Category: Essays

 

Our format has been adopted to insure the minimum of arguing, bickering, amending, censoring, and voting on other people’s ideas,rules, and other volatile subjects. Each person is totally responsible for their fantasy, the logistics of carrying it out, and the rules they want abided. It is up to the members to decide if they want to attend and when, if they do attend, they want to end their participation. At the same time guidelines have been offered by people in very empirical terms-i.e. what they would have done differently if they had only known…. These aren’t rules because we don’t even meet much less vote.

They are for whatever purposes you may use them for and as warnings or assurances for those events that bear our names.

WE DID THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT IS WRITTEN BELOW

1) Discussions will take place at the first meeting place. People became too excited and it was so chaotic in the sewers that we couldn’t get people to listen to us, stop talking, count off or apprise them that people were following us that we might have been in danger.

2) The leader will give a point by point description of the adventure as they imagine it. Diagrams would be helpful at the meeting place. When people climbed the side of the ship facing the guard house on the Golden Hind we realized that what was obvious to some wasn’t so obvious to others.

3) The leader will give a point by point fantasy of what he thinks could go wrong and what he fantasizes doing about it. If they’re wrong, great!

4) We will not be meeting people beyond the first meeting place where the discussions and planning takes place. We realize that this will be a hardship but it has been more of a hardship trying to avoid hardships.

5) Verbal directions are out. Duplicate maps will be given all drivers.

6) The organizer will provide a list of the equipment necessary and will give it to someone to check off as we leave.

7) We won’t simulate danger, even for joke purposes, in situations that are possibly dangerous already.

8) We’ll ask someone to be an official explainer and talk to witnesses that insist on staying and being perplexed when we’re climbing buildings, etc.

9) A firm hand grasp (holding hands) will be our universal, non-verbal signal to stop talking at any volume.

10) Everybody should have all of the equipment that is specified, the organizer has advised us with a reason, we shouldn’t disqualify ourselves from their requirements because we think we know better. If it says everyone must have flashlights- this means everyone (and many people still don’t own one- buy one). If it says no kids- it means no kids- if it says hard soled shoes, it means hard soled shoes, if it says everyone should have a candle-
EVERYONE has to have one.  We feel its best of tell people the truth, if not the whole truth, about what we’re doing. Many people are not using the planned chaos form and so are leaving information out of the write ups that others need to know or that the leaders are not thinking about. Use them. On the small but positive side- we feel we were right about the use of costumes to offset police suspicion/ repression and food (pot luck) helps too!

CARNIVAL COSMOLOGY
– Gary Warne

The world is a midway; cities are its sideshows.
The only difference between children and adults is
that there is no one to take care of us. When we
left home it meant we were lost on the midway
and, unlike God, the carny boss will only let us ride
as long as we pay.

No one will come to find us. Some children will hurt
us, others will stop to play…some are still deciding.
But you can sneak in too.

I have been exploring a world of adventures, exotic
locales, mystic essences, confronting my fears was
the immediate goal, the predominant focus of the
explorations and challenges. Now, nine months
later, my fears have become wafer like and
crumbling, shadows of their former selves. Now I
find fear only a final, non-evolving image that stills
other possibilities, the creation of more intoxicating
future images, that prevents me from entering into
a visionary dialogue with whom I could become.

Recently I have walked past the place where my
fear images blotted out what would have come
next if I had not been afraid. I climbed the Golden
Gate bridge three weeks ago immersed in images of
falling thru space into the ocean. There was
nothing to fantasize beyond this one, final, deadly
image. Fantasies of my friend’s deaths were
perhaps even more vivid and recurring. People who
didn’t go asked their companions to call them when
they returned, no matter what the hour. Those
unable to express their love in this way simply
asked for the rent before their roommates left for
the climb. The image of death, for many THE
culminating fear image, blots out all other
possibilities.

The subject of fear has fascinated me for many
years. That night I felt I understood it much better.
Fear is a freeze on the future, the filter or floodgate
that stops our imaginings; something within us that
stops us from becoming more powerful and loving,
rather than fearing those things that are more vivid
than our fantasies, more powerful than our magic, more
mysterious than our own mysteries.

I buried the predominance of fear in my own
cosmology that night. After many months of
incredible experience and a rich new flood of images
and emotions I began to see the colours and text-
ures beyond the death images, beyond the
fantasies of authority and arrest, beyond inner
visions of my own failure of stamina or confidence.
And something more began to emerge.

I am not speaking at all metaphorically when I say
that it was the bright lights and moving colours of
the bigtop, carnival, amusement park-midway.
Once I was on the bridge I was greeted instead by
moonlight on still waters and the skyline of the city
diminutively reduced to scale on a plywood board,
ready for display. The outline of the city floated
across in, all of shades, autumnal colours of yellow
and orange. Our height did not make them that
way; it allowed me to see them that way as the
houses, ships and lights below took on a bathtub,
toy like countenance. The height silhouetted by
sky and underscored by the sea allowed me to
place it within a gigantic midway, rather than
myself as a stick figure man within the reality of
the cities overwhelming back buildings.

Two months before I had climbed the Oakland Bay
Bridge and for the first time the metaphor had
become real. The bridge was obviously a jungle gym
made to climb rather than drive over: the cars just
using it for the in between times. The girders were
so huge that you could climb inside them like chimps,
risking nothing but a strained heart from the
excitement. It was then that I was first struck with
the feeling that we were here to play, if nothing else,
here to play with the world and other people.

Before that I visited a ghost town in central
California and it became the spook house of a long
bankrupt carnival, disappearing into a marshy bog
at the same pace it was swallowed up by the past.
As I walked along the tracks at night that led to
the town, unsure if I was going the right way, a
bouncing yellow light appeared behind and we
waited for the predictable “hey you kids, get out
of here!” only to have it explode instead in to a
supernaturally silent coal black train screaming
into the night ahead, shaking the ground in great
heaps and gulps of air as it roared past.

My mind elongated with it, as it did as a small child
in front of the tv, when Daffy Duck sold Elmer Fudd
a new house and then turning to leave, opened the
front door and let a train rush straight at the
camera, straight at Elmer, straight at me, right
through his living room and mine, my child’s mind
simply gasping at the possibilities.

Other possibilities are becoming much more apparent.
The world is becoming a total play environment and
I am becoming something else entirely. The future
is no longer on a circuit like the news, entertainment
something an entrepreneur plans as I expectantly
read the notices in the bleached parchments on the
corner stands. It is an imagination away.

This paper is an attempt at describing the succession of stunts, parodies, and put ons that have gathered so much attention for Communiversity and,
at the same time, present the ridiculous concept of organizing principles for creating chaos, anarchy and high times. Towards this end it may also be referred to as ROBERTS RULES OF DISORDER. IT is shared
equally and for free to all comers in the hopes that you find the lost spirit of THE FEAST OF FOOLS and ALL HALLOWS EVE. When Communiversity was still at S.F. State in Sept. 1974, several of us got the idea to do a practical jokes class. This event was to signal a new era for Communiversity, the Free University Movement and many of us individually. As soon as it hit the streets we were told it (the class) was “Not educational, in poor taste and probably illegal from the sound of it.” Preliminary discussions went on among the top brass at State about withdrawing our pay checks until threats and coercion failed. At the end of the year we withdrew the school from State forming a non-profit. A hundred people signed up for the practical jokes class,making it the most popular class in the history of the school (so far).

 

 

 

See Class #1 on THE FRONT PAGE We filled a room with hundreds of large balloons,

covered the floor with mattresses and pillows, covered the ceiling with a parachute and waited…. Two doormen greeted the registrants, asked them to remove their shoes, picked them up, and threw them thru the door into the room. This went on for three hours- a balloon and pillow fight culminating in a whipped cream and feather fight separated the wheat from the chaff so to speak. People left hurt, pissed, creamed & feathered, and limping. The thirty people that stayed journeyed to North Beach in a Salvation Army bus and pulled five stunts. First the women put balloons in their blouses and tried to apply for jobs as topless waitresses. They wouldn’t let them in. We practiced carrying imaginary plate glass windows up the street sideways- it worked, people actually walked around us! Then we tried pan-handling the same people as they walked down the length of a block – thirty people asking for spare change-all acting as if they didn’t know each other. Then we tried giving money away- which didn’t work either. Finally we tried to buy a banana split and couldn’t come up with the money between us (30 of us that is). This one really didn’t work because we weren’t very good actors, the intersection of Columbus & Broadway was so choked with people the waiter couldn’t concentrate on us or even see clearly that we were together and the idea sounded much funnier in the room than it was in action.

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. 1
DIVEST YOURSELF OF EXPECTATIONS
Make sure the people you’re doing something with can dish it out as well as take it. If it isn’t funny when it happens to them then you’ve got sadists instead of pranksters. Initiate them to be sure they have a sense of humor about themselves. Never preconceive what the reaction to an event will be like, you are sure to be disappointed. Ergo.

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. II

YOU WILL NEVER BE TOTALLY IN CONTROL

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. III
BE A FOOL N OT A SADIST. YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO TAKE IT AS WELL AS DISH IT OUT.

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. IV
ALLOW PEOPLE THE VALIDITY OF THEIR OWN EMOTIONS (HUMOR IS A VERY SERIOUS THING)

When you are doing what you really want to do, maybe for the first time, allow people the reality of their own emotions and the sincerity of their own responses. Don’t be shocked or bummed out if you are ignored, slugged in the mouth or arrested. People can not be expected to think your jokes are funny. Their reactions are no less valid then your own.

NATIONAL CLOWN WEEK Aug 9, 1974

Twelve clowns went into the B of A at Powell & Market singing “We’re in the money.” And tried to deposit fish, flowers, juggling balls, and comics at the tellers’ windows. The guards came and they were really MAD, they were definitely going to beat up the ring leader. I was dressed as a Keystone Cop with a giant silver badge, British Bobby Hat, cane and long blue trench coat. I ran up, blew my whistle, arrested the lead clown, and dragged him away,
rabid as he was, and this was a very scary moment- the other clowns had already run for the door- burst out laughing. We ran. It was scary but it was their territory, their values and their job- accept what ever response is- it’s real. The fact that the group broke ranks was really terrifying.

Again remember Principle #III.

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. V
SOLIDARITY IS A NECESSITY
(SEE FRONT PAGE)
Every time we changed locations in the course of the evening’s bizarity we lost people. This became a stead-fast rule of entropy in future stunts. This is not good. The people need each other for energy and support, plus it is relatively dangerous to go out as a group to do stunts – anything can happen. If you’re going to start something- finish it. Corollary- Nothing’s Ever Over When You Think It Is.

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. VI

PLAY IT OUT TO THE END
(ANYTHING GOES (See page One)
A disaster- it fulfilled it’s title but the people couldn’t trust one another because of the things each of them brought and did for and to each other with out knowing one another- A common purpose or focus decided beforehand is the best- even if people still can’t go through with it- it will be an inner failing rather than paranoia. Other than initiations and despite Principle #2, Agree beforehand on what you want to do.

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. VII
THE MORE EXTREME THE ACT, THE MOVE EXTREME AND VARIED THE RESPONSE WILL BE.
VOYAGE TO ANOTHER PLANET (SEE FRONT PAGE)
We broke down into three groups and talked about how we imagined life on other planets. Then we blindfolded twenty-five people and took them to two unusual environments- one natural and one synthetic. We told them that when we took off their blindfolds they could not use proper nouns, names or earthly references for the sights they would witness. They had to decide what they were, why they were, what they did, as if they had never
seen them before. Confused? For example, if we took them to a street and unblindfolded them they couldn’t use the word “concrete”, “street”, “Pavement”, “road”, etc.

We took them to the Judah street tunnel under the Great Highway and took off the blindfolds in the dark. They had to walk out the seaward side as if they were just landing on another planet and “decide” what the ocean was. The descriptions, fantasies and hallucinations were utterly incredible. I will never think of the oceans in the same way ever again! Then we reblindfolded them and took them into the belly of the monster. Alcoa plaza at midnight – to Ripple’s. A bar surely from the 21st century. TV sets two feet apart all the way down to the bar with curtains on either side of them like windows- all showing the ocean beating on the shoreline (?). Eight foot motion picture screens broadcasting a band playing while people danced- the band wasn’t there though. Women taking off their clothes in view screens over the urinals – women could enter accompanied by men but men
couldn’t see what was going on in the women’s bathroom. This place was so way out on a Saturday night that no one could come up with anything farther out. JOKE CLASSES ARE LISTED ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE FRONT PAGE We ran joke classes every catalog for two years until our “DEATHSKOOL” catalog when people got too confused and we stopped for awhile. Someone had registered for every joke class we have ever run no matter how outrageous it was written. When the HARIKARI class asked them to kill themselves they politely asked if it was real or not. For DEMONIC POSSESSION we were asked in a whisper if we “had connections.” When we ranPARANOIA AS A STATE OF HIGHTENED AWARENESS we had to re-evaluate the whole concept of joke classes- a device as far as we know- that no other alternative university has used. SIXTEEN people signed up for Paranoia. These were the ones either cowardly or fun loving registrars let sign up. Many more were turned away by other registrars. Some people didn’t want ANY other class but that one and as you can imagine HATED filling out the skills exchange (a program we run in which participants signing up for the school offer their skills for barter.) If you re-read the description a couple of time I think you might agree that it’s pretty horrible. But people wanted it. People in on the joke wanted it to happen but the BIG QUESTION MARK was what kind of people had signed up for it? The joke became too real- everyone who wanted to see what the registrants were like were also afraid to offer their homes to find out! The joke became very real. Eight months later someone was moving out of their house and offered to have the class the night before they gave the keys back to the landlord. We wrote and called people, had the class and had a very intense and fantastic evening of sharingwhat we were afraid of. Our first joke had become real. An incredible reversal.

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. VIII HUMOUR IS AS RELATIVE AS ANYTHING ELSE

NIGHT OF ADVENTURES DEATHSKOOL
CATALOG- SPRING 75
Description: Bring your ready to live adventures. Leave your pride at home if we think they’re either too dangerous or too boring. Must be in the borders of S.F. Twenty five people signed up for this class and three came with adventures. After we talked for awhile people started thinking up practical jokes but I was never sure if they were fantasizing them THEN or they had brought them. There was a practical jokes class in that catalog listed without a teacher but no one signed up for it (because everyone was afraid to sign up first because then they had to offer THEIR house). We planned two of the three adventures for the first night and the third would be put together later. The first-mine-was to walk through the JUDAH STREET CAR TUNNEL from Duboce Park to Cole & Carl. Half of the group went home and never came back right then. Other people didn’t want to go through the tunnel and didn’t want to go home either so they waited for us at the other end.

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. IX
FEAR IS A STATE OF MIND: THE FEAR/RISK RATIO IS NOT PROPORTIONAL
Since most fears are about things that have NOT happened to us or that we haven’t experienced but have only witnessed thru media representatives or in our fantasy states- we usually don’t know what an experience is like and our fears keep us from finding out.

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. X
WE HAVE MANY THINGS TO RISK BESIDES OUR LIVES
It is also possible, I won’t posit a principle here- that our adventures and fantasies are a Combination of excitement and fear and other people’s adventures are more frightening than our own because THEY have the excitement/ motivation and we don’t so we are only left with the fear. To support this I offer up that one of the people who waited outside of the tunnel was the one who organized the FUR SALE demonstration, which
terrified me and which didn’t phase him. 

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. XI

WE SUBCONSCIOUSLY BELIEVE WE HAVE EXPERIENCED THINGS WHEN WE HAVE ONLY WATCHED THEM. WE HAVE NOT.

CHAOTIC PRINCIPLE No. XII
WHEN WE TEST OUR FANTASIES OF OURSELVES WE FALL SHORT- SO WE DO NOT.