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0:06
MICHAEL COHEN: Hello, everyone. Welcome. Can you hear me? Yes. All right. Hi everyone. Welcome. Today, we have the honor and privilege of presenting Greg Castillo, who is one of the co-curators of the exhibit that you just all walked past, and hopefully have already spent considerable time in, talking about hippie modernism. But it is my task as the instructor of the proverbial course, which brings us together to offer some words of introduction. My name, for those of you who don't know.
0:38
They all know. My name is Michael Cohen. I am an associate teaching professor of American Studies and African-American studies, and I am the co-teacher with Natasha Boas for L&S 25, thinking through the arts and design at Berkeley, a course that we have entitled California countercultures. For those of you who are-- I'm looking for my cursor here. It's always a two screen gig. There it is. All right. For those of you who are not tapped into the Berkeley
1:06
computer system, but are civilians or former students, you can access the syllabus to this course. And in fact, some of the readings through this website, which can be found at medium.com/calif orniacountercultures. And it gives you the imagery, the links to all relevant related programming. Reading list, though, that is required of the civilians. You all are required, but they're not. And then the syllabus now, if you're interested, you can also-- all of the reading is available here as well.
1:41
You can simply click on these links and download the readings if you care to do so as well. Now our course is part of a larger enterprise here at UC Berkeley, which I'm going to link to click to hear, the thinking through the arts and design at Berkeley, which is a larger project of arts access and education here at the University. And this programming is made possible-- we'll just say that this countercultural enterprise is brought to you by major corporate foundations
2:16
and friendly plutocrats who make all of this possible, which seems ironic, but necessary all the same in these neoliberal times. So this is sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, by Cal Performances and Lisa and Douglas Goldman, whose generosity makes all of this possible. And we thank them for that.
2:36
It is my honor, then, to introduce, and I will-- well, one quick other announcement is that this exhibit, the Black Panthers power to the people at the Oakland Museum of California, is still open. It closes on the 26th of February. It is highly, highly recommended that everyone see this before it disappears. It's a phenomenal show of real, I think, profound importance to the history of the Bay area, particularly of Oakland. And the Oakland Museum of California is an outstanding museum.
3:10
And this exhibit has been held over for several months because of the popularity and importance of the show. And that this is our local history. This is the East Bay heritage. This is why the East Bay matters in the history of the 60s. And so I would encourage everyone to go see that. There is, of course, you're already in the building to see this show, Hippie Modernism and the Struggle for Utopia, which we will be discussing in part today.
3:39
And so then let me turn to introduce our guest speaker today, Greg Castillo. Greg Castillo is the associate is an associate professor of Architecture here at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Cold War on the Home Front, the Soft Power of Midcentury Design. And he has, in the past, studied photography at Rochester Institute of Technology. He's got a master's degree from the Annenberg School of Communications at USC. And he received his PhD here in architecture at the University
4:09
of California at Berkeley. And he is also the co-curator of the Hippie Modernism exhibit and editor of the catalog, among many other contributions to this very important show. And this, then, Hippie Modernism, the Struggle for Utopia is the subject of today's talk. And with that, let me do some digital maneuvering. And again, searching for my lost cursor somewhere around here. There it is. OK. And with that, possibly, Greg Castillo. [APPLAUSE] GREG CASTILLO: Thank you very much.
4:45
MICHAEL COHEN: No problem.
4:48
GREG CASTILLO: Thank you. I'm just going to get my documents situated here. OK. I think this is about an hour lecture. I just finished it last night. We'll see about that right now. So I am the co-curator, guest curator of the show. The show originated in at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and it's traveled to one other location before coming to Berkeley. It shed some of its large installations, and we use that as the opportunity to add
5:19
a lot more Bay Area content into the show, because of course, the idea of taking a show on hippies from Minneapolis and bringing it to the Bay Area is term shipping coals to Newcastle. So we've added a number of things to the show, and some of those things will be in this presentation. I'll try to let you when I show things on the screen that are here in the museum, so you can take a look at them yourself. So this exhibition title, Hippie Modernism,
5:51
the Struggle for Utopia involves two concepts that seem to be pretty antithetical. And that's I think, quite purposeful on the part of Andrew Blauvelt, who put the show together in the Walker Art Institute. It conjoins the word hippie with the word modernism. And it's a provocation in a sense. So if we think about the term modernism, it tends to evoke ideas about the celebration of technology, futurism, rationalist ideologies, and the minimalism
6:24
of the glass and steel grid, which you see up on the screen. On the other hand, the term hippie, as seen in this family portrait shot in 1969 at the Wheeler Ranch commune in Sonoma by photographer Bob Fitch, that term evokes very different connotations. The flower power slacker, the stoned tree hugger. Tribal living self-exiled from industrial progress. All of these are essentially the kind of stereotypes of the hippie, and now hippie modernism. It conjoins these seemingly irreconcilable notions
7:07
as is done in this photomontage by the Italian art collective called Superstudio. This is a part of the exhibition, although it's quite a small image there. The gridded ground plane in this visionary project represents a planetary power and information grid, called the Supersurface, that would allow people to become in effect, a high tech nomads, wandering the surface of the planet and plugging in anywhere. So I'd like to point out two things about this project that you see on the screen.
7:37
First, that Superstudio's hippies, who were literally cut and pasted from a magazine article, conform to a European modernist practice that proclaimed the primitive as an intervention into Western cultural civilization. Of course, Picasso used African tribal art as a springboard for abstract painting, as shown in the inset images at the top of the screen, which show Picasso in his studio surrounded by his collection of so-called tribal art,
8:10
an actual African mask, and his interpretation of that mask in a detail from the Ladies of Avignon, the painting of 1907. So, in a similar way, Superstudio deploys the hippie as a primitivist icon in an aesthetic debate external to its originating culture. Just as African sculptors had no say in how Picasso redefined their works from a European perspective, the hippie family at Wheeler's Ranch had no say in their portrayal as post-war primitives. When external observers define a culture,
8:50
they exert their power over how it is represented and remembered. And this is something that happens time and time again to the hippie. To this day, hippies are stereotyped through representations not of their own making. The term hippie, according to most sources, was a journalist's invention, a mocking diminutive of the term hip. Popular media typically depicts hippies either as a moral lesson in modernity gone wrong, for example, in this hips exploitation kind of drive
9:23
in film poster, calling LSD a lovely of death, or just as a mere consumer lifestyle diversion, as in the ad on the right for Hippie Chic perfume. Both of these stereotypes carry the message that hippie efforts to define and live out cultural alternatives were, at best, superficial, and at worst, delusional and dangerous. For the upcoming 50th anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love, the city of San Francisco is publishing a nostalgic representation of the hippie.
9:56
This hippie is not toxic like some of the previous ones, but also stripped of any potential to change mainstream values. So in this talk, I'll attempt to set aside these media stereotypes in assessing counterculture efforts to define a series of alternative visions for postwar American modernity. But first, I should quickly address the most frequent objection to Andrew Blauvelt exhibition title Hippie Modernism. And that's the idea of what modernism is. Modernist design is most often associated
10:34
with things like the Bauhaus tradition, the iconic gridded glazing of Bauhaus facade designed by Walter Gropius, which you see on the screen in a period photo, and also the Bauhaus ideal of rational mass production. Machine aesthetics are even imposed upon the human body, in the image on the right, of students performing a Bauhaus theatrical. You can see the way in which their bodies are encased in mechanistic geometries, and even their movements were very mechanistic for this ballet.
11:06
So hippies did not definitely embrace Bauhaus machine age modernism. Instead, they celebrated tribal communality and do it yourself craft. So you might wonder, how can they be considered modernists? Weren't hippies actually anti-modern? Well, only if one chooses one sort of modernism as the real deal, but not if we accept that there are multiple modernisms. So, as Picasso has already shown us, tribal art and aesthetic primitivism are deeply baked into modernism's cultural DNA.
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Machine age modernism and hippie modernism had very different approaches to what it meant to be human in an age of industrial modernity. That's depicted in these two images. A 1926 German poster, representing the human body through factory processes, and a 1967 human be-in poster from San Francisco. And that poster is downstairs in the lobby. They depict alternative ways in which modernity might be literally embodied. Bauhaus modernism's man machine interface consistently privileged the machine.
12:21
Its celebration of the assembly line is reflected in a depiction of the human body as an industrial object, perfectly attuned to rational regulation and social engineering utopias.
12:35
By contrast, the hippie body was an outlaw zone. It defied mechanistic analysis. Hippie modernism transgressed cultural geographies and violated fixed categories of high and low tech, modern and primitive. And its holistic worldview was a do-it-yourself blend of global philosophies and traditions infused with LSD, a modern pharmaceutical project, a product, and also set to the rhythm of wailing electric guitars and strobe lights to more modern technologies. So in going beyond media stereotypes
13:13
to examine hippie cultural output, I'll start by considering how San Francisco and Berkeley emerged as urban incubators of the counterculture. I'll then examine some of the cultural and spatial strategies that defined Bay Area counterculture. And finally, since I'm an architectural historian after all, I'll conclude by assessing the nature of hippie architecture and its contemporary relevance. So the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco was a cradle of hippie culture.
13:42
It was the cradle of the counterculture. And Theodore Roszak, who was an academic at Cal State Hayward, invented that term, counterculture, as a way of distinguishing counterculture from subculture. Subcultures, coexisting with the mainstream society and trying to fly under the radar often so as not to be detected. On the other hand, counterculture was flagrantly in-your-face. It was trying to invent a completely alternative path to a kind of mainstream culture.
14:14
The Haight-Ashbury district is outlined in red in the Google Maps diagram on the bottom of the screen. And the Haight-Ashbury runs the length of this long, block-wide park called the panhandle. How many people here have been to Haight-Ashbury district? A lot of you. OK. Almost everybody. Good. And of course, the panhandle runs from the Golden Gate park, toward downtown. So post-war planners considered this area of San Francisco ripe for urban renewal, and they proposed
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to build a new freeway through the panhandle that would link downtown with a Pacific Coast freeway. And thankfully, all of this was unbuilt. But the red arrows on both of those diagrams show you the proposed path of the freeway. Of course, this stacked freeway, which you see in a kind of envisioning of it by Lawrence Halprin at the top of the screen, would really have drowned the Haight in noise and vehicular pollution, and it would have turned a residential area
15:19
into a zone much more appropriate for commercial buildings. So this prospect of redevelopment created a disincentive for owners to maintain the local housing stock. If it was all going to be torn down, eventually, why not just hold on to these rundown rental buildings and wait for them to be purchased for demolition by large scale developers? So with its depressed values and cheap rents, the Haight became an alternative to North Beach,
15:45
which in the early '60s was San Francisco's established bohemian district. A new urban community took root, renting out large Victorians, often for communal use, like the band called the Grateful Dead, seen on the lower left.
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By the mid 1960s, the Haight had developed a community with a tribal feel, both in its communal residences, shared music culture, and almost a quasi sacramental use of LSD as a rite of passage and initiation. So now we get to talk about the elephant in the room, LSD. Hippie counterculture is really unimaginable without the catalytic influence of lysergic acid, diethylamide, LSD, or acid for short. Albert Hofmann, who you see in a wonderful psychedelic representation, was a pharmaceutical chemist
16:39
at Switzerland's Sandoz labs. He first synthesized LSD in 1938, then put it back on the shelf. While handling the drug, six years later, he accidentally dosed himself, perhaps by touching or scratching, rubbing his eye. He discovered not only the hallucinogenic effects of LSD, and you can see his response to what that was like. In a dream-like state, I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.
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He also experienced another property of the drug, its entheogenic property, which creates an experience of being connected to a total cosmic order. By 1947, Sandoz had begun to market the synthetic drug for experimental psychiatric use. But in the early 1950s, the CIA's project MKUltra began testing LSD on human subjects, often illegally, without informed consent as a potential mind control weapon. And you see them using it in a kind of a claustrophobic, little
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cell-like environment at the right, top of the screen. Testing was done through front organizations, including Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, where Ken Kesey, a Stanford creative writing student, worked as a night aide. Kesey, who you see on the lower right, volunteered as a test subject, and the rest is history.
18:07
The mind blowing experience he had informed his 1962 best selling novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey used his royalties to fund a psychedelic bus trip in 1964 from San Francisco to New York with his commune called the Merry Pranksters. They became acid ambassadors, promoting the synthetic hallucinogen from Coast to Coast. LSD, which was still legal throughout the US at that time, had escaped its laboratory quarantine. In 1965, back in California, Kesey
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began to host LSD-infused happenings that he called acid tests. He devised a plan to scale up the acid tests as a new kind of urban festival, and enlisted some of his friends in that project. Kesey had to drop out of the project, essentially because he got busted for marijuana possession. And so the project was carried over by Stewart Brand, Ramon Sender of the San Francisco Music Tape group, and they essentially put together a three-night long trips festival held in January 1966
19:17
at San Francisco's Longshoreman's Hall. This was the Big Bang event, announcing the arrival of San Francisco's hippie counterculture. And you can examine the posters and other handbills from the trips festival in the museum galleries downstairs. This was a happening rather than a conventional rock concert. There was a minimal distinction made between the audience and the performers. So flyers for the event announced, quote, "the audience is invited to wear ecstatic dress
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and bring along their own gadgets. AC outlets will be provided." Stewart Brand and his co-conspirators ceded the venue with electronic paraphernalia to be discovered and played with. Microphones, in one location, sent disembodied voices to speakers placed on the complete opposite side of the Hall. Musician Jerry Garcia recalled, everything was going on at once. It was a great, incredible scene and I was wandering around. I had some sense that the Grateful Dead
20:20
was supposed to play sometime, maybe, but it really didn't matter. That was the beauty of it. People weren't coming to see the Grateful Dead. So we didn't feel compelled to perform. At the Trips Festival, essentially, hippie moderns, realized the avant-garde dream of dissolving the proscenium wall, the wall that separates actors from viewers. And it took an astute outsider to recognize the market value of keeping that proscenium wall intact. And that was Bill Graham.
20:54
Bill Graham was hired to organize ticket sales for the event. He may have been the only person there who was not on acid. And after three days, and a cardboard box with $78,000 in it, which in 1966 was worth a lot more than it would be today, he realized that this was an incredible opportunity, and he began the Fillmore Theater's, essentially a branded name for San Francisco acid rock that essentially took over that area of culture. So a series of psychedelic aesthetics
21:33
came out of this Trips Festival. One is the idea of LSD art of this kind of being bathed in colors and light, liquid light shows. And the other, of course, is San Francisco acid rock with posters like the ones you see downstairs in the Hall, which with their really vibrating colors, difficult to read type, really try to show you on paper what this entire overwhelming sensory experience of being at a rock concert would have been like. So this was the kind of development of let's say,
22:11
the Haight-Ashburt tribe. At the same time, there was a different counterculture tribe developing across on the other side of the Bay right here at Berkeley, even though many of their activities were in San Francisco. And that's of course, the Berkeley tribe, a counterculture focused on racial desegregation, civil rights, and free speech. And often, the '60s are thought of, if you're talking about counterculture, as really occurring between the mid '60s and the mid '70s.
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In fact, in Berkeley, the '60s began in 1960. If we look at the newspaper, which is talking about Berkeley students going and interrupting the house of un-American activities hearings that were trying to force Berkeley professors to sign an oath of their allegiance to the US. Students went to that and were protesting and were literally dragged down the marble stairs. They were knocked over with fire hoses. And I think it was a moment in which students realized, just
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because you're from a wealthy family and white and wearing a perfectly matched skirt and sweater outfit. It doesn't mean you have the kind of privilege if you're protesting. This was a moment of understanding, I think, the limits of white privilege. There was also a large impulse to intervene in a segregated hiring activities. So on the right, you see the anti segregation in hiring protests held at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco, where people were dragged out bodily.
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Of course, the free speech movement occurs in 1964. And then by the later 1960s, the main political involvement of UC Berkeley students is anti-war protests, the war in Vietnam. So essentially, two very different countercultures have emerged. One involved and in a sense, inserting themselves in the political scene, another one devising a new notion of politics as the personal, the way that you embody a kind of political stance in society. And an event in 1967, the Human Be-in,
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really was billed as a gathering of the tribes. The explicit desire was to bring together both tribes on either side of the Bay into some larger kind of discourse. That's exactly what happened at the Human Be-in. And so it really marked the melding of San Francisco hippie culture with UC Berkeley political activism. As of this point, you can't really cleanly separate these two notions of counterculture. As many as 30,000 participants came to this event. A shocking number.
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No one really expected it. It was held at Golden Gate Park. They listened to bands including Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. They heard people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder recite poetry. And they enjoyed something called white lightning acid. This was a bespoke formula supplied by Owsley Stanley, who was the Henry Ford of home LSD production and who started right here in Berkeley. Go Bears. So this massive attendance at the Human Be-in
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really caught the media completely off guard. Something extraordinary was clearly happening in San Francisco. And to maximize readership, media reporting really focused on sensational stories about drug use, about free love, about a kind of bizarre youth culture. And this launches the Summer of Love. By the summer of 1967, these media reports create an incredible cascade of people coming into the Haight to check out this new culture. The new people who are arriving include
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people who are interested in hippie culture, but also include both drug addicts and drug pushers. There are an enormous number of runaway teens who hate where they're living, and basically find this as being reported as a kind of utopia. And also sexual predators who are trying to prey on those teens. So this is the moment at which this particular Haight-Ashbury tribe makes the terrible discovery that tribes don't scale up endlessly. Suddenly having Tens of thousands
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of new people coming in really disrupted the life of the neighborhood. And it's sort of interesting that this 50th anniversary is a celebration of the Summer of Love. That's exactly the event that took down the Haight-Ashbury kind of collectivity, that sense of closed community. So by October 1967, a group of street performer, kind of anarchists called the Diggers, who I'll say more about later, conduct a street performance/protest called Death of the hippie, birth of free.
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And you see the funeral notice and you can see that imagery also downstairs in the downstairs gallery. Funeral notice for hippie in the Haight-Ashbury district of this city. Hippie devoted son of mass media. The Diggers were trying to say, this mediated version of the hippie is not what this movement is about. And they wanted to change the name hippie to the name free man, of course, with its sexist implications. But that was 1967 for you. So the collapse of the coherence of the community
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in Haight-Ashbury did a number of things. It created a huge influx to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, which suddenly became known as the capital of the counterculture. Telegraph Avenue was a place where people who wanted that sense of coherent community from San Francisco moved to. And there was another very important trajectory that came after the Summer of Love, which was getting out of the city and back to the land. So this was a reaction to really the turmoil of the inner city
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or many inner cities in the mid to late 60s. And also with things like the hazard of being charged with marijuana, with possession of marijuana. This possession of marijuana accounted for one fifth of all California felony arrests in 1967. And people like Timothy Leary received a 20-year sentence for the possession of three burned down roaches. So when we look at the kind of draconian punishments, we realized like this is clearly being levied against a community.
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This is a way of suppressing this community and also clearly the Black community. So hippies moved to the country. And by the time the Summer of Love had ended, they had created the largest number of intentional communities or communes ever seen in American history. We heard a little bit about that in a previous lecture. By the early 1970s, about 750,000 people lived in more than 10,000 communes across the US. This wasn't simply an anti-urban movement, as it's often portrayed.
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Communards tended to circulate among communes, both in cities, in remote urban areas, and in places somewhere in between. And that kind of cosmopolitanism, that kind of nomadic trajectory that took in both city and country, was also reinforced by an informational network of underground newspapers, magazines, and the encyclopedia like Whole Earth Catalog. So actually, in the relaxation cube, which is in the top floor gallery, there is a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog
30:24
that you can actually look at. The Whole Earth Catalog was created by Stewart Brand. He was one of the trip festival's organizers. And he launched his crowdsourced publication, the Whole Earth Catalog, in 1968 after a different enterprise had failed. The first version of this enterprise was a truck store. He actually loaded things that would be useful to commune people in a truck, drove around from commune to commune with his wife, trying to sell that stuff, learned an enormous amount
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about the commune movement, and only lost a little bit of money, he was proud to say. So after that business model failed, he, with a grant from the Portola Institute, launched this Whole Earth Catalog. It reviewed products, devices, books, and other ideas that could be purchased, but not actually from the publication. Reviews of products were crowdsourced from readers. And the Whole Earth Catalog was, in effect, a text-based browser. It forged a networked community that
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was linked by shared interests. Steve Jobs, of course, the founder of Apple computer, later described the catalog as quote, "one of the bibles of my generation." It was like Google in paperback form. 35 years before Google came along, it was idealistic and overflowing with new tools and notions. So in its architecture listings, the Whole Earth Catalog reflected a broader hippie fascination with Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. Here, we see a US postage stamp of Buckminster Fuller,
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who has actually turned into a geodesic dome in this image. Buckminster Fuller was a systems theorist and engineer, sometimes architecture, but actually very much a visionary with gigantic plans and projects for the evolution of humanity. The whole Earth Catalog initially published a lot of Fuller's domes as things that you might build on a commune, but took somewhat longer to acknowledge Fuller's more enduring contribution to the counterculture, at least in my estimation, which
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was his notion that real human activity-- creativity took place in the outlaw area. That was the title of his 1966 New Yorker interview. Fuller elaborated his notion of the outlaw area as a personal and idiosyncratic origin myth of technology. Fuller claimed that early civilizations produced breakthroughs only upon taking to the open sea. This was an outlaw area that imposed challenges in a zone unregulated by land-based covenants. Sailors, according to Fuller, became world men.
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Lawlessness begat piracy and weaponry, but ultimately, advanced the development of what Fuller called livingry, in other words, technology devoted to better ways of life. By the late 1960s, outlaw spatial imaginaries had permeated Bay Area radical discourse. And in 1970, Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, somewhat late, described the outlaw area as evolution's, quote, "open end," a place for other stuff to happen, and potentially an Aquarian haven for the most useful
33:44
pioneers the cream and the dregs of society. So while Fuller's geodesics remained a hippie curiosity, outlaw areas, infused with spatial notions of political and cultural liberation, produced a new Bay Area conceptual geography. So we're going to take a little step back from 1970 to around 1966 to '67. In San Francisco, just as hippies were discovering Buckminster Fuller's trippy visions, the Diggers, an anarchic art tribe that championed a cash-free society,
34:20
staged public performances that redefined patches of urban turf as outlaw areas.
34:28
The Digger food service in Golden Gate Park, which you see on the right, provided meals from donated and stolen ingredients from behind a giant yellow frame, they called the free frame of reference. In order to be served, you had to step through the gateway and into a realm freed of Bourgeois conventions like property and profit. Diggers also papered the town with flyers, the most famous being depicting two San Francisco Tang Clan members around the turn of the century with a caption 1% free.
35:00
You can see this poster downstairs. Clearly, the Diggers considered themselves part of that 1%. The Diggers called themselves life actors, not hippies. Their motto was, quote, "create the situation you describe." This was a conceptual springboard for subsequent counterculture action. If you envision a city without hunger, give away food. If you don't believe in capitalism, create a space where its rules don't apply. If you believe in outlaw areas and liberated territories, make one.
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The counterculture project to create a permanent outlaw area as an urban amenity produced Berkeley's People's Park in May 1969. The story is pretty well known. Hundreds of people heeded the call when a local underground newspaper invited readers to come to a vacant University-owned lot with plants and garden tools. The announcement proclaimed all artists should show up and make the park their magical possession. Nobody supervises, and the trip belongs to whoever dreams.
36:02
This populist expropriation of state-owned land yielded a community garden and a festival site. But this occupation enraged California Governor Ronald Reagan, who vowed to suppress this outlaw area creation. And the resulting battle of Berkeley left one bystander dead and dozens of people with shotgun wounds. The town was placed under nighttime curfew, enforced by an armed National Guard militia. And the utterly disproportionate level of violence
36:33
indicates really, the high stakes of this outlaw area as an idea of outlaw area tactics and their perceived threat that they pose to the opposite, the people Stuart Brand called in-laws.
36:50
Here in Berkeley, Reagan's culture war backfired. Alienated local voters overturned Berkeley's conservative city administration, making the town an oasis for further outlaw experiments. This is what created the Berkeley we know today. What most people have forgotten is that People's Park, off Telegraph Avenue, was not the only one. In town, in fact, it wasn't even the first guerrilla gardening seizure of institutional land. A huge vacant lot owned by Bart, along Her Street,
37:18
was seized in locals by 1969 and called People's Park Mobile Annex. You see that photograph on the right. The land had been cleared for Bart tunnel construction and was slated for redevelopment at higher density. Locals camped out on the site as they planted it to ensure that it would not be seized by the police. Bart system administrators, unlike Governor Reagan, had no interest in waging a war against citizens, and the site was ultimately ceded to the city of Berkeley.
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Today, it's called Ohlone Park in honor of the area's Indigenous inhabitants. It has recreational facilities, a community garden, and the world's first urban dog park, a local grassroots invention. Another Berkeley first. So there are many possible reasons that just about everybody knows of the troubled People's Park, but not the successful People's Park. Whatever the reason for this lapse in historical memory, it advances the message that popular appropriation of land
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ultimately results in failure. Berkeley's other People's Park demonstrates exactly the opposite, that outlaw exercises in the public appropriation of vacant land can create liberated territory. Moving from guerrilla gardening to outlaw building takes us to the great impresario of hippie architecture, Lloyd Kahn, who lives up in Bolinas. A self-trained builder, Kahn helped students erect 17 do-it-yourself domes at an alternative high school in Santa
38:50
Cruz in the late 1960s, and one graces the cover of Domebook 2, which you see on the left. After editing the shelter section of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, Kahn struck off on his own. With Brand's support, Kahn and co-editor Bob Easton published Domebooks 1 and 2. With his publication revenues, Kahn built his own dome home in Bolinas. Although featured in Life magazine, the domes inherent flaws really annoyed Kahn. Domes tended to leak from their dozens of panel seams,
39:24
demanding building tolerances that were hard to meet when using used or scavenged materials. Kahn's co-editor was a Berkeley architecture student named Bob Easton, and he also began to doubt the dome craze. He felt that Fuller's dome was not architecture at all, but rather an industrial invention, something that Kahn understood quite well, having to have paid a licensing fee just to publish Fuller's patented diagrams in the Domebooks. But a hallucination that Kahn had when hiking on mescaline
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proved to be the final straw. And this is from a kind of oral history interview I conducted with Kahn. So you won't find this in the books. Enjoying his lovely buzz in a pristine Marin County meadow, he had an architectural apparition. He envisioned a geodesic dome. But it was not the geodesic dome that he was familiar with having built them. It was 20, 30, 40 years old. It was weathered. Its panels were warped. Its plexiglas windows were yellow. It looked absolutely scabrous.
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And Kahn was horrified by this hallucination, and he decided that he did not want to have this on his karma. Those are his words. So he told his equally horrified publisher to recall all unsold copies of Domebook 2 from bookshelves at the height of sales. In Domebook 2, Kahn had stated, the only growing resource is trash. And what hippies needed was a paradigm for architectural production located further downstream in the flow of resource consumption. Shelter, Kahn's Domebook replacement,
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promoted a funky vernacular architecture better suited to quote, "building with junk and scrap." The fallout of industrial society. Kahn depicted the self-build process as one that would also build a new self. He writes, starting small and heeding local advice, you will change during the building process. And reflecting upon his earlier enthusiasm for geodesics, Kahn wrote, our work on domes, though perhaps smart, was by no means wise.
41:44
So this new paradigm for hippie architectural production, and also hippie communal living, environmentalism and do-it-yourself construction, all of these come together in a course, put together by Professor Sim Van der Ryn in our own Wurster Hall at UCB. This was called the Outlaw Building Builder Studio. This showed what a professional design program might learn from hippy architecture. Students designed and built their own back to the land settlement on a remote Marin County Hillside.
42:19
At the end of the course, each received certification as an outlaw builder. You see on the right their outlaw builder certificate. Mornings were devoted to workshops and skills needed to establish a rural foothold, including mapping, tool use, and carpentry. Afternoons saw seminars by visitors engaging the empirical, aesthetic, and spiritual aspects of counterculture architecture's expanded field. The syllabus lists presentations on mobile lifestyles by the members of the Ant Farm collective.
42:51
Material properties of wood by the sculptor JB Blanc, Regional Ecology by Gordon Onslow Ford, who was a disciple of the San Francisco Zen Master Hodo Tobase. Ecopsychology by wilderness therapy advocate Robert Greenaway, and Scrounging by Doug Hall, a member of the San Francisco Truth Co Art Collective. I mean, that must have been quite a course. That's kind of a stellar collection of counterculture figures. In the end, nothing that the students built conformed to code requirements or had
43:26
been granted a building permit. Van der Ryn had successfully subverted an academic program dedicated to instilling professional design competencies, and instead redirected its pedagogy toward the production of outlaw architects. And as an alternative to buying building materials, Scrounging was said to be a transformative do-it-yourself practice. As Kahn wrote in Shelter, wrecking is a way of thinking, a totally different approach to building and working with new materials.
43:57
Studio participants built their communal village with scavenged old growth redwood from chicken coops abandoned by the local poultry industry, and it switched to factory farming. Dismantling sheds, scraping chicken shit from wood, and trucking the gleanings home and back to camp, students enacted the hippie call to become quote, "advanced junkmen," taking advantage of advanced obsolescence. For their final report, students produced an underground publication, the Outlaw Building News,
44:28
which sold out as quickly as it could be printed.
44:34
So by teaching self-building schools, creative scrounging, and eco metaphysics, and celebrating a complete disregard for building codes and zoning, the Outlaw Builder Studio embraced a, quote, unquote, "disturbance of the sensible." This is a term that the philosopher Jacques Ranciere associates with his concept of dissensus. The 1973 book Handmade Houses, a Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art also celebrated hippie architecture's junkyard origins. Art Boericke and photographer Barry Shapiro
45:08
scoured Northern California for do-it-yourself dwellings built by outlaw builders from salvaged materials. And you can see a collection of these images, which are now in the Bancroft Library, on a monitor on the first floor of the exhibition. Most of these homes flagrantly violated building codes and zoning permits. The authors were very aware that local building inspectors would be tempted to use their book as a hit list for red tagging and demolishing illegal structures,
45:37
so Boericke and Shapiro eliminated every reference to location and owner from the publication. From Boericke's photos, which are now archived at Berkeley's Bancroft Library, I'll focus on just one hippie marvel, the home of Barry Smith on the right, tucked in a redwood forest in the illegal hillside settlement of Canyon in the Hills East of Oakland. Smith's home was a shrine to the art of outlaw building. A closer look reveals an incredibly sophisticated construction.
46:08
The warped planes of a hyperbolic parabola crowns Smith's living pavilion. His weird hybrid of prospector, shanty, and modernist monument reinterprets the postwar Californian trope of gracious outdoor living for the acid-fueled eco freaks of an Aquarian age. Smith's marriage of low and high design yielded a first world version of the third world favela, an impression reinforced by a close look at Boericke's interior shot on the right with its smoke from an open fire obscuring the two goats, who
46:43
are feeding under the kitchen counter, if you look closely. I don't know if you can see them. One two. One seems to be eating out of a shopping bag.
46:58
Boericke framed the homes Escher-like maze of kitchen plumbing on the right as a glowing still life. Its declaration of independence from the uniform building code telegraphs Smith's outlaw virtuosity rather than an in-law builder's ineptitude. An aesthetic precedent for Smith's post-scarcity primitivism can be found locally in beat era assemblage, quote, "the first homegrown California modern art," according to art critic Peter Plagens. Like the Smith house, works by San Francisco artist Bruce
47:31
Conner, whose piece, Looking Glass, you see on the left, revel in the capacity to invoke new worlds from the refuse of the old. Conner's name for its creative circle, the rat bastard protective society, was inspired by the name of a San Francisco garbage collectors union. And Connor truly was a garbage collector, scavenging sculptural materials from San Francisco Victorians slated for demolition by urban redevelopment planners. Connor dubbed his aesthetic funk art,
48:01
a term borrowed from jazz, and in turn appropriated by BAMPFA curator Peter Saltz for his 1967 exhibition, which included works by Connor. And actually, you can buy old copies of this Funk catalog in the gift shop right now. I don't know where they found them, but they're really kind of a find, and they're really wonderful. For his catalog, Saltz interviewed exhibited artists asking, what is funk? One replied, funk is concerned with man, and the funk image of man is the final inversion.
48:35
It's a groove to stick your finger down your throat and see what comes up. This is funk.
48:42
So while intended as a provocation, this definition is unerringly accurate for Connor's Looking Glass and Barry Smith's house. Both works interrogate commodity status.
49:01
I'm sorry. Both works interrogate commodity status and value in what was understood to be a post-scarcity economy. Both interrupt the resource stream from goods to waste products. Sticking a finger into the process of consumption to display what comes up. Connor and Smith deploy funk to stage an aesthetic confrontation with consumer debris. As skilled outlaw builders, they worked with the materiality of trash and the regurgitation of past lives that gives debris a temporal depth
49:33
that new construction materials lack. Hippies were indeed modernity's subjects. But in their repudiation of core modernist precepts, they challenged the First World faith in luxuriant consumption as the definition of progress. And in the 1960s, outlaw building had become something of a popular Bay Area pastime, not just among hippies. For two decades, a funk and junk wonderland greeted drivers along Interstate 580 as they approached Berkeley from the Bay Bridge.
50:07
At the Emeryville mudflats, now the Eastshore State Park bird refuge, locals began to fashion driftwood and other waterborne refuse into overscaled public sculpture. Seen by tens of thousands of freeway commuters every day, the do-it-yourself public park provided a funky antidote to commercial billboards lining the inland side of the freeway.
50:34
Built by amateurs from driftwood and flotsam, giant animals, human figures, and even a funk campanile emerged from the tidal muck. And then collapsed, providing building material for the next generation of constructions. The mudflats sculpture park marked the Bay Area as a liberated territory, where untended private property could be claimed by grassroots public initiatives, where do-it-yourself construction was not just a consumer pastime, but a citizen's right,
51:06
and where the detritus of an environmentally destructive economy could be turned into a resource from which to build a new and playfully responsible world. So to return to the question of just what constitutes a hippie modernism in architecture, within the parameters of the Bay Area funk tradition that we've looked at, I'd call out the following characteristics. First, hippie funk building is process-oriented rather than being purely form-driven.
51:35
It approaches the building process as a performance art, rather than simply the means necessary to create a work of architecture. The finished building is understood as the artifact resulting from a specific performance, rather than being understood as some autonomous object. And the construction process, rather than being the province of building and design professionals, is intended to create community, often through do-it-yourself methods. The physical materiality of these buildings
52:05
expresses a worldview, and typically, this is the holistic notion of ecology. And we saw that LSD was the drug that created a notion of being submerged in the totality, being part of a totality. I think that's where our understanding of ecology comes from in many ways as a cultural idea. The fact that something that you do, like pouring chlorine down your bathtub to get rid of a stain, actually has a cascade of influences in this entire gigantic biosphere that you live in.
52:39
So given these ideas, what can contemporary architecture learn from this. Is there any enduring tradition of this idea of funk and junk and building as performance, building as collective performance that we can see in the world today? And I think that there are some. This is the Jellyfish Theater. This was Britain's first building to be built and furnished almost entirely from reclaimed detritus. And it was created as a temporary venue for two simultaneously commissioned plays
53:17
about people rebuilding their lives after environmental and political catastrophes. The Berlin-based husband and wife team of Kobberling and Kaltwasser described themselves as conceptual artists interested in places that quote, "nobody cares about" and material that quote, "already has had a life," providing freedom from architectural preciousness. In this total theater project, a structural steel frame is clad with debris from timber yards, building sites, and domestic renovations, materials
53:48
making a momentary detour from their landfill trajectory. Volunteer labor, ranging from unemployed architects, and there are a lot of those, to people walking in off the street during lunch hour, assembled the theater. The designers supplied few drawings and no fixed plans. As Kaltwasser describes his responsibilities, quote, "I cannot be a dictator, one who tells everybody what it should look like, the final result is a kind of social structure that
54:19
enables almost everyone to participate in an assembly of different ideas," end quote. The result is, according to Kobberling and Kaltwasser quote, "an aesthetic of resistance to the symptoms of late capitalism and the ways people are so often just passive users of the buildings that have been given by politicians, developers, and their architects." In that sense, the Jellyfish Theater marks a liberated territory in which outlaw building methods, adjusted to zoning and safety standards
54:48
yields a transient community of do-it-yourself builders and a public space intended to defy conventions of neoliberal development. Quite unlike the aesthetic of resistance asserted by Kobberling and Kaltwasser, the Rake Pavilion in Trondheim, Norway, explores recycling as an ecological practice by fusing modernist form to funk materiality. 30 students from architecture schools in Trondheim, Oslo, and Bergen designed and constructed the pavilion for material salvage
55:21
from a nearby office building demolition. Architect August Schmidt and artist Charlotte Rostad provided on site guidance. Collaborators assembled the exhibition space in 12 days. Two layers of repurposed windows make up the pavilion walls. Ceilings consist of three layers of doors. The gallery floor is crafted from wooden cubes hewn by a local farmer from trees called for removal. While the process that yielded rake might be described as outside the box, its interior adheres
55:54
to the convention of a white box gallery, largely purged of the aesthetic intransigence that we saw in the Jellyfish Theater. Here, counterculture legacies of junk and funk produced a tasteful, ecologically conscious alternative to mainstream construction. And finally, I would cite this project in which digital design meets eco freak recycling. It's Studio KCA's 2013 Head in the Clouds Summer Pavilion, a temporary installation on New York's Governor Island.
56:27
Its exercise in parametric funk turned 54,000 disposable plastic bottles, that's the number consumed in New York in a single hour, into a fun palace with a conservationist message. Curved aluminum framing supported exterior pillows made of one gallon jugs. Inside, smaller water bottles, tinted with organic food coloring, created a luminous canopy for dance parties. A kickstarter campaign raised funding. 200 volunteers from arts and architecture organizations,
57:01
as well as the local community, provided construction labor, that a self-build project made of trash could win an American Institute of Architects small projects award. An idea unthinkable in the age of hippie outlaw builders really suggests the degree to which their methods and eco ideology have gone mainstream. Public acceptance has come, though, with a certain loss. As with most of the previous contemporary projects, studio KCA deploys junk and funk to express mainstream notions
57:32
of sustainability, rather than to mark a territory liberated from consumer capitalism and the rule of law. As proclaimed in warnings that drug use would not be tolerated inside a dance pavilion named Head in the Clouds. Really? The outlaw builder's vocation of staking liberated territory is missing from most translations of counterculture building practice as an alternative model of professional design. That loss may have more to do with the mandates
58:04
of our own contemporaneity than any cultural failure of nerve. Having laughed off the save the planet message of scruffy eco freaks for half a century, we find ourselves beached on the darkening shores of climate catastrophe. Perhaps simply envisioning an architectural path to survival, one stitched together in part from legacies of hippie modernism, must suffice as our generation's passage to liberated territory. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
58:42
So we have plenty of time for Q&A if there are any questions, but please wait for someone to come to you with a microphone so that everyone can hear your question. So are there questions or comments?
59:02
AUDIENCE: Would you care to issue a postscript about hippie architecture with what happened at the fire in the warehouse in Oakland? GREG CASTILLO: Yeah. Well, this is one of the things about liberated territory. It does come with risks. And I think that's one of the things that we lose when images of the counterculture, like the ones circulated by the San Francisco Travel Association of like come to San Francisco. Always a good trip. Well, guess what, it wasn't always a good trip.
59:37
People really did these experiments, often at their own peril. And in a sense, that has something to do with youth. I think the idea that you're invulnerable is very much a youth thing and was definitely part of this youth culture and clearly part of the culture of being an artist in a warehouse where who cares if it's sprinkled kind of a thing. Yeah.
1:00:07
AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm just curious what your-- if this is too personal question, but what your-- I don't how old you are, but what your personal experience is within these subcultures, or if you're more like looking in or if you have personal ties. I grew up in back to nature cultures and all those handmade houses. And I'm an artist too, but I'm just so fascinated with this idea of hippie modernism. I can't tell you I'm really excited. GREG CASTILLO: So let's put it this way.
1:00:39
I'll tell you mine if you'll tell me yours.
1:00:44
How do you view this as somebody who participated in it?
1:00:50
AUDIENCE: Well, there's so many things I can say. I mean, I feel that I grew up as part of a marginalized subculture that was portrayed in a erroneous light, often, and portrayed darkly. And all those dark things existed. I would say my parenting was terrible in a lot of ways, but I was exposed to so many wonderful things that me and my sister basically came out OK. But the primary successes within the culture are often, again, marginalized.
1:01:25
And I see this tie-in now because we're at this juncture that I can see very clearly because I've grown up as an outsider, that we're headed for a dead end here with climate change. And so much of the culture still marginalizes this quote, unquote, "hippie voice," this ecology. And it's tied into the suppression of the feminine and the marginalization of the Native American voice, where they've been telling us all along, what you do to the world, you do to yourself. It's a holistic.
1:02:00
I mean, I could go on and on about I studied holistic theory at San Francisco State, so I took it from my actual experience and then took it academically. But it's still marginalized. And it's actually the very thing we need to save ourselves from extinction. And it sounds radical, but I believe it's true. It's your turn. GREG CASTILLO: Yeah/ I agree with the things you've said. So my personal connection is just a bit young for the direct experience of this era, which is
1:02:37
why I believe I'm alive today. When I was in high school, I always hoped that some hippies would stop at my bus stop in a van and say get in, we're going to San Francisco. But that never happened. When I was around in maybe seventh grade, my parents and I took a trip to California and we saw it for the first time. And I really remember driving on that stretch of 580 and seeing those huge-- I mean, those things were like two-story tall sculptures
1:03:09
of driftwood and stuff, just thinking like, oh, my God, this is like no place in the world I've ever seen. And I think I would like to live here. And so I live here now. So I mean, part of it, I still, as a kind of outsider, looking onto the era as somebody who was a little too young to participate, find it super interesting and find that it has a lot of wisdom to offer. I really like, as a historian doing oral history interviews, and because many of the people who
1:03:40
worked in this area of architecture are still alive, it's amazing to be able to go to their homes and talk to them. And some of those hippie handbills that I've seen, I mean, I don't really use this term as an architect, but they are magical. I mean, there are places that are created in which you're in this wooden kind of shell inside that is warm and has enormous kind of feelings of comfort. So I do think there's much to be learned, and especially
1:04:12
in what you're saying about this hippie notion of ecology. I mean, I think it was clearly it's historically can't deny it. It was simply suppressed. In one way in California was on a leading edge during the first Jerry Brown administration. Sim Van der Ryn, who was the person who did that outlaw building study at Berkeley, moved from the School of Architecture to become California's first state architect. One of the first things he did is set up Office of Appropriate Technology.
1:04:49
One of their big initiatives was to create a road van called the New Possibilities show. You can see that poster in the exhibition gallery. It went throughout California, hundreds of thousands of people saw this thing that was showing off ways in which you could make your house more energy efficient. You could put together a solar collector. You could create a garden that used less water. And when a new Republican administration came in under Deukmejian, the Office of Appropriate Technology
1:05:22
was the very first thing that was cut out of the budget. It just simply ceased to exist after 1983. So one of the things one can wonder is like, my God, if we had continued on that trajectory and didn't have this interval in which there was this collusion with oil industries to prevent solar and wind power from making a mark, what would have changed? And actually, we're clearly at that moment again right now, seeing what wondering what will happen. Yes.
1:05:58
AUDIENCE: Thank you for your excellent presentation. The 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, a couple of young students came up to a friend of mine. And they said, they were inquiring about the Free Speech Movement, but also they said, what was a hippie? And I said, well, the simple definition for me would be that someone who valued peace and love over war and greed. Also, somebody recently said, well, what good were the '60s? Look at now, we have Trump.
1:06:35
And my answer was that, well, OK. The '60s were a great transformational period. And a lot of people-- it was a great example of how people could live together, love one another, and help one another. Also, my ex-wife and I, we traveled a long time in a van, two years actually, and we visited 10 communes. And we lived on three of them. One was Black Bear. You probably heard of that. It was one of the first ones started by the actor Peter Coyote. Osha Neumann, lawyer here in Berkeley.
1:07:09
And actually, it's one of the few that's still going. I was there five years ago, and two years ago. 35 people were still living there. And there are two books about it called Free Love, Free Land, and January Thaw. But it changed my life. I was disillusioned with LA and moved here in '69. There was a free university also that it had. Everything was alternative. Anybody who had something to teach alternative wrote a few paragraphs. I still have the catalogs. And it lasted three years, I think.
1:07:43
And there were classes like women's lib, yoga. Back in '68, '69, it was wonderful. So it was a great period. And thanks for the memories. GREG CASTILLO: Sure.
1:07:57
Yes.
1:08:03
AUDIENCE: Regarding the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, do you see any ironies in the way it's marketed? Or do you have any criticisms against this coming summer is one question. The other is regarding the image of the digital nomad, if you are familiar with that concept, have you considered comparing the digital nomad versus a hippie? Thank you. GREG CASTILLO: So for the first question about the promotion of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I mean,
1:08:39
one could be quite cynical about it, and I prefer to see it as my colleague Adam Hirschfelder, at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, explained it to me, he's working very much with the Historical Society in presenting historical knowledge and working with San Francisco Travel. And he said, you know what, for me, this is a humanist project about urban memory, and I'm willing to pull any lever I can reach to advance it. So essentially, hey, we live in a capitalist society.
1:09:12
Tourism is a huge industry. If we can get people from Germany and France to come here and to other places to see what happened at that moment and to think about it, then why not? That's my attitude toward it. And so the second thing is I actually don't really work in digital history areas or super contemporary areas. And so yeah, it is an interesting idea. I mean, but the only thing I'm wondering in terms of nomadics, is the digital nomad someone who actually moves through space,
1:09:56
or are they just moving psychically through networks and the web? In which case, I'd say that it's more like a digital flaneur as opposed to a digital nomad. I think if nomadics is very important to keep the notion that you are in a place your body is actually going from place to place, and the entire environment around you is changing. I think that's part of that. I would say that's an important part of the definition of a nomad. Yeah.
1:10:25
Up in the back.
1:10:33
AUDIENCE: I was wondering about applications for homelessness then and now.
1:10:40
GREG CASTILLO: Yeah. It's a hard thing to say, really. The house that you saw, the Barry Smith house built of debris that was a shanty, essentially a first world favela, first world kind of squatter settlement. And so that is the direction that that kind of hippie self-build would go towards. But of course, as in the question about the Oakland warehouse fire, those aren't exactly often safe or wonderful places to live. I mean, I have a friend who grew up in Canyon,
1:11:23
and he's talked to a lot of other kids who grew up in Canyon. And typically, growing up there wasn't especially great. And as soon as he left Canyon and lived in a conventional suburb and went to a regular school where he went to with a lunchbox with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, that was actually liberating experience for him. So yeah. And often, people say that if people who grew up with hippies, if the nomadic variety, if their parents were very
1:11:58
young, they had a very tough childhood, if their parents were older and more settled in a commune, then that was of just fine. But I'm getting off the topic. It's really hard to at this moment in time exactly what building solution can help the homeless problem. Because if you look at Bay Area real estate, any building that you see, a little bungalow that costs $1.8 million, like 80% of that is the land that's sitting on. A very small percentage, 20% is the building itself.
1:12:33
So if we keep on looking at ideas of how to create less expensive buildings, it's actually not getting at the problem. The problem is caused by really expensive land. And when land is worth that much, it's pretty clear that any attempt to seize that land, to appropriate it as a liberated territory, is going to encounter like a huge pushback, which might not happen if the land was worth $15,000, for example. Yeah. So that's a question that it's a really important question,
1:13:10
and it's one that I'm not sure anything that we've seen can actually advance the answer to.
1:13:19
Up there on the microphone. AUDIENCE: I'm just curious, your thoughts on Burning Man. GREG CASTILLO: On Burning Man. Yeah. Burning Man is really this kind of outlaw building put in an in-law framework. So essentially, it's a very interesting phenomenon of people descending on this site, using all of their creative energy to create these things, and also obviously doing a lot of drugs, but then completely clearing the site and leaving it pristine when they leave. It's a new phenomenon.
1:13:56
It's quite amazing. I've never been to it. These foolish people who organize it always have it on the second week of the fall semester, which is the least possible for somebody teaching in a college.
1:14:13
Anyone else?
1:14:20
AUDIENCE: Well, thank you for this. What I really appreciate is the conclusions that you were drawing at the end where you talked about-- I think you had about four or five ideas that were really important. One was process, the other was performance. The other was the transformation you go through when you participate, in other words, the learning. And then finally the notions of ecology. And to draw those out of the negative stereotypes, I think is really, really important.
1:14:58
And what I find, I'm an architect and former Dean of the College that did all this, those thrusts that you named actually have much more powerful roots going forward in the making of architecture and the remaking of our cities than most of the people realize.
1:15:23
It's almost like I want to see the SQL to your show, which shows those themes played out in what's happening today. Because to see another kind of drop thing, which is of nostalgia for the prior projects, puts it back into that kind of nostalgic resistance, when in fact, I think it's having much more powerful implications for the solutions that we're searching for now to climate change. So on the one hand, I thank you for pulling this out of the Summer of Love and the counterculture,
1:16:12
but I wish more people could appreciate what those theoretical themes that you outlined there, how they're playing out today. Because I think they're very powerful. Thank you. GREG CASTILLO: Well, that would be a good topic for a seminar in Wurster Hall, wouldn't it? AUDIENCE: Yes, it would be. AUDIENCE: As I was listening to you and I have seen-- I saw the hippie modernism show at the Walker when it opened, and then seeing it here with all of the new material is really amazing.
1:16:45
I was remembering being 10 in 1968 and also seeing those Emeryville flats. But the shadow, I think that's underlying a lot of these searches for alternative spaces for me is Jim Jones, and the way some people who are searching for alternatives to oppressive mainstream structures went to spaces that became what we call cults, or where maybe the structures of power in the outlaw spaces fell back into all too familiar patterns of authoritarian, patriarchal oppressiveness.
1:17:27
And there are a number of contemporary movies are thinking about this, maybe not always in real focused ways, but thinking about Captain Fantastic or The East, and other movies or memoirs about this, there's all of this wonderful potential. And you talked you mentioned risks of the experience in safety, but there's also this very gendered experience of violence in these spaces as well. And I wonder if you could say something about that a shadow to this experience.
1:18:01
GREG CASTILLO: Well, I think this is, as many other moments in time, really does have these shadows. I mean, I guess maybe as a historian, there's a kind part of me that's interested in looking for these extraordinary moments that are positive. So, for example, when I showed the house in Canyon like not-- it's a much more intriguing house than many of the hippie shanties that were built. And that's how art history works. It chooses the extraordinary thing to hold up from that moment.
1:18:41
But you're absolutely right. I mean, if we think about it, well, if people come to Peter Coyote's talk, I really have enormous respect for him after reading Sleeping Where I Fall. Is that what it's called? His biograpy. Because he basically looks at his behavior in the past and the degree of misogyny in his treatment of his partner. And I mean, he just depicts himself as a real asshole. And so one has to remember that, yeah, we're moving out of that moment, and this counterculture
1:19:19
became this crazy mixing chamber. And one of the things that pops out the other end are really new constructs of identity. So basically, Chicano identity in the notion of sons and daughters of Aztlan, gay liberation, women's liberation, Black movements for Black empowerment, all of these kind of identity-specific countercultures move out of this time. So in a sense, that idea of the oppression and gender is part of that mix, and some wonderful things come out of it.
1:19:56
And each of those things, in their own way, will have their own shadows, if you want to put it that way. But I do think that there's some really positive things that come out of it as well. One more question, I think, before we have to leave the theater. AUDIENCE: In that same way, I'm speaking as someone who doesn't really have much knowledge of this period or this culture, but in general, from what I've seen, a lot of it is simply put heavily [INAUDIBLE]. How does racism play into-- how did it
1:20:30
play into this culture in the spaces? And did you not find it hypocritical that they were preaching anti-capitalism like peace and love, while also engaging in like I don't know, countercultural white supremacy? GREG CASTILLO: Yeah. Actually, well, clearly, I probably wouldn't put it that way, countercultural white supremacy. And I think we have to be careful about projecting our own standards from this moment back at that past. I think, as a historian, you really need to stay in that moment.
1:21:01
So clearly, there's incredible misogyny. There are gender relationships that are very unequal. There are complicated racial relationships obviously, as well. The Black Panthers are emerging in Oakland, I would say, as a counterculture in Oakland. If you go downstairs and look at the issues of the Berkeley Barb and Berkeley Tribe that are on the wall, that was a underground newspaper based on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley that was essentially purchased by whites.
1:21:40
But if you look at the covers, the covers really have echoes of intersectionality today. I mean, there's a cover of-- actually, it's the one you should see now because it's about to come down. We've had a complaint about it, of a bunch of gay men in a park, some of them naked, holding guns and stuff or bricks. And its headline is "Freaking Fag Revolution." There's another issue with a woman in a karate outfit, and that issue is about women's empowerment.
1:22:12
There's an issue on Native Americans retaking Alcatraz Island. So I think there were, in some areas, a real desire. And I think some aspects of intersectionality come out of that moment. In Berkeley, there was a group called the White Panthers who were very disappointed to find out that the Black Panthers didn't want them in their movement. Wow, what a surprise. So yeah, basically, there are moments in which these things are welling up from this counterculture stew,
1:22:44
but it's a stew that's composed of stuff from the '50s and early '60s, which was like a very difficult and racial moment in society. There's going to be a hippie modernism forum on identity, fluid identities in the hippie movement. And that's occurring, I think, in April. You might want to come into that. And one of the people who's speaking there is Lauren Onkey, who worked for the Rock & Roll Museum. And she has a really interesting story about Jimi Hendrix
1:23:12
and how when he went to play in Harlem, people spit on him because they said like, who the fuck do you think you are, dressing up like a white man like this. So all of these moving across or trying to work with different racial positions was totally fraught in that time, as it probably still is today. Yeah. MICHAEL COHEN: So join me in thanking Mr. Greg Castillo. [APPLAUSE] GREG CASTILLO: Thank you. Thank you very much.
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