To hire trains to move 7,000 people from San Francisco to the city of Belmont, may constitute the first Human Be-In in the Bay Area, if not America. What was Carl Janke’s motive? His German Theme village was already a success. It had become a refuge for hard working people in what would become one of the greatest cities in the world, where one day tens of thousands of young people would flock, with flowers in their hair.
“The same year the Belmont Soda Works opened, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.) hired 75 Southern Pacific railroad cars to transport 7,000 of its members from San Francisco to Belmont Park. There, 1,000 other members met them there, making the largest picnic ever held at Belmont Park. With all the alcohol, dancing and overheated bodies gathered in a relatively small place, trouble seemed destined to follow. In 1880, rival gangs started a small riot at Belmont Park, leaving one person dead and several injured.”
I was at the first Human Be-In with my childhood friend, Nancy Hamren, who would be adopted into Ken Kesey’s family. We went to Oakland High School and met at McCheznie Junior High. She was the first girl I ever kiss. Her ancestors came to Texas in search of a new Utopia.
When I moved to Berkeley after living in Boston, I warned my friends not to attend the Altamont free concert. I knew it was going to be a disaster. The hippie Movement was attracting extremely aggressive and psychotic people from all over America. I used to describe myself as Balder guarding the Rainbow Bridge. I had seen the Hell’s Angels guarding the stage at the Be-In, and was dismayed by their energy. So was Nancy, who grew up around these violent gang members. We had gone to school with some of them. We did not invite, nor did we want them there. They were foisted on us by folks who were now claiming they were our leaders. We asked for no leaders. This was bullshit! It was the beginning of the end of a very closed party by locals. We had no intentions of changing the world – via mass numbers of believers. We were going to alter the world’s conciencness by altering our own. We would radiate the power of change, because things had to be changed. There was a dark force in the world that wanted our generation to die in war so they can bessen as war heroes and crusaders of the Christian religion.
I suspect the six portable houses Carl Janke brought around the Cape were purchased by the Odd Fellow who wanted to build a Utopian city out west, in the land of the free, free of the eastern puritanical government – and the Feds! William Ralston ‘The Man Who Built San Francisco’ moved into the home of Count Cirpiani that was put together with thousands of screws. The count had put several additions on the orignal structure, and it became ‘The White House of the West’ . Several Presidents stayed here, and famous artists and writers. Here was held the first Salon on the Pacific rim. Wealthy people want to get married here, because Ralston Hall represents old money and traidtions – the them!
Ralston founded the Bank of California, and as a member of the Odd Fellows, bankrolled their expansion – even into Europe. An orginaizwd group of men and women were spreading Love all over the world while holding titles that linked them in some manner with the Knight Templars. Consider the DaVinci Code and the idea Jesus and Mary Magdalene weee married and gave birth to a new generation of Love that has been severely oppressed. Why wouldn’t their Love Line come to San Francisco for the Summer of Love and impart their hidden teaching, that is not an alternative teaching, but, the real thing!
Those who claim they found the real thing, are of the tired old world. Last year, I was invited to attend the Scottish Games near Portland by a member of the Sinclair Clan. I was going to camp nearby, then, drop some acid and chill-out to some bagpipe music. Oh look, there’s a guy trying to throw a big wooden poll over a line. Didn’t Jesus, the carpenter, invent this love game? I heard he did some shrooms in the wilderness.
“Wooden ships on the water, very free!”
Jon Presco
Copyright 2012
“Delegates traveled free, thanks to the generosity of Templar Lodge No. 17, San Francisco: A Templar Lodge member, William Chapman Ralston (president of the California Bank) underwrote the $10,000 pledged by Templar Lodge. Subsequent to the 1869 session, California was host to Supreme Lodge sessions in 1888, 1904, 1915, 1949, 1960 and 1994. In 1871, Past Grand Master of California Odd Fellows, John F. Morse succeeded in establishing the Order in Germany and Switzerland. For the pleasure of members and their families, the Odd Fellows maintained several outdoor resort areas in California, including the Odd Fellows Beach and Park on the Russian River near Healdsburg, CA.
Odd Fellowship was established in California in 1849 with the formation of San Francisco Lodge No. 1 in San Francisco. Odd Fellowship spread throughout the state, particularly to the gold rush towns such as Marysville, Rough and Ready, Grass Valley, Whiskey Flat, Hangtown (a.k.a. Placerville), Comptonville, San Juan, Downieville, etc. The Grand Lodge of California was established in 1853, making it the first Grand Lodge of Odd Fellows established on the Pacific. By 1856, the jurisdiction of California consisted of sixty lodges with a membership of more than two thousand four hundred.
Early in the history of California, the two largest fraternal orders, the Odd Fellows and the Freemasons embarked on a unique cooperative project to benefit the State. The two fraternal orders created the first hospital in the new State of California in 1850 following the great flood of the winter of 1849-1850. It was called the Odd Fellows and Masons Hospital, and admitted and cared for any patient regardless of affiliation, making no distinction between members and non-members. All funds for operating the hospital were to be contributed only by the members of the two fraternal organizations.
In 1869, California hosted the Supreme Lodge session in San Francisco (opening September 20, 1869), an event memorable for two reasons: the Supreme Lodge officers became the first organized body to cross the continent to the Pacific by the newly completed transcontinental Rail Road; and the financial panic known as “Black Friday” occurred during the sessions. Delegates traveled free, thanks to the generosity of Templar Lodge No. 17, San Francisco: A Templar Lodge member, William Chapman Ralston (president of the California Bank) underwrote the $10,000 pledged by Templar Lodge. Subsequent to the 1869 session, California was host to Supreme Lodge sessions in 1888, 1904, 1915, 1949, 1960 and 1994. In 1871, Past Grand Master of California Odd Fellows, John F. Morse succeeded in establishing the Order in Germany and Switzerland. For the pleasure of members and their families, the Odd Fellows maintained several outdoor resort areas in California, including the Odd Fellows Beach and Park on the Russian River near Healdsburg, CA.
The principal tenants held dear by Odd Fellows are friendship, love, and truth (FLT). The principal Odd Fellows emblem is the three links, standing for the virtues of Friendship, Love, and Truth. The duties enjoined upon Odd Fellows are to visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead and educate the orphan.
The Odd Fellows ritual has gone through three major revisions. When the society was first introduced into the United States, its ritual was a simple catechism – the society met in taverns and its membership was often criticized for drinking in excess. One author speculated that the simple “Making” ceremony first employed may have derived from the “Ancient Order of Bucks,” an older English society. (Red Blood of Odd Fellowship, Curry, pp. 212-216.) Slightly more complex rituals were adopted during the 1820’s, including an early version of the White Degree, the Blue Degree and the Scarlet Degree, to which the Covenant and Remembrance Degrees were added in 1826. One IOOF member, Augustus Mathiot, applied for membership in a Masonic Lodge and was denied membership there because he belonged to that “Bacchanalian Club of Odd Fellows.” Mathiot thereafter successfully campaigned to have his brethren adopt middle class reforms, particularly temperance. (Saloon-keepers and Bartenders became ineligible for membership in the IOOF.) This shift led to a new emphasis on ritual and adoption of a new ritual in 1845. Two prominent members of the committee to rewrite the Odd Fellows ritual were Edwin Hubbell Chapin, Universalist Minister and John McCabe, who was ordained an Episcopalian Minister three years later. The ritual became a dramatic exploration of the ties between father and son in which the initiate dramatically gains the approval of the patriarchs and with it acquires manhood and acceptance into the masculine family of the Lodge.
Poster advertising the ‘Human Be-In’ designed by Michael Bowen using the photograph of artist Casey Sonnabend.The Human Be-In was a happening in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park the afternoon and evening of January 14, 1967.[1] It was a prelude to San Francisco’s Summer of Love, which made the Haight-Ashbury district a symbol as the center of an American counterculture and introduced the word ‘psychedelic’ to suburbia.
Human Be-In focused the key ideas of the 1960s counterculture: personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological awareness, higher consciousness (with the aid of psychedelic drugs), acceptance of illicit drug use, and radical liberal political consciousness.[2] The hippie movement developed out of disaffected student communities around Stanford and Berkeley and in San Francisco’s beat generation poets and jazz hipsters, who also combined a search for intuitive spontaneity with a rejection of ‘middle-class morality.’ Allen Ginsberg personified the transition between the Beat and hippie generations.
The Human Be-In took its name from a chance remark by the artist Michael Bowen made at the Love Pageant Rally.[3] The playful name combined humanist values with the scores of sit-ins that had been reforming college and university practices and eroding the last vestiges of entrenched segregation, starting with the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in of 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The first major teach-in had been organized by Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Michigan, 24–25 March 1965.[4]
[edit] EventThe Human Be-In was announced on the cover of the fifth issue of the San Francisco Oracle as “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.” The occasion was a new California law banning the use of the psychedelic drug LSD that had come into effect on October 6, 1966.[5] The speakers at the rally were all invited by Bowen, the main organizer. They included Timothy Leary in his first San Francisco appearance, who set the tone that afternoon with his famous phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and Richard Alpert (soon to be more widely known as ‘Ram Dass’), and poets like Allen Ginsberg, who chanted mantras, and Gary Snyder. Other counterculture gurus included comedian Dick Gregory, Lenore Kandel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jerry Rubin. The Hells Angels, at the peak of their ‘outlaw’ reputation, corralled lost children. Music was provided by a host of local rock bands including Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, who had been staples of the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom since February 1966, and ‘underground chemist’ Owsley Stanley provided massive amounts of his “White Lightning” LSD, specially produced for the event, to the gathered masses.
The national media were agog. No one was able to agree whether 20,000[6] or 30,000 people showed up. Soon every gathering was an ‘-In’ of some kind: Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In comedy television show began airing over NBC just a year later, January 22, 1968.
The ‘Human Be-In’ was later recalled by Allen Cohen (who assisted the artist Bowen in the organizational work,[7][8]) as a necessary meld that brought together philosophically opposed factions of the current San Francisco-based counterculture: on one side, the Berkeley radicals, who were tending toward increased militancy in response to the U.S. government’s Vietnam war policies, and, on the other side, the rather non-political Haight-Ashbury hippies, who urged peaceful protest. Their means were drastically different, but they held many of the same goals.
According to Cohen’s own account,[9] his friend Bowen provided much of the “organizing energy” for the event, and Bowen’s personal connections also strongly influenced its character.[10]
The counterculture that surfaced at the ‘Human Be-In’ encouraged people to ‘question authority’ in regard to civil rights, women’s rights, and consumer rights, and shaped its own alternative media: “underground” newspapers and radio stations.
One of the bonanza gods San Francisco loved was William C. Ralston. In the summer of 1875 he was a hero and a prince in the eyes of the ordinary people. He was a bank president, backer of great and small business enterprises, builder of a vast, unfinished hotel, confidante of little men to whom he loaned money on character alone. Secret donor of funds to educate promising sons of men with little money.
A former cabinet maker, Ralston won the hearts of workers in the factories he financed. Whether it was a business to teach erring boys a trade, blight crime in the bud, a real estate development in Marin County, a mine in Washoe or a railroad, Ralston was always eager to help. His door stood open to callers no matter how lowly and in need of money.
Gallant, Genial
Ralston had achieved the dreams of ordinary men had dreamed in vain and wore his success with so much more grace than any other man that he was a symbol of everything that might have been. He was gallant, colorful and genial, quick-witted and full of imagination. The men he had known when he arrived in San Francisco at 28 with nothing but a clerk’s job received the same friendliness in 1875 that he had given them in 1854.
The countryside, from San Francisco to Belmont, identified itself with Ralston’s flair for magnificent living in his country place, the old Cipriani House in Canada Diablo, which he had enlarged to four stories and 100 rooms. The 300 gas lights glittered in the crystal chandeliers, the ballroom and gracious staircases were splendors.
Party Legend
There were legends of great parties, of guests with flying veils riding in carriage behind teams of horses driven by the debonair Ralston, racing the San Jose train from the Valencia Street Station to Belmont, of dinners, of background music played by an imported orchestra, of coaching parties and picnic luncheons on the beach. It was living on a grand scale and all took a part.
The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery-detective novel written by Dan Brown. It follows symbologist Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu as they investigate a murder in Paris’s Louvre Museum and discover a battle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus having been married to Mary Magdalene. The title of the novel refers to, among other things, the fact that the murder victim is found in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, naked and posed like Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing, the Vitruvian Man, with a cryptic message written beside his body and a pentacle drawn on his chest in his own blood.
The novel is part of the exploration of alternative religious history, whose central plot point is that the Merovingian kings of France were descendants from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, ideas derived from Clive Prince’s The Templar Revelation and books by Margaret Starbird. Chapter 60 of the book also references another book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail though Dan Brown has stated that this was not used as research material.
The book has provoked a popular interest in speculation concerning the Holy Grail legend and Magdalene’s role in the history of Christianity. The book has been extensively denounced by many Christian denominations as an attack on the Roman Catholic Church. It has also been consistently criticized for its historical and scientific inaccuracies. The novel nonetheless became a worldwide bestseller that sold 80 million copies as of 2009[update][1] and has been translated into 44 languages. Combining the detective, thriller, and conspiracy fiction genres, it is Brown’s second novel to include the character Robert Langdon, the first being his 2000 novel Angels & Demons. In November 2004, Random House published a Special Illustrated Edition with 160 illustrations. In 2006, a film adaptation was released by Sony’s Columbia Pictures.
In the novel Leigh Teabing explains to Sophie Neveu that the figure at the right hand of Jesus in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of “The Last Supper” is not the apostle John, but actually Mary Magdalene. Leigh Teabing says that the absence of a chalice in Leonardo’s painting means Leonardo knew that Mary Magdalene was the actual Holy Grail and the bearer of Jesus’ blood . Leigh Teabing goes on to explain that this idea is supported by the shape of the letter “V” that is formed by the bodily positions of Jesus and Mary, as “V” is the symbol for the sacred feminine. The absence of the Apostle John in the painting is explained by knowing that John is also referred to as “the Disciple Jesus loved”, code for Mary Magdalene. The book also notes that the color scheme of their garments are inverted: Jesus wears a red tunic with royal blue cloak; John/Magdalene wears the opposite.
According to the novel, the secrets of the Holy Grail, as kept by the Priory of Sion are as follows:
The Holy Grail is not a physical chalice, but a woman, namely Mary Magdalene, who carried the bloodline of Christ.
The Old French expression for the Holy Grail, San gréal, actually is a play on Sang réal, which literally means “royal blood” in Old French.
The Grail relics consist of the documents that testify to the bloodline, as well as the actual bones of Mary Magdalene.
The Grail relics of Mary Magdalene were hidden by the Priory of Sion in a secret crypt, perhaps beneath Rosslyn Chapel.
The same year the Belmont Soda Works opened, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.) hired 75 Southern Pacific railroad cars to transport 7,000 of its members from San Francisco to Belmont Park. There, 1,000 other members met them there, making the largest picnic ever held at Belmont Park.
With all the alcohol, dancing and overheated bodies gathered in a relatively small place, trouble seemed destined to follow.
In 1880, rival gangs started a small riot at Belmont Park, leaving one person dead and several injured.
Visually, I totally fell in love with the way that the acid trip scene in Taking Woodstock was done.
From a review article: “Julian Sancton in Vanity Fair called it “the best visualization I’ve ever seen of an acid trip.”
Here’s the scene, the effects kick in around 2:25 and really move into high gear at 2:46:
http://www.tagtele.com/videos/voir/50707
I’d like to hear from other after effects artists, how they might approach recreating some of the basis of these effects inside after effects, particularly the undulation and pulsing of the shapes and colors, and the eventual color shifting and bleeding. I would be very interested in any innovative ideas that could allow me to take video or stills, and make them breathe and bleed in this organic, hallucinagenic way.
Any and all suggestions and thoughts are much appreciated! Below are some more notes from the article, which describes a top line about how the visual effects were done.
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/Mr.X-post-vfx-Taking-Woodstock-Toronto
One of the film’s most memorable moments depicts an LSD experience. Julian Sancton in Vanity Fair called it “the best visualization I’ve ever seen of an acid trip.” Movieline says it is “a stunner [with] overlapping pastel lighting effects, green-screen animation, shifting film speeds, lens trickery and undulating CGI…” “LSD affects each of the five senses,” says Taylor, “and we needed to portray this overwhelming experience using visuals alone.”
The acid trip begins with the main character, Elliot, inside a van mesmerized by a painting, which appears to come alive as he watches it. “We wanted the ‘trip’ to come on slowly – to gently coax the audience into the hallucinogenic experience,” said Taylor. “In our research, we found that one of the common things users describe is a definitive ‘pulsing’ when they are on acid.”
Acid SceneThe team at Mr. X used this pulsing effect on the colors in the painting. At first the colors start to move very subtly. This was accomplished by keying out individual colors – red, turquoise or yellow – and then rhythmically applying carefully calibrated displacements on them. There were three different visual motifs within the acid trip sequence. First, there is the scene with the painting in the van. Then Elliot leaves the van and the effects of the drug really begin to take hold. Finally, we come to the climactic scene where the concert stage transforms into a giant nebula that spins out towards the audience. “
http://www.tagtele.com/videos/voir/50707
Approximately 300,000 people attended the concert, and some anticipated that it would be a “Woodstock West.” Filmmakers Albert and David Maysles shot footage of the event and incorporated it into a documentary film titled Gimme Shelter (1970). The event is best known for having been marred by considerable violence, including one homicide and three accidental deaths: two caused by a hit-and-run car accident and one by drowning in an irrigation canal. Four births were reported during the event.[4] Scores were injured, numerous cars were stolen and then abandoned, and there was extensive property damage.[5]
Rosamond Press 
Reblogged this on rosamondpress and commented:
https://rosamondpress.com/2012/06/09/william-janke-on-haight-st/