[Landline] Useful music, Natural Suzanne on her San Francisco Diggers days, more
1. (WHAT IS THIS EMAIL?)
Landline is a free, to-the-point email, sent by me every once in a while to 4,000 subscribers. Deeply irregularly issued epistles intended for friends, colleagues, food bank workers and other curious sweetfolk, old heads from the days of Arthur Magazine (which I edited), pastoral people and dharma bums, 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.
2. MUSIC I AM FINDING USEFUL I recommend listening to the Dick Slessig Combo as much as possible. Start with their 42-minute instrumental cover of "Wichita Lineman," and go from there. (Now that I think about it, I would recommend not going anywhere from there. Just slow down and stay put, maybe.)
Ethan Miller (Howlin Rain, Heron Oblivion, Feral Ohms, Comets on Fire) has been posting whole albums on his "Home Listening" spotify playlist chosen by him and lotsa great music friends. A huge and welcome resource if you want to do some deep exploration with good guides. Sez Ethan: "A 'full albums' playlist conceived as an ever-expanding general resource mix-tape for mental calm + music for challenging but positive brain stimulus under stress + friday/saturday night party jams ~ The trinity of survival music for life in lockdown. Now guest curated and headed for the infinite. "
Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) has posted an album's worth of tone drones to help you fall asleep. Sez Ben: "This project began from my own insomnia. Using ideas taken from relaxation methods, such as lengthening the breath with every out-breath, I started to make my own pieces to fall asleep to. I don’t know if this will be the same for everyone, but perhaps it might help (I know when I was a teenager I found thrash metal put me to sleep, so everyone is different.) I consider these to be more 'pragmatic tone pieces' than music, to tell you the truth." "Sleep Tones" is available for free on Bandcamp, but please donate to Ben if you can.
3. A BOOK I AM FINDING USEFUL
THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION SHOW
From Shaman to Superstar
by Rogan P. Taylor (1985)
"Showbiz originates in demonstrations of [shamanic] spirit-power which give a teaching about the supernatural, an instruction in the art of transformation from sickness into health." This book is absolutely astonishing and enthralling. Looks like dude's anthropology PhD thesis converted to a general interest book, very footnoted and detailed, friendly, witty and learned. Julian Cope, Erik Davis, Aaron Gach (Center for Tactical Magic) and others have referenced it for decades and I can see why. Passed around by smart stage magicians, musicians, clowns and other "showbiz" performers who (I think?) want to know more about what it is they're doing and why it works when it does. Out of print, very expensive. Let me know if you'd like a PDF copy that someone shared with me years ago. Glad to finally tuck into reading this now, seems somehow timely given how sick everything is....
4. INSIDE THE SAN FRANCISCO DIGGERS, PART IV It's been a large charge indeed to share my San Francisco Diggers research/interviews with everybody via my Diggers Docs blog. Just posted is is the fourth one, an in-depth conversation with Siena Carlton-Firestone (aka Siena Riffia, aka "Natural Suzanne"), pictured below at a Diggers' dance/concert for inmates at the prison for the criminally insane in Atascadero in 1968.
Siena arrived in San Francisco in 1966, a 19-year-old working class Grand Rapids, Michigan native taking a break from attending university at Antioch in the midst of some personal turmoil. Before long Siena fell in with a group of fellow Antioch students living in the Haight-Ashbury who were involved in the San Francisco Diggers. The Diggers were a group of anonymous acid-fueled street anarchists — dancers, poet-playwrights, actors, mechanics, longshoremen, artists, runaways, activists, bikers, etc. — who were building a communal urban community that avoided the use of money, one “free” public project at a time. Diggers provided free food; they ran a free store; they put on free public events; facilitated free housing and free LSD; and so on.
Siena took part in it all — this whirlwind of activity from Fall 1966 through 1967 and beyond, that helped midwife the ’60s counterculture — becoming “Natural Suzanne,” a nickname whose derivation is revealed below. Her boyfriend for much of this period was Emmett Grogan, the Diggers’ most notorious member, and the one most heavily mythologized, both at the time in the underground and mainstream press, and later, in his 1972 fictional autobiography Ringolevio.
I interviewed Siena one evening in August, 2010 at her Sacramento, California home. She’s had quite a life — at the time that I interviewed her, she was working as an attorney in the Sacramento County Public Defender’s Office (she has since retired) — and the Diggers period was only a short, small part of it. Nonetheless, her time in the Diggers was formative and pivotal, and more than 40 years after the fact, Siena’s memories were sharp and often affectionate, her insights by turns loving, forgiving and — necessarily, given the subject matter — devastating. We talked for over two hours and it was clear to me that we were only scratching the surface of an extraordinary period in an extraordinary life.
"To me, the Diggers were a phenomenon," she said. "I don’t know that there’s been anything like them in history — yes, history repeats itself, so there probably was somebody at some time, I’m just not aware of it — a situation where you have a group of people whose goal is to help other people, to bring them not just the basic necessities you need to survive but the things that you need for your imagination, your brain, your growth on other levels. It was like an opium dream or something. I just think I was so fortunate to be where I was, when I was. Because who knows when something like that will happen again..."
Read the complete interview with Siena here.
Please note: I have incurred not insignificant expenses in my Diggers research through the years. If you would like to support my work, please donate via PayPal. All donations, regardless of size, are greatly appreciated. Thank you!