[Landline] Change of desert, Kid Congo Powers, composting Arthur Magazine, an interview with a Digger, and more
1. (WHAT THE HECK IS THIS EMAIL?)
Landline is a free, occasional email newsletter dispatched to over 4,000 subscribers, a to-the-point epistle intended for friends, colleagues, food bank workers, old heads from the days of Arthur Magazine (which I edited), pastoral people, dharma bums, antifascists and other curious sweetfolk, made up of ideas, nudges and announcements that hopefully form a small bailiwick outside the cruddiness at large. An archive of previous Landlines exists here. And here is my personal Linktree.
2. AND THEN I CHANGED DESERTS After 11 years in Joshua Tree, California I have moved to Tucson, Arizona. From the Mojave to the Sonora. From the rural wilderness to the city. From the frying pan to another frying pan. It’s been a good move and I like it here: javelinas, butterflies, chess clubs, progressive municipal government, summer rain, etc. And, in a beautiful coincidence that left me trembling, just as the wife and I were moving house in January, this brand new casually shamanic 14-minute music video by Kid Congo Powers came across the transom…
The legendary Kid Congo Powers! In a pink suit! Shot near Tucson, where he lives with his husband! Directed by David Fenster, a brilliant filmmaker I’ve long admired from afar, who is married to an Arthur alumnus, and lives in Tucson! Kismet times three, right? Maybe more.
3. COMPOSTING ARTHUR MAGAZINE’S REMAINS
“I’m here to capture the rapture and the resurrection at the same time,” says Tim Dundon, pushing a wheelbarrow brimming with fresh mulch, leading me up the inclined path into his shady tropical reserve. “Isn’t life triumphing over death the resurrection? The body turns back to basics and then the basics are picked up by the next generation and the next generation makes use of it and is happy to live inside this new entity because it didn’t go to the landfill. It went to the hill with the will.”
— from “The Sodfather” by Daniel Chamberlin, originally published in Arthur (Dec. 2007)
In the spirit of the late Tim Dundon (photo above by Eden Batki), I'm doing some compost work here on the site, making sure nothing goes to the landfill, and all that we did back then is available to the next generation — as well as to us older folks who need a refresher. I'm restoring lost blog images and credits, and posting text, photos and art from old print issues of Arthur Magazine online for the first time. Come and have a gander: arthurmag.com
4. A NEW ENTRY IN THE DIGGERS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT....
What a joy it was to find Claude Hayward alive and well and ready to reminisce and think about the San Francisco Diggers back in 2011.
Claude was a shadowy figure in the Diggers — mentioned here and there by name in various accounts and memoirs, famously rendered as mysterious and evasive by Joan Didion (!), the one living guy who could talk in depth about the late Chester Anderson, his partner in printing over 600 broadsides (many of them Diggers-penned) as the Communication Company. Amongst Diggers and children of Diggers, wild stories abounded about Claude’s life before, during and since the Haight. I thought he might be hard to find. But he was right there all along, online, active on Daily Kos and easily reached by email.
In 2021, the Diggers are little-known. But in 1966-8, such was the Diggers’ presence and notoriety that seemingly every reporter filing a story on the Haight included the Diggers in their account. “A band of hippie do-gooders,” said Time magazine. “A true peace corps,” wrote a local daily newspaper columnist. The Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor would write, “[The Diggers] were in my opinion the core of the whole underground counterculture because they were our conscience.”
I interviewed Claude in a San Francisco backyard on October 2, 2011. I think we were eating apples and drinking coffee. We got a lot of talking done. "I lucked out so many times, man," laughed Claude. And I laughed too.
Read my interview with Claude here.
This is the eighth interview in my series of Diggers’ oral histories; the others are accessible here. I have incurred not insignificant expenses in my Diggers research through the years. If you would like to support my work on this project, please donate via PayPal. All donations, regardless of size, are greatly appreciated. Thank you!
5. ONWARD
This will be the final Landline through this tinyletter service—I’m moving over to Sleestak or whatever it's called. You don’t need to do anything, you should be automatically switched. The frequency of these Landline bulletins will increase, as I’m gonna stop frittering away so much time-energy on twitter and return to connecting with folks on good ol’ email, which almost everyone prefers anyway. I’ve got three, maybe four, metric tons of stuff saved up to share, so prepare your inbox and stock up on smokeables. Better times coming!
Fondly,
Jay Babcock
Tucson, Arizona