Bryce Galbraith: That was interesting…
Bryce Galbraith: So you’ll create the wiki on the arsvirtual site?
Rubaiyat Shatner: yes there is a serious lack of social relevance in many sl projects
J0E Languish: if you want to read a 1 sided conversation. http://welcometosecondhome.org/printshop/
Rubaiyat Shatner: yeah, actually I can do that
J0E Languish: just the text
Rubaiyat Shatner: well thanks for coming guys
Rubaiyat Shatner: I am on EST and it is 10:30 here, so I have business
Bryce Galbraith: Thanks J0E for the url…
Bryce Galbraith: Okay 
J0E Languish: np sorry the “mic” wasnt on at the begging
Rubaiyat Shatner: joe, can you de-spamify the emails?
Rubaiyat Shatner: I don’t know if you have edit privs
J0E Languish: emails?
Bryce Galbraith: I love that animation
J0E Languish: posts?
Rubaiyat Shatner: yes make them like sam - at- red76 -dot- org
Rubaiyat Shatner: sorry com
Rubaiyat Shatner: when it is published??
J0E Languish: ohhh yeh ok Illl try to work on that I think I have the power
J0E Languish: Its published now
Rubaiyat Shatner: I just don’t need more spam and porn
Man Michinaga: ok
Man Michinaga: y
Man Michinaga: ok
Man Michinaga: what I was thinking was to create a center
Man Michinaga: - repository
Man Michinaga: like a sttore buut free
Man Michinaga: for people to have the free/open source goods
Man Michinaga: and then also distribute them for |$0 on onrez and slexchenge
Rubaiyat Shatner: /yah, that makes me think about the licensing of the repository
Rubaiyat Shatner: /like creative commons
Man Michinaga: make it totally open
Rubaiyat Shatner: /so it is free
Rubaiyat Shatner: /always
Man Michinaga: yes
Bryce Galbraith: You just mentioned the rules of court but I’m not sure I caught it all…so this kind of presentation would be in the same category of visual displays, right? Say for a car accident a diagram of a street intersection, but in a machinima presentation?
Rubaiyat Shatner: /more or less that is what it does
Man Michinaga: well, there are folks who will take and resell here, it happens
Man Michinaga: right
Man Michinaga: I’m intereted in whether we’re talking about Realtime dramatization or machinima
Rubaiyat Shatner: /it would be up to the lawer and client to determine if it represented the POV correctt>
Man Michinaga: another idea might be tabeau
Man Michinaga: tableau
Man Michinaga: basically create the scene in SL
Man Michinaga: and have participants meet wiin court virtually
Man Michinaga: and have folks be able to look at it frommany perspectives as needed
Man Michinaga: and swvel POC as needed
Man Michinaga: POV
Man Michinaga: it would require pretty skilled viractors, though
Rubaiyat Shatner: it would be up to the lawer and client to determine if it represented the POV correct?
Man Michinaga: right
Rubaiyat Shatner: /so we had discussed, what are the next steps?
Ixmal Supermarine: If there were a walk-through, the prosecuting side could agree it and it would be a non-contentious tool…. but what happens if a prosecutor uses this SL tool and the defence doesn’t?
Man Michinaga: I think there will need tobe a lot of R
Man Michinaga: fromthe depiction side
Ixmal Supermarine: Understood - I see that from what Laura said - it makes it more symmetrical
Man Michinaga: might be an interesting project for the Eyebeam folks
J0E Languish: yeh
Rubaiyat Shatner: oh, yes that is true
Man Michinaga: or eyebeam could get involed with this group
Man Michinaga: Great.
J0E Languish: redeyesvirtua
Man Michinaga: I’m playying scrabble with amanda now
Bryce Galbraith: eyebeam.org?
Man Michinaga: yep
Man Michinaga: The director and Iplayscrabble…
Man Michinaga: 
Rubaiyat Shatner: so the question is, do we start working with infrastructure?
Man Michinaga: will do
Man Michinaga: Steve lambert
Man Michinaga: will do
Rubaiyat Shatner: I mean is there a way that we can wikify the metaprocess?
Ixmal Supermarine: Do you need money to help the project? if so, do you have any ideas how much?
Rubaiyat Shatner: I think we can pull together some of the tech on the site…
Man Michinaga: possibility that my school could do something.
Man Michinaga: but we’re on break.
Rubaiyat Shatner: yes I am going to have students in fall
Rubaiyat Shatner: maybe we can pull it together for some form of student involvement?
Man Michinaga: I think a good idea would be to start organizingit
Man Michinaga: maybe us academics could see if we could put students on this
Bryce Galbraith: How quickly do you think you would need to be able to turn out a machinima presentation (or just the environment for real-time walk-through)?
Man Michinaga: Columbia College Chicagop
Man Michinaga: cool!
Man Michinaga: heard of, never met
Man Michinaga: I’m in interactive art
Man Michinaga: I know them
Man Michinaga: fisher
Man Michinaga: I have been used to 2 weeks for a 5 minute animation
Bryce Galbraith: Yeah, I was just thinking about how quickly you would need to be able to mobilize some folks to produce something. Fortunately people can build things pretty quickly in SL but it also depends on getting info to them…
Rubaiyat Shatner: /we had started to build out a scenerio, does that seem a reasonable next step?
Man Michinaga: highly stressful
Man Michinaga: the Yes Men anims
Rubaiyat Shatner: with assets in place that might be reasonable
Rubaiyat Shatner: but I agree it would be super stressful
Man Michinaga: 5 mins with char anims is crazy, so using |SL in a 6 week period was good
Rubaiyat Shatner: yes to put it together in 2 weeks
Man Michinaga: I was using 3ds max
Man Michinaga: sl is much easir in thsi respect
Man Michinaga: actually I think the issue would be user coordination
Rubaiyat Shatner: okay, we can add a wiki to the site… and we were considering stills could be compelling as info
Man Michinaga: more like acting
Man Michinaga: super
Man Michinaga: well, here’s a really interesting take
Rubaiyat Shatner: I do want to talk to the lawschools in SL to see where their artists/ participants would be as well
Rubaiyat Shatner: not for law
Man Michinaga: my kids are totally vocational in outlook
Rubaiyat Shatner: but for construction
Man Michinaga: and they don’t get sl
Rubaiyat Shatner: this is pretty vocational patrick
Man Michinaga: so this would be a way to show them how SL could be applied to the |RL
Man Michinaga: as a potential job, butII hate goign there
Man Michinaga: I hate havign too put things in terms of “job”
Man Michinaga: but sometimes it’s the only way I can get through to them
Rubaiyat Shatner: yes, I can work with you on getting the wiki onto the site
Man Michinaga: cool.
Rubaiyat Shatner: sam ‘at’ red76 ‘dot’ com?
Rubaiyat Shatner: you can type too : - )
Rubaiyat Shatner: /lol
Man Michinaga: sending to amanda now
sam Eales: lbaldwin ‘at’ ntglty ‘dot’ org
sam Eales: sam ‘at’ red76 ‘dot’ com
Rubaiyat Shatner: gallery ‘at’ arsvirtua ‘dot’ com
Man Michinaga: excellent
Rubaiyat Shatner: yes, thanks for coming
Man Michinaga: absolutely
Man Michinaga: good
Man Michinaga: sorry to be quiet
Man Michinaga: ok
Man Michinaga: am going to get onto emailing
Rubaiyat Shatner: okay, thanks sam
Bryce Galbraith: Happy eatums
Free Love, a Long and Lasting Love
By Gabriel Saloman
Consume as Much Love as We Can
The words Free Love don’t inspire much more than a giggle now a-days, conjuring up images of flowerpowered hippies giving patchouli rubdowns. Popular legend has it that all that “exploration” just led to drug induced hedonism, the endless party of the 70’s, the awkward post collegiate key party partner swap. Or worse. Survivors became porn addicted, evangelical or both, while those unwilling to give up their lascivious ways got STDs, soaring divorce rates, or decades worth of regrets. In the most recent turn of the century, Free Love has an almost apocalyptic connotation, where for Gays AIDs is inevitable, and straights the end of society, be it rapture or global warming, doesn’t give you a reason to care. Free Love is infused with Capitalism, where we now consume sex, life experiences, each other, with as much care as we would a pair of shoes or a new cell phone. Free Love means the ability to consume as much love as we can and to never have to pay for it (charging it to our karma kredit kard).
It is hard to imagine that in another time we would have seen Free Love not as the philosophy of promiscuity, but rather held it synonymous with the civil rights struggles of women and homosexuals, the fight for access to contraception, divorce, and legal protection for spouses. In fact Free Love is part of our heritage of civil rights and the evolution of consciousness, and that the phrase has been allowed to die a death of neglect and misunderstanding speaks almost of a conspiracy. If one were to conduct even a cursory investigation of North American and European radical history one finds almost every visionary activist, utopian idealist, and concerned humanitarian extolling the virtues of Free Love and fighting for its realization.
Without the Benefit of Marriage
My family tended to be a bit antiauthoritarian. Though the student activist days were behind them, and inspite of my mother’s role as the head principle of a middle school, my parents instilled in my sister and I a healthy disrespect of authority, and a value system that strongly encouraged autonomy and independent thought. They taught us manners, and how to “obey” as a way of getting through situations that weren’t’ worth fighting over, but they raised rabble rousers. My sister started an Atheist club, and was an out bisexual in high school. I wore dresses and distributed underground newspapers. It’s little wonder that one of the most revered family artifacts was a yellowed copy of the San Francisco Chronicle with a photo of my father and the suggestive header,
“Free Love Firing of Postal Clerk”
Located just below a more lurid headline stating “Paris Street Battles”, the photo is not especially flattering. Surly looking and crowned with a Jew-fro halo, my father looks more like the Algerian terrorist responsible for the insurrection in the City of Lights, than a happy go lucky hippy from the Haight. Yet this May 1968 cover seems to sum up quite a bit of what the Modern 1rst world was up against. The hard to imagine but clearly critical generation gap is there in the details like a fornicating, fire-bombing devil.
My dad worked at the San Francisco Post Office, Rincon Annex, a hot spot for anyone in the rarely employed hippie scene that wanted to work a few months and live for 2 years of their earnings. My father was living with a girlfriend in a small apartment in the Mission, and word got around to his bosses. They asked him if it was true that he was living with a girl “without the benefit of marriage”, and when he said it was, they fired him. The ACLU took up the case and years later a landmark decision was made determining that Postal Service had no business knowing anything about my dad’s personal life, much less firing him for it, if it in no way affected his job performance.
My father’s case, which was important enough to be taken up by Time magazine with a much more charming photo (my dad swears the chronicle guys begged him to pose without a smile, and then only took that one snap), and to be used as a precedent for a short time after. In my house, it is the kind of thing we drag out on holidays and share with friends and extended family. It has a small amount of kitsch factor to it, with it’s ironic subtext and strange local pride. For the kids, it’s hard to imagine that anyone cared about such things, much less went to court over them. For my parents it’s just hard to believe how much has changed. Myself, I always took it for granted that this was an issue that only pertained to the recent past, until I began looking for origins of the legacy which flowered into what we call Hippie.
Yes I am a Free Lover
In the 19th century radical movements found common cause in Free Love. Utopian Socialists, individualist Anarchists, Abolitionists, Mystics, Spiritualists,Free Thinkers, and feminists all saw Free Love as a inseparable aspect of their visionary movements. To all of them, Free Love was a means of liberating women, and thus all people, from the tyranny of marriage, a form of “sexual slavery”, in which women were no longer a person in the eyes of the law, and in the eyes of society as a whole. A married woman no longer could own property, nor make legal or economic decisions for themselves or their children. Marriage meant becoming a part of their husband’s estate, and in effect becoming an object less than a person.
Free Love proponents believed that no governmental authority, through laws or physical coercion, should be allowed to determine to whom and under what circumstances a person should be married. Marriage (if it should even exist) should be completely voluntary, and should either party of a marriage wish to end that union it should be done immediately.
In her 1871 speech, spiritualist leader, candidate for US President, and outspoken feminist thinker Victoria Woodhull offered this declaration on Free Love:
“Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing less!”
What Woodhull address’ is the epic ambiguity where our political and metaphysical freedoms overlap. Though in word she is talking about Love the emotion, in content she is addressing the legal implication of how we choose to act on love, and in doing so she acknowledges that Law often attempts to control the spectrum of experience that we may know well beyond, though also including,our physical world. In promoting Free Love, Woodhull is fighting for her right to self-ownership, but also she is attempting to address the infinite quality and variety of love that Victorian Christian society couldn’t possibly imagine, much less allow for.
This mystical quality of Free Love may, much as it’s practice, have it’s precedent in the Heretical practices of such groups as the Cathars, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Taborites, and even the Essenes. Certainly the western occult tradition that began to become popular in the 18th and 19th century encouraged such views, and by the onset of the 20th century, it became a common feature of antinomian christian groups, libertarians, anarchists, and others who sought to create a new society built on rationality, fairness, and a transcendental relationship with the world around them.
Many of these groups sought to form intentional communities to put into practice their utopian concepts. Radical thinkers such as Charles Fourier, Robert Owens, and John Humphrey Noyes all attempted communes in the United States which practiced various forms on nontraditional marriage. Though some of these communes were more concerned with “complex marriages”, or polygamy, many sought to be a refuge for men and women who desired gender equality. Many were directly reacting to the attitudes of the Church which insisted that sex, and by it’s correlation, the human body was sinful and bad. Many people, including many Christians, desired a life where sex and the body were celebrated as part of God or Mother Nature’s creation.
Their Own Path of Liberation
In the Pacific Northwest there were a vast array of utopian social communes, most with beatific names such as Freeland, Home, and Equality, who’s general goal was to create a new society by example. It’s telling that they located themselves so far from the furthest outposts of American civilization. Much akin to other radical communities in the East, their ideas did not just disturb the social order, they raised a literal bloodlust in “decent” society, inciting cries for vigilante murder in the pages of major newspapers and from the pulpits of various churches.
One of the practices that most disturbed the relative peace of modern society was their advocating of Free Love. Home cofounder Oliver Verity, publisher of The New Era, invited “…all who believed in man’s rights to do and think as he pleased…” to take up residence at Home. His invitation was accepted and in Home many couples who did not condone marriage, as well as other men and women who wished to have no scrutiny upon their sexual and loving relationships, and for many years they found a peaceful haven in which to live.
When one reads the histories of Free Love it is easy to see the underlying theme of Homosexual liberation. Certainly many Suffragettes were themselves struggling with the oppression of lesbians though quietly and under the veil of the grander vision of Women’s rights as a whole. Men who themselves were not allowed to love other men openly could not help but see the emancipation of Women, and for that matter Black Slaves, as a part of their own path of liberation. English Poet Edward Carpenter was himself a vocal advocate of Free Love, and his struggles with infamy in post-Oscar Wilde England led to his seclusion at Milthorpe’s gay intentional community.
Though rarely the sole motivating factor, sexual freedom and the freedom to love without the institutional controls of Marriage were very much behind the 19th and early 20th century movement towards communal colonies.
The Unspoken Desires of Society
The wild woods weren’t the only places where experiments in Free Love flourished. The bohemian enclaves of Greenwich Village in New York City, the Parisian districts of Montmartre and Montparnasse, and Schwabing in Munich, Germany all were fertile grounds for the flagrant disregard of social mores. The tradition of artists and dropouts attempting to create cultures that shock and at the same time celebrate the unspoken desires of society very fluidly brought the cause of Free Love into the pivotal center of the 20th Century. The Bohemians beget the Beats beget the Hippies beget the radical gender and sexual politics of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. Though society bristled at the flagrant queer otherness of the Bohemians and the Beats, the Hippies were the sons and daughters that could not be ignored. Though their brand of Free Love was more orgiastic and performative, it was also more widely cultural and generational. It was just a bunch of kids trying to piss off their parents. Though certainly some Hippies (Yippies in particular, and the New Left in polemic form) attempted to equate Free Love with a radical practice, many used it as an excuse to get laid, and as many contemporary feminists pointed out, as an excuse to put pressure on women to consent to sex.
By this time the Free Love movement as far as women were concerned, was more interested in women’s rights to reproductive control, and to the legalization of adultery, homosexuality, and abortion. Many of the reforms that were called for in the earliest days the Free Love movement were realized by the 1970’s. What was left to accomplish was a deeper investigation of love, sex, and gender both in theory and practice. One could almost feel relieved to see a triumph of utopian idealism, were it not for the painful realities of the most recent turn of the century.
Now we can look and ask ourselves if we as a society actually practice some kind of Free Love. While the legal protections for Women and Homosexuals still hold, there has been a cultural shift towards Anti-sex attitudes on the one hand, and an entropic totality of pornographic sex on the other. The Evangelical Christian and global capitalistic forces respectively behind these shifts have broad support in Government here in the United States. Schoolchildren are indoctrinated to both fear and remain completely ignorant of sex by abstinence only education, while then being assailed with sexual imagery in everything they consume. The ubiquity of porn and porn like imagery has become the only model for young people exploring sex, and it forms the only outlet for sexual expression that is given any assent by our society. Sex is not for enjoyment, but it is for sale.
Of course this only speaks of the struggles of Western Countries. Elsewhere we can time travel to our not so distant past and witness moral atrocities committed upon women and homosexuals being carried out across the globe. Arranged Marriage and Forced Marriage are not uncommon in South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Human Trafficking, much of it for the purpose of prostitution is at epidemic proportions. The legal punishment for “crimes” such as adultery (which can include being the victim of rape) and homosexuality can be as severe as state sanctioned murder. While there are often religious and cultural histories that provide context for these issues, it in no way excuses these acts from critique and it would seem absurd to think that there was not a similar context in the West for the oppression of women and homosexuals. This history of Church and State was battled against by people who had the courage to believe that none should have authority over Love. Could there be any more Totalitarian act that that of a Government attempting to legislate and regulate Love? Certainly this question brings to bear questions regarding Polygamy, the Age of Consent, and love between species, but in investigating these issues we will confront our basic concepts of Romantic and Sexual Love.
Free Love may not hold as call to arms, but it’s underlying cause of Emotional and physical emancipation is as needed now as ever. Surely a goal of totally nonviolent, non-legislated, non-heirarchal Love is a Love that lives up to its name. Whether the world is ready for Anarcho-sexuality and all that implies is not nearly as important as the fact that people are already engage in this struggle. Free Love forever…
Going Beyond Democracy:
By Marvin Garson
Last week I pointed up the day-to-day virtues of the revolutionary gang, family, commune as opposed to the revolutionary party, and promised to show how revolution itself could grow out of their activities.
Revolution is such an overused word that I’ll have to start by clarifying it, clearing away all the ideological garbage littering the ground. Sorry, it’s not my fault.
The most common idea – the most childish – is that revolution is the armed seizure of power by revolutionaries. A revolutionary, in this image, is someone who is young, bearded, wears a fatigue jacket and beret, clenches his fist, and carries a sidearm – in short Fidel Castro or a reasonable facsimile thereof. (Some schools of thought hold that the revolutionary should also smoke pot and fuck on television; others consider this frivolous nonsense. It is a minor which can be settled after the revolution, most likely at gunpoint.)
If you imagine yourself one of the revolutionaries, it’s a very noble prospect plus you get a lot of pussy. But the real test must be how it looks from down below. And from below, it looks a great deal like dictatorship.
Fatigue-jacket revolutionaries will reply: dictatorship in FORM, perhaps, but democracy in CONTENT – the opposite of what we have now. A revolutionary government would give land to the peasants – whoops, wrong country – would, uh, end racism-and-exploitation by ending the corporate system that perpetuates it.
That discussion won’t get much further unless we switch now to the more sophisticated revolutionaries who all this time have been smirking along with me at the romantic Moaist-Fidelistas. They are a little older, more historically-minded: they’ve read Marx and Lenin and Trotsky, and also people you’ve never heard of – from Rosa Luxemburg (“red Rosa,” martyred in the German revolution of 1919) to Kuron and Modzelewski, now serving long prison terms in Poland for trying to organize a revolutionary socialist party in opposition to the Gomulka regime.
They believe it is not enough to expropriate industry from private owners; it must be kept from falling into the hands of a new, “Socialist” ruling class of bureaucrats administering property which belong to the people only in legal theory, not in fact. Very good. And how do you ensure democratic control of industry? Why, by setting up workers’ councils in each industry which operate with full respect for all the normal democratic procedures – especially the right to establish caucuses and factions, and the right to strike. The economy, in short, will be run the way a government is SUPPOSED to be run; it will be like a gigantic new left convention – impeccably democratic and a stone drag, as I said last week.
Some people call democratic voting a “means of expression.” It is that, but it is the poorest means of expression that I can think of. Isn’t it more satisfying an expression to sing, or tinker with your car, or have a fistfight, or write on a wall, than pull a lever? No, voting is a defensive weapon, not a creative instrument; it is something you use to make sure you don’t get entirely fucked over by would-be dictators of any variety, but not something you build your life around.
The democratic process is in fact painful and boring for all but the few who are so skilled in the game itself that they find it exhilarating regardless of its content; everyone else looks for excuses to stay away. This means, of course, that power falls into the hands either of faceless bureaucrats or of “groovy” revolutionaries who govern by decree “in the true interests of the people.” Once again: how can you run a society democratically if people don’t WANT to “participate in making the decisions that affect their lives?”
The only way out is a revolution which is consciously determined to go BEYOND democracy. “Beyond democracy” – that will stick in many throats. Let me over-explain it, just to make sure.
When I say democracy, I mean majority rule. When I speak of going beyond majority rule I don’t mean minority rule: I mean no rule at all.
A storm of protest: Anarchy! Madness! Our society is too complex to run without laws, discipline, control. True – but don’t be smug about it; start to change it. Start right now and let your revolution be a dramatic speeding up of the process.
Our technology is such that it can only be administered by an elite. That’s true too – after all, it was an elite that set down the design criteria for the engineers to follow. Did you think they ordered their own functions to be designed away? Do you think they told the engineers to be sure to remember that free men would be working in those factories and offices?
Perhaps it’s impossible to run a steel mill or an electric power plant in a free and creative way. In that case, run it automatically. If computers can fly super sonic jet plane at a constant altitude of 100 feet over rough terrain while making it take evasive action and launch bombs on target and screw up enemy radar (the plane flew two miles in the time it took you to read that half-sentence), then certainly computers can run a steel mill.
Will there be any work left for people to do? Certainly. We’ll have the time to build our own house, for instance, with our own hands, with master workmen around to supervise and instruct. How’s that for a start? Better than rent subsidies.
Sorry I didn’t get around to explaining how the revolutionary gangs/families/communes fit into the revolution, but first things first. Next Week.
(Originally printed in the San Francisco Express July 13th 1968)
The Nude and the Prudes by Jay Fox
(The Article for which Fox was Arrested)
(July 1, 1911)
Clothing was made to protect the body, not to hide it. The mind that associates impurity with the human body is itself impure. To the humanitarian, the idealist, the human body is divine, “the dwelling-place of the soul.” as the old poets sang.
To the coarse, half civilized barbarian steeped in a mixture of superstition and sensualism, the sight of a nude body suggests no higher thoughts, no nobler feelings than those which the sight of one animal of the lower order of creation produces in another.
The vulgar mind sees its own reflection in everything it views. Polution cannot escape from polution, and the poluted mind sees its own reflection in the nude body of a fello being, and arises in the early morning to enjoy the vulgar feast, and then calls on the law to punish the innocent victims whose clean bodies aroused the savage instincts is not fit company for civilized people, and should be avoided.
These reflections are based on an unfortunate occurrance that took place recently in Home.
Home is a community of free spirits, who came out into the woods to escape the poluted atmosphere of priest-ridden conventional society. One of the liberties enjoyed by Home-ites was the privilege to bathe in evening dress, or with merely the clothes nature gave them, just as they chose.
No one went rubbernecking to see which suit a person wore, who sought the purifying waters of the bay. Surely it was nobody’s business. All were sufficiently pure minded to see no vulgarity, no suggestion of anything vile or indecent in the thought or the sight of nature’s masterpiece uncovered.
But eventually a few prudes got into the community and proceeded in the brutal, un-neighborly was of the outside world to suppress the people’s freedom. They had four persons arrested on the charge of “indecent exposure.” One woman, the mother of two small children, was sent to jail. The one man arrested will also serve a term in prison. And the perpetrators of this vile action wonder why they are being boycotted.
The well-merited indignation of the people has been aroused. Their liberty has been attacked. The first step in the way of subjecting the community to all the persecution of the outside has been taken. If this was let go without resistance the progress of the prudes would be easy.
But the foolish people who came to live among us only because they found they could take advantage of our co=operation and buy goods cheaper here than elsewhere have found they got into a hornet’s nest.
Two of the stores have refused to trade with them and the members avoid them in every way.
To be sure, not all have been brought to see the importance of the situation. But the propaganda of those who do will go on, and the matter of avoiding these enemies in our midst will be pushed to the end.
The lines will be drawn and those who profess to believe in freedom will be put to the test of practice.
There is no possible grounds on which a libertarian can escape taking part in this effort to protect the freedom of Home. There is no half way. Those who refuse to aid the defense is [sic] aiding the other side. For those who want liberty and will not fight for it are parasites and do not deserve freedom. Those who are indifferent to the invasion, who can see an innocent woman torn from the side of her children and packed off to jail and are not moved to action, can not be counted among the rebels of authority. Their place is with the enemy.
The boycot will be pushed until these invaders will come to see the brutal mistake of their action, and so inform the people.
This subject will receive further consideration in future numbers. 23
Good Tables Make Good Neighbors;
A Case for Conviviality as a Plausible Vehicle for Action,
Education, and Transcendence
In 1897, not far from Red76’s former headquarters - the Brooklyn Yards – three men were arrested for publishing “obscene” material. The material in question was published in the Sellwood Firebrand, an anarchist newspaper with an international circulation. Henry Addis, Abner Pope and Abraham Isaak - the editors of The Firebrand - were briefly jailed, then run out of town on the rails. After a short stay in San Francisco, Addis and Pope resurfaced a little over one hundred miles north of their former residence outside Portland, Oregon, this time at Home, Washington.
Two years prior to the Firebrand editor’s arrests, three other men built themselves a rowboat and paddled out into the Puget Sound, Seattle’s gateway to the Pacific Ocean. They were looking for an isolated spot wherein they could form a new community based upon the ideas of Free Speech, Free Love, and Pure Anarchism. George H. Allen, Oliver A. Verity, and B. F. O’Dell found their spot at the base of the Sound, a few dozen miles west of Olympia, Washington. Amongst them the men put together a down payment of five dollars, thus reserving themselves twenty-six acres of land at two dollars and fifty cents an acre. They promptly went to work to earn the remaining funds, and by the following year, 1896, had moved all three of their families onto the land, which they named Home.
The community grew in size and membership over the years. A meeting space - Liberty Hall – was erected, which attracted speakers from across the country, including the likes of Emma Goldman and the perennial Presidential candidate of the times, Eugene Debs, as well as a host of others. In short order a newspaper was started, entitled Discontent; Mother of Progress. Similar in scope and theme to the Firebrand, Discontent, in the words of Stewart Holbrook, the former lumberman and noted Pacific Northwest Journalist/Historian, was, “from a close look at the yellowing files to have been more about sex… than economics.” Shortly after the assassination of William McKinley, Henry Addis – formerly of the Firebrand – wrote an article for Discontent, which came out full force against marriage. Marriage, in Addis’s words was, “the lowest form of prostitution.” The stage was set for a beautiful confrontation.
May I pause and tell you: when I think about the scene that happened next, and I think about it often - the scenario seems so picaresque, so mindful, controlled, and reasonable. I can’t help but want to travel back in time and have the opportunity to stand on the sidelines, taking in the scene.
The post office in Seattle got wind of the aforementioned issue of Discontent. They considered it the last straw. A year prior a gang of folks from Tacoma set out for Home with guns, bats, and other objects of destruction. The rumors of the goings-on at the isolated Puget Sound commune put the fear of bomb throwing madmen into the minds of the citizens to the north. Only the sound reason of Ed Lorenz, and J.F. Doescher, the Pastor of Tacoma’s German Evangelical Church, turned them around. Doescher and, Lorenz, a steamboat captain who regularly stopped at Home on his route, convinced the mob that, from firsthand experience with the members of Home they knew them to be, “Sober and Industrious people.” This time trouble was averted. But after Addis’s marriage article in Discontent, and its subsequent exclusion from the mails, the Federal government got involved. Soon a Federal Marshall, guns set into the holsters on each hip boarded Lorenz’s Seattle ferry expecting a confrontation. It is at this point that my mind beginnings to extrapolate. There isn’t much information concerning the incident in question that I have found. I have yet to even find the name of the Marshall who traveled to Home to arrest the editors of Discontent. I find myself attempting to look through the eyes of the Marshall. Home is nestled between the Puget Sound and the Nesqually Valley – one of the rainiest places in an already overly damp region. Was there fog on the Sound as the ferry approached the dock? Did he stand at the bow, peering out, waiting to catch his first glimpse of the maniacs on the shore? This is how I envision him. Wide-brimmed hat coated with droplets of rain, dripping the occasional drop, as the boat neared the shore and the picture became clearer.
On the dock as the ferry arrived the Marshall found the inhabitants of Home waiting for him, but not as expected. Little girls, in simple sundresses, stood with flowers, and the men and women, dressed for Sunday – even though there mostlikely wasn’t a “Sunday,” at Home, as there was outside the town. They greeted the Marshall upon his arrival with open arms. The Anarchists at Home prepared a great meal at Liberty Hall and invited the Marshall as the guest of honor. They ate and drank from afternoon into evening as they spoke with him about their town. As the sun set, they held a dance. They prepared a bed for the Marshall, who slept overnight, leaving Home the following morning with the editors. At their trial he testified in their defense, saying something along the lines of, “while visiting Home I met some of the most gracious, and hospitable people I have ever had the opportunity to spend time with. If the men and women of Home are what Anarchists are supposed to be, then I’m all for it.”
I constantly revisit this scenario. I find it captivating, and ripe with possibilities. American history is peppered with intriguing scenes, frameworks, initiatives that vary in the levels of their poetics, from the sublime to the measured. They show us the opportunities inherent within the forms of conviviality that we are so used to, that we encounter so often within our everyday; dinners, barroom meetings, supper clubs, parties galore. I am reminded of The Junto, a group of young mechanics that met each Friday evening in pre-revolutionary Philadelphia. The group, initiated by Benjamin Franklin in 1727, met at a public house each week to discuss specified topics, debate, read texts written by its members, as well as talk about ways to improve their businesses and their town. Self-improvement and public works laid at the core of The Junto. As well, there is the Black Panthers children’s breakfast programs, or the food projects initiated by The Diggers for that matter. The inception of the Yippies began while discussing ideas for artfulness and action over a few joints in the apartment of Abbie and Anita Hoffman.
As a means towards problem solving these frameworks of conviviality afford us a neutral ground to meet, a place familiar to all to discuss new ideas, and new possibilities. But in the end, I have to admit; I find it difficult to write about “the why,” of it all. And I think there is good reason. How do you discuss something that you do everyday? If this is a problem, this is where it lays. As a form I understand what the tool is. I understand what the tool can do. How much does one need to elaborate upon why the tool achieves what it does? A meal, getting together for a beer, as tools, are like hammers, inclined plains, steps – all the “simple tools” we learned about in elementary school. They are so intrinsic that we don’t need to define them. A hammer is an extension of our self, a means towards augmenting what is already within us. A dinner with friends and strangers is an augmentation of what we need to do to survive – eat. So in the end, the more important thing to discuss is not how the hammer works, but what you plan on doing with it.
Sam Gould (of Red76)
December 2007