Our new gobal village

Well, here we all are. It seems Marshall McLuhan was right after all. Just a little ahead of his time. #GlobalVillage is brought to you by #Covid-19. The medium is the message, and apparently it is brought to you by Facebook. McLuhan was a bit more than a one-horse town, than that quote. But he coined that phrase in 1964.

Weird, when I was in high school, we were really paying attention to the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Ram Dass, and Mario Savio. We could flash those revolutionary quotes at the drop of a hat. But we were also a politically aware high school class, on the vanguard. We were so badass, we shut down the Marin county draft board, it had never been done before. We were the first high school in the nation to do so, and we were also the first high school to go on strike. 

Drake High School made the cover of Time Magazine and also the 6 o’clock news. We were clocked by the feds—the FBI and the CIA. I remember cutting class to attend those Free Speech rallys at UC Berkeley. Our school president was Jared Rossman, brother to Michael Rossman of the FSM fame, probably helped to motivate us—we had a direct line to Mario Salivo, as it were.

I remember when Marshall McLuhan nattered on about the concept of one big global village, and I thought he was nuts. We can’t even manifest one happy family. I thought he was a stark raving dreamer. Yeah, yeah. He was. But he was also a visionary. Back then, there was no internet, no Facebook, no pandemic disease to unite us all. He predicted the World Wide Web three decades before it was invented. Let that sink in. I’ll wait.

I know Marshall was in Marin during that tumultuous era of social upheaval. That got me Googling. I found a 1999 directory that listed the Marshall McLuhan Center for Communications, in San Anselmo, Ca. TG for the Internet—I was able to find the connection, and not rely solely on a vague memory. After all, as Robin Williams said, if you remember the 60s, you weren’t really there. No wonder McLuhan was forefront. Here we are interconnected by the World Wide Web. Giants walked among us, even way back then.

In “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” published in 1964, McLuhan said that the communication medium itself—not the messages it carries—should be our primary focus of study. He postulated that “artifacts as media affect any society by their characteristics, or content.” I’m paraphrasing Wikipedia, so here is a direct quote that explains it better. Wiki itself is a perfect example of the global village in action.can access, communication is the message. No more trickle down from the top theory.

“The term global village describes the phenomenon of the world becoming more interconnected as the result of the propagation of media technologies throughout the world. The term was coined by Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan and popularized in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). Literary scholar Sue-Im Lee describes how the term global village has come to designate “the dominant term for expressing a global coexistence altered by transnational commerce, migration, and culture.” —Wiki

I vaguely remember something similar from a Richard Brautigan article—remembering the crazy milieu that was Marin during the 1960s and 70s. Marshall McLuhan and his wife were at the epicenter. There were a series of extraordinary community lectures held at Olney Hall, College of Marin. That’s where I met Timothy Leary, Allan Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Joseph Campbell, Bucky Fuller, Paolo Soleri, urban experimental architect of Arcosante, who was re-defining the ways in how we lived. Pre-commune days. And that is where I probably met McLuhan too. 

Everybody was hanging out in Marin at that time. It was an heady, if not head-trippy time to be living in. With the somber backdrop of the Vietnam war to kindle our angst, we were redefining our boundaries, our worlds, moving back to the land. Our older siblings were moving to communes and rethinking and redefining the whole shebang that was the 1950s. And we were not going gentle into the 1960s, that’s for sure.

Alan Watts was living on Varda’s ferryboat in Sausalito, Stewart Brand was setting up the Whole Earth store next to Marin Surplus in San Rafael. Ravi Shankar was playing mind-altering sitar right down the street from Drake High School in Fairfax at the Ali Akbar College of Music. We would drop in and tune out as we walked home from school, the odor of incense, and other herbs, pungent in the air. We couldn’t help but be altered by a new consciousness. It truly was a New Age dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

“Stewart Brand drifted into the Zen-tinged New York art scene of Ginsberg, Cage and Rauschenberg and thence into counter-cultural groups like USCO and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. These "New Communalists",… sought an escape from the whole system of confrontational left and right politics and the psychological fragmentation that - as illustrated by Kesey's seminal "One Flew Over the Cockoo's Nest." Drawing their energy from cybernetically-informed thinkers including the designer Buckminster Fuller (inventor of the geodesic dome) and ur-media theorist Marshall McLuhan (coiner of the term "global village"), Brand and his peers began to design a possible future for themselves not as workers or managers, but as Fullerian "Comprehensive Designers" - or "an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist. …His answer was The Whole Earth Catalogue, a collage of adverts and articles covering everything and anything … that the budding Comprehensive Designer might need. The Catalogue was an instant cult hit, not just among back-to-the-landers setting up experimental communities out in New Mexico, but also with the computer-obsessed inheritors of the Rad Lab tradition, who in research laboratories across the US, but most especially in MIT, Stanford and Xerox PARC, were busy designing cybernetic systems that included everything from the prototype Internet to the first video game, SpaceWar.” —Wiki

This was our world. We may not have had the words to describe what we were living, it took the hindsight of media analysts to puzzle together the fabric of the times that shaped us all, one way or another. 

I never thought I’d be so dependent upon the likes of Facebook to see who’s still alive, who’s died, and who is now fighting the disease. This is our new global village. This medium is our new black plague domesday journal and even Monte Python is in the audience. Bring out your dead!

From a Facebook post, rev. 3/26/23 

ALAN WATTS

    

Alan Watts, early 1970s, Everett Collection, Brain Pickings

 —The only way to make sense out of change 

         is to plunge into it, move with it, 

         and join the dance. —Alan Watts

When I was a child, I swear

Alan Watts was older than dirt.

Now from a photo, he gazes out 

looking younger than I am today. 

Sausalito in the good old days, 

when Varda lived on the old ferryboat 

and nailed his paintings to the walls, 

& from the captain's cabin,
Alan danced at the helm,
with his seadog legs braced
against the raging '50s tide, 

steering the '60s into oblivion.

7/9/14

Bohemian Housewarming Party

At my childhood friend Micaela's housewarming party in Berkeley, I ran into small segments of our past; it's such a shock to see Micaela and her brother Chris, mirrored in the faces of their children. Christopher has a 10-year-old boy named Chris who looks just like him; Chris must've been 10 when I first met him. I wasn’t prepared for this telescoping of time.

Chris is an equipment appraiser for Bank of America, a vice president in a roomful of vice presidents, living in suburbia, with the wife and two kids. I expected so much more from Chris, with his intellectual prowess, I expected him to go places. All the people that his parents knew were part of the avant-garde Bohemian world. Instead, the black corporate heart of America took him hostage. I wanted to say to him, Where is Chris and what have you done with him? 

The people we met through Micaela and Chris’ parents, and step-parents were unusual—in and of themselves. Bohemian artists for the most part. Arthur Boericke was friends with Jaimie de Angulo. I remember the stories about the drunken sweat lodge parties in Berkeley. Imagine building a full-on sweat lodge in a Berkeley backyard.

I think Arthur was a sociologist by trade. During the 1970s, he wrote Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art, the first book of its kind. Then there was Patrick Wall who was Micaela and Chris's father, from the island of Jersey, his formidable intellect, his love of classical music, his coldness shaped us. His third wife, Betty the potter, once married to painter Wilfred Lang, was a worrywart and self-depricating in a delightful way that made up for Pat's distance.

Micaela and I went for a hike on Saturday and while comparing notes, we discovered that both Pat and my grandmother actively discouraged us from using the broad American Aaaaa sound they found so offensive to their ears. Their tirades against our using that nasal American A sound left us feeling a little like mini Eliza Doolittles. They didn’t want us to sound American. To this day I still say ofTen with a full T sound instead of offen.

Betty's first husband, Wilfred Lane, recently died; his paintings are valuable already, said Chris. Micaela mentions the name of the woman that kept Wilfred in suspense for years – Marsha. I remember meeting her with her Mexican tiered skirts and Wilfred with his gobs of tiered turquoise. They were all living in Santa Fe at the time.

Betty Wall gave me these when I was a young. I returned the pots, bowls & cups to Micaela

The New Mexico contingency included Betty and Wilfred and the children—Chris and Micaela's stepbrothers and sisters: Pete, Sonia, Stan, and Justina—the joke always was: What is your name? Tina. Tina? No, Justina. Just Tina? and so on. But they originally hailed from Sausalito. Circular file.

I suspected that Pete had a crush on Micaela, she was so beautiful, and but he went off to become a spy And she became a hippie. In the early 1970s I stayed with Pete and his wife Sara in Parksville, British Columbia. They moved to Florida where he built wooden boats, and later got divorced. She's now living in Hawaii and he's in Galveston Texas, said Chris. The others I didn't ask about. 

Stan was living in the Virgin Islands. I think Micaela was always a little in love with Stan who looked like bad boy James Dean. I was a little in love with Chris. I imagine Sonia and Tina are still living in New Mexico. Sonia was one of the first people to move to Morning Star Ranch in Occidental, and become part of Lou Gottlieb's commune. She was always out there on the periphery of way cool. Ironically I lived just down the road from Morning Star in the early 1980s.

Chris and Micaela's mother, Rosalind Sharpe Wall died about four years back; her book on Big Sur memories was on its third printing. Kudos, but sad that none of this happening during Rosalind's lifetime ironically. She grew up on a rancho in Bixby Canyon in Big Sur. Rosalind dabbled in paint too, which was handy as her then husband Patrick was an art dealer in Carmel. The first modern art dealer on the West Coast. 

One artist that was well represented in Patrick's house beside Wilfred Lang, was Carmel artist Ellwood Graham. Graham's paintings always fascinated me. (See more Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: Ellwood Graham).

Rosalind dabbled in the occult as well. She was an overbearing woman who always had some project going. She was a bit like Frida Kahlo, and Wilfred was a lot like Diego Rivera but they never hooked up. I couldn’t imagine that combo. Both of them larger than life. I don't think the fabric in the time-space continuum could've contained it.

The mysterious Marsha was more like Georgia O'Keeffe, the model. I've no idea what she did, other than to be haughty. Her full size portrait has a marionette at the bottom. Was it a portrait of the artist, Wilfred? who was pulling the strings?

Rosalind, and my mother were like two cats locked up in a room, too similar for words, each itching to defrock the other of her occult witches' vestments. Each calling the other a fraud, each designing their own tarot decks. Rosalind's rather simplistic deck design was at least published, in John Starr Cooke's The New Tarot: The Tarot for the Aquarian Age (Boxed Set with Cards)1970.

It turned out that Brite Bonnier, the painter with her jaunty beret and red sports car, was also a friend of John Cook's. Small world. She was at the party with her small dog. I was so glad to see her again, the last time I saw her, I was a child.

I arrived late to Micaela’s housewarming, having nearly been nearly clobbered by a bad driver who, as luck would have it, was also coming to the party as well. I wanted to clobber her in real time as well, but thought that would make a bad entrance. I had to go a block out of my way to keep from being hit, so when I finally parked, Micaela and Brite were on the front steps. 

And I was in a rage so I wasn't introduced to Brite ’til much later. That I even remembered her last name was a miracle. She mentioned her brother living in Sweden. I think he visited once. I never knew she was Swedish. She asked if I remembered the barge in Sausalito. I'm not sure, but I do remember the Charles Van Damme, Pero and Alice Wolfe's houseboat, and the others. 

I remember crashing parties when we were kids, Chris lighting off cherry bombs underwater. We were banned from the parties, but snuck in anyway. I was on the Charles Van Damme ferryboat at least two times when Varda lived there. His paintings were bolted to the walls of the skewed boat. I recognized the paintings by style, like the ones I had seen in Patrick's house in Sausalito, and later when he was our neighbor in Forest Knolls. Varda, Lang, Graham: a litany of Bohemian artists: West Coast names that changed the very face of art.

I remember late at night walking the plank at Pero and Alice's houseboat, and peeking into the windows to see the partygoers, the water was alive with biolytic luminescence under the full moon. Which place was Brite Bonnier's? She was friends with John Cook and I will have to interview her to find out more about it. 

I tell Brite the story of how I managed Western Star Press for Alice Kent. Alice was John's sister. Before John's death in the early 60s, Chris, Micaela and I used to steal trinkets from the Trade Faire, a ferryboat emporium. We were nine and ten years old and we mailed large turquoise rings to John Cook in Cuernavaca. He must've wondered about why we were sending him turquoise rings in the mail as we didn't have any money.

I remember John Cooke, a tall broad-shouldered bald silent man with a kindly face. At that age we knew nothing of the world. Betty called us her brats. And we ran wild through the shipways and alleys of Sausalito, and the hills of Forest Knolls. I didn't know I would want those memories back one day, but with the tag that explains their significance and relevance.

For it was those interesting people that help shape us and made us who we are. By their very presence, and not necessarily by design. The order of the Golden Dawn, Allister Crowley, Alan Watts, Jean Varda—these are all names out of my childhood. But I have no place to put them in the larger order of things. Just fleeting recollections of childhood.

Actor and dancer John Cooke was a kind of a mythical God. We instinctively knew he was special, but we didn't know why. Begin the Beguin was his favorite song, said Alice Kent. Did the Sufis really burn him with their hands on his shoulders at the airport because no one ever escaped their order – was it in Morocco? Tangiers? The imprint of the hand on the shoulder had the doctor shaking their heads, for it was to become the cancer that eventually killed him. 

John's Tarot for the New Aquarian age was decades ahead of its time. And we grew up on the arcane trivia from the Tibetan and the Egyptian books of the dead, we grew up on tarot, and astrology, you name it—long before there was a New Age. 

My mother's world, and Micaela and Chris' world, each parent was a satellite with an asteroid belt of followers—and small rivalries were of no concern to us. My mom was an actress and costume set designer at the Gate Playhouse Theatre in Sausalito. 

Patrick was a connoisseur of the arts, he was in the realm of the philosophical world. Rosalind Sharpe was into the occult, living in Sausalito during the early 60s as well—these people that helped shape my life. 

What I remember most are the visual images, the quality of light, the colors of the sky, the colors of the bay and the cypress trees, and the odor of nasturtiums and geraniums. Chris's paper route. The stinking bay. The dilapidated boats. Gate Five. Tiki Junction. And now all those adults who lived there are nearly all dead now, and their stories, buried. All I have left are these incomplete fragments that have little cohesiveness, or shape. 

What about Pero and Alice Wolfe? the story of Pero who once owned Anchor Steam Beer, crossing the bay in a boat dressed to the nines, to go to the opera, but they forgot to check the tide table. So they spent the night fighting the tides, the ferocious bay singing primal arias. Who will write their stories?

Micaela said her lover, musician Tim Boomer, with whom she had bought the house, hence the housewarming party, reminded her a bit of me, Chris, Rosalind, and Pat. All of us so strong-willed with lots of interesting things to say. 

Micaela elaborated how her mother was so overbearing, she snuffed her out like a candle. And I'm shocked by the inference. Did she feel of no importance as a child with nothing to say? Sure, I spin fantastic stories now, but back then I was rather mute, quiet and shy. My entire world was made of horses. Micaela went on to say that the best years of her childhood were spent with me running around the hills of Forest Knolls with me (when I thought I was a horse).

School was awful, a kind of death for her. Me too. She dropped out during her sophomore year. I'd always thought it was because of the drug scene. We grew apart by the time puberty had set in. And she was far more adventurous, the Summer of Love, pot, etc., while I was still verging on redneck, and more than a couple of years behind her socially, so to speak.

I remember a reconciliation of sorts at age 13 or 14. We spent a good week together making miniskirts out of old 50s corduroy pencil skirts, and castoff clothing, and then we gradually drew apart into our own respective fragmented worlds. 

We lost touch when she moved—or ran away. I didn't consciously drop her as a friend, she just moved on. Our values were no longer the same. I suspect sex had something to do with it. She was 14, I waited until I was 18. The invisible border between child and woman had been drawn out and there was no defrocking of the wall, pardon the pun on her last name, Wall.

Micaela reminded me of the time that Ken and Mary Howard were having a party and a movie on Arroyo Road and we were forbidden to attend. But Chris was allowed to go. So incensed, we snuck over to the Howard's place at sunset after they had all left, and under the cover of dusk, we crept into the darkened living room to watch The Wild Ones.

Brando lounged on his motorcycle. In the late 1940s, bikers took over Hollister. What are you rebelling against? ask someone. What've you got? quipped Brando. After the movie was over, we made our escape via the kitchen, only to be busted for tripping over the silverware box. The Bohemians we were surrounded by, busted us for watching The Wild Ones. Odd. What exactly were they sheltering us from?

We'd seen much more by way of errant or deviant behavior in real life. Jean Varda liked young women, lots of them, Alan Watts, and Jaunita Mousson all lived on the Charles van Damme. Not all at the same time. Maybe it was her party, I don't know. My neighbor George said that the Charles van Damme was falling apart even way back then and she was busted for something and then hauled out. 

Who moved in after Juanita? Brite Bonnier? But she had the barge I think. Perhaps it was Varda. Anyway, what was the big deal about seeing Brando anyway? Ken Howard was a Harvard man and Mary had East Coast leanings, and money too. Both are dead now, their daughters, Debbie who now goes by the name of Nina, and Sarah, were pretty whacked and scarred by that warring relationship. 

Ken and Pat were very much alike—both carpenters, both very intellectual, utterly charming and bitterly cold towards women, unless they wanted sex. They were unnecessarily cruel to their daughters, who didn't survive them emotionally. The boys fared better, Chris Wall, and Guy Howard, but they chose the American life over Bohemia. Perhaps to escape their parents. 

Children of Bohemians living a middle-class life, feeling like frauds, and feeling guilty for going against the quasi-Bohemian grain, fitting into neither world very well. I was the observer, raised by my grandmother from a previous generation, call it Victorian, or Edwardian, and a way of life destined to fail, for what could follow that? 

The Beatniks were not the physical inheritors of the Bohemians, for they escaped the middle-class, and sought refuge here, while we children of Bohemians were never middle class. More like ravaged by a social experiment. I later found out that one of the thinkers that influenced the Bohemian movement, Allister Crowley was an omni-sexual pervert, flaunting sexual mores and delving into magic. But we were sheltered from any deviant behaviour. 

I'm sure Brite Bonnier and John Cooke were both bisexual, and Crowley's teachings would've seemed like a blessing to them. Brite, being Swedish, only had quasi-American morals to overthrow. John Cooke came from a real missionary family, for they were the famous Cookes of Hawaii. They were the black sheep, Alice assured me, not the Castle-Cookes, not the Big Five.

The Beats would've been closer to my mother's age. And Patrick was from a previous generation; he was in his 40s when he had children. Our generation is doing much of the same thing, having children so late... or not at all, except by accident, not design. That failure to commit runs deep.

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• Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: Ellwood Graham (journ...
• Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 2 Betty Wall (journal...
• Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 3 Henry Miller and th...

Food for Though, Joan Marler, KPFA, Marija Gimbutas, The Paper, Oct 4, 1990

JOAN MARLER/FOOD FOR THOUGHT  10/4/90

Hunger is a primary motivator, whether it’s corporeal or intellectual, and if you listen hard enough, you can hear corn grow. Radio personality Joan Marler stumbled into the art of the interview because as a dancer and an artist, she felt isolated. “I was frustrated I couldn’t see what I had accomplished. As I worked on stained glass in my studio and listened to KPFA, I found I was mute.” Eight years ago, she asked herself what the most challenging position she could put herself into “to see if I could think straight.” Food for thought. The answer came in loud and clear on the airwaves. Marler volunteered at KPFA fm in Berkeley, and eventually became a producer of interviews, lectures and documentaries for public radio.

Joan Marler lives with her husband Dan Smith, and daughter Sorrel, in an octagonal handmade house, and several studios tucked under the oaks in the Sebastopol hills. A fifth generation Californian, she grew up in Fort Bragg, Mendocino. “As a child, I was literally starving, until the first artists moved to Mendocino in the ‘60s. I remember the beginning of my life, the invitation into my creative life. There was a storefront window with musical instruments. All I did was see the outside of the door and it was as if I was hit with a thunderbolt.” She was 13. “It’s important for me to work in a variety of fields simultaneously,” said Marler--and she does--in dance, the visual arts, interviewing, writing, and editing.

Her latest food-for-thought weekly edition, program which began in June, “Brainstorm,” a which airs Tuesdays from noon to 1 p.m., covers a broad spectrum of the universe. Marler, who was KPFA’s former poetry editor, described it as a series of lectures, interviews and live pieces that focus on ideas, philosophy, mythology, women’s spirituality, humanities, the arts and sciences.”

Asking: “What are the sources of our hidden impulses,” she delves into repressed material, “uncovering the hidden assumptions that create the blueprint for our individual, and collective lives and attitudes, bringing them into consciousness.” 

She explained, “I drive down to Berkeley to broadcast a show, and my voice comes back to the community via the radio.” Programming on KPFA affects whole communities of listeners, it’s a circulation of ideas. She likens ideas to food. “As a child I was starving for information. I’ve gained tremendous experience through this work. I’m concentrating nutrients and transmitting them to others.” 

Marler has interviewed and produced lectures by many notable luminaries including the late Joseph Campbell, Phil Cousineau, Alan Watts, psychologist Carl Rogers, Riane Eisler, who wrote “The Chalice and the Blade,” and Marija Gimbutas, whose book, “The Language of the Goddess” has challenged the concept of patriarchal belief systems.

A motivating factor in Marler’s work is the exploration of women’s spirituality, and how it relates to the modern world. On Oct. 6th, she will host a special 12 hour women’s spirituality marathon, focusing on the inseparability of politics and spirituality, on KPFA fm. Marler wrote an essay entitled, “Women’s Spirituality” for the KPFA “Folio,” “This listening to the deepest interior voice, past all rigid systems and laws, is at the heart of women’s spirituality. Beyond this, there is no organized theology, no dogma, no centralized system of worship or practice, no governing spiritual body or leader. Instead, there is a multiplicity of traditional and evolving forms of ritual, celebration, and sacred inquiry, practiced alone and in community with others, found in every culture in the world.”

“As the Chinese saying goes, ‘If we do not change the direction in which we are going, we are bound to head up where we are headed.’ The necessity of examining the myths by which we are operating, which gives rise to our attitudes and actions, has never been greater. Women’s spirituality, therefore, is not a form of escapism, but is a practice of clarity and inner alignment by which individual integrity and responsibility for ourselves, our communities, and the planet are being fostered. In this view, the spiritual and the political are profoundly intertwined,” wrote Marler.

She dragged a large box across the floor of her studio, and showed me the results of two year’s worth of hard work, a 500 page book she’d edited: “The Civilization of the Goddess: Neolithic Europe before the Patriarchy.” This manuscript is a companion volume to the groundbreaking book, “The Language of the Goddess” by Lithuanian anthro-mythologist, Dr. Marija Gimbutas. The professor of European archaeology at UCLA is author of 20 books and over 200 articles concerning European prehistory, mythology and the origins of the Indo-Europeans.

In “Women of Power,” Marler wrote: “The significance of Marija’s work on the Goddess cultures of Europe... (and) pioneering scholarship has influenced an entire generation of artists, mythologists, archaeologists, and feminist writers.... Marija contends that old Europe, which was peaceful, art-loving, matrilineal, and egalitarian in social structure, was overrun by patriarchal horsemen from the Eurasian steppes who brought the technologies of war. This was a collision of two entirely different world-views, one which celebrated life in the form of the Goddess, and the other which worshipped power through domination.”

“Doing interviews for KPFA brought me to Maria’s work from that of Campbell’s,” said Marler, who has written for many national magazines including “Yoga Journal,” and “New Age Journal.” Her interview of Joseph Campbell was one of three indepth magazine articles on the great mythologist to be published in his lifetime.

Marler’s most consistent interest is that of mythology, and of “matristic” cultures. “Matristic” is a word coined by Marija Gimbutas. Marler explains that the word matriarchal implies the opposite of patriarchal, which is another division. Marler noted that Gimbutas’s work profoundly influenced mythologist Joseph Campbell’s later work. She said “Marija’s work updated his work and brought it into focus. 

In an interview, Marler asked Gimbutas; I know that Joseph Campbell drew a great deal from your work; in fact he spoke of you often in your public lectures. Gimbutas replied: I heard indirectly that he was mentioning my name, and this was such a pleasant surprise. When he received the manuscript of my last work, called the “Language of the Goddess,” he responded with such warmth and enthusiasm... He wrote a foreword to my book which I appreciate very much. Joseph Campbell made mythology alive.” 

Marler recounted the manuscript for Gimbutas’s latest book was carried to Lithuania, chapter by chapter, and translated into Lithuanian, though it’s not yet published in the states. Gimbutas’s family is considered to be the keeper of information on Lithuanian culture supressed under Soviet rule. Marler’s next project is to write a biography of Marija Gimbutas.

(And now for some missing text—damned ASCII code. I guess I should be grateful I've salvaged this much, but what a mess!!!)

...and editing.


The multi-talented Marler has been teaching folk and ethnic dance for 15 years through SRJC, using the aesthetics gleaned from Marija’s work. She described the ancient dances as formulas for the evocation of certain states of communal and individual experiences. I first met Marler as she led a spiral dance at the memorial ceremony for her father-in-law, and poet-activist, the late Ralph Smith. As the spiral wove in and out of the garden, we were transported beyond the framework of late afternoon, fall verging on winter, to something more ancient and primal. We dropped the isolated barriers of our 20th century trappings, and, for a few moments, we came together as a tribe.

“I love dancing with my students, making the ancient formulas together so a field of vitality is set up, we’re connected with the earth and communicating. Dance is primary, transcendent; it’s the physical embodiment. The ancient formulaes are exacting; dance cuts across time and space.” Marler commented that when her daughter Sorrel was learning to walk, she fell down and got up again. “It’s not one but two movements.” How we are living inside our bodies is important as well. She added, communal experience is so alien to our culture. “Through music and dance we have to learn how to move together to a rhythm beyond the cerebral. To get students to blend with each other, it’s important to learn to move in communal manner. In my dance classes it all converges: the study of myth, sociology and literature--all these things are combined in the process of teaching and performance.” Her dance teacher Don Frye focused on how to receive the impulse from the earth and transform it--spiritual food manifested physically. Marler also studied with a Balkan dance teacher, Dick Crum, and with Jana Nierenberger.

Marler received her degree in modern dance at Mills College in Oakland, and traveled to Japan. In New York, she read “Hero with a Thousand Faces,” gave everything away, bought a tent, and taught dance in Mendocino. A self-professed student of Campbells for 20 years, Marler explained, “I use Campbell’s text as a basis for my classes. What I’m about is finding the sacred ground. What is the path to the sacred, the ground of your own being?” She said students must find it within themselves. Again, Marler left Mendocino to study ballet, and ended up marrying her former sweetheart, Dan, in Sonoma County, and began teaching folk dance and modern dance instead.

She discussed the importance of the natural beauty of the physical world and the balance between intense work and environment. “I feel bonded to northern California. This is my garden of choice. The primary connections with nature are my first teachers. Our human expression is to give voice to our connection with nature, to celebrate being alive is a part of nature,” this, in contrast to the concept of exile in the West.

A self-proscribed member of the global community, Marler has traveled to most of the continents, and after a visit to China in January, she noted, “It’s a privilege the access we have to the media. We need to have continued access to knowledge. As a radio programmer, I’m in charge to do this. I don’t think I can take anything for granted, especially after waht happened in China,” said Marler, referring to the role of the media--especially the crucial role of the fax machine during the Tiannenmen Square massacre. Marler said she honors the privileges afforded by this culture, and of living on the western edge of the continent “where Oriental cultures and the pioneer spirit merge. There is always a new, internal frontier before us,” she explained. “The job of the artist is to continually rediscover the moment. We’re all part of the interconnected mystery. That’s what the dance, visual arts and intellectual arts are all about. You can only find balance by letting go of the paradox.”

We sat in the garden under a great oak tree, where the cat patiently waited on the path for someone to pet him. “Creativity is the essence of it all, and that means being courageous, discovering uncharted territories. Creative, not imitative,” she mused. “It means seeing through your own eyes, being as fully present in the moment as possible, and challenging old assumptions.” She pointed to her abundent garden by way of example: “This process of turning over the ground, what we know to be true; what is alive, worth keeping, is a vital composting. There’s noting we can hold onto anyway.” And with that, she handed me a yellow squash, as gleaming as the sun. The scent of apples perfumed the air with promise. I recalled some lines from one of her poems, “Women’s Spirituality”: “Breathing/ Taking the slow inward trek/ past the inevitable shattering/ where the listening can begin// Listening/ inside the incessant howl/ (so quiet and still)// What is Born and what is Dying/ circles in this place.”

COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS (Summer of Love) long v.

I grew up on Turtle Island. I was an unwilling player during the revolutionary birth ot the 60's and the Summer ot Love. Some ot it had to do with age, or lack ot it on my part. I was 14 and uptight. Half of my friends ran away to the Haight Ashbury and the other half practiced making their necks as red as the necks of their blue-collar parents'.

My mother turned me on with green oatmeal cookies. Actually, it was an accident. We were at her gay friend's house in Larkspur having dinner. A friend, Sue Williams and I helped ourselves to the big cookie jar. We couldn't understand why they made such a fuss, and wouldn't let us have any more health food chocolate chip cookies loaded with that weird green shit. Ugh!

Why were they watching us so oddly as we corn-braided and beaded each other's long hair, danced, and wove peace symbols on the shoebox we converted to a finger loom? My mother went along with my frenzied creative urges before I fell into a narcoticised dreamstate while Janis wailed and crooned on the stereo:

Take it!
Take another little piece of my heart
now baby
you know you got it
if it makes you feel good

A life size poster of Grace Slick wrapped in an American flag sung to me from the wall and the air filled with visual debris.

Micaela and I crashed parties on The Charles Van Dam ferry boat stuck in the Sausalito mud at an angle that almost rivaled that of the Spreckles House. Jean Varda's geometric blue and red paintings nailed to the curved ferryboat wall, defied horizon and plum-line logic. 

We sneaked into the captain's brig that served as a loft and watched the party below us carry on. While our parents were turning on and dropping out, we ran wild in the streets. Sneaking off to the Avalon. Fillmore. Winterland. Sometimes finding our parents there before us. My mother was very hip and my reverse rebellion kept me straighter than most of my friends.

The drug experimentation blossomed in kalidascopic exponentials. Crazy people got crazier. My mother checked out all Ken Kesey's acid tests. Took me to the Panhandle. Parties and concerts in Golden Gate Park. The Be-in. Magic Mountain of Marin. Clouds of incense roiling out of the Psychedelic Shop. People sleeping in doorways. Crash pads with wal-to-wall bare mattresses, sinks filled with putrid dishes, mountains of rotting garbage, incense and patchouli oil made me wary of acid and hard drugs.

Various rock groups divided up the San Geronimo Valley like musical mafias. Jefferson Starship hung a model bi-plane from a bay tree in Woodacre. The Grateful Dead were mostly encamped in Forest Knolls, while Big Brother and the Holding Company took over the barracks at Barbano's summer camp on Arroyo Road. Mrs. Barbano rented the dorms to them, but after her daughter was killed by a car in Mexico— something to do with dope; Mr. Barbano shot himself in the head. Walking home from school, I remember him all white and red as if asleep on the gurney as they wheeled him into the ambulance.

Most afternoons, when the shadows grew long and chill settled into the gulch, the hills reverbrated with the distorted screaming of electric guitars. My friend Micaela quit coming home from school, dropped acid with the musicians at Barbano's instead, and I felt betrayed by this.

We ran from one end of the San Geronimo Valley to the other searching for dope. And the rock stars were our best bet. Most of the musicians never got out of bed until afternoon—that was the time to score, and hang out for a jam session. Bill Bowan, the drummer for the Sons of Champlain, always had grass and there was even an abandoned van parked at Dead Man's Curve in Lagunitas for lovers in search of a bed. John McBride often took advantage of that pad on wheels.

It wasn't just the rock stars who moved into the San Geronimo Valley. Those fleeing from the Haight. From LA, or New York, everybody began to migrate westward like lemmings to the sea. 

House of Richard took over the old dance hall in Forest Knolls. I sold my first chain crocheted caps there, and in exchange, bought hay for my horse. Richard told me how the border police, looking far dope, tore apart their VW van after a textile buying trip in Mexico. Even the tires were removed from the rims. The disciples of the Summer of Love moved to the Valley enmasse. 

COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS

COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS

"If you remember the '60's you weren't really there."
— Robin Williams

I was an unwilling player during the birth of the 60's and the Summer of Love. Some of it had to do with age, or lack of it on my part. I was 14 and uptight. It was an accident but my mother turned us on with green cookies. We couldn't understand why they made such a fuss, and wouldn't let us have any more cookies loaded with weird green stuff. Why were they watching us so oddly as we corn-braided and beaded each other's hair and wove peace symbols on an improvised shoebox the finger loom? Janis Joplin wailed and crooned on the stereo:

Take it!
Take another little piece of my heart
now baby

A life size poster of Grace Slick wrapped in an American flag sung to me from the wall and the air filled with visual debris. We crashed parties on The Charles Van Dam ferry boat, sunk rakishly in the Sausalito mud. Varda's geometric blue and red paintings nailed to the wall defied horizon and plum-line logic. The drug experimentation blossomed in kalidascopic exponentials. Crazy people got crazier. My mother checked out Ken Kesey's acid tests. Clouds of incense roiling out of the Psychedelic Shop. People sleeping in doorways. Crash pads with bare mattresses and sinks filled with rotting garbage, reeking of incense and patchouli oil.

Big Brother and the Holding Company took over the barracks at Barbano's summer camp on Arroyo Road. After Barbano's daughter was killed by a car in Mexico— something to do with dope; Mr. Barbano shot himself in the head. Walking home from school, I remember him all white and red as if asleep in the ambulance.

Most afternoons when the shadows grew long and chill settled into the gulch, the hills reverbrated with the distorted screaming of electric guitars. My friend Micaela quit coming home, dropped acid at Barbano's, or hung out at one of the Grateful Dead pads instead, and I felt betrayed by her abandonment.

We ran from one end of the San Geronimo Valley to the other—searching for dope. And the rock stars were our best bet. It wasn't just the rock stars who moved into the Valley. Those fleeing from the Haight, or New York. We all dealed.

At The House of Richard, once the old dance hall in Forest Knolls, Richard himself, told me how the border police tore apart their VW van looking for dope after a textile buying trip in Mexico. Even the tires were removed from the rims.

Kerouac On the Road. Cassidy at the wheel. Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass floated into town. Alan Watts was staying with a former Jesuit brother at the Heart Sutra House. There was no time for recording history. In Mary Mackey's English class at Drake High School (emphasis on high), we studied the lyrics on the Revolver album. We tried another high. Someone issued a warning that morning glory seeds were coated with poison. Heavenly Blues turned deadly. A friend in the slammer for dealing. Rumor of another petty dealer turning up dead in an oil barrel in the San Rafael canal for double-crossing a dope dealer. Hendrix dead. Joplin dead. Bobby dead. The vets. All those dead coming home in boxes.

We traded Zap Comix for dope. The school narc married red-headed Kelly, a friend of mine. My art teacher Warren Fairbanks (who went to school with my mom), married my classmate Rachel and moved to Bolinas. No one else bothered to get married. We watched light shows at the Fairfax Pavillian. Everybody's made Time Magazine as the first health food store in the US.

Things got hopping on the Bolinas Mesa. Lots of writers climbing aboard Turtle Island. Gary Snyder talked about this place as if he owned it; I thought I could write like him. What's the big deal? So I began my apprenticeship.

Moulton's store in Forest Knolls burned down and there wasn't much to downtown except hang outside the Valley Tavern, or at the train platform. The same was true about Lagunitas. Some say, the boy who set his own house on fire, killing two younger brothers, torched this building too. Some say he burned down all the historic wooden buildings in The Valley.

Tensions rose. Old Man Bevans, out gardening on the old railroad bed between Castro and Sir Francis Drake Blvd at Arroyo Road, went vigilante and stuck his rake through one Hell's Angel's tire spokes. When the Angel got done with Old Man Bevans there wasn't much left to hospitalize. Everyone started selling out. Land was subdivided. Dairies went under. One could feel the change in the wind.

Gurus and TM moved to Marin. Then, the EST graduates. Most of us moved on and became ex-patriot. I moved from Forest Knolls to Forestville. Little did Lew Welch know when he wrote "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings," that there was nowhere else left for us to go. It was no longer a question of need. Houses desecrated the sides of the goddess, Mt. Tarn. Ken Kesey, the Merry Prankster headed north to greener pastures.

Life magazine ran pictures of the war in full color, they're still etched in my mind like shadows of Hiroshima. My mother checked in and out of mental wards like they were revolving doors. She wanted me to read One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest so I could understand shock therapy. I waited in hospital wards with wax-yellowed and green tile floors with curved corners for my mother to make her grand entrance in a blue hospital gown and paper slippers.

One pill makes you whiter

And one pill makes you small 

The ones that mother gives you 

Don't do anything at all

On the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I'm working with the crazies at Napa State Hospital. The inmates have their poems memorized. I can't remember any of my poems all the way through. I meet a friend of my mother's, Sally Lacy, an inmate, who raised an eyebrow, and wants to know what I'm doing in a place like this. It's like a 60's time capsule here. Do I tell them that of all the artists, poets are the most often institutionalized? Depending upon how one looks at it— maybe it's those who are locked up who are closer to poetry. The nuthouses are breeding poets. The trickster Coyote has holes in his pockets.

The Summer of Love wore down like a bad trip. Vietnam. Reagan brought out the National Guard at People's Park; brothers and sisters fell. As we marched, we shielded our faces from the FBI who took photographic aim from the top of the Zim's Drive-in tower in San Rafael. Zim Boy grinning down at us and waving.

People moved to the country and joined communes like Limelighter Lou Gottleib's Morning Star Ranch in Sonoma, or moved to the Eel River. Some went back to the land and raised families. Most cut off their hair, bought suits and joined the rat race. Jerry Rubin. Yuppies. Baby boomers, baby carrots and raduccio.

Bitter vets returned home and were treated like aliens from another planet. John Lennon gunned down in New York by some crazy wanting fame, and 20 years later, we like to think a revolution is brewing. Punk rock. The children conceived during that Summer of Love have come of age in an era of violence and apathy. And Lew Welch, with a gun to his head, walking off into the wilderness for the last time because there was no way left to remind the planet of its smoky gentleness. Turtle Island is shaking again. In what form will the revolution take this time around?

6/1987
added 6/17

More S o L

• COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS (Summer of Love) long v....
• COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS

Summer of Love, etc.
A revamp from an earlier post from 2013, 'Tween Worlds

A related blog post: Ken Kesey