The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Read online

  “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people” was the tagline in the SLA’s communiqués. The SLA used a communal toothbrush, because private property was bourgeois. While Hearst lived blindfolded in a closet, they fed her on mung beans and rice—the food of the poor, she was told—and peppermint tea, which was most certainly the drink of hippies. Once she joined, she was told that to meet each others’ sexual needs was “comradely,” and so a bunch of young women who thought of themselves as feminist made themselves available on demand to the men in the group. Hearst didn’t get much sympathy afterward.

  On the A side of her first recording in 1974, underwritten by Robert Mapplethorpe’s patron/lover Sam Wagstaff, protopunk New Yorker Patti Smith remade the old standard “Hey Joe”—the one that goes “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand.” In a spoken-word piece tagged on, she said, “Patty Hearst, you’re standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread I was wondering will you get it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women.”

  THE ARC OF JUSTICE

  Even failure has interesting consequences. The first ransom demand the SLA had made was that the Hearsts feed the poor. Their original demands would have cost $400 million, which was out of reach, even for a major newspaper magnate. The Black Panthers—despised by the SLA in that golden age of infighting—had run little-remembered, extremely effective programs to feed Oakland kids for a few years. The food program set up by the coerced Randolph Hearst was run out of the old Del Monte building in China Basin, in San Francisco’s industrial east.

  Calvin Welch, who had already been a housing activist in San Francisco for a long time, writes of the far-reaching consequences of that program. Hearst’s father tried just dumping groceries: “It was a disorganized disaster. Scores of people were injured as panicked workers threw boxes of food off moving trucks as huge crowds of people unexpectedly showed up for the food. The size of the crowds shocked the media and so upset Gov. Ronald Reagan that he stated, ‘It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.’”

  The SLA responded by demanding that food distribution be managed by a community organization named the Western Addition Project Area Committee. WAPAC had ties both to Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple and to the Black Liberation Army. According to one biographer of Jones, one of the BLA/Peoples Temple leaders involved in WAPAC had helped torture to death a member of the Panthers—which is to say that it was all tangled up in the mess that was the 1970s. Nevertheless, the Western Addition group was heading back into useful community politics. The sheer modesty and practicality of WAPAC’s endeavors forms an instructive contrast with the SLA. The course of action didn’t lead to revolution as it was imagined then, but it did lay the groundwork for decades of radical change.

  First they handed out more than 100,000 bags of groceries at sixteen locations in four Bay Area counties. The program ran efficiently, and the Community Coalition morphed into the Coalition to Register 100,000 Voters, and those voters elected progressive Mayor George Moscone and helped return the city to district elections (whereby neighborhoods would elect their own representatives rather than vote in citywide races for supervisors; this was the shift that made Harvey Milk’s 1977 victory possible.) Welch writes of this organizing coalition:

  Within two years, some had begun the creation of community-based nonprofit housing development corporations, building affordable housing for many of the people in those long lines seeking free food. Others went on to transform the urban environmental movement in San Francisco, redirecting it toward limiting high-rise development and demanding developer payments for child care and public transit. The “neighborhood movement” that dominated the political agenda of San Francisco through the early 1990s was born during those two insane months in 1974.

  “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King had said in 1963, and what began as the madness of the SLA ended with the civil, public, inclusive campaign of Harvey Milk (who was opposed by some in the Castro District as a compromiser, as one who would turn the queer sexual revolution into mere reform). Milk was both a visionary and a moderate, one who defended small businesses and cared about city policy, and who saw that what seemed like an outrageous agenda—the acceptance of gays and lesbians within the mainstream—would open the door for their ordinariness. The tape he made to be played in case of his assassination was the opposite of paranoid: it was practical, naming his preferred successors, asking that there be no violence, and ending with “You gotta give ’em hope.”

  NO MORE HEROES

  A few other things that mattered began the year Milk was elected. The Abalone Alliance, whose name was inspired by New England’s antinuclear Clamshell Alliance, began protesting Diablo Canyon Power Plant on the central California coast. At the August 7, 1977, demonstration against the poorly designed nuclear reactor, 1,500 people showed up; a year later 5,000 people showed up. By 1981, there was a large and effective antinuclear movement—focused then on the dangers of nuclear power (confirmed by another 1970s disaster, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near-meltdown in 1979).

  This movement was organized by anarchist means—without hierarchy or authority—with consensus-based decision-making. Radicals were learning to self-govern without charismatic leaders or coercion, in a shift initiated in large part by feminists. Anarchy became the politics of punk, and punk became the gateway through which a generation decided to embrace anarchism. Abalone Alliance and the activism that came after was committed to nonviolence and worked openly, which undid much of the paranoia of the 1970s. This non-authoritarian and largely nonviolent means of organizing is still central to radical movements everywhere—including Britain, Eastern Europe, India, and Argentina—that have done much to change the world in the last few decades, picking up from the 1960s civil rights movement, the half of that decade that actually worked well.

  Those smitten with the conventional notion of revolution had hung onto the notion of vanguards. They believed in the idea that the few would lead the many; thus a lot of college students without a clue of how to get along with the proletariat fantasized that they would bring it into armed revolt. The idea of vanguards—or avant-gardes—had been important in the art world too. A military term presuming linear narrative, the phrase suggests humanity as an army of sorts that someone was leading forward.

  If the 1970s accomplished anything, it was the realization that we actually wanted to go in a lot of different directions, not one. We never had been anything as neatly assembled and homogenized as an army, and we shouldn’t trust leaders. This meant, for art and for revolution, no more avant-gardes, though there might be prophetic and influential elements in both culture and politics. In 1977, the Stranglers released what might be the most anthemic of punk songs, “No More Heroes.” Heroes were leaders; leaders begot followers; following was demonstrated to be literally fatal and otherwise troublesome in that era in which so many followed their leaders down strange and malevolent paths.

  To go to or stay in California had always meant to choose to be outside the mainstream, the orthodoxy, to choose other influences and a less Eurocentric point of view. This could mean cults, but it more often meant a little useful distance, literally and otherwise, from the status quo at the center of cultural power. You were further from the culture police—that’s why a painter like David Park could drive all his abstract expressionist paintings to the dump in 1949 and begin to paint in the style that would be called Bay Area Figurative. Artists such as Bruce Conner and Jess made a conscious choice to stay outside the market and the mainstream by settling in California and abandoning the reigning aesthetics.

  In the 1970s, the art world would go “pluralist,” which means only that New York abandoned its dominant narrative of an avant-garde and admitted to the variety of artists and directions that had always been there. While race was talked about by the New York–based national media as though it were a
black/white division well into the 1990s, Californians had, since the Gold Rush, inhabited a region where indigenous, Asian, and Latino presences mattered. To be in California was to braid together various possibilities and to unravel the main thread. Further away from Europe and the notion of an elite white lineage, those under the big black sun of the Golden State were closer to all sorts of fecund things—Asian, Latin, and indigenous traditions; esoteric subcultures and the burgeoning countercultures of Buddhists, bikers, communes, foodies, druggies, Diggers, and more—as well as to the vastness of deserts and mountains, the untamed landscape.

  More of what began as 1960s revolution became part of everyday life. Communes mostly failed, but organic farming, food co-ops, and attention to food as politics, health, and pleasure spread. Arenas like health care were democratized (a comment that only makes sense to those who know that before feminists took on the medical establishment in the 1970s, doctors were autocratic figures who made decisions for you, including whether you should know your diagnosis and prognosis). Queer people advanced astonishingly in both legal standing and cultural acceptance. The conservative movement has made its own inroads, particularly in the economic organization of the country, but the genies of reproductive rights, women’s rights, queer rights, and the rights of people of color are not going back into any bottle. The SLA’s food program failed; Milk was assassinated; many visible projects failed; many subterranean forces moved onward; everything changed. In the 1970s, many things blew up spectacularly (and sometimes literally), but a lot of seeds were quietly planted.

  “You can go your own way,” sang L.A.-based British émigré band Fleetwood Mac in 1977, the year that the Avengers sang an ironic “We Are the One.” Music was unraveling into several strands that year when hip-hop was being born in the Bronx. In his 1977 hit “Disco Heat,” San Francisco queer black disco king Sylvester sang, “Dancing’s total freedom / Be yourself and choose your feeling.” The 1970s were as generative as they were terrible.

  2010

  CONCRETE IN PARADISE

  Some Pictures of Coastal California

  Et in Arcadia Ego, says the famous inscription on the tomb in Nicolas Poussin’s paintings of that title. Even in Paradise there am I. He twice painted a group of shepherds and a woman who looks like a goddess standing around a tomb in a pastoral setting, as though he were wrestling with the meanings himself. The phrase was sometimes thought to be spoken by death itself: even in Arcadia death is present. Other interpretations suggest that it is instead spoken by the dead shepherd whose tomb is being inspected. Whether the text refers to death itself or to one dead friend, the tomb is two kinds of intrusion into the landscape.

  One, often remarked on, is mortality in a beautiful landscape. But growing is always also dying, even in Arcadia, even in springtime, where the new grass pushes through the old, where the trees and flowers feed on the soil made out of life and digested deaths, where mortality itself, of lambs and shepherds alike, gives it the poignancy that heaven lacks. And Poussin’s Arcadia is a little rough and rustic, not tender shoots, but lean trees and, in the distance, sharp crags. What isn’t remarked on often is the architectural intrusion of the big, heavy, rectilinear stone monument in the landscape, a trace of industry, of a labor far harder than herding, of altering the material world, of making stone itself work for men and their intentions, and of making something permanent in a landscape of change.

  We have our own tombs throughout the coastal San Francisco Bay Area, each of which could readily be inscribed et in Arcadia ego. Even in the paradises I have hiked so often, there is, along with the smell of coastal sage and the sea shining silver or green or gray to the horizon or not shining at all on foggy days, death, in the form of deer carcasses, the pellets of coyote, and fox spoor in which the fur of mice and rabbits is compressed, squashed salamanders, and countless vultures soaring and swinging around the hills on the lookout for carrion. And every spring’s green grass turns gold and then gray. The ordinary realm of natural death is present one way or another in every landscape. But there is also the violent death of war, in thought if not in deed, commemorated in the seventy or so bunker complexes whose blunt concrete forms are an apt modern echo of that shepherd’s tomb.

  There they are, along the beaches, roads, and the trails of this superlatively beautiful landscape, to be stumbled upon by hikers and day-trippers, who will stop for a moment like Poussin’s shepherds to contemplate monuments and death. The bunkers were becoming outdated as they were being built, and so they were becoming monuments to a particular imagination of danger and fear even as they were erected. And in a way, they are honorable monuments to the idea that wars would involve direct confrontation and that the United States would face the dangers it imposed on other nations. Soldiers sat in them waiting for ships to appear on the horizon and waiting to receive orders to fire on those ships and to be fired upon. It has not turned out that way, however.

  “We are here because wars are now fought in outer space,” said Headlands Center for the Arts director Jennifer Dowley in the 1980s, when the center was still a fresh arrival in what was a fairly new national park, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), and the Star Wars missile defense system was being actively pursued not far away, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The park is unusual because it’s a large amount of open space—almost 75,000 acres—in one of the major metropolitan areas in the country. It’s also unusual because its focus is neither historical nor natural but an uneasy melding of the two. The history is rarely examined, though its evidence is everywhere in the chunks of concrete embedded throughout the landscape of the park. These are the dozens of bunkers and related structures, crumbling souvenirs of the wars that never were, or that were elsewhere. And yet, war is here in a thousand ways. Even in the headlands there is war.

  Dowley spoke in Building 944, a spacious military barracks built in 1907, when the Headlands was an extension of the Pacific headquarters of the U.S. Army across the Golden Gate at San Francisco’s Presidio and Fort Mason. From those headquarters U.S. military action was directed, from the Indian Wars to the Korean and Vietnam Wars; during the Second World War alone, more than a million soldiers were said to have embarked from Fort Mason for the Pacific theater of war. The barracks and the other handsome buildings arrayed in a horseshoe tucked into a valley in the Headlands were used for housing and training soldiers who’d be deployed elsewhere. The Bay Area has always been militarized, always involved with wars, though the actual wars have been, since the 1860s, fought elsewhere.

  If you walk down Building 944’s worn, handsome wooden staircase and out the big doors and head west, past the old bowling alley and chapel, the eucalyptuses and the Monterey cypresses, you come to the Nike missile launch site tucked into a depression that the road curves around. It was designed to fire nuclear-tipped weapons at incoming missiles, but by that time the targets were imagined as incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles fired from overseas. In the 1950s the threat was thought to be Russia, but by the late 1960s the nuclear war fantasies that generated the preventative architecture and weapons included China, and the idea that a missile could take out a missile was itself something of a fantasy. There was no particular reason to situate missile depots directly on the coast. The Marin County Planning Department put together a staff report in 1969 (probably written by my father) that wondered “whether the probable risk of accident isn’t greater than the probable risk from the kind of attack these missiles are supposed to defend against.” Fortunately, neither accident nor attack ever came before the warheads were taken away. What remains are industrial structures surrounded by cyclone fencing.

  So ignore the Nike facility and keep walking. You can take the narrow, uneven trail that takes you through tall green banks of willows, coyote bush, brambles, and poison oak, on past the lagoon that the pelicans, ducks, seagulls and other birds frequent, to the sand of Rodeo Beach, the cove beyond the lagoon, and between two high shoulders of coastline. If you go le
ft, or south, you’ll come to the bunkers. If you go north, you’ll pass the many buildings of Fort Cronkhite and arrive at the old road that leads to more bunkers. They are embedded in the landscape like shrapnel or buckshot in a body, the ruins of old fears and old versions of war, the architecture of a violence that was first of all a violence against the earth, with concrete poured dozens of feet deep into slopes that were also home to rare species and prone to erosion when disrupted.

  These welts of concrete have shifted, cracked, crumbled, and in some cases slid down eroded hillsides into the surf, but the majority of them are still in place. If you imagine them as an assault on the earth, then the earth has fought back, with foliage that has half-hidden and choked some of them, with the forces of water and temperature that forced cracks in the massive structures, with erosion that has dislodged and tilted some at crazy angles. But they have a harsh beauty of their own, in the simple geometry of the domes and semicircular walls and cylindrical pits of the gun emplacements, in the steps that take you up to the roofs of some of the structures, and particularly in the long tunnels that frame views of land, sea, and sky.

  They have the shapes of art-school exercises in drawing cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders with shading, and they are the color of old pencil sketches. Poussin with his passion for simple monumental form would have loved them, though he would have inscribed them all “et in Arcadia ego” lest the hasty hiker miss the point. And they have the seduction of all ruins, the seduction of the past, of lost history, of irrecoverable time, of the sense that something happened here and then ceased. In Poussin’s landscape it’s the tomb, not the trees, that invites contemplation. It’s only when you imagine the dreary discomfort of soldiers stationed in them, the actual big guns that pointed toward the bay, and what a war might have looked like on these shores, whether like the bombardment of Fort Sumner at the beginning of the Civil War or the Normandy Invasion toward the end of the Second World War, that the romance diminishes. Or does it?