In pride of position was an essay by Chester Anderson, "Notes on the New Geology," which had started out as his review of a Byrds' album but had turned into a McLuhanite essay with a stirring vision of rock revolution. In a section headed "Some Principles," Anderson argued that rock and roll was a legitimate avant-garde music structurally akin to Baroque music, that it was "intensely participational and nontypographic," a tribal art form synthesizing most of the intellectual and artistic movements of the age, and that any artistic activity not allied to rock was doomed to sterility. The New York underground paper Anderson had originally written his essay for had turned it down, but when Ron Thelin came across the manuscript at the com/co offices a few days after the Be-In, he instantly grabbed it for the Oracle. p.141

The Diggers were already at work setting up communes outside the city, as the Oracle had reported. At the beginning of March a small delegation went up to Morning Star Ranch in Sonoma County to talk with Lou Gottlieb.

Morning Star had been drifting along peacefully, with plans of turning the ranch into an ashram. Some of the original people had left, but in November seven young people had come up from the Haight, and four more had come in January. The communal experience had been so fluid and natural that it was an article of faith that Morning Star did not have to enforce any regulations. One of the January newcomers was a young woman from New York who had a habit of standing and screaming for hours on end. Ramon Sender steeled himself and asked her to leave. "Why should I leave?" she countered. "Why don't you leave?" Impressed with her logic, Sender left. pp.148-149

The Communication Company, however, was still busy. It had picketed an evening of experimental events that included rock bands and the Mime Troupe, put on at Longshoremen's Hall by the neo-Dadaist Fluxus Group__not because the evening of events was overpriced, but because it was "boring imitative bullshit." Com/co's outrageous pamphleteer duties were served by such leaflets as a photo of a Vietnamese child hideously maimed by napalm, captioned "Poor taste, disgusting,' and a cheesecake photo captioned "What? Dope planted in books throughout the San Francisco public libraries?" As a literary publishing house, com/co had printed 500 copies of a 140-page novel Informed Sources (Day East Received), which depicted an anarchist revolution taking place in a universe of wire-service teletype symbols. p,167

June 16, Monterey Pop festival...Activities were provided, however, for people outside the arena; a playground, a projection room, a stage for impromptu acts, demonstrations of closed-circuit TV and the Moog synthesizer, and about forty shops and booths, many of them recycled from the Magic Mountain Festival (including the three-headed Buddha statue). p.205

July 2. Peter Cohon told reporters that the Diggers had begun work on the Reno Hotel at 272 Sixth Street in order to make it a free hotel, with the owner's permission. "We want a free theater, free movies, a hospital," he said. The place was big, with 482 rooms__indeed, part of the building was the old Calliope Company loft where the Acid Test Graduation had been staged. The Reno had one big drawback: it was in the heart of skid row. p.220-221

July 31. The Free Clinic held a benefit concert at the Fillmore, featuring Big Brother, the Charlatans, Blue Cheer and the Anonymous Artists of America. The comedian Bill Cosby, who was living on a houseboat in Sausalito, turned up and drummed for a while with the Charlatans. p. 223