's still intact, including untrimmed bark on the inside rafters. The master bathroom, with its mind-blowing tile work, is one of the coolest rooms I've ever come upon. The front courtyard and second-story balcony overlooking the pool announce "Party!"

Not everything works in this place. In fact, it's a little like a Grateful Dead concert: funky, uneven, full of peak moments. Check it out, I say.

RNC Redux

You may have seen the story out of the Republican National Convention. Two RNC attendees were ejected after throwing nuts at a black CNN camerawoman and saying "this is how we feed the animals."

Atrocious but not unprecedented. The story put me immediately in mind of Belva Davis's memoir, which we published at PoliPointPress. Belva covered the RNC in 1964 at the Cow Palace and was treated to similar indignities. Very similar, in fact. Here's what she told KALW's Holly Kernan:

It was a mean-spirited crowd up in the galleries where we were. And we did all right the first day because they were behaving for the cameras. But then, there was a speech by former President Eisenhower that was like lighting a match, in which he talked ... the words he said could have been interpreted as being racist. And after that, all hell broke loose. Reporters were being, I mean really big-name reporters, were being taken and arrested, really – one of the leading reporters was arrested on that night. So, we watched all this from up high, and finally we heard somebody from down below yell, “What are you N-word people doing up there?” And he screamed it in sort of a chant. And the next thing we knew, there’s a mob of people screaming all kinds of things. Up there, isolated where we were in semi-darkness, we felt threatened. We started down the stairs and garbage started being thrown at us. I didn’t really get nervous until I could feel a bottle whiz by my head. It crashed against the concrete, and my knees started to shake as we were walking down the ramp to get out of the Cow Palace.

Louis said to me, “If you cry, I will break your leg.” Just like that! And I looked at him, I was shocked! Straightened my back, and we both kept eyes straight ahead and got down to the bottom. And then we looked at each other because we saw uniformed officers, but coming from the South, we knew that was no safe passage. And we knew we still had the outside to the parking lot to go. We were both terrified. We were at a political convention, or you know, one of the two organizations pledged to protect the rights of American citizens and feeling that our lives were in danger. But that’s the way it was that year. It was an experience that made me sure that I wanted to go into the news business because they were the only ones who seemed to be able to shine light on these people. And I wanted to do that.

More power to Belva, but it seems like we can do better than this.

Season of the Witch

I just finished reading David Talbot's Season of the Witch, which the good folks at Free Press sent along at my request. I received it too late to pitch a review, and I see that the New York Times Book Review has already covered it. (I still may use the book in my class at San Francisco State.) I'll return to that review in a moment, but first let me say that after some initial misgivings, I found Talbot's account of San Francisco's roller-coaster ride through the 60s, 70s, and 80s both informative and entertaining.

My misgivings arose from the over-the-top style and what seemed to be a highly synthetic account of San Francisco (especially the Haight) in the 1960s. But as I got deeper into the book, I realized that the style was in many ways adequate to the topic. To be sure, there were cliches, false notes, and mixed metaphors, but the story Talbot tells is an extravagant one, and I came to enjoy and even admire his energetic phrase-making.

I also realized that his selection and emphasis worked, at least for me, and that his original research was substantial. I really dug the material on Vincent Hallinan and his progeny, for example. His chapters on the Good Earth commune and other "heavy hippies" is a welcome addition to the usual accounts of the Diggers. His treatment of the Zebra killings of the 1970s fills in a lot of blank spaces for me. In a series of short, punchy chapters, he guides readers through more familiar material about Jim Jones, George Moscone, Harvey Milk, and Dan White, but he also adds important details about the SFPD and its culture as well as conservative pol John Barbagelata, who was sounding the alarms about Jones and the threat he posed to the city. Talbot does a good job on Dianne Feinstein, whom he compares to Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie but also credits with safely navigating the city through one of its most difficult periods. And though I was initially skeptical about his claim that the San Francisco 49ers helped redeem the deeply troubled city in the 1980s, I have to admit that he marshals impressive evidence to support that claim.

So what does the New York Times review make of all this? Although Ellen Ullman's take on the book is more negative, I don't actually disagree with most of what she says. But I think she comes quite close to a reviewing no-no when she starts outlining the book she wanted to read (or write). That book, it turns out, would include more coverage of women activists, including "a bunch of really angry women marching through [COYOTE founder Margo] St. James’s Tenderloin turf."

David Talbot fired off a letter to the Times, which they ran. (Some would say this is an authorial no-no.) Here's the last part of Ullman's reply:

My objections to his book are literary and intellectual. And, yes, political. I cheered for the 49ers. But Talbot devotes two chapters — two — to their winning the Super Bowl, and not two pages to the women’s organizations that changed our political and social life. This is all you need to know about nits and tribes and equal weights.

Let me say again that I find a lot to agree with in Ullman's review. But her comment about the two chapters on the 49ers is misleading unless we already know that the book has 36 (short) chapters. Also, the evidence presented in the book suggests that many San Franciscans cared a lot more about the 49ers than about the women's organizations she has in mind. So no, I don't think that's all we need to know about nits and tribes and equal weights.

UPDATE: I heard from two friends about this post, both very knowledgeable and with different takes on the book. Randy Shaw, who has forgotten more about workaday San Francisco politics than I will ever know, sent me a critical review he posted on Beyond Chron. As executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, Randy is especially attuned to housing and redevelopment issues, which figure in his review.

I also heard from Duffy Jennings, the Chronicle reporter who covered the Patty Hearst kidnap, the Zodiac serial murders, the Moscone and Milk assassinations, the Dan White murder trial, and the riot that followed the White verdict. Duffy is mentioned in the book. Talbot notes that when Dianne Feinstein announced the murders of Moscone and Milk at City Hall, she stopped herself from breaking down by focusing on a familiar face--Duffy's. Anyone who has seen that footage will recall how gripping it is. Incredibly, Duffy ended up in my class at SF State a few years ago and graciously agreed to cover this material for a subsequent one. Duffy's comment on the book: "Even as a reporter immersed in many of these events at the time, I learned a lot from Talbot's work."

Subversives ... and Richard Aoki

My review of Seth Rosenfeld's book, Subversives, ran on Truthdig last week and received a fair amount of traffic. As it turns out, Sol Stern reviewed the book for the Wall Street Journal. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that Sol was on the staff at Ramparts and wrote many of its most important stories. He has since repudiated the magazine's politics, especially when it comes to Israel and the Black Panthers, and is now a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

Some readers may find a comparison of the reviews instructive, especially when it comes to the importance of selection and emphasis. My review focuses heavily on what I take to be the book's central story: the relationship between Ronald Reagan and the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. The book clearly invites that reading. For example, Reagan's name appears in the subtitle, and Seth concludes the book by detailing the FBI's stubborn refusal to release the files that document its relationship with Reagan. That Seth was able to land those documents through a series of lawsuits is a major part of his contribution.

Sol acknowledges that the Reagan-FBI story contains the book's "most significant historical revelations," but he devotes relatively little space to, and offers almost no details about, those revelations in his review. He's more interested in the book's treatment of Mario Savio and the radical nature of the student protests. That emphasis assorts well with a more general argument Sol has been making in various forums over the years.

Interestingly, Sol also passes on what has proven to be a very controversial aspect of the book: its claim that Richard Aoki, a former Black Panther, was also an FBI informer. Seth released that story separately through the Center for Investigative Reporting this week, and it got a lot of pickup. The story hit a nerve, especially among activists and academics interested in race and ethnicity, and some of the most vocal early responders were deeply skeptical or dismissive--reflexively so, in my opinion. One way to evaluate that opinion is to perform what Stanley Crouch used to call the flip test. If someone brought similar evidence against Reagan or Hoover, for example, would the claim be accepted or rejected?

Readers of a certain age may recall the 1978 New West piece on the Panthers by Kate Coleman and Paul Avery. That one was also sponsored by CIR and received a great deal of attention. (I discuss it in the Ramparts book.)

Lincoln Steffens

I just finished reading Peter Hartshorn's I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens. I was drawn to it by my interest in Carey McWilliams, who met Steffens in the 1930s, and my interest in muckraking generally. But I knew little about the impressive sweep of Steffens's life and work.

Hartshorn lays it all out, starting in Sacramento, where Steffens grew up in the family home that later became the governor's mansion. Then on to Berkeley and the continent for higher education and back to New York for his early journalism. There Steffens befriended the city's police commissioner, a fellow by the name of Theodore Roosevelt. Steffens's muckraking efforts during the Gilded Age, mostly published in McClure's, made him famous and wealthy. Before it was all over, he would also mix with Woodrow Wilson, Clarence Darrow, Walter Lippmann, Eugene Debs, Robert La Follette, John Reed, Louis Brandeis, William Randolph Hearst, Vladimir Lenin, Herbert Hoover, Ernest Hemingway, Mary Austin, Robinson Jeffers, and many other notables.

For a muckraker especially, his life was charmed. He was a busy lecturer, but there was also a great deal of leisurely travel, especially in Europe. Indeed, one of Hartshorn's challenges is to make the second half of the biography something more than a travelogue. Steffens produced little writing of note during that time except for his autobiography, which was a hit. But during his travels he met and married the much younger Ella Winter, with whom he had a son. After much roaming, they settled in Carmel. The return to California was enriched by his connection to his niece, Jane Hollister. Her enormous family ranch in central California was another playground for the Steffens family.

Hartshorn spends a good deal of time on Steffens's connection to the Russian Revolution and communism. The book's title, for example, echoes Steffens's enthusiastic assessment of the USSR and its prospects. Having muckraked during the Robber Baron era and witnessed the senseless slaughter of the First World War, Steffens wanted basic reform and embraced various revolutionary efforts. Later, the Great Depression confirmed his sense that capitalism was hopeless.

Hartshorn provides the context for Steffens's convictions but doesn't share them. It's an easy call at this historical remove, but one wonders how Steffens and others accepted such widespread brutality in exchange for the promise of democracy. Part of the answer, Hartshorn argues, was Steffens's advancing age and the comfort he and his family enjoyed in Carmel, a world away from the terror.

During one of his lecture tours in 1920, Steffens noted that his talks were growing "clearer, firmer, [and] redder." In Pennsylvania, he reckoned that one-third of his audience was "visibly shocked." "Apparently I am to talk every night," he wrote his sister Laura, "until I land in San Francisco or jail."

BANG!

Just got my third call this week on behalf of the Bay Area News Group. Do yourself a big favor. Stay away from these people.

I wanted to support my local newspaper, so I began subscribing to the West County Times when I moved to Richmond two years ago. It's not a very good paper--their headline the day after the Chevron disaster was on the Olympics, despite the fact that the level-3 fire broke out at 6 p.m. the previous evening in Richmond. But the paper has some local news and the New York Times crossword puzzle, so what the hell.

I decided to stop service because I need to write in the morning, not linger over the puzzle, so I didn't pay the latest bill, which would have continued my service through September. Then I went on vacation. They continued daily service, despite the fact that I put in a vacation stop. My yellowing papers on the front law notified prospective burglars that no one was home. That's the norm, by the way.

The calls started this week. I asked the first caller to discontinue my service and send me a bill for the remaining balance--somewhere in the $14 area. The next call came a few days later. I told the guy the same thing but finally decided to convert my service to Sunday only. He transferred my call to his supervisor, who ran me through the basic info again (address, house or apartment, was older than 18, etc.). Then he told me he couldn't take the order unless I paid with a debit or credit card. Which meant they could bill me into perpetuity, whether or not I wanted the service. No thanks.

Third call this morning, a couple of hours after I sent an email to subscription services to erase any trace of a doubt that we were through. Told caller #3 the same thing. No more calls, no more service, just send the final bill.

I like newspapers, but come on.

Philip Fradkin RIP

I learned today that Philip Fradkin passed away. I knew he was ill because I stood in for him at a recent awards conference. (Two of his UC Press books were nominated.) That was less than a month ago, so I wasn't quite ready for this news.

I met Philip through the California Studies dinners, which used to be held at the UC Berkeley Faculty Club. That was right around the time his biography of Wallace Stegner appeared. I reviewed it favorably for the Los Angeles Times, and he went on to write two more books, both for UC Press in 2011: Everett Reuss and The Left Coast: California on the Edge, which he co-authored with his son Alex. His Wikipedia page lists 11 other books, all of them set in the west and Alaska. Three of them concerned earthquakes, including The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself (UC Press, 2005), which I assigned for my class at San Francisco State University. It helped us understand, among other things, how the 1906 disaster was connected to the Progressive Era.

Philip lived in Inverness, a tiny burg near Point Reyes Station in Marin County. He said he chose it because it changed less than any other place he knew. Part of the appeal, I'm sure, was the fabulous Tomales Bay landscape; having served as an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times and as western editor of Audubon magazine, he was especially attuned to its charms.

There's more information about Philip and his impressive body of work at his website, and obits have run in the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times.

Few have written more--and more compellingly--about the modern west, its ecology, its natural catastrophes, and the imperfect ways we've prepared for and responded to them. And his biographies of Stegner and Reuss, a precursor to Christopher McCandless of Into the Wild, extended his reach to those who explored and wrote about the west as well.

Grateful Dead Archive Opening

The Grateful Dead Archive had its public opening yesterday at UC Santa Cruz. I went down for the event and was able to catch the first couple of hours. Beautiful day and setting, Moonalice sounded great, and the exhibit looked swell.

During that brief time, I visited with archivist Nick Meriwether (who was very busy), Rosie McGee (whose e-book on her years with the Dead is about to appear), Paul Grushkin (author of the recent Dead Letters), and Steve Parish (Jerry Garcia's key roadie).

Parish, who wrote Home Before Daylight, gave a short talk between Moonalice sets. He and I have the same editor (Marc Resnick) at St. Martin's Press, and Marc recently signed Bill Kreutzmann's memoir, too. Not sure if he acquired Playing in the Band by David Gans and Peter Simon, but either way, St. Martin's has sponsored a great deal of Dead lit over the years.

The event was well attended--and well covered, if the early rushes are any indication. I've already seen articles from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the Los Angeles Times, and the Atlantic. I'm sure there will be more.

Many thanks, and heartiest congratulations, to Nick and his colleagues at UC Santa Cruz for their good work and a delightful event.

Jeff Lustig RIP

Jeff Lustig--professor, activist, and founder of the California Studies Association--died of cancer on June 14.

I came to know Jeff primarily through CSA, which he helped create in 1989. At that time, there were few organizations devoted to the study of California. Over the years, CSA's annual conference has drawn and honored notables such as Mike Davis, Patty Limerick, Kevin Starr, Luis Valdez, Richard Rodriguez, Robert Gottlieb, Malcolm Margolin, James Houston and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Wilson Carey McWilliams, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gerald Haslam, Delores Huerta, and Peter Schrag.

Many of these folks received CSA's Carey McWilliams Award, which recognizes those "whose artistic vision, moral force and intellectual clarity give voice to the people of California, their needs and desires, sufferings, struggles and triumphs." Jeff was one of those people.

Pia Lopez wrote a piece on Jeff for the Sacramento Bee. I would only add that Jeff's deep and firsthand knowledge of Ramparts magazine, Carey McWilliams, and the Free Speech movement were a huge benefit to me over the years. Also that his colleagues at CSA are saddened by this loss and grateful for his work, friendship, and spirit.

Mickey Hart--and the Archive

Jason Hoffer emailed me this week and called my attention to this conversation with Mickey Hart. In it, Hart discusses his interest in the sonic aspects of deep space and his new album, "Mysterium Tremendum." Very trippy. Also very timely for those of us in the Bay Area, since his band is playing the Fillmore tomorrow.

Speaking of timely, the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz opens today, and I'm planning to be there. Yesterday Krista Almanzan of KAZU, an NPR affiliate in Monterey, stopped by my office in Berkeley to tape an interview. (She wanted to hear from someone who will use the archive for research purposes.) Not sure when the story will air, but it was fun to chat with her.

Mickey Cohen

Just finished reading Tere Tereba's Mickey Cohen: The Life and Crimes of L.A.'s Most Notorious Mobster (ECW Press). It filled a gap in my education, which is pretty good on Los Angeles and mob history, but I didn't know much about Cohen, who succeeded his mentor Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel as a central player in the post-war Los Angeles rackets.

Tereba's portrait stresses Cohen's Boyle Heights roots, his shortlived boxing career, his obsession with cleanliness, and most of all his appetite for publicity, which distinguished him from his underworld peers. Cohen absorbed his native city's lust for the limelight, and he paid the price for it. He appeared before the Kefauver Committee and was later subpoenaed for the McClelland hearings. His cagey answers earned him a new enemy, committee counsel Robert Kennedy. In 1961, after Kennedy became U.S. Attorney General, Cohen was convicted of tax evasion and given a 15-year sentence starting at Alcatraz. During his ten-year prison stint, he was brutally attacked and disabled. He was freed in 1972, but the Sunset Strip he had once commanded had turned into a hippy scene that couldn't have been less interested in an old-school mob figure like him. By this time, of course, Nixon was president, and Bobby Kennedy had been killed at the Ambassador Hotel. Divorced, out of the action, and battling stomach cancer, he tried to cash in with a memoir during the Godfather era. He died in his sleep in 1976.

The book's main strength, I think, is the way it uses Cohen's experience to sketch the larger Los Angeles underworld and demimonde of that period. Interesting enough in his own right, Cohen is also a perfect delivery system for this portrait, largely because of his long tenure. His friends, associates, and adversaries included not only Siegel, but also Jack Dragna, Johnny Rosselli, Johnny Stompanato, and Jimmy Utley as well as writer Budd Schulberg, screenwriter Ben Hecht, super lobbyist Artie Samish, actress Lana Turner, Frank Sinatra, and a young Richard Nixon, whose campaign manager tapped the mobsters he had defended in court. Cohen also had connections to racketeers in Cleveland, Chicago, and New York, including Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, Siegel's former partners in Las Vegas. And one of Cohen's crew was Stumpy Zevon, father of musician Warren Zevon.

I turned on L.A. Confidential last night and remembered that James Ellroy used Cohen to get that story going. Cohen may have achieved a kind of iconic status in Los Angeles, but I found relatively little too admire in his character, even by underworld standards. Yet I enjoyed and learned a great deal from Tereba's up-tempo, well-turned biography.