Every once in a while, S.F. Chronicle columnist Herb Cain would put together a column of bits and pieces, so-called 3-dot journalism,  and he would call it “Friday Morning Fish Fry.” I’m still unscrambling things from my month on the road, so here’s an interim bunch of disconnected facts:

It’s an iPhone world I live in a small-town. Most days I only see a few people. Spending weeks in the cities among 1000s of people, it struck me how everyone is connected via smartphones. I’m not into that level of communication, so the extent of phone calling, texting, googling, is um, awesome. It’s the way the world is out there — yow!

AirBnB I guess I really don’t get out much in the world. What I didn’t realize re AirBnB is that many of these are rooms in homes where it’s like you have a roommate. Shared bathroom, kitchen, living room. My 2 AirBnB experiences were very good, but I think I lucked out. A lot of those rooms on the website look pretty grim.

Dylan fans The Bootleg Series, Volume 12, a 6-CD set is a whole new level. Shows how the ’65-’66 songs were constructed. They’d do 14 takes. Listening to disc 6 today lifted me out of my weeks-old funk. Oh mama, can this really be the end…

Skateboarding Yesterday I thought: realistically, at age 82, I can’t afford any more accidents. This shoulder operation wasn’t due to skating, but the other shoulder and the broken arm were. Plus they’re have been a lot of close calls. I’m thinking of hanging it up, or at least drastically cutting down the frequency. Is that mature or what?

My book on the ’60s I’m fiddling with it, to see if it seems a go. Scanning some of my photos from the ’60s is like stepping back in time. I’ve never seen (i.e. printed) many of these.

At left, The Lovin’ Spoonful, John Sebastian on right, at Cafe Wha’ in NYC, Fall, 1965, shot during my month-long hitchhiking trip across the country

I’ve got a different take on what went on then, as opposed to the frenzy of “Summer of Love” TV shows, articles, museum exhibits.

House in Santa Cruz last week

I wrote this article 27 years ago, so to bring the first sentence up to date, “It was 48 years ago…” Egad!

Its purpose was to describe the impact of the Whole Earth Catalog on a number of people, including me, and the birth of west coast publishing in the late ’60s. I ran across it recently and thought it might be of interest in helping people connect some of the dots — especially younger people, who may have heard of the WEC, but don’t understand its significance.

It was 21 years ago, a cold, dark, early December evening when I walked into a semi-vacant storefront in Menlo Park, California. A sign out front said “Whole Earth Truck Store,” but there was no truck, no store, just an army-camouflage VW bus and Stewart and Lois Brand and a ton of books piled around in the back room. I was a dropped-out San Francisco insurance broker turned builder. I was about 10 years older than the inspired and visionary kids who were moving and shaking up America at the time, but I’d got the message and in a few years preceding that evening had latched onto many of the elements that were fueling the cultural, metaphysical and epochal revolution of the times.

I had just built a homestead, then a geodesic dome workshop in Big Sur, was tending a garden, listening to rock & roll, making weekend trips to Haight Ashbury, reading The Owner-Built Home, Organic Gardening & Farming Magazine, The Oracle, The East Village Other, The Dome Cookbook, The Green Revolution, getting food by mail from Walnut Acres, listening to Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, discovering B.B. King, Ali Akbar Khan, Buddhism, Alice Bailey, astronomy, astrology, prisms and Ashley automatics, learning about ferrocement, wind electricity, solar heating … what a time it was!
Read More …

From an article (long one) in yesterday’s The Observer, by Carole Cadwalladr, here. Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images

“…But then, it’s almost impossible, to flick through the pages of the Catalog and recapture its newness and radicalism and potentialities. Not least because the very idea of a book changing the world is just so old-fashioned. Books don’t change anything these days. If you want to start a revolution, you’d do it on Facebook. And so many of the ideas that first reached a mainstream audience in the Catalog – organic farming, solar power, recycling, wind power, desktop publishing, mountain bikes, midwife-assisted birth, female masturbation, computers, electronic synthesizers – are now simply part of our world, that the ones that didn’t go mainstream (communes being a prime example) rather stand out.…

“It changed the world, says Turner, in much the same way that Google changed the world: it made people visible to each other. And while the computer industry was building systems to link communities of scientists, the Catalog was a ‘vernacular technology” that was doing the same thing.…

“John Markoff, who wrote What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, says, simply: ‘Stewart was the first one to get it. He was the first person to understand cyberspace. He was the one who coined the term personal computer. And he influenced an entire generation, including an entire generation of technologists’.…

“Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, tells me how he first came across the Catalog when he was still in high school ‘and it changed my life. But then it changed everybody’s life. It inspired me not to go to college but to go and try and live out my own life. It was like being given permission to invent your own life. That was what the Catalog did. It was called “access to tools” and it gave you tools to create your own education, your own business, your own life’.…”

Sent us by Vic Long

“…The creative explosion ignited by the back-to-the-land builders of the 1970s was memorialized by many photographers, most notably Art Boericke and Barry Shapiro, who produced a best-selling book, Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher’s Art. In centuries to come, historians will probably note that the era of the hippie builder was the last chapter of a century-long period in American history — namely, the closing of the American frontier.”

https://shltr.net/hippiebuilders

Thanks to Mike Litchfield for heads up on this article.