Events

  WEDNESDAY EVENING:  Please join us for a celebration of the Diggers, the Communication Company, and the Haight-Ashbury of the mid 1960s on the occasion of the publication of the new book from Foggy Notion Books, Notes from a Revolution: Com/co, the Diggers & the Haight. A panel discussion, moderated by Kristine McKenna, will feature Harvey Kornspan, Claude Hayward, and special surprise guests.     The social upheaval of the sixties gave rise to fascinating coalitions and communes, but the Diggers stand apart from them all. Formed in Haight-Ashbury in 1966 by members of R. G. Davis's subversive theater company, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Diggers took their name from the English Diggers, a seventeenth century agrarian collective devoted to creating a utopian society free of ownership and commerce. Under the leadership of Peter Berg, Emmett Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Billy Murcott – they were true anarchists, with roots in the Theater of the Absurd, Existentialism, and strategies of direct action. They coined slogans designed to prod people into participating and staged art happenings, public interventions, and street theater infused with wicked humor. The Diggers also provided free food, clothing, medical care and lodging to anyone in need as part of their effort to create a unified and mutually supportive community. A critically important part of their methodology were the hundreds of broadsides that they regularly produced and distributed throughout the Haight, printed by the Communication Company, a maverick, short-lived publishing outfit founded by Chester Anderson and Claude Hayward. A selection of these graphically inventive, lacerating and sometimes funny broadsides are gathered together for the first time in Notes From a Revolution, which offers a fascinating and oddly moving record of the counterculture in its early bloom.         Claude Hayward was born in Brooklyn and raised in rural New Jersey. In 1963 he moved to Venice, California, where he worked as advertising manager for the L.A. Free Press, and as a contributing reporter for maverick radio station KPFK. In late 1966 he moved to Haight-Ashbury, where he partnered with Chester Anderson to co-found the underground printing press, the Communication Company, in January of 1967. Throughout that crucial year, the Communication Company published daily bulletins that were distributed throughout the Haight and unified the community. At the end of 1967 Hayward founded a commune in Covelo, Calif., and spent the next three years developing his skills as a builder and homesteader. I n 1971 he moved to a traditional Spanish Land Grant village on the Pecos River, in northeastern New Mexico, where he refined his skills as a builder of adobe houses made of sun-dried mud brick. He currently serves as the elected Majordomo of the Acequia de Tecolotito, and is president of the local drinking water cooperative that provides domestic water to approximately one hundred families.        Harvey Kornspan was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and in 1962 he earned a B.S. in philosophy and science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In August of 1964 he moved to San Francisco and enrolled in Hastings Law School; he dropped out the following year, and beginning in spring of 1965 he worked for a year as the manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. From 1966 through 1968 he was a managing partner in the Steve Miller Blues Band, and in 1969 he moved to Los Angeles, where he was a fellow at the American Film Institute from 1970 through 1971. Over the next five years he worked in film in various capacities, and from 1976 through 2008 he was director of production for advertising and promotion at CBS.      Kristine McKenna is a Los Angeles based writer and art historian, and is a partner, with Donna Wingate and Lorraine Wild, in the publishing imprint Foggy Notion Books. She has published twelve books on various aspects of popular culture of the west coast.   NOTE EARLY TIME: 6:30 - 8:30PM