Archived Weblog Entry

[Previous entry: "3/7/02 Workshop Agenda"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "3/31/02 Prescott Day 1"]

05/01/2002 Archived Entry: "3/8/02 Events"

I was putting on an event quite a few year’s ago (in the early 70’s), and had chosen a friend named Armando to do the poster for the event. At that time, for that kind of event, posters were they way to go. I had given all the info to Armando, but he had not yet produced the poster. I called on him three days in a row. He was living, at the time, on Allan Watts’ houseboat in Sausalito.

Each day, I would find him sitting and looking at an empty canvas. Finally, on the third day, I said, "Armando, we are running out of time." His somewhat anguished reply was, "I’m going as fast as I can." It was a great poster, and a pretty good event.

I became hooked on doing events back in the middle 1960’s. At the time, it was in the early years of the War on Vietnam, and in the middle of the time when nuclear war seemed imminent. I was the Executive Director of the War Resister’s League-west, the West Coast branch of the WRL. I spent a lot of time speaking on college campuses, particularly San Francisco State College. I had had quiet a bit of success organizing at SF State. Many professors and students had signed the WRL’s "Declaration of Conscience." Working with Michael Vozick (who was with Turn towards Peace at the time), and James Nixon (who was Student President), we had built ourselves deeply into the infrastructure of the campus. We had established the first "Experimental College" which hosted classes designed by students, many of which were credit classes with faculty sponsors. The classes were pretty extensive, having to do with much of the current situation: state of the world; organizing techniques; issue analysis, and many exotic and esoteric courses.

We decided to put on a three campus anti-war event, at San Francisco State College, UC Berkeley and Stanford. We worked with David Harris at Stanford, who was then student president, and Michael Rossman at UC Berkeley, from the Free Speech Movement. We also brought in Stuart Brand (who went on to be the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog), who had been running with the Pranksters for a while (more on the Pranksters some other time). We called the event World War IV. The concept came from Stewart, who said that we had to pass through our fears of World War III in order to be able to work against it. He said we were paralyzed by our fear.

We had varying degrees of success in implementing our whole collective vision on the different campuses, doing best at SF State. It was a several day event: music lectures and discussion, body movement workshops (a new and radical thing at the time); "war games," (invented by Stuart to help us release aggression, and which evolved into New Games) and other such activities. The culmination was a rock concert on Saturday night. For this concert, we installed many layers of flash bulbs all wired in series around and around the hall. Towards the end of the concert, a portentous voice announced: "we interrupt this program…." It went on to say that Soviet planes have been detected heading for the USA, and it seemed that war was imminent. Soon there was the heavy drone of big planes flying low, the sound of bombs falling. A huge crash, and a brilliant flash of light, as all the flashbulbs went off at once. Darkness. All the lights out on campus. End of program.

When all the events were over, Stuart said to me, "I think you have become hooked on events," which turned out to be quite prophetic.