Tag: writing

Outside Lands and Altamont. Golden Gate Park now and what was not then

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 8.8.2026 UPDATED

This August weekend is the now annual Outside Lands three day concert at the Polo Fields near the blogger’s home. 75,000 fans a day are expected to attend.

The hordes at Outside Lands – 8.7. 2026

Golden Gate Park was not always a cash register for corporatization.

One only need look back at rock and roll history to learn that in 1969 the Rolling Stones wanted to give a “free” concert in Golden Gate Park. San Francisco officialdom, mainly in the person of Mayor Joe Alioto, wouldn’t let it happen.

Instead the Stones concert was moved to Altamont Speedway in the East Bay which turned into a total disaster for the musicians and hundreds of thousands of fans. The tragic event is memorialized forever in the classic documentary ‘Gimme Shelter’ which is available on multiple streaming outlets and as a DVD in The Criterion Collection.

The days of San Francisco looking askance at massive concerts in park spaces are a thing of the past. What counts in the current Big Tech, AI monied metropolis is anything is permitted as long as it brings in money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Free_Concert

The Altamont Speedway Free Festival was a counterculture rock concert in the United States, held on Saturday, December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Speedway outside of Tracy, California.[2][3][4][5] Approximately 300,000 attended the concert,[2][4][5] with some anticipating that it would be a “Woodstock West“.[6] The Woodstock festival had taken place in Bethel, New York, in mid-August, almost four months earlier.

The event is remembered for its use of Hells Angels as security and its significant violence, including the killing of Meredith Hunter and three accidental deaths: two from a hit-and-run car crash, and one from a drowning incident in an irrigation canal.[4][5] Scores were injured, numerous cars were stolen (and subsequently abandoned), and there was extensive property damage.[7][8] During the Rolling Stones’ headline performance, violence erupted close to the stage, resulting in the fatal stabbing of Hunter, a spectator. MusicRadar noted that the tragedy, captured on film in Gimme Shelter, eclipsed the event and marked a dark ending for the 1960s counterculture.[9]

Outside Lands (festival) – Wikipedia

A “love letter to San Francisco,”[2] the festival is named for the city’s western neighborhoods, which were known as The Outside Lands in the 1800s. The 80-acre festival grounds feature art installations and exhibits by local artists and San Francisco-centric areas devoted to cannabis, activism and sustainability. With stages named after San Francisco locations including the Panhandle, Lands End, Twin Peaks, the Sutro and the Presidio, the San Francisco Weekly wrote that Outside Lands “was about the city, rather than just in it.”

Outside Lands, formerly known as the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival, is a three-day music, art, food, wine, beer and cannabis festival held annually in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Multi-genre and multi-generational, it is the largest independently owned music festival in the United States. It was founded in 2008 by Another Planet Entertainment, Starr Hill Presents, and Superfly.

Golden Gate Park is not a cash register for greedy promoters

Mom and Pop on the FBI 10 Most Wanted List. Not your typical American family.

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 5.31.2026

The 1960’s radical movement thankfully never went away.

Depending on your retrospective walk through American history in the 1960’s and ’70s ‘Progressives’ are thought of as either forward looking progressives determined to upend the System. Or spoiled rotten kids who didn’t appreciate the good things about the consumer driven money making post World War II era in which their parents participated in.1

Zayd Ayers Dohrn was unwittingly and unknowingly raised and nurtured in the maelstrom of 1960’s politics. And seems to have landed with both feet firmly in the camp of realistic thinkers without having forsaken his upbringing.

Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal ‘Review’ Joseph Epstein – 5.29.2026

What’s in a name? Consider the name of Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the author of “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young.” His first name derives from that of Zayd Shakur, the minister of information of the East Coast Panthers, a radical group formed in the late 1960s. Ayers was his father’s name, his father being William Ayers, a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a founder of the terrorist group the Weather Underground and a relentless organizer on behalf of revolution. Dohrn was his mother’s name, and she, Bernardine Dohrn, was a fellow member of the Weather Underground, as well as the fourth woman to appear on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. Quite a bit, it would seem, can be in a name.

The subtitle of Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s book is “A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground.” Reading it, I was more than grateful for the ticket I had drawn in the parent lottery. Throughout his book, Mr. Dohrn, who was born in 1977, wonders how much he, his younger brother and his foster brother really meant to their parents. As a child he feared, and he reports he fears still, that next to their commitment to revolution, perhaps not all that much.

The book offers an account of both of his parents’ revolutionary careers. Neither was brought up in a radically political family. Both came to their politics in their early adulthood.

His mother, whom J. Edgar Hoover would call “the most dangerous woman in America,” was born into a middle-class home and grew up in a suburb north of Milwaukee. Strikingly good-looking and an excellent student, she went off to college at Miami of Ohio, where she was rejected by every sorority on campus because she was Jewish. Doubtless this rejection set her off on her political path.

‘The Weather Underground’ Academy Award nominee 2004 – The Weather Underground (film) – Wikipedia

Soon, the author explains, Ms. Dohrn transferred to the University of Chicago, where she fell in with the political faction among the students. (Bernie Sanders, later a firebrand senator, attended at the same time.) She went on to law school, though at the time she had little interest in a legal career. She would work with Martin Luther King Jr. on his rent strike in Chicago and, her son reports, had a single magical meeting with Muhammad Ali.

Ms. Dohrn would later have a hand in planning the student riots in Chicago in 1968. “I consider myself a revolutionary Communist,” she declared when she was elected to the SDS national board that year. “There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence,” she said, “in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created.” Her hatred for America was unqualified.

William Ayers grew up in the middle-class Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, the son of a high-level executive at Commonwealth Edison (he would eventually become its Chief Executive Officer). In 1963 Mr. Ayers went off to college at the University of Michigan, at the time the residence of the political organizer Tom Hayden and the scene of the founding of SDS. Not political before then, Mr. Ayers began showing up at protests. Soon he quit his fraternity and not long after dropped out of school.

The young Chesa Boudin

They didn’t marry until 1982, when Ms. Dohrn was 40 and Mr. Ayers was in his late 30s. They settled in Hyde Park, Chicago, where they also raised Chesa Boudin, the son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert who were serving long prison terms.

Former Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn walks with friend Bill Ayers and an unidentified child outside the Federal Court Building in New York, May 17, 1982. The couple refused to identify the child. Dohrn refused to cooperate with a Federal Grand Jury investigating on October’s bloody Brink’s robbery in Rockland County. (AP Photo/David Handschuh)
“You don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/dangerous-dirty-violent-and-young-review-raised-in-the-revolution-e0a005a9?st=wFcDsx&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Top photo: Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers with a young Zayd Ayers Dohrn

In the ‘country side’. “We (SFDPW) hardly ever get calls out here.”

SAN FRANCISCO – OUTER RICHMOND DISTRICT

Liz Heidhues – Guest Blogger – 3.16.2025

The proverb “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” did not hold true for Donna the Drain.

For several days, a blight of shoes and plastic bags had been discarded at the corner where Donna the Drain is located. No one had poked through the pile to take away anything at all.

The constant rain over the last week had turned the pile of shoes and bags into a sodden mess. It was polluting the corner where I, as an SFPUC volunteer, have kept Donna the Drain free of pollutants and trash since 2017.

Liz social media message to the San Francisco ‘311’ hotline – 3.13.2025

I noticed the ugly mess as I walked home from my class at Tat Wong Kung Fu Academy on Tuesday. But I waited two days before reporting it to the City.

This morning as I hustled down the hill towards St. Thomas the Apostle Church for Sunday service, I saw a miracle had transpired. The trash was gone! The corner was clean! The upshot. I wouldn’t have to clean it myself and lug it up our steep hill to our trash can.

As I walked down the hill towards St. Thomas, I saw a miracle had occurred. The mess was gone!

Who had performed this miracle? A DPW open bed truck, carrying an assortment of discarded battered possessions – broken chairs, ladders, an ironing board and more – was pulling up to the corner. A smiling city worker jumped out of the driver’s seat. “I’m so glad to see you,” I said.

We greeted one another as he pulled an iPad out of his pocket. The City worker, who undoubtedly sees plenty of trash, told me, “I wouldn’t want to see this on my corner either.” He then pulled up the screen shot of the ‘X’ post I had transmitted to ‘311’ three days earlier. His up to date technology had chronicled a record of my communication. The City had missed its deadline of responding within 48 hours but it had taken action. The City came out. I was gratified by the City’s high level of service.

‘311’ response to Liz

Out here in the countryside, junk abandoned on the corners often lingers for days. When the City worker told me “We rarely get calls from people out here”, not only was he explaining why DPW was late in responding, he was also affirming we live by the old proverb in my west side neighborhood. What we consider worthless could be highly prized by someone else.

Liz with the SFDPW worker on a Sunday morning.

Top photo: Local resident Elizabeth Heidhues is pictured in front of the drain she tends to as part of the city’s Adopt a Drain program, at the intersection of Anza Street and 40th Avenue, in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond neighborhood. Charles Russo/SFGATE

Liz Heidhues has been caring for Donna the drain since 2017, as soon as she saw the Adopt a Drain program advertised on a San Francisco Public Utilities Commission calendar she picked up from a local store. As a runner and a cyclist without a car, she said she was always encountering flooded intersections, so her motivation to adopt the drain was to keep her intersection from becoming flooded. She looked online and saw the drain on her corner was available, and she’s been caring for it ever since. https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/Adopt-a-Drain-program-SF-16641794.php