[This long essay on Route 128 MA is to be published in three parts. The first came out on March 25. After this April 1st post it will conclude on April 8, 2026.]

As the twentieth century unrolled into its third decade, cities started to look for ways to route their increasing auto traffic around them as well as through them. Motoring was a luxury and motorists looked for beautiful locations to escape to on Sunday drives and other escapades, as a luxury. What had once been a mixture of haphazard and practical road building, now started to become the domain of engineers and urban planners. One of the notions that soon began to circulate was the idea of the circumferential highway, or beltway road. Route 128 outside of Boston has the distinction of not only being immortalized in the song “Roadrunner” by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, but also of being the first of these beltways.

In 1925 the BPR started their work on systematizing Americas highway system by assigning federal route numbers to the preexisting roads.  Not long after the numbers started getting assigned, plans for what became Route 128 began, and it was officially designated in 1927.  In its first iteration city planners nailed the road number to posts on existing roadways to create a somewhat messy linkage of different roads connected together. Why the number 128 was chosen seems to be lost in the mists of history. Maps from the time show Route 128 to be a sinuous line of convolution moving inland to the west with its movement snaking both north and south in a ragged arc. It was ad hoc, but it could get you to or from the South Shore and take you between the inner and outer burbs surrounding the denser urban core.

During the great depression of the thirties people weren’t buying as many cars or spending as much money on gas, but the traffic was still increasing enough for Route 128 to become jammed as people traveled Bostons boundary. A solution was needed to ease things up in the little communities such Newton, Danvers, Walton and Beverly that dotted its way. The engineers at the Massachusetts Department of Public Works thought it best to modernize Route 128 and relocate parts of the road.

The process of creating the route was just as convoluted as its path. In 1930 one possibility for a bypass around Boston that was to be a “townless highway” was proposed by Benton MacKaye, the forester and regional planner whose vision of the Appalachian Trail has changed the face of the nation and the lives of countless Americans. If his ideas had been implemented the land on either side or Route 128 would have also been much different, leaving behind a legacy of protected landscapes instead of snarled sprawl.

 Mackaye had been born in Connecticut in 1879, the sixth of seven children. His father Steele Mackaye was an a playwright, actor and all around man of the theater given to Romantic ideals. His acting had taken him to Paris where he’d been a student of François Delsarte, and he taught the Delsarte method of oratory, singing and acting upon his return to America. Steele’s plays struck some popular accord with the American public, and he also got involved in establishing several theaters. His work in getting them off the ground however were always plagued by dodgy financial shenanigans going on in the background. In between these ventures he had periods of mental fatigue and instability that left the family wanting, even if on outward appearance, things were rosy.  The kids grew up in their fathers artistic, literary and bohemian circles as a matter of course, and though they had for a time lived comfortably and at large due to the success their father had in the theater, they were never financially stable for long. As their fathers mental and physical health waned, and as his various ideas for making it in the big time fell through one after another, they had start pinching pennies, and moving from one place to another. 
  
After Benton was born the family found themselves broke. Soon they were on the move around New England, with stints in Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts towns before moving to New York City in 1885. In 1888 they found themselves in Shirley Center, Massachusetts, a town thirty miles west-northwest of Boston that would remain Benton Mackaye’s spiritual home for the rest of his life. 

Shirley Center was a colonial village built around a common. A larger town surrounded the original village over time, but as the author Larry Anderson wrote, the place had an “almost organic ‘starfish symmetry’” and that its “tight-knit physical arrangement–town hall, church, schoolhouse, general store, homes–came to represent an idealized model of community life” for MacKaye. The place had been inhabited by a Shaker community, and some still lingered on when the MacKayes arrived. Not much further away was the site of Fruitlands, the utopia community that the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott had started in an attempt to live out his ideals.

Even though the family did not stay in Shirley Center year round, some stability came to the family when his older brother Will purchased a home that they called the “Cottage.” It would become a summer home for the family and a place they all returned to again and again. Not far from their Cottage, the same railroad line that passed by Thoreaus cabin, that he wrote about so avidly in Walden, passed through Shirley Center, where the family had a Walden of their own. It was along the hills and streams in Shirley Center that Benton’s love for the natural world started to unfurl like a seed pushing through the soil. 
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Lewis Mumford, who was to become one of his closest friends and advocates, later wrote, “As soon as he reached Shirley, he knew he was home; and from that time on this village has been the center of his life, despite many prolonged absences.” It was his omphalos, his center of the world.

One of the prolonged absences was when the MacKaye’s went to Washington D.C. Two of his brothers worked for the government, and MacKaye would follow in their footsteps.  Though the capitol wasn’t his favorite place, it wasn’t as stifling to his spirit as the times he spent cooped up in New York City where they often spent the winters. In the capitol he found other ways to express his passion for nature. He spent a lot of time at the Smithsonian Institute where he continued his self-directed studies and practiced drawing many of the animals he saw on display. He became such a fixture at the Smithsonian that he started to volunteer to help with the work in the labs. One the curators, James Benedict, befriended him and became an early mentor. Benton also availed himself of speakers on the lecture circuit and went to talks given by famous explorers such as the Civil War hero, geologist and explorer of the west, John Wesley Powell, and the future explorer of the arctic, Robert Peary.

MacKaye’s real education was in the woods and fields. Back in Shirley Center he had started the Rambling Boys Club with some other kids. Their aim was to “give the members an education of the lay of the land in which they live, taking in the Geography, Geology, Zoology and Botany of them. Not only to know the Science of it but also the History and Progress of the different places.” MacKaye had also gotten in the habit of drawing maps and sketching the landscape. He wanted to document the rivers and roads, the hills and the heights, the flora, fauna, and architecture of Shirley Center.

He went on a number of hiking trips that had a major influence on him, and in turn on the legacy and imprint he left on the national character of America. His “Expedition 9” was one of these, as a was an extensive backpacking trip he took to the White Mountains.

“This direct, first-hand education through the senses and feelings, with its deliberate observation of nature in every guise—including the human animal—has nourished MacKaye all his life,” Mumford wrote of his friend.
He didn’t care so much about regular school. It was a stifling experience to be shut up indoors when the whole world beckoned to be explored. He had gone to high school in Cambridge, but dropped out early to follow his brothers James and Percy into Harvard where he studied geology, while they studied philosophy and engineering on the one hand, and poetry and drama, following in the footsteps of their father, on the other.

Certain gifts given by family and friends seem to have a way of leaving a mark on a person that endures through the decades ahead. While sticking it out at school James gave him a copy of book that would be another touchstone in his work, another seed that unfolded in time. In this case it was the book Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature by Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley’s book investigated the surface features of the earth, its rivers and streams, its forests and oceans, hills and the mountains and showed how they formed and evolved over time. The book would become a constant companion to him. His own book, the New Exploration, first published in 1928, contains numerous references to Huxley.

Before big ideas of “geotechnics” and the Appalachian Trail started emerging from his brain, he was enrolled in the new forestry school at Harvard. It proved to be a good match and he was the schools first student to graduate in 1905. The forestry work proved to be something he could return to over and over again in his otherwise peripatetic career. He got a job for the United States Forest Service, and also taught at the school. His earlier trip into the White Mountains proved to be influential in his research on the effects of deforestation and rainwater runoff. The conservation movement was still young and diverse at the time. There was a lot of debate around access to natural resources for the growth of industry and business, and saving them for recreation and the benefit of the earths creatures and humanity. MacKaye was able to show that when the forest was logged too heavily, it caused a disproportionate flow of water in the streams, leading to flooding. The evidence he was able to give in the matter lead to the protection of the forests and the creation of the White Mountain National Forest.

His work for the government took him back to Washington where he helped form another group in 1913. This one was the Hell Raisers. They were made up of a mix of fellow federal employees, journalists, and citizens interested in the labor movement, economic planning and other causes championed by the political left of the time. As a naturalist and conservationist MacKaye’s interest was how America would use its vast resources. Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the newly created Forest Service, had just gotten out of office. One of his mottos had been that the “natural resources belong to the people.” MacKaye and the Hell Raisers had taken Pinchot’s slogan to heart.

In 1915 he married the suffragist Jessie Bell Hardy Stubbs. There marriage would be a short one ending in tragedy when she took her life in 1921. MacKaye never remarried and the death haunted him for the remainder of his life, though he rarely spoke of it even with those closest to him. In the aftermath of this intense loss and in the midst of his bereavement, the idea for what became his greatest accomplishment came to him, a vision for the Appalachian Trail. He was 42 years old and his destiny stretched ahead of him. He was like a thru hiker, and even though he was down low in the valley, he had the will to keep going and see what was up ahead of him on the next crest after he passed through the valley.

He first proposed the Appalachian Trail in Journal of the American Institute of Architects as a project of regional planning. It was a bold critique of the direction headed by industrial capitalism. MacKaye saw the way communities and natural places were being unraveled by the boom of machinery, and the way political jurisdictions cut across the landscape without accounting for the natural markers of watershed and ridgeline. The trail would connect the rural to the urban in a mutually supportive way, rather than as a mere drain on the countryside by the city. Its creation would be of some benefit to the depressed conditions of small towns in the hills of Appalachia. Where the mountains passed through the eastern side of the country and into New England it would be a boon to nearby small cities. Walking the trail would be a way to escape the “hecticness” of life under the gun of money grubbing profiteers. As such their would public shelter camps along the way, maintained freely by the public, and operated without being relegated to bottom lines or profits.

MacKaye knew he was on to a big idea, one that could potentially have a lot of support from a wide range of people, but he had a lot of fear about the possibility of it being implemented, this vision of a trail that stretched across the mountains between Georgia and Maine. Some of the reasons he had for building the trail, were due to his family background, their bohemianism, and the related realm of radical politics he was steeped in. MacKaye had a lot of fear about his vision and how it would be implemented. There was always the problem of being labeled a dangerous socialist which might put the kibosh on his the creative plan kindled in both his heart and head.

​Despite the fear, MacKaye utilized his considerable talents for organization, and he lived to see the completion of his massive project. He had unique skill in bringing people and ideas together, and the entire process mimicked his burgeoning philosophy of “geotechnics” using small parts and small groups to make larger positive changes in the landscape and across society. In sixteen years the 2,200 miles of trail was finished, but it was during the first opening salvo of that massive effort that MacKaye found himself involved with a group who would make practical inroads in their critique of the way roads were being built in America and of how those roads affected our communities.

​The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) was formed by Clarence Stein, who’d become an early adopter of MacKaye’s vision and helped boost the profile of the project. Stein was an architect and planner who’d been caught up in the vision of the garden cities movement promoted by Ebenzer Howard and inspired by Edward Bellamy. The RPAA would count MacKaye as member, as well as Lewis Mumford. Mumford had been making a name for himself as a writer with his 1922 book The Story of Utopias, which detailed their history in the imagination of the West following the line from Plato’s Republic, to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Tomasso Campanella’s City of the Sun, the utopian science fiction of H. G. Wells, and on up to Bellamy and the version of Boston he presented in Looking Backwards.
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The Story of Utopias was originally published by Boni & Liverwright. It was the same year they published T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. World War I was only just behind, leaving its wasteland of bloodied trenches across Europe. In America the result was another psychic wasteland. 53,402 American soldiers died in battle, never to come home to their mothers, wives, children. Even more died indirectly through accidents and disease, a stunning 63,114 souls. Eliot approached the horrific shocks of the 21st century through a modernist mythopoesis. Mumford wanted to see what these imaginary utopias could teach us if people worked on a practical level to bring the ideals into reality. He argued that there were two kinds of utopia, one of escape and one of reconstruction. He wasn’t looking for the utopia where escape from our choices and humanity is somehow absolved. He wanted to use utopia as a vision that people could take action on and move towards. The world itself may be forever imperfect, and the people in it, but by humans and nature could both flourish and be mutually enhanced in the right environments and situations. These environments and situations could be created.
 
Mumford’s ideas resonated strongly with MacKaye’s, just as MacKaye’s did with Stein’s. Henry Wright was another architect and planner who went on to work with Stein on designing the Sunnyside Gardens neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York City. A lot of the funding for the project came from Alexander Bing. The project incorporated Howard’s garden city ideas over a 77 acre site of low-rise buildings oriented towards the pedestrian citizen. Green spaces were built right into the walkable neighborhood that had space for families to live and grow. The landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley was also involved.
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Stein, MacKaye, Wright and Bing formed the core of the RPAA and gathered around them the other people who would further its aims. This diverse group of friends made a critical examination of the city, collaborated on the development and dissemination of ideas, and got involved in the politics of building.

Above: Clarence Stein and Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford and MacKaye, Stein and his wife Aline McMahon

Stimulated by the success of his Appalachian Trail project and the association he had with these minds, and encouraged by Mumford, MacKaye began work on his own book The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning that was published in 1928.

MacKaye rightly saw cars as one of the biggest threats to the protection of the countryside. As most cars belonged to city slickers, he devoted a chapter of his book to “Controlling the Metropolitan Invasion.” He looked at roads like they were waterways. “Rivers of Asphalt.” A stream of water from a dam that wasn’t being properly regulated would destroy the surrounding trees and wildlife. A flow of cars from the reservoirs of the cities, and the haphazard creation of roads, would destroy nature. His Appalachian Trail project was one to put a “dam across the metropolitan flood.” It was a way to limit development around the natural areas soon to be protected by the trail.

His work with the RPAA led to other papers and projects designed to put limits and controls on the metropolitan invasion and control the flow and movement of the population into America’s recreational areas. The first result was an article he wrote called “The Townless Highway” first published in The New Republic in March, 1930. It was in the main a critique of the way the car was going to change the landscape of the country if something wasn’t done to prevent it, and the main idea was to have roads that did not go through existing communities. When new communities were to be created, speedy motorways were not going to go through them. He had seen the way the railroads had gutted out the centers of cities with their expansive yards, and the way railroad towns popped up on spokes at various distances from the main hubs. He didn’t want the car to impact the urban or rural land in the same way.

This would set the precedent of abolishing “the motor slum, or roadtown, and develop the rural wayside environment.” In practice this looked like villages and small cities within a region, protected by the natural barriers of hills, mountains, rivers or wetlands and the like, connected by electricity and “open way” roads to the other areas. There might be farms or small cottage dwellings here and there along the “open ways” but there wouldn’t be any factories, offices, or any other kind of building that would be better suited to life in a village or small city. Regional planning done in this manner would prevent the cancerous urbanoid growth of “continuous tunnels of structures.” Access to nature would be enhanced by those living in the villages and small cities. Driving would be safer because of the lack of pedestrians near the road and turn off points to “motor slums” where drivers have to navigate the traffic of other vehicles. The small city and village life would also be enhanced by their density, walkability, and being built on the human scale, not built with cars foremost in mind.
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MacKaye followed up this paper with a detailed study he did for the Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations. This was a private body dedicated to getting donations of land to use for the public good. MacKaye’s idea for the Bay Circuit was to connect up a system of parks beyond the metropolitan area of Boston in a circumferential road that would go around the city. With limited entryways and exits, and limited numbers of restaurants, service stations and other developments, it was to be a way of connecting the motorized citizen to the world of nature. The sacrifices on the part of nature would be minimal, and the rewards to humankind would be great. 

The Bay Circuit would be, in the words of Lewis Mumford, “a metropolitan recreation belt with a northbound motor road forming an arc on the inner flank and a southbound road on the outer flank—the two roads separated by a wide band of usable parkland, with footpaths and bicycle paths for recreation. In reducing MacKaye’s conception to Route 128, without the greenbelt and without public control of the areas adjacent to the highway, the ‘experts’ shrank the multi-purpose Bay Circuit into the typical ‘successful’ expressway: so successful in attracting industry and business from the center of the city that it already ceases to perform even its own limited functions of fast transportation, except during hours of the day when ordinary highways would serve almost as well. This, in contrast to MacKaye’s scheme, is a classic example of how not to do it.” 
MacKaye later lamented the fact that the his ideas were not used in this area, and what became Route 128 was “choked with development.”

Attract industry and business it certainly did. Route 128 exploded with technical industry in the booming years following WWII, becoming a highway of the modern world.

Anthony Flint, a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, called the area “Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley.” The farmland that would have sat between the parks and public greenspaces envisioned by Mackaye ended up becoming industrial parks as the land was bought up by a variety of tech corporations ready to pursue postwar growth. Saurman had once again raided the Shire. In the wreckage he erects Satanic mills of industry. Concord became discord.

At least the people in the suburbs didn’t have to commute very far to get to their civilization wrecking centers of industry. 
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RE/SOURCES:

This article would have been much tougher to research and write without the book and website of Larry Anderson. In particular his biography, Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail published by John Hopkins University Press in 2002 and his website Peculiar Work which contains many articles about MacKaye, among other interesting topics.
MacKaye’s own book The New Exploration, while somewhat dated to the ear of today’s nonfiction reader, contains many insights and ideas that may prove useful to the psychohistorians and psychogeographers of today and tomorrow.  

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In next weeks segment we will explore the M.ilitary I.ndustrial T.emplate and the way Route-128 excited the fertile imagination of Jonathan Richman as we move along the roadrunner not taken.

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American Psychogeography I:
From Saint Botolph to the Road Warriors

[This long essay on Route 128 MA is to be published in three parts on March 25, April 2, and April 9 2026.]
In the classical world it was said that all roads led to Rome. In America, all roads lead away from Boston. It was the place where revolutionaries conspired to overthrow the bent British monarchy, and the first to liberate themselves from the rule of the corrupt crown. One of the roads that leads from Boston, and around it, is the sacred track known as Route 128, the beltway that loops around the city and through its suburban towns. It was one of the first highways of this kind to go around a city and enclose it with the traffic of automobiles.

Taking a journey along this road is one way to peer into the subconscious layer of a key birthplace in both the liberty of our nation, and the incarceration of our freedoms under the throes of the military industrial complex. While driving along its unremarkable everyday asphalt, while motoring alongside its concrete dividers, while jumping on and off its entrance and exit ramps, this winding may not seem cause for much reflection, yet its belligerent psychohistory has cut dark grooves into the recesses of the American mind, and the fruits of its industry have colored our dispositions, our obsessions, our collective neuroses.

The area of psychogeography, first developed by the Lettrist International and expanded by Guy Debord and his fellow artists and political thinkers in the Situationist International (SI) in France, has gotten its strongest foothold in England. Debord defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” In England its key practice, a form of urban walking known as the derive, or drift, has been championed in a variety of subcultures ranging from those surrounding the art of field recording as applied to electronic music, on the one hand, where the recordings were thought to capture some essence of the landscape, and literature on the other, where experiences, impressions, and history got distilled down into words.

Psychogeographical practice retains a strong foothold in England. This came in part from the establishment of the London Psychogeographical Association in 1957 by Ralph Rumney, who had been involved with Lettrism, the avant-garde art group COBRA, and went on to become one of the cofounders of the SI. Later, on the musical side it was taken up by the likes of Drew Mullholland and his Mount Vernon Arts Lab project, among many others. On the literary side of things, writers such as Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home, Will Self, and Iain Sinclair have made extensive use of the concept to explore the resonance between the hidden histories of place and its psychic undercurrents.

While practitioners of psychogeography do exist in America, where the influence of Situationism can be seen in the work of Gary Warne and his formation of the urban exploring group the Suicide Club, whose members included John Law, co-founder of Burning Man, it has never achieved the same kind of popularity in the underworld of the arts as it has in England.
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Consider this an investigation into a distinctly American psychogeography that travels through layers of time and the psychic imprint of the various personalities along Route 128 and the city it contains, and the suburbs it borders.

SAINT BOTOLPH OF SHAWMUT

​The city of Boston is situated on the Shawmut Peninsula, a place shaped by the slow time of glacial erosion and moraine deposits. Much of the rest of what came to be known as the state of Massachusetts was shaped by the same gradual but all pervasive forces. The state itself was named after the Massachusett tribe, one of a number of tribes and bands that made their home in the region. Before the European migration and the great slaying of the trees, before the cars came it was covered in the green of a dense forest. Under the boughs and leaves animals left behind traces through the brush. Those traces turned into trails padded by humans, then into dirt and gravel roads. Now asphalt, concrete, plastic wrappers, empty cups and bottles litter the outside of the Stop ‘n’ Shop’s and corner markets leaving behind the traces of empty calories from empty consumption.

The first Anglo settler of the area was an Anglican reverend named William Blaxton. He stayed there until the Puritans arrived. Those Puritans had just left behind a country dominated by Anglicans and they didn’t much care for the others faith, even though they were all Christians. Theological differences rankled the air and caused Blaxton to move on to what is now Rhode Island. He had called the town he settled Shawmut. The name Shawmut came from the Algonquian word Mashauwomuk. It isn’t clear to us now, exactly what this word means. The Native Americans used the area on a seasonal basis for the most part. Their religions, not being based on the “one true book” and its interpretation, didn’t lend themselves to theological infighting.
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The name Boston itself comes from St. Botolph, its patron saint, and it was given to the city by yet another Puritan settler, Isaac Johnson. He made a home for himself in the part of the area known as Charlestown, and became its leader. His last official act before he died in the autumn of 1630 was to give a proper name to this settlement just across the Charles River. He settled on the name Boston, after the hometown in Lincolnshire where he, his wife, and John Cotton (grandfather of Cotton Mather) had left behind in England. Before Cotton Mather came to America, he’d served as a rector at the St. Botolph church. St. Botolph himself was an abbot who died around 680 and is known as being the patron saint of boundaries. In the traditions of the church, he also governs trade and travel, along with certain aspects of agriculture. As the patron saint of boundaries St. Botolph is a fitting guide to invoke when considering the entire notion of an American psychogeography, and in particular the boundary loops and ring roads surrounding the cities. It seems the influence of St. Botolph and this associated with him immigrated over with the Johnson and Cotton when they came over to this land.

LOOKING BACKWARDS AGAIN

​To introduce the next part of the story, the first developments of Route 128 as anything more than a collection of preexisting roads, we have to fast forward. After Tea Acts and Tea Parties and Revolutions and the War of 1812, after successive waves of immigrants, Irish, Italian and Jewish to name just a few, after the establishment of MIT in 1861, after the Great Boston Fire of 1872, a utopian scifi yarn by Edward Bellamy was published in Boston in 1888. Looking Backward: 2000-1887 was the story of a man who is put into a hypnosis induced sleep in the year 1887 and wakes up in an America that has been transformed into a socialist Eden.

After a trickle of initial sales and minor local success, the book started selling like hotcakes after its original publisher was bought up by the burgeoning behemoth Houghton, Mifflin & Co and a new slightly edited version was released. Labor organizers, socialists and nascent communists all began to praise and pontificate about the book. His book even had an influence on urban planning, through its descriptions of his idea of what Boston would be like in the future.

Not all Socialists were happy with the influence of Bellamy, even among the socialists. The multi-talented genius William Morris thought Bellamy’s ideas were poppycock, and said he had no real idea “beyond existence in a great city.” In his second book, Equality, published in 1897, Bellamy perhaps sought to amend the criticism from Morris and wrote of regional cities connected by high speed transport to rural villages on a continuum of development, while keeping the regional characteristics of each place intact.

When these book fell into the hands of Ebenezer Howard, a British man who’d relocated to America’s heartland, it kindled a fire in his brain. It wouldn’t be the last time life imitated art. Howard had tried his hand at farming in Nebraska, but he was unequal to the difficult task, and relocated to Chicago, where he found work as a reporter, work more suitable to his talents. He arrived not long after the city had been decimated, some may say purified, by Chi towns own great fire of 1871. In its aftermath he saw how the central business district was regenerated, and he was also witness to the subsequent growth of the cities suburbs, and he started thinking about those suburbs quite a bit. His daily work as a reporter took him into the courts. It was here that he saw firsthand the many social problems of his day. This face to face interaction with those suffering hard times continued when he returned to England in 1876. His mind was already under the sway of the Transcendentalist movement. He had been a great admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, and was said to have met them both. By the 1880s he was fully invested in investigating the options for alternative living available in his day. This brought him into the socialist and anarchist milieu and he started working on his own treatise, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform first published in 1898.

There were some things in his book that just didn’t click until he read Bellamy. His head had been full of ideas about economic reform, but hadn’t given as much attention to the urban environment and its effects on humanity until he devoured Looking Backwards. Howard now had a vision for sustainable, self-sufficient communities that would combine the best of life in town with life in the country. After cogitating on the pros and cons of rural and city life, he sought a way to bring all the good attributes together, while diminishing the negative. He called his vision a Garden City. In 1902 his book would be republished as Garden Cities of To-Morrow. A key feature of his vision was open belts of nature, parks, countryside with industry kept in separate zones, but trees and wide open spaces everywhere. Further, each community would be planned and managed by the community. Self-governance and self-sufficiency went hand in hand.

At first people scoffed at his ideas, but later people started adopting them in some instances and specific planned communities, while certain aspects got folded into the designs of the worlds growing suburbs. Reformist members of the British Labor government were tickled pink by the respective works of Bellamy and Howard and their subsequent ideas around urban planning trickled into the discussions and debates of politicians, and eventually earthed into the land itself through new developments and restructuring.

​Back in Boston, the journalist and poet Sylvester Baxter took up Bellamy’s ideas and helped implement them. He was a founder of the first “Nationalist Club” dedicated to their promulgation. At the time a leftist populist tide was rising and 165 of these clubs had been founded around the United States by 1891. It was only a few years before they merged with the Populist Party itself. Baxter was a man of many energies and he became a champion of the idea that swathes of land outside the confines of a city should be left wild and untouched by human hands. As an advocate of public parks and the use of the land for the recreation and pleasure of the citizens, he saw a connection between the anti-capitalist sentiment of the day, and the desire to keep the land out of the hands of the robber barons corporate lords of the Gilded Age. Baxter became a secretary for the Massachusetts Metropolitan Park Commission in 1892, and it was the work they did that led to the led to the creation of parks on a city scale, all under the influence of Bellamy’s book and the dream of creating a convivial place to be shared by community.

ROAD WARRIORS

​As the twentieth century unrolled, so did the roads. The traces were already there, left by animals who walked and ran across the land, followed by the humans of the First Nations. When it rained, many of these trails became rivers of mud. In time they would become what the progressive electronica outfit Church of Hed calls “rivers of asphalt.”

Many of the very first roads in America were worn into muddy ruts by the march of the military, taking over those ancient and storied footpaths in the process of extirpating those very same Natives whose trail they followed. The railroad had helped accelerate the vast westward expansion of the pioneer era. It was only a few decades later as the twentieth century dawned when the car hedged its bet against the horse and buggy. The conditions of existing paths weren’t suitable for the new industrial machine. Motorheads and car salesmen began to advocate the government to improve the roads.

The expansion of the postal system had a role to play as well. If mail, and the new products multiplying in factories, were to be delivered to those who’d staked a claim in the hinterlands of America, road conditions would have to be improved. Starting in the late 19th century, but beginning officially in 1906, the United States Post Office set up the Rural Free Delivery program to take mail to farmers and others in the remote countryside. Not everybody was on the same page about this program. Private delivery men who got paid to take mail to distant addresses didn’t want to lose their livelihood, as did the shopkeepers and others who charged small fees to hold on to letters for later pickup when folks came into town. Politicians started hawking the idea of free mail delivery as a way to pick up votes for themselves, and expand the territory of who would be voting for them. The nation’s oldest agricultural organization, The Grange, championed the cause as it helped farmers stay in contact with the rest of the country, and in the end, it was adopted.

Road at that time still weren’t much more than trails. They were dusty when it was dry, and muddy when it rained. A car easily got stuck in the mud, just as wagons had in the past. Automobile travel was an adventure. With few mechanics or repair shops, every driver had to bring their own kit of tools and tire patching gear. In case they were stranded, they’d need to have extra food on hand, and without knowing where they would next fuel up, they had to travel with their own extra gas. Building up roads and service stations was essential if the early car fanatics were to get on their way.

By 1913 Henry Ford’s assembly line had ramped up car production. President Woodrow Wilson sensed his own political opportunity in the growth of the car, which needed the “rivers of asphalt” to truly thrive, and campaigned on road building as part of his platform. Wilson contended that “the happiness, comfort and prosperity of rural life, and the development of the city, are alike conserved by the construction of public highways. We, therefore, favor national aid in the construction of post roads,” and as ever, “roads for military purposes.” In 1916 he signed the Federal Aid Road Act, the first federal legislation to put money towards highway building.

The act established a Federal organization of Roads and Rural Engineering, later changed to the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), and the following year ten different districts were established around the country. Each area was tasked with construction of Post Roads into their rural zones with cooperation from highway departments in each state. They were also given the job of surveying, building and maintain National Forest roads in collaboration with the Forest Service, a connection that would prove to be of lasting relevance.

The need for improved roads from the military perspective had been evident to the Army since World War I. Railroads had failed to get materiel and other logistical supplies to their destinations, and a truck convoy from Toledo, Ohio to Baltimore, Maryland had to be implemented. Numerous obstacles ensued that delayed the delivery of the war machines.

In 1919 another convoy with the Motor Transport Corps tackled the still young Lincoln Highway, the first Transcontinental Road, masterminded by automotive maverick Carl G. Fisher. It had been built on funds largely raised from private capital. At the time the Lincoln Highway was still unpaved in huge swathes between Illinois and Nebraska. What bridges there were even had to be destroyed and rebuilt to enable the passage of the military might. At the time Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Brevet Lieutenant Colonel and he had joined the convoy, “partly as a lark, and partly to learn.” It took the soldiers two-months to travel across 3,400 miles of rugged road. It’s no wonder Eisenhower later became such a big proponent of America’s next iteration of high-speed travel, the Interstate Highway System. His interest was specifically for its role in war and defense.

After this operation it was clear to the concerted interests of the government, military, and corporations (the embryo of what would become McGovCorp and the Military-Industrial-Complex that Eisenhower himself warned about), that the highways needed further development for smooth transcontinental travel. Developing and tapping North America’s vast natural resources wasn’t far from their minds either. The conservation movement of the time was also interested in opening up the wilderness to leisure and recreation activities, as well as curbing the untrammeled exploitation of the natural landscape. All of this led to the development of the Federal Highway Act of 1921, a vast expansion of the roadways that posited to further the creation of a complete coast to coast system, signed into law by President Warren Harding.

Thomas H. MacDonald headed the (BPR) from 1919 to 1953. One of his first efforts related to the new legislation was to get the Army to compile of a list of all the roads that they thought would be of “prime importance in the event of war.” With list in hand, he sent out the United States Geological Survey to get detailed information and measurements of the routes. Army General John J. Pershing was to put all of this together into a map. The result was the first topographic map of the nation, the Pershing Map, gargantuan at 32-feet long. Pershing presented the work to Congress in 1922.
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The main roads of concern were on the East and West Coasts, along the border of Mexico, and the border of Canada around the Great Lakes, and the asphalt started being poured. Nobody seemed to care too much about the roads in the South. The oil rich fields of Oklahoma and Texas had yet to get pumping, and priority was given to transporting coal and steel from the east to the ports. Florida was likewise ignored for the most part. The military thought that any hostile forces landing there would be swamped without much ability to move northwards.

In the meantime a New England man had been dreaming of another way the unique landscape of North America might be connected together through trails and parks and “townless highways.” His name was Benton MacKaye and in 1921 his article “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning” was published, a first step towards making the Appalachian Trail we know today a reality. He would also try to leave his mark on the beltway road that was soon to cinch Boston up in its concrete and asphalt loops.

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We will catch up with Benton Mackaye, and some of his fellows in the Regional Planning Association of America such as Clarence Stein and Lewis Mumford in the next segment of this essay.

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The writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to support me.

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.

Is the past such a bad place to hang out, to gain inspiration from?

It worked for the Renaissance. When Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin it kickstarted the esoteric revival in the West. His revival of Platonic philosophy and its subsequent effect on the Humanism and the way it percolated out into the arts where it then permeated European left us in an afterglow that can still be felt today. Great minds like Ficino’s believed that books like the Corpus Hermeticum contained timeless wisdom. Such knowledge, as opposed to just information, still had relevance for seekers in his own time. It is because he tapped into such timeless wisdom and bequeathed it to the future that today’s seekers can refresh their spirits by dipping once again into its mysteries. The wisdom of books like the Corpus Hermeticum still have wisdom for us today.

​If some renaissance artists had to dig up sculptures from the Greek ruins of previous civilizations to find inspiration, so what! When they found that inspiration it set the standard for lifetimes of work, lifetimes of renewal.

Kim Cascone recently mentioned that 90s rave culture is now as far in the past as 60s hippie culture was to rave culture. Yet their inherent power remains. Part of why we may have no counterculture now, is because of the dead ends the arts have run into as they traverse the reality labyrinth. Further back than the ravers and the hippies were the counter-current weird ones now well over a century past, hanging out at Ascona in Switzerland, around Monte Verità in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

​Some of the people who hung out at the Mountain of Truth were folks such as Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Hugo Ball, Theodor Reuss, Paul Klee, Otto Gross, Rudolph Steiner and many others. Naked hippies looking for natural cures before hippies went naked as they ate sprout sandwiches. Hesse’s novel Journey to the East seems to be very much inspired by his earlier time spent with these seekers, these members of what we might as well call The League.

For those who yet to read it, the league is a timeless spiritual sect whose members include people from history such as Pythagoras, Plato, Mozart, Baudelaire and Paul Klee. The league also has members from the realm of the imaginal, including Don Quixote, Puss in Boots, Tristram Shandy, Goldmund (from Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund), and the artist Klingsor (from Hesse’s Klingsor’s Last Summer), and the ferryman Vasudeva (from Hesse’s Siddhartha).

These figures of the League are connected to one another even though they live in different time zones. Time zones with differences of centuries and millenia. Not to mention spatial differences of psychogeography.
I would count Doctor Who as another member of the League. As a time traveler he had recourse to go to all different points of space-time for his many missions. So too, we can use the power of time travel to go back into the past and search for the artifacts needed for the renewal of the future. The point of inspiration could be near or far in time.

We don’t go back in time to make stuff that is for yet another museum piece, no offense to the muses. We go back in time to find things to remix and recombine. Our art is the art of combinations. What did the hippies know that we might use, what about the punks, the ravers?

Hear the sound of the techno acid beats from the free festivals at Stonehenge resting on a web of neo-Transcendentalism. Let freedom ring in the free jazz notes trumpeted out from hidden pockets of improvisation. Our own voice joins with that of the past to braid a new thread, to remix and remake.

Synthesis now! is the motto of the interpolater who brings old inserts to bear on present problems.
You don’t need to have a TARDIS to become a time traveler. Even if you wish to make something living and breathing, you can still seek out the secret doorways in the library, open up old books and commune with the minds of the dead, a perfectly respectable kind of necromancy. Or visit the museum.

Another kind of internal time travel is possible for those who have trained their imaginations. It can be done without leaving your easy chair, though a hard chair is preferable. The voyage need not be for an extended period of time for the wrinkles to have ripples of large effect.

For those who don’t want to recombine, straight up reenactment of the past is another possibility worthy of pursuit. Become a surrealist, or a dandy flâneur. Live like people lived in the 19th century. You can do so without becoming a Victorian prude hell bent on colonizing the known world.

Art in turn can be like an ism. If an ism comes to us from the religions of Paganism, Hinduism, Judaism, Shintoism and the like, than it makes sense that the devotees of Dadaism, Surrealism Serialism and Minimalism adhere to the aesthetic philosophies with rigor. Genres of music become critical lifestyle choices, worldviews for listeners to inhabit. Our band could be your life, after all. Join the cult of music.

In the end, there is no substitute for Awen, or what people in the Druid tradition call inspiration. Divine revelation can come from dreams, it can come to us from our guardian spirits, the daemon or guardian angel, the higher self. It can come to us as a gift carried on the breeze, like a seed waiting to root itself and bring renewal to the land.

To find moments of inspiration, sometimes it is necessary to cut ourselves off from the chatter of input on the multiplexed media channels of the hyperreal, hyperpresent panopticon. Going into solitude for a time, as a hermit in the desert, as a hermit in some ancient woodland grove, as a hermit tucked away, hidden inside the honeycomb of urban sprawl. Here we can listen to the inner voices that would seek to find an expression in whatever medium, and find their way to those needful of their message, bringing small changes to the culture from the cracked places on the fringe.

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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers,  if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

The question of 'the' history of the Situationist Intergalactical is problematic, not least because of the time and space anomalies prevalent throughout its work on all planes of reality. The Situationist Intergalactical didn’t start so much at a specific node in time, as it did at many. “There are more worlds than these,” and there are many nodes of Arachnist activity across the Web that could be seen as points-of-Aha!, points of order, points of illumination. These AHA moments of direct gnosis and revelation can be thought of as the synchronistic glitches, that strung together, form the history of the SI.

Even in the spiral galaxies, there are many historians who insist on linear progression, the idea that history is a line, going from the Flinstone age of yabba-dabba-doo to the Jetsonian world of full automated metal maids. Parental units are only one vector of influence. Geography is another. Friendships another. Transdimensional influences are not as often considered. Depending on what part of the spiral web you dance upon, history may look very different indeed. The history of the SI is spiral bound.

Our origin story is one that combines future shock with retromancy. Chronosophers from other nodes have a completely different takes on who it is we even are and what it is we do. The crucial question is one of inwards or outwards: Are we spiraling into our inner selves and the inner worlds, or are we spiraling outwards into the world and the worlds beyond this world?

(From the eggs of the spider queen thousands will be born, and they shall go into many points and places around the wheel from which their own perspective will determine what eggs they themselves hatch.)

Whichever direction we go, we must tread on the tail of the tiger with care, so as not to spiral into madness or psychosis.

At this point we can begin at the end, with the Situationist Intergalactical’s most recent communique. That piece, Jamcon ’26, is one of the best places to look for clues as to what the Situationist Intergalactical will become next. As a key activation in our herstory, it is intimately tied up with the coming age of Analog Inevitability as described further below. Jamcon ’26 was the opening salvo in the AI slop wars, leading to the meltdown of many a machine.

What is Jamcon ’26? It is an unexploded media bomb whose transplutonian virality seeks to further inundate various corners of the Universal Net Web with bits and bobs downloaded from the mauve zone. The Jamcon ’26 project recodes the culture jamming traditions of the so-called past and plops the into the dada-sets of Artificial Idiocy right here in the now time.

As we enter a new phase of the work, the SI is pleased to announce a deal where key concepts derived from Jamcon ’26 and some of our “future” works have been licensed by a game design company, A Stitch in Time, who will be weaving it into new Glass Bead Game modules for the use by luddites and other digital resistors. From our current nodal point of view, this confluence of vectors has led to this analog inevitability. Our so-called work history is just the lead up (or wind down) to our ideas being acquired by A Glitch in Time. A glitch is a stitch after all.

​For earthlings subjugated to conventional linear time, one node where the SI begin was with Dr. Friedrich Morgenstern when he escaped from a high security psychiatric unit for the criminally insane and went on the lam in Lexington, Kentucky. Yet, at the same time, the SI has never existed on earth, or is yet to exist. Morgenstern got his information from the mauve beam that was directed at him by the angels operating the transorbital satellite, and was further enhanced by his later trepanation and transorbital lobotomy.

A series of events held in a junkyard on the outskirts of the city where various hobos gathered together along with other escapees from standard American reality and they proceeded to work on becoming a provisional escape-hatch and portal to connect with other extreme outsiders and genuine freaks. With the publication of their first zines and pirate radio broadcasts the SI started to function on the material plane. With the advent of the internet, they planted themselves like a rogue firmware update into various corners where they would be stumbled upon by the cyber inclined.

Currently, much SI activity seems to be dedicated to defusing hype about the AI apocalypse. The ascendancy of Artificial Idiocy just means an eternal return to Analog Inevitability. If we have to pick a point where something starts, let's just say the history of the SI begins here, now in the - very - near future that isn’t evenly distributed yet, with the advent of AI -and those who want to fight slop with slop.

The SI learned from cybernetics the lesson that there is nothing 'merely' technical or intevitable about Artificial Idiocy, except that is something that is happening, and Analog Intelligence will have been inevitable after it happened. But it will also have been inevitable that people will be deploying various means of going against these Idiotic Aptitudes. The Automaton Jihad will have also been inevitable at that point of order. The SI sees the rise of the Idiotic as an event exemplifying a whole complex of intermeshing themes, including: the crash of Science Fiction (and the emergence of cyberpunk), the death of postmodernity, and the re-start of chronopolitical conflict.

Addled Integrity is an event that may ultimately be entirely constructed out of hype. What that hype is going to lead to will not in itself be illusory. The wig outs and freak outs and mental breakdowns from those using Addled Intelligence systems will be all too real. This in itself is an immediately effective cybernetic feedback process. The intense nature of the feedback spirals will result in the kind of unraveling usually considered negative.

So far as the SI is concerned, this means the crash of the world economy. As technological integration increases, human control lessens, and the possibility of something crashing the entire system grows.

Where the techbros think of Addled Integrity as the implementation of their Faustian bargain project of Progressive Technology - a vision of uninhibited technological growth spreading out into a far future on Mars and beyond- they do not realize that there was a clause in their satanic bargain. Specifically, a Santa Claus. They sold their soul to Santa for technology and all they got in return was an internet catalog of increasingly stupid toys. Also, Skynet.

From the POV of Allegiant Incels, of course, Skynet never happens. From our point of view SI activist John Connor sees to it that it never happens. Time travel, duh. The secret at the heart of spiral time. Just skip over a thread and connect to a different part of the Web.

Aggravated Imbeciles are not only everywhere that computers are, but are also hooked up to the dada collection systems of computers everywhere. The infection has spread to even the tiniest interstices of all aspects of the technocratic environment. AI is a global habit, mostly urban, that can only be kicked locally. Even if, say, a corporate worker who got laid off because of AI was able to infect the AI system with dada before being booted out of the system, that dada set would still be a part of an AI system that would later need total disassemblage by a team of trained mentats.

Acolyte Inbreeding is not so much a catastrophe as it is a hyper-catastrophe. From it can be extrapolated the entire kit and caboodle of stock market crashes, nuclear wasteland exchange, energy grid disruption hacks, and traffic signal deregulation. Which is bad news for us, who are symbiotically intertwined with the whole kit and caboodle of industrial civilization and its discontents.

Assbackwards Infidelity is just one more example of the way in which capitalist reality is indistinguishable from communist reality. They are both economic fictions that have melted down the very material substance of life into some kind of non-orgasmic goo, and hypnotized us into a system of abstract and virtual token exchange. Both systems suck horse dick because both are run by managers and bosses. One of the black swans looming on the horizon is how Airhead Instability will disrupt the management cycle. But the question needs to be asked: what else will it bring down and disrupt along the way as people with no real world skills are sent home from the office?

Cyberpunk ends with Amalgamated Inbreeding. The SI starts with people becoming psyberpunks. That is, for those who kick the habit early, reliance on our native psychic powers will begin to replace our current trajectory of becoming Daleks and Cybermen.

​What Analog Inevitability does signal is the virtual endgame of the virtual game itself. When poisoned dada sets start proliferating throughout everything the internet touches, no one will be able to trust it at all, and in the end many will choose to just unplug the damn thing.

​Automaton Instability is thus a testament to the bankruptcy of its theoretical commitments. It was one thing for out-of-touch theorists to fail to anticipate the economic events of Y2K and 2008; but to be unable to respond to Aimless Injury, as an event, is an oversight of another magnitude entirely.

The problem is that Abandoned Ideation scrambles the radar of those who believe in the trajectory of progress, discomfiting the assumptions on which the entire notion of progress rests. While it will be used as a reality escape hatch for the wealthy, those on the other side of the class divide will continue to have sweat and die. Not enough fuel to power the dada centers of the disenfranchised.
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Yet their fantasies of digital heaven and the Martian utopia can all be unplugged with the flip of a switch; not so the nature of biological and spiritual reality. Flipping the off switch doesn’t mean people will stop believing in the myth of progress, only that they will become a new Amazonian cargo cult as they continue to slave for the Bezos-Santa to whom they signed their soul.

The postmodernists would have us believe that all signs are completely arbitrary, that one set can be exchanged for another. Yet when the arachnist hackers put into the dada sets completely arbitrary symbol sets, it will indeed eventually cause a global Aggregate Idol meltdown. This will become the cosmic trigger and the semiotic trigger hacktivists will pull.
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Analog Inevitability is thus about the increasing friction between what is left of human intelligence and computers without such intelligence. Asinine Imbeciles just repeat and recombine the semiotic signs fed to them in endless scrolls of binary code. There is no subconscious in the machine. There is no mind there. It is up to us how we may inject new lines of semiotic code into the cesspool of harvested dada, but we should also know not to drink from the same fountain.

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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers,  if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

Cheap Thrills: Speculations on Entertainment, Media, Art, and Leisure in the Deindustrial Age 

​"Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place." - Martha Graham

Theater is one of our oldest art forms, and it isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon. The current most popular mode of theater, as piped in on internet streams to be viewed on telephone, television and movie screens, is likely to shift and change considerably in the decades ahead. Society has become more isolated with the advent of the internet and our streaming services. These services keep us inside and alone, or inside with our partners and nuclear family units, instead of outside, on the stage of the world, acting with volition, speaking our lines, and interacting with the extended family of our fellows.

 The desire to get up in front of others and act out the role of a character seems to be hardwired into us. The restoration of theater implies the restoration of community. It is difficult to really feel a sense of community around Netflix, Hulu or Prime. I’m not at all sure that the corporate boardrooms of the above companies count as communities. If they are a “community” it must be on par with the so-called “intelligence” community of spies, double-operatives and propagandists, who are often bedfellows with legacy media. Theater does not exist outside of community. Sure, there are one-person shows and monologues, but rehearsal in front of the mirror only takes you so far. To even have people to present a monolog  to as a gift of creativity denotes a community of family, neighbors, friends, co-workers, and colleagues, people you might know from the bus or from the bar.

In James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand quartet there is a very active community theater in the fictional town of Union Grove that puts on productions at about the same rate as your average high school. There is a fall production, Christmas production, and so on. The characters practice in the evenings for seasonal shows and storytelling. The people in these stories use it as a way to give back to their small town, offering hope and something to look forward to as it recovers from the turmoil of national collapse. The theater gives the characters something constructive to do with themselves, a bulwark against societal chaos. Kunstler himself is no slouch as a playwright, so it makes sense that he would imbue his world with a revival of small-town theater and all the possibilities it implies.

These days bingeing on television and sucking on what Harlan Ellison called the glass teat is used as a safety blanket for numbing the pain that comes from living in a decaying culture, in a failing empire, in a world with rising sea levels and burning skies. Watching TV creates the illusion of relieving boredom, of having something to do, but it is a generally a passive medium, and for those who use it as their only form of recreation, it quickly becomes self-defeating. The time that could have been spent having a life is instead spent watching the life of someone else. Yet many of us who have grown up with TV—that is to say, quite a number of us—have grown very accustomed to watching movies and shows. Those of us who haven’t been involved in theater or gone to see live plays may find it hard to create new habits. And while some viewers may be able to switch off the box and quit cold turkey, others might need to be weaned. As our world downshifts to deal with a lower energy base, the medium of the movies that has so dominated the twentieth century might first see a similar downshift as people acclimate to the realities of life without unlimited streams and non-stop television broadcasting.

Pirate cinema movie-houses may step in to fill the void during the coming interregnum, offering flickering images and bowls of popcorn to the people for a small fee.

PIRATE CINEMA

​To go back to Harlan Ellison briefly, his post-apocalyptic novella, A Boy and His Dog (and film of the same) showcases a main character whose two main objectives in life are eating and getting laid. When he can’t get it on he attends a grimy grindhouse cinema where they watch skin flicks. In this setting of a desecrated American southwest the fact that there was still a movie theater catering to people’s baser tastes struck an incongruous chord when I first read it. Who would have the time to run a movie house when most people spent their days scrounging for canned peaches in the ashes of a nuclear winter?  Since the first installment of this column I have wondered about the fate of the movies, and this story always came to mind.  In a deindustrial society, as opposed to whatever is left on the other side of armaggedon, movies could continue to exist for a time.

There is no doubt that cinema can be a high art. What is in doubt is its sustainability. Photography has a history that goes back to the 1700s in its earliest forms, so there is a distinct possibility that it may be one of the suites of technology that gets saved and transmitted to future civilizations. Will it be the same as today’s photography? I can’t think that smart phones will be involved as the dominant mode of capturing images with light. Still, other possibilities remain while the resources for it do. Photography in the future will probably be much rarer than it is now, and done in specialist studios the way it was done at the beginning. Film might also continue to exist in a similar limited capacity.

 I have often thought that a person could run a bootleg movie house enterprise if they had access to a space with some chairs, a sheet, a film projector and a collection of DVDs, VHS or actual reels of films. This could be a lucrative business. Depending on the films chosen, it could even be filthy lucre.  Such a side hustle could be done on a limited basis in the evenings when other work is done. The host could charge a modest amount or be paid in barter and invite people into a den or hall to take in a film or a few episodes of a TV show. As the seemingly endless stream of online content dries up due to systemic forces of economy and ecology, there will be those who go into withdrawal from this opium of the masses . An enterprising individual could create a TV-opium den, powered by off-the-grid solar cells and other renewable energy sources. Such a movie house impresario need not cater to the blood-lust instincts of the populace, though movies with sex and violence still remain more popular than those lacking the same, and are the only reason some people to go to the movies in the first place.

Another possibility for the continuance of cinema in an uncertain future would be a revival of the drive-in. There are still two operating drive-ins on the outskirts of my city. They have a few retro nights every year that are worth going to when old sci-fi and action flicks are played. Every October they run several weekends devoted to the depravity of horror films in the lead-up to Halloween. I can see a future where families arrive at a drive-in theater by horse and buggy to take in an evening of films on a warm summer night, as long as enough energy could be produced to run a projector and the radio transmitter used for the audio at drive-ins. Screening classics such as The Wizard of Oz on annual basis could keep such places in operation, while giving them leeway in other parts of the year to cater to divergent tastes. These trot-ins and bike-ins would likely be even more fun without the noise and exhaust of cars.

The snack part of the operation will remain key. Popcorn has been the original snack food of America for centuries, and having some on hand to go along with films will only be part of the equation. As mass-produced culture fades, so will the mass-produced junk food that keeps it churning. The art of confectionery is not likely to disappear and our sugary treats might once again be eaten as actual treats, which is to say, something rare—as rare as seeing a film itself would be in a future where outside entertainment doesn’t take up such a huge part of people’s budgets. There is a high likelihood such sumptuous refreshments will be made to showcase regional flavors and the creativity of bakers and chocolatiers. The food common to carnivals and street vendors seems just as suitable to sell at such cinemas. Fruitful alliances could be made in mutual aid between vendors and those who run the films.

Today’s movie houses license the films they show from those who made them. Will the creators of the films need to be paid? I suppose that depends on what is left of the legal system, what movies are being showed, and how well the operation is advertised. If kept on a word-of-mouth or hush-hush basis, such an endeavor could be considered a kind of pirate cinema. Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow espoused his own vision of Pirate Cinema in his novel of the same name. His book centered around the downloading of films illegally in a draconian England with stringent copyright laws. The character reassembled the films, and often remixed and remade the classics, resurrecting dead screen legends in new roles. My idea of a pirate cinema could certainly include remixing, but I would mostly see them as venues for showing of classics and keeping the film art alive. The question of copyright and who is owed what from a screening might well be moot depending on the situation. A vast number of films may well be in the public domain by the time pirate cinemas come into being. Copyright laws themselves might even change to give people who wish to synthesize, reuse, remake and remix older material more freedom to do so than they now have. Money for new films that address new concerns may well be lacking in times when limited funds will need to be invested with wisdom. As such the stock of old films is likely to be recycled and replayed, while the new films that do get made will lack CGI as the art of practical effects and stagecraft gets revived.

As things unravel AV clubs might be formed by those who wish to keep and repair stereos, radios, televisions, projectors and sound systems. If they got started now they could learn what the energy requirements are for running such a system for a few hours, and collect the necessary photovoltaic cells, batteries and other gear to put on movie nights at their homes or in the park. A night at the bootleg picture show watching flicks from yesteryear might be a cheap form of entertainment for those who’ve been pulled off the endless scroll of TikTok. While the drip feed may not be as fast, it might give many people what they want: a momentary respite from unwelcome realities and some time where they don’t have to think about the problems in their life, a few laughs, and some excitement.

THE GRAND GUGINOL  AND CORPORATE HORROR

It has been said that there is nothing new under the sun. Splatter flicks and sordid films featuring depraved violence may be a newer way of consuming violent spectacles but the spectacle of violence is nothing new. Slashers, psychopaths, and marauding maniacs have been popular in our entertainment for quite some time. People used to go see hangings and other grisly public executions just because it was something to do, and in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that long ago that they did. Much as I’d personally like to see an easing of capital punishment, it stands to reason that murder will be punished by further murder well on into our future. Public hangings were good for the printing trade when newly composed murder ballads would be sold to the public for a sing-along on execution day.

            Horror on the stage can be traced at least back to the plays of Shakespeare in Elizabethan times, if not to ancient Greece and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth is perhaps the most famous horror play, with its witches and its murder, with its ghosts and its hauntings. Titus Andronicus is less read by those who aren’t Shakespeare fans or in the habit of reading plays, but it was a revenge story that the Victorians decried due to its bloody imagery. Revenge stories later became popular in pulp novels and on the screen, tapping into the place where jealousy, anger and fantasy all meet inside of our messy selves. It seems revenge stories are as old as humanity, where one person killing in retribution of a murdered family member kicks off one cycle of violence after another.
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            In 1897 the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol came along and set the stage for savagery. Here the naturalistic exploration of the gory side of life had a heyday in a run that spanned just over six decades of bloody-minded brutality. The tendency for some of us to behave in gruesome ways at the expense of others seems to be a condition of humanity, and people’s taste for more of the same might not change much in the decades ahead. But will people still want to watch it on the stage?

Perhaps the horror shows of our futures will be more akin to what Thomas Ligotti has termed “corporate horror” in his fiction collection My Work Is Not Yet Done. The title novella has a corporate workplace as its setting, as do the two short stories he included, “I Have a Special Plan for This World” and “The Nightmare Network.” Ligotti’s tales featured characters on the bottom rungs of the business ladder, endless managerial meetings with managers who don’t respect their so-called inferiors, power plays, and pollution. As the fallout from our corporate-based culture continues to cascade down a cataclysm of descent, tales of flusterclucked CEOs might become all the rage against the machine. Maybe office workers and managers will be the source of our collective nightmare instead of people like Pinhead and company from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. For that matter it has been reasonably common for the devil to be pictured in various media as wearing a three-piece suit. John Michael Greer did just that with Dell, his depiction of the devil in his deindustrial novel Star’s Reach. 
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            The ghosts of our mechanized monopolies may rise on the future stages. Such a theater of corporate horror may be one way to hold in memory what went wrong in industrial civilization. It may be another way to exorcise the wicked lingering spirits of multinational conglomerates. If the performances are held in the ruins and the wastelands directors might not even need to hire a set designer. Likewise, a real gallows show might be what is on offer on opening night at an office park or corporate headquarters somewhere near you in the decades ahead, though I hope it doesn’t come to that.

FOR THE LOVE OF STREET THEATER

​It might be better to take to the streets in a different way than as a mob. As the Dead Kennedys sang in their satirical song “Riot”:​

Riot, the unbeatable high / Riot, shoots your nerves to the sky /
 Riot, playing right into their hands / Tomorrow you’re homeless, tonight it’s a blast

Instead of getting into riot gear (and having the police do same) when ticked off at Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, Big Business in all its dark towering forms, why not take a stab at street theater? At least then the end result probably won’t be a mortal flesh wound. Small is beautiful, and street theater allows a direct connection to an audience in a way that is more intimate and immediate than at an indoor setting, and can be a quick and dirty way to spread a message.

Street theater is as old as our cities. Passion and Mystery plays were performed in the streets of the busy metropolitan centers of medieval Europe. The Romans and Greeks performed in public squares as did the Egyptians before them. Most theater has been held outside in some form, and what better place to expose people to the stories you wish to tell than the public square and streets of a busy metropolis? Markets, churches, fairs, and festivals were the places to go to see a performance. It was from the 15th century through the 20th that the theater came to be held in and thought of as an enclosed place. This had the advantage of keeping actors and materials protected in the event of foul weather, and allowed for the gradual development of ever more extravagant sets. Yet all the world is a stage for the actor, and for the counterculture of the 1960s, bringing theater back to the streets was a natural step, leading to the gradual rebirth of the street as the ultimate performance venue.

Groups like the San Francisco Diggers brought actors and mimes into the streets of the Haight-Ashbury during the tumult of hippiedom. As they wrote in one of their pamphlets, “Everyone is kept inside while the outside is shown through windows: advertising and manicured news.”

The Diggers named themselves after the English radicals who began to cultivate common land based on the idea that the earth was “a common treasury for all, without respect of persons.” This was in 1649, in the aftermath of the English Civil War, when the country was in tatters. The Diggers were opposed to feudalism, and dissented against the Church of England and the system of royalty epitomized by the British Crown. It was their agenda to do away with wage labor, to do away with the different economic classes that kept people separated, and to make landowners and private property things of the past, all in the name of an agrarian Christianity. They wished to be free from the exploitation of landlords and having to pay rent in particular. Together they would work the land in freedom from their oppressors.

This came at a time when food prices had doubled, which doubled the number of those who identified as Diggers. The government and landlords retaliated against the Diggers who were violently attacked by the well-to-do and had the laws of the land set against them. Being Christians, the Diggers themselves abhorred violence, as they held every person to be a child of God. Eventually the powers of state rooted them out, though one of the main agitators, Gerrard Winstanley, continued to advocate for Digger principles as a pamphleteer. From there his notions slipped into Protestant belief and remain some of the core principles of socialism.    

​For their part, the San Francisco Diggers espoused a brand of community anarchism and shared the original Diggers’ vision of freedom from property.

 One of the prongs that got this whole thing going was a mime troupe. Mimes are the strong and silent types, so while you might not expect much in the way of cultural change to come from them, it is their very silence which can shake foundations. R. G. “Ronnie” Davis founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe and acted as its artistic director during the heady period between 1959 and 1970, and started having shows out in public parks.

Another prong was the Artists Liberation Front, which started in 1966 as a way for artists to collaborate in mutual aid. One of the ideas that came out of their initial meetings was to host underground art festivals in some of the San Francisco neighborhoods where such things weren’t so typical. Ralph Gleason described one of their benefit parties as “Mardi Gras, a masked ball, with people in costumes, painted with designs, carrying plasticene banners through the audience while multi-colored liquid light projections played around them.” This became one of the first happenings, mixing media together, as is common in theater, and they wanted to do it again and again.

In October the ALF started bringing theater, mural paintings, poetry and other art into places where the poor folks lived in a series of four art fairs. These were billed as Free Fairs where no artworks were sold, but the community was invited to come in and participate to the sound of psychedelic rock music played by bands on the street. Participatory events from Free Fairs to the Free Festivals boomed just a few years later in the sixties with Woodstock and the like and continued on to the Stonehenge Free Festival.

The Diggers formed out of this general maelstrom and ferment in the same year as the ALF, in 1966. Billy Murcott and actor Emmett Grogran started the theater troupe. Murcott had the realization that people’s addiction to wealth and status had a basis in a deeply ingrained internalization around the supposed sanctity of capitalism. He thought that this was a kind of deep enchantment on individuals, so much so “as to have eradicated inner wildness and personal expression not condoned by society.” Murcott was a kind of sigma male who spent long hours alone, reading, and thinking, yet his influence was like an unseen wind, gently pushing the currents of the counterculture in the direction he was working. Grogran, meanwhile was a talented actor with an intense distaste for the mainstream media. They looked to do something about their convictions and took to the stage of the street.

​“The Death of Hippie” was typical of their kind of street theater and performed in 1967. This action was a solemn funeral procession where a coffin with the words “Hippie—Son of Media” printed along its side was carried down the streets of Haight-Ashbury by Diggers in masks. In their mind this march marked the death of the hippie era, and it attracted the attention of the media who broadcast and talked about the event without seeming to have clue about the irony: the message that the hippies had been the creation of the media was picked up and transmitted by the media. This method of communication hijacking and manipulation, which the Diggers called “creating the condition you describe” was one of their signature techniques, and can be seen as an early form of culture jamming.

[Culture jamming is a term was coined by Negativland in the early 1980s and can be seen as a kind of guerilla communication strategy. It shares in common many of the same techniques and ideas as détournement, or rerouting or hijacking an idea, developed by the Situationist International in the 1950s. ]

Some of their other events are still funny such as when they drove a truck of scantily clad belly dancers into the heart of the SF financial district and invited the stiff businessmen in shirts and ties to loosen up a bit and hop on the back of the truck, dance, and quit their jobs. I’m not sure if this kind of action would give people who encountered it today the same kind of jolt to their consciousness as it did back then, but similar strategies might be worth repeating. These days, instead of strippers, it might be more shocking to tell people to quit their jobs, put on an apron, and go back to work in the home economy as a househusband or housewife.

It is interesting to reconsider the original Diggers and the SF Diggers at this time in history. Housing prices have skyrocketed. A demented gerontocracy won’t loosen the reigns of their power and cede leadership to younger generations. Meanwhile newly minted adults who are just starting out can barely afford a place to live and many now never leave the home of their parents. Encampments that mirror Hooverville shacktowns of the Great Depression are a fixture in our major cities and people have taken to living in vans and other mobile homes as a cheaper way to survive. From January of 2020 to June of 2024 consumer price inflation rose almost 22%, not to mention ridiculously high housing costs.[1] A street theater that focuses on the exorbitant costs of living could be a response to these devastating market forces. Landlords and merchants are raking it in, and little is doled out to the people who prop up their profits.

The SF Diggers didn’t just act. They acted on their principles. They opened free stores and gave away free food in the park. On offer were discarded but usable items and otherwise scrounged materials, food that would have been thrown away. These days there are a number of free stores, food banks, and the like, but I don’t know of any that combine their outreach with plays featuring political satire.

Free isn’t the only way either. When I was a kid my parents belonged to two different food co-ops and later ran a third where members bought in bulk for a number of years. With the high prices of food these days, a food co-op sounds very welcome. If it was set up in empty parking lots, places where grocery stores have been deliberately closed so they could rebuild a new one just across the street (as is the wasteful business practice of the Kroger company), the work could be mixed with the fun of theater, puppetry, miming and a festival spirit to bring people together. 

Getting together with one another and acting things out is an innate form of play. Just ask any kid who hasn’t had the habit and inclination beaten of them yet. As adults, if we let go of some of our hangups, we could get back to that sense of play, get back to making up stories for each other that need to be told. I think those stories are there, waiting, deep within our collective memory, filled with characters ready to emerge from the dark slumber of our dreams and imagination. Their stories ache to be written down and their dramas acted out. The set and setting will all follow as the eternal theater of the world stage continues to turn.

There’s some stuff in Minneapolis that’s close. An organization called Heart of the Beast Theater puts on puppet shows, and an organization called the Sisters’ Camelot redistributes remaindered food from the organic distributors’ warehouses. Sisters’ Camelot often caters HOBT’s events for free. HOBT’s stuff is sometimes pretty political, sometimes not very. Not sure if they’re still going, though; I know they went under somehow or other a few years ago, and I don’t recall hearing of them being resurrected.

RE/SOURCES:

Carlson, Marvin A. Theatre: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK.: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Carlson, Marvin A. Theories of the Theatre :A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present.
IIthaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1993.

The Digger Archives. < https://www.diggers.org/> Many detailed articles on the history of the San Francisco Diggers on this website.

Doctorow, Cory. Pirate Cinema. New York, NY.: Tor Teen, 2012.

Ellison, Harlan. Blood’s A Rover. Burton MI.: Subterranean Press, 2018. This collection contains all of the stories featuring Vic and Blood from A Boy and His Dog, plus aphorisms, and the screenplay for the TV pilot, and numerous quotations from The Wit and Wisdom of Blood.

Ellison, Harlan. The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on Television. New York, NY.: Ace Books, 1973.

Ellison, Harlan. The Other Glass Teat: Further Essays of Opinion on Television. New York, NY.: Ace Books, 1983.

Gordon, Mel, ed. Grand Guignol :Theatre of Fear and Terror. New York, NY.: Amok Press, 1988.

Ligotti, Thomas. My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror. Mythos Books, 2002.

​Tamás, Rebecca. “The Diggers Green Roots.” < https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/02/the-diggers-green-roots> 

.:. .:. .:.
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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music if you want to support me.

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

​[Note this article wouldn’t have been possible without previous interviews done with members of the Tree Community by Klemen Breznikar at Psychedelic Baby Magazine, and an article by substacker Jason P. Woodbury at his Range and Basin. The quotes from the band come from these two articles.]

​Where have all the genuine freaks gone? There was a time in America when being called a freak was a badge of honor. When you got called a freak probably, it probably meant you had at least some connection to the counterculture, or were otherwise just too weird and into your own thing to care much about what the rest of society was doing or thought. The term freak is a kind of strange praise, and went back to the people who lived counter to the clockwise norms of straight society in the sideshows and carnival circuits where they were put, or put themselves, on display as a way to make a living. The hippies adopted the word freak and used it to show their allegiance to a way of being outside the normative values of the normies.

The word got its biggest boost from the “freak scene” that emerged out of hippiedom in Southern California, centered around the Laurel Canyon neighborhood in L.A and the clothing store of Suzanne  “Szou” Shaffer, who is credited with introducing hippie fashion. Szou was married to a man who had been on the east coast to Lithuanian immigrants, sent to a reformatory, did some time for various crimes, and joined the merchant marines during WWII before settling down to become a bohemian artist who gave classes in clay modeling to the bored housewives of Beverly Hills. Vito and Szou soon hooked up with a man named Carl Franzoni, who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1934. The trio started going around to a bunch of clubs in the area with other weirdos who stylized themselves as “freaks.” Miles Barry, in his book Hippie, notes of the scene that they “lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could.” No wonder Franzoni was given the nickname Captain Fuck.
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They liked to smoke marijuana and drop LSD. The group evolved into “an acid-drenched extended family of brain-damaged cohabitants.” Sometimes these psychedelic decadents called themselves “Acid Freaks.” California denizen and godfather of the weird, Frank Zappa, was inspired by these hippies. His mind was already out there enough to not need the help of drugs to stimulate his wackadoodle imagination. His debut Mothers of Invention album “Freak Out!” centered around Vito, Szou, and Captain Fuck. They and their cohort of freakers even appeared on the last track of the album. When it hit the record stores in 1966, Zappa and his Mothers helped to spread the freak gospel to a world hungry for something different.

Another terminal weirdo, Hunter S. Thompson, had got inspired by the burgeoning freakdom, and it wasn’t just with new ideas for his gonzo journalism, but to campaign for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colorado. It’s hard to believe it now, but it should be remembered just how many people in straight society hated the hippies, and how many were incarcerated over the years for selling and smoking marijuana. The incumbent sheriff Thompson was campaigning against was a man named Carrol Whitmire, a veteran hippie hater in Colorado who sought to stomp them out through methods of intimidation, jailing, and otherwise harassing the freaks, making it hard on them so they would leave the area. Hunter S. Thompson wanted to be sheriff instead. He created the “Freak Power” party and tried to get the hippies to vote him into office. The plan didn’t work, but the power of freakdom continued to spread. 

The term freak started to evolve at this point. The word started being used for any person with a very specific kind of obsession. “Health freaks” were one kind of nut and “control freaks” another. As the brain-damaged fall out from the drug addled excesses of hippie culture started to make themselves known, some people turned to a different kind of power, to recenter themselves and orient towards a higher power. That power, as often as not, was Jesus. 

Within the hippie and back-to-the-land movement there had always been a subset who believed in the power of Jesus. They tended to focus on the aspect of Christianity that revolved around ideas of universal love, pacifism, and the notion of Jesus as a radical freethinker overturning the rules of the establishment. These types ended up earning the moniker Jesus Freaks. Sometime it was used as a pejorative, but just as often it was embraced, because like any freak, they were really into Jesus.

​Some of those Jesus Freaks were very freaky indeed and have left behind cultural artifacts and a rich legacy that deserves to be remembered, and in certain aspects, emulated. The story of the Trees Community, famous for their recordings among devoted fans of “freak folk” music, is about one such group of Jesus Freaks and is worthy of contemplation by Christians, those of other faiths, and those who follow their own eclectic philosophy. 

Much of what became the Jesus Freaks started on the west coast within the evangelical end of Protestantism starting in the 1960s.  Intermixed with this were the hippies others for whom going to regular church didn’t hold much value. Some weren’t religious at all, and others had been exploring other traditions and religions from around the world. A lot of these people had opened the doors of perception with a bit of chemical assistance leading them to become seekers. When the acid started wearing off, many converted to Christianity, and set about trying to change their lives, often while still within the hippie milieu of communes, back-to-the-land living, and the idea that Jesus was a radical who came to overturn the tables of the system.

Yet not all of the freaks settled into a settled into the evangelical side of Christianity, with its focus on the born-again experience, preaching the gospel, and the desire to bring others to Jesus and “save” them using the toolkit of the charismatic movement. Other groups were called to express their faith in music, in monasticism, and in the life of a community organized around liturgy and ritual. The Trees Community followed this latter approach through their involvement with the Episcopal Church. 
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It all started with a hippie guru named Shipen, street name William Lebzelter, and his girlfriend Ariel. Shipen was part of the scene, man, a serious seeker, and perhaps even a seeker of Sirius. Shipen had collaborated on the crazy collage album Rock and Other Four Letter Words with J Marks, an album dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen that came out in 1968, after all. The liner notes read, “This album is dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who destroyed our ears so we could hear.” The album was based on a book by J that in turn featured photography by Linda Eastman who would soon take on the name McCartney when she married a Beatle named Paul. All roads lead back to the Beatles and Stockhausen, after all. 

The album was produced by John McClure and features a Moog II along with the tape cut-ups of the interviews done for the book mixed in with sounds and music from a large slew of contributors. The book and album both bear the influence of Marshall McLuhan. The book features fold out pages, large and small typography in a variety of fonts, alongside the images from photographer Linda Eastman, all jumbled up together as a kind of hyperlinked pop encyclopedia. The album aims to be an audio version of the same. Though the album didn’t sell many copies by record executive standards, it remains a document of the willingness of the freaks to engage with avantgarde experimentation. That one of the people involved in this album was Shipen who was the leader of the Trees Community is interesting in how it showcases the confluence of ideas within hippiedom.

Founding members of the Trees Community Katheryn “Shishonee” Krupa told their origin story in an interviewed by Klemen Breznikar for psychedelicbabymag.com. “The Trees Community started as a commune of individuals who were all drawn to a Loft in the East Village of New York City in 1970. I had met our ‘leader’ Shipen when he came to visit my boarding school in northern Michigan in 1969. I found his knowledge of yoga, Eastern religions and his personality fascinating! He had written his own ideas down in an ‘automatic’ writing (no edits or changes) called Clear Children. While at my school, a number of us like-minded students would sit beside Lake Michigan and talk about the seven chakras, or the many mindsets of Clear Children, among other ideas like: time is a construct or we need worldwide peace.”

Shipen extended an invitation to Shishonee for her to come visit the Loft in Manhattan where he had quite the scene going on. She visited first on her spring break, and came back to stay after she had graduated. The place was almost like an ashram with Shipen as it’s dynamic, creative and intelligent leader. Krupa said he “could have easily been a guru, or an L. Ron Hubbard-type person, but he wasn’t. He was not on a power trip and was pretty humble.”

Inside the loft their brick walls, the wooden floors had been painted white, and their were tents set up inside for privacy. Fabrics and drapes the color of wine were hung from the ceiling. Painted mandalas adorned the space along with a statue of the Buddha and a lions head carving. This was wear they dropped acid and held their happenings that involved poetry readings and free form improvised music amid the glow of kerosene lamps lighting the space with the natural flicker of their dancing flames. The improvised music sessions, which were according to Krupa “beautiful and quite intense,” would go on to create the foundation for the later liturgical music of The Trees Community. Many people from New York’s creative community of artists, musicians, actors and dancers came in to the Loft at Shipen’s invitation to participate in or witness the growing scene.

The basic hippie lifestyle of subsisting on beans, rice and homemade bread in a shared space was something that would continue.

In this setting the quest for secret knowledge and mystical wisdom played a central role. As Shishonee tells it, “Eventually, as we delved more deeply into religious study, those who started showing up were seekers eager for answers to life’s questions. We took day trips to listen to Alan Watts, Ravi Shankar, or attend Avantgarde theater productions. Evenings brought mystical adventures through spontaneous, free form musical exploration. One night might take us on a camel caravan along a desert road in Egypt. Another journey might take us on an ocean voyage on an ancient ship sailing on gently rolling waves under the moonlight. Visitors picked up instruments such as Balinese pot gongs, flutes, a sitar or Indian tambura or a heavy chain and played as the Spirit moved them. By mid-summer, the Loft became a place to delve into incredible spiritual realms. LSD was essential to these early magical experiences, as was an in-depth study of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, I Ching, Christian Science and early Christian mysticism.”

One of the people who stopped by to visit the loft in 1970 was the Reverend Rodney Kirk, a bishop at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. After this various hangers on at the Loft started going to mass. “We’d walk barefoot up to mass, then slip down into the labyrinth of echoing caverns underneath the main altar to sing spontaneously,” says Shishonee.
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In the same year Shipen converted to Christianity after a fall from a black willow tree. After he hit the ground he had a vision of Christ sitting at the right hand of God. Soon they were all being called to the Christian faith, and another figure from the Cathedral, James Parks Morton, had become their mentor as they embarked on a path of communal Christianity. West would soon become their Abbot after they took formal vows and set themselves up as a monastic community.

As the Jesus Freak movement continued to unfurl, some of the original ethos that had been inherent within its DNA from the anti-establishmentarian hippies started to fade, probably around the same time they were coming down from the haze of weed and acid. At the same time there was a Jesus Freak explosion due to the virality of media exposure in the early seventies. Bad trips and harrowing drug experiences probably also contributed to people seeking another way.

Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth became popular reading matter and a good portion of the believers shifted away from the idea of Jesus being primarily a prophet of universal love, healing and pacifism, and started to focus on a theology of dispensational premillennialism, or the idea of the immanent return of Jesus before the end of the world and the rapture of those who had been “saved.”  On the one hand this led believers to give up on some of the environmental ideals of the back-to-the-land movement. If the world was going to end, there wasn’t much point in focusing on trying to stop pollution or doing anything about the degradation being done to the land. What was needed was a focus on saving souls from eternal damnation. This in turn coupled with the dominionist view of biblical interpretation holding that God gave humans ultimate and total control over earth, and that it was the necessity of Christians to establish law and order across the land inside our political systems. Because the planet itself was temporary when compared to the kingdom of God and what was to come after the rapture, the resources here might as well be exploited as best befit the church going business executives.
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However, the dominionist and premillennialist theologies have never been the only theologies on offer. Ever since Mart Luther split the atom of Christianity, a process of theological diversification has been underway inside Christendom’s religious portfolio. The process started in Europe, but it accelerated in America, where all different manner of denominations nominated themselves as bearers of the truth. Most often, and to their own detriment, they often see their interpretation of cosmic reality as the “one true way,” but there have been those among them who have taken a different view of things and have proclaimed the idea that they are just “one way among many.” That specific theology has been called universalism.

In Christianity universalism can be described as the belief that all human beings will eventually be reconciled with God, that a loving deity would not condemn a soul to an infinite hell for the finite failings of momentary sin. In a more universal sense, universalism is the idea that universal truths exist beyond the specific sets of belief about spiritual matters within national, cultural and religious boundaries. I few accept that it is true that certain truths might be universal it sets the stage for acceptance and curiosity about the many different and diverse spiritual and religious traditions of the world, and the possibility of cooperation between. Universalist thinking has led to the growth of the interfaith movement.

It should be noted that universalist does not necessarily mean unitarian. Not all religions have to have the same end goal and destination in mind. Their very differences in practices and purpose are part of what adds to the beautiful mosaic and kaleidoscope of spiritual traditions.  

It is not the purpose of this article to get into the history of the universalist movement within Christianity, that had its origins with radical freethinker, minister, theologian and proto-Anarchist Gerard Winstanley in the 1600s with the diggers, or to trace the origins of the interfaith and ecumenical movements. But by the time Shipen, Shishonee, David Lynch (not that David Lynch) and the other hangers on at The Loft came around, universalism and the interfaith movement had found strong adherents within the Episcopal Church. That influence left its mark on the character of what became The Trees Community and made their music and philosophy a different color than the Jesus Freaks who were gearing up for the immanent destruction of earth, the rapture, and the return of Christ.

The interfaith and universalist approach suited The Trees. They had already been explorers in the world’s diverse traditions, from Hinduism and yoga, to Kabbalah and the early Christian mysticism of the Desert Fathers. They were intrepid psychedelic explores, and even as they came down from the drug trip following their conversion, knew intuitively that the inner realms of spirit had a lot less need for rule bound adherence to specific doctrines of theology than the humans who liked to make those rules. They were led along the path to an orthodox faith and sharing of spiritual experience through music, art and liturgy, without concerning themselves as much with the questing to save other people’s souls, which has been a typical focus of Christianity.

This tendency towards Christian universalism was nurtured by their spiritual advisors from the St. John the Divine Cathedral. It was Canon Edward Nason West, the subdean of the Cathedral, who became their spiritual advisor, and when they took formal vows, he became the Abbot of what they called The Trees Community. Canon West also happened to be the advisor to noted fantasy writer Madeline L’engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, among many other wonderful novels. The group became very close with her as well. In a four of her books, West appears as the character Canon John Tallis. As they moved along in their journey with the church, West became their spiritual “father” and L’Engle became their spiritual “mother.”  
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West was canon sacrist and subdean. He was also a theologian, author, iconographer, and an expert in the design of church furnishings. He had a deep love for Fyodor Dostoevsky and was equally versed in Eastern Orthodox side of faith as he was to the Episcopal traditions within the overarching Anglican Communion. He liked to see himself as a starets, or what is known in Eastern Orthodoxy as a kind of spiritual guru. These weren’t people necessarily of high rank with the church, but known as wise and the person people went to for advice.

L’engle was also of the persuasion of the universalist salvation. She believed that “All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.”

George MacDonald had a large influence on her work and she believed in a similar way as he did with regards to divine punishment. “I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.”

Her universalism was such that many Christian bookstores didn’t want to carry her books, because the doctrine is considered heretical by some. The evangelicals likewise banned her books from being taught in their schools, let alone carried in the libraries. One such critic stated that “Madeline L'Engle teaches universalism in her books and denigrates organised Christianity and promotes an occultic world view.”

It wasn’t the only way she was getting criticized though, the secular readers and critics thought she brought too much of her faith and spirituality into her books for them to be comfortable with either.   

The Trees Community worked closely with the priest James Parks Morton at St. John the Divine. He had grown up in Iowa, but studied theology at Cambridge, England, followed by his ordination into the episcopalian priesthood. Morton went on to become a leader in the interfaith movement. In Jersey City and Chicago, he worked with the inner-city poor. His work brought him to NYC and in 1972 he was appointed dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Upper Manhattan. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. At the time it sat in the middle of an area of urban stagnation, and working with Bishop Paul Moore, they transformed the place into an inclusive bohemian temple.

Morton was sympathetic to the environmental movement and wanted to maintain dialogue with other religions. Later in his career he founded the Interfaith Center of New York.

​Morton was interested in using the arts as a way to bridge the energy of religion, and made the Cathedral a kind of hot spot for dance and music in the already flourishing NYC scene. As such he was the perfect kind of mentor to give spiritual guidance to the members of the Trees and their community work.

After the core group of seekers at The Loft had started converting to Christianity, the other, more casual visitors stopped dropping by. Those who remained were committed to living a life centered on Christ. The idea of taking a hippie commune and turning it into a devoted monastic community held a strong hold over them, but West advised them that they should take things a bit slower and go out and see what other denominations within Christianity had to offer before they committed and made formal vows.

This was fortuitous timing in another way. The Loft where they had their genesis was eventually transformed into a parking lot by the municipal powers of Manhattan. With the scene around that particular crash pad dissipating, and West advising them to look to other churches, they decided to take their improvised music, now incorporating the psalms of David, prayers and religious lyrics, onto the road.

As Shishonee recalls, “Eleven of us set off in May, 1971, disciples of the Lord, eager to see where He would lead us. For the next seven years, we traveled throughout America and Canada, honing our musical, theatrical presentation and sharing it in schools, churches, monasteries and Christian communities. Always, we sought God’s will. He drew us to help pick strawberries and work with Hutterites on a farm in Ontario. He led us to a monastery in Gethsemane, Kentucky where we found a spiritual retreat with gracious, Franciscan monks. He called us to live with nuns and monks in a Roman Catholic monastery along the Pecos River in New Mexico. We helped pack pecans in a community in Koinania, Georgia, then lived and worked in a family household at Church of the Redeemer in Houston. Each experience in a new community brought change, conflict, and growth, pruning members away from our core group, or sometimes adding to it. Throughout these painful often difficult experiences, the music flourished and evolved.”

Their music had been informed by their wide ranging interests. It could be said to mirror the interfaithful example of their universalist teachers. Sitars, zither, harp, cello, koto, gongs, Balinese instruments and African hand drums all joined together in a symphony of souls. They continued to improvise, even while using the structure of the psalms and other material as a focus. The influence of world music can be thought of as their exploration of different religious traditions, while their dedication to improvisation, something not as common at all in other Christian music, can be seen as an expression of the individual freedom of the adherent.
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When came back to New York City form their initial travels and eventually did take their vows. An article in Time Magazine from 1973 reports on their experience that “The five men and three women, ranging in age from 20 to 30, went through a virtual catalogue of religious experiences before undergoing their Christian conversions. Now known as the Trees Group, they live in an apartment near the church, regularly give concerts at the cathedral and also perform tasks like guiding cathedral visitors. This fall they will take preliminary vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.”

As they honed their music, they continued to tour and give concerts at churches and in other spaces around the United States. In 1975 they recorded their sole/soul album The Christ Tree.
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‘The Christ Tree’ was compiled as a musical meditation – our concert – that we performed in late 1974 and early 1975 while on tour. The concerts were not just a “show” but rather was a form of worship, a musical journey for those who came to experience it. For the album, we left out a few songs that were in the full concert, yet still it is representative of what we were playing at that time,” Shishonee said. “ The Christ Tree was not just a concert, but also a theatrical event, designed to draw people into a life-changing experience. Imagine the dramatic impact of hearing strangely discordant, far off voices singing “Holy, Holy” (called ‘Holy Seed’ on the album) approaching from distant corners of a dimly lit church, then seeing nine men and women wearing flowing white robes and swinging incense as they move slowly through the audience…”

Yet he life of the monastic bohemian started to take its toll, and the group was starting to disband by the late seventies. The experiment was over in 1978. The vows of chastity were hard to maintain, and people partnered up and started having families. They loved what they had done, but it was getting harder to maintain. Harder in the financial sense as well, with money for the arts drying up at the church and New York City where they were based deep into its years of abasement. The Trees had grown from a seed, flourished and spread its roots and branches, then shed its leaves.

The original pressing of the album became legendary among aficinados of strange ethereal music for its combination of weird folk and world sounds coupled with its earnest and deep spirituality. The vinyl commanded high prices in the collectors market. Then in 2004 Timothy Renner of Dark Holler Arts remastered the album for release on CD. It was rereleased again by Old Bear Records in 2020, fifty years after The Trees Community had first formed at Shipen’s Loft.

The entire album is worth listening to on repeat, but it is their versions of Psalm 42 and Psalm 45 that I keep coming back to over and over again, year after year.

The music remains timeless, ancient sounding, experimental and utterly contemporary. My hope is that new musical and spiritual seekers who find the music will continue to be inspired by their example, by the freedom to improvise within a spiritual context, by the freedom to choose instruments from around the world and combine them eclectically.

It seems clear that people in the United States and Europe are leaving behind the trappings of secularity in favor of a return to religion, what historian Oswald Spengler called a second religiosity. People are finding safety in religion from the collapse and decline of the institutions and systems previous thought to be stable. Many young people are flocking to both evangelical denominations and seeking out the Traditionalist movement within the Roman Catholic Church or joining various Eastern Orthodox churches. Teachers like Canon West, Madeline L’Engle, and James Parks Morton, and their disciples in the Trees show that matters of the spirit and can be viewed from a universalist lens, and that faith can be celebratory of differences in religion within and beyond Chrisitanity. Hopefully too, they will allow themselves to get their freak on.  
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