Please know that I have just left Kabuki Spa in San Francisco's Japan Town. The effort to expel the last of Wednesday night's wild evening of dancing and firewater in North Beach was difficult.
A totally uncomfortable 110 degree sauna was followed by short very hot steam room visits, and at last a couple of cold plunges before the traditional hot tub finish. Right now, the body is relaxed and the mind is calm and light. Between steam room visits, sat in the rest area and downed a cold bottle of RAW featuring turmeric, ginger, and oil of tangerine plus much more, and after that an Odwalla Superfood (with the complex green ingredients). Later, sat outside of the spa for awhile on a stone bench, enjoying the cool evening breeze. I WILL NEVER TEAR UP THE TOWN LIKE THAT AGAIN!!! All of the uncertainty, the ton of networking emails sent since July which produced nothing in activist-flattened America during this depressing presidential election season, the haunt of the unknown, the weird worries about aging and death and so on and so forth, everything magnified and distorted in the mental house of mirrors, and then finally clarity came through once more, as today I purchased a one way airplane ticket to Honolulu, leaving behind the mainland struggles early Monday afternoon, 26th of September. Will celebrate my 67th birthday on Wednesday the 28th by doing nothing at all. Open to spirit fully...that's our way! Yes? Happy!! ;-)))))
A quick note to say that I am moving out of San Francisco's Emperor Norton Travel Inn Monday morning, and going nearby to a travel hostel for one week. I don't have any idea what the future looks like, but will continue creating space and being spiritually available. I have sent out an email to say that if anybody has more insight than this, please share the vision.
Have been attending Catholic Mass at St.Patrick's historic church (across the street from the not so historic Metreon, on Mission Street). As the priest said in his sermon, we are the Children of the Light! Our future is not defined by earthly existence only, but in the hereafter also, which gives one an entirely more positive view. Received Holy Communion to be able to glow a bit more also.
Am attentive for spiritual instructions tonight, ;-))))) Craig
Good afternoon everyone, I went out to Castro Valley and met with the lead carpenter from Amma's ashram. We agreed that whereas I am looking for a group with a mystical charism, being at Amma's ashram in a karma yoga program is not appropriate. Also, I was at Yogaville in Virginia as a karma yogi 5 times from 1985-1994, with Sri Swami Satchidananda, so I have similar experience already, and do not require more.
I have just booked a one week reservation in San Francisco across the street from where I presently am staying, extending my stay here I am giving this every chance that I can, as I continue to not know what is upcoming. I have definitely created open free space to be accommodating spiritually. What else can I do?
I might wish to return to The Plumeria travel hostel in Honolulu after September 25th. If anybody has deeper insight than I have, then please inform me. Wishing everyone the very best. Yours mystically, Craig
...to perform karma yoga and meet the ashram administrator. It is my wish to live there, because there is nothing satisfying that I am able to find in the larger world, and I need to seriously go in a spiritual direction now, and just keep going! I pray that this works out and that it leads ever spiritually onward. Thank you very much for your friendship, and I am sorry if ever my behavior, particularly networking emails, were bothersome. Stay in touch, Craig. Sept 16, 2016
September 15, 2016 Am back in my Emperor Norton Travel Inn room in SF...following a night of drinking beer and dancing in North Beach. Met a wild woman at Tupelo's on Grant Street, and gave her my email address. Took a taxi to Grubsteak for a late night breakfast (the cabbie dropped me off there in error, since I asked to be taken to Pinecrest, Mason & Geary). I need to move out of the travel inn
Am awaiting responses from the networking emails that I've sent out. Where do we go? Where do we go? Where do we go from here?
Trump Tower opened on September 12th at the old post office location (near where we had D.C. Occupy on Freedom Plaza). I heard it's only $800 nightly, with the larger suites available during the inauguration for 1/2 million per night. I'm not sure what the "minimum stay" is there...probably five nights. However, instead of taking a guest towel as a a souvenir, one could sneak out a chandelier! ;-)))))
I am scheduled to leave the Emperor Norton Travel Inn in downtown San Francisco at 11 A.M.on Monday September 19th. I am seeking others who are spiritually centered internally, and thus we may go where we need to go and do what we need to do as a nomadic action group. I have sufficient money to maintain myself. If this interests you, go ahead and contact me atCraigStehr@inbox.com
Kali-yuga is scheduled to last for 427,000 years more.
However, within this Kali-yuga, there is a special Golden Age (Suvarna-yuga) of Lord Caitanya which lasts for 10,000 years. According to our calculation, it began in the 500th year of LordCaitanya’s appearance, ie 1986. But I see the present time as a dawning of the Golden Age in which the ghosts of the Kali-yuga flee away in the rising sun. So perhaps, the year of 2062 can be considered when the Golden Age will be in full swing.
September 11, 2016. Took a walk south on 4th Street in San Francisco on a cool, cloudy Sunday afternoon. Not attached to anything at all. Ignoring thoughts. Just non-interference where the body goes. Identifying with the total lack of anything mental or physical, (which the individual discovers upon meditating fully and deeply enough). The yogis in India told me that this is where one needs to be anchored! "Focused incessantly" is how it was described at Swami Sivananda's ashram in Muni-ki-Reti near Rishikesh. (Cont'd below)
The Reality at the core of everything will take care of every detail. The Higher Will is not to be denied at the earthly chaotic carnival. The phase between darkest Kali Yuga and emerging light-filled Satya Yuga is in motion. Paradigm shifting, shifting, shifting. Where are you, O Prem? I need to move out of the Emperor Norton Travel Inn in downtown San Francisco on Monday September 19th. If you want to team up, write down the bones, attack the New World Order head on, advocate for an Earth First! approach to global climate destabilization and other ecological areas of decline, then email me at CraigStehr@inbox.com. I'm ready. You ready??
Craig Louis Stehr September 11, 2016 San Francisco
As I continue to network for ever more opportunity to be active on the frontlines of radical environmentalism and attenuating peace & justice movements, there is an odd aspect to this which I've not written about nor shared. But just between us, I believe that ultimately myself and friends will have to be creative, insofar as realizing social opportunities. Yep, that's what I said.
I (and we) need to be a part of something which this world has not seen before; particularly because what we presently are doing and know, does not appear to be "gettin' it done" in regard to environmental issues and peace & justice globally.>>>>> I mean, in recently reviewing my own online published writings, I noticed that I often call for "divine intervention" within the overall message. This is most curious, because the reader has nothing to do with "divine intervention". So why do I bother to write that into any message, at all?? I suggest that the reason is that there is a need to push beyond our known boundaries, not just in terms of spiritual realization, but also in terms of how our actions manifest in society. Take for example the St. Francis prayer, wherein the individual asks God to utilize the individual to perform on earth the Higher Will. Wouldn't the individual's behavior henceforth be considerably different in society? One would hope so, correct?
In the 1970s and later, I was associated with The Living Theatre in New York City. Julian Beck and Judith Malina introduced the concept that everything (i.e. all social life) is in fact the living theater, not only stage performances. One night, the group proceeded to go outside of the physical theater on 14th Street, and interact with everybody outside, literally putting into practice the group's realization that everybody at all times is participating in an ongoing living theater 24/7-365. The passersby outside of the physical theater were understandably taken by surprise, although many caught on and joined with us, eventually returning inside of the theater building after the police department came by and informed us that they'd had enough of our "activity on the sidewalk".
I offer this example to illustrate my point, that what we need is something revolutionary for all of us to be a part of. I don't even want to just go somewhere again, just to participate in yet another organized eco-political campaign, as I've done hundreds of times. Although it is fine generally to participate, there is a problem with diminishing returns. I believe that is why I've been calling for "divine intervention". Maybe our cooperation is what "divine intervention" will look like. What do you think of that???
EARTH FIRST!...WE'LL SAVE THE OTHER PLANETS LATER ;-) Frin www.daplpipelinefacts.com "The Dakota Access Pipeline Project is a new approximate 1,172-mile, 30-inch diameter pipeline that will connect the rapidly expanding Bakken and Three Forks production areas in North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois. The pipeline will enabledomestically producedlight sweet crude oil from North Dakota to reach major refining markets in a more direct, cost-effective, safer and environmentally responsible manner. The pipeline will also reduce the current use of rail and truck transportation to move Bakken crude oil to major U.S. markets to support domestic demand.
It will transport approximately 470,000 barrels per day with a capacity as high as 570,000 barrels per day or more – which could represent approximately half of Bakken current daily crude oil production. Shippers will be able to access multiple markets, including Midwest and East Coast markets as well as the Gulf Coast via the Nederland, Texas crude oil terminal facility of Sunoco Logistics Partners.
Depending upon regulatory approvals, the pipeline is projected to be in service by the fourth quarter of 2016."
Awake at 4AM most mornings, immediately acknowledging that I am not the body and I am not the mind, but I am indeed the spiritual energy which works through them. Not identifying with the mind is of the utmost importance, for the individual, for the society, and for the planet earth. It is quite simple: if you wish to do something positive for yourself, for society, and for the earth, then stop identifying with the mental factory and its ever-changing thoughts.
Stop acting out thoughts! They will form and dissipate of themselves, so just leave them alone. Take care of the body as you would take care of any large mammal. It isn't difficult. And above and beyond everything else, identify with the nameless formless Absolute which you are. There really isn't any other solution to the confusion of this lost civilization, and there isn't any better remedy for environmental decline. You have a choice.
N.B. I am staying at a travel inn, downtown San Francisco, until September 19th. If anybody wishes to team up and go on a spiritually creative rampage to boycott the worthless 2016 American presidential election, while simultaneously advocating an Earth First! approach to the global environmentally insane situation, plus perform a few effective rituals as we fully engage our spiritual mojo, then contact me at CraigStehr@inbox.com.
The church was packed :for Warren Hinckle's funeral service. It was the full Catholic celebration, with the elite of San Francisco politics in attendance (Willie Brown, the Agnos family, Quentin Kopp, etc.) plus the regional literary vanguard...also, some publishers/editors/ writers flew in from New York City. Editors previously with Ramparts, the Argonaut, SF Chronicle & Examiner, plus currently active Last Gasp and City Lights folks attended. The entire congregation sang "San Francisco" as the covered casket was wheeled out, greeted outside by a vibrant Green Street Mortuary band playing full tilt, plus three cops on horses holding the national, state, and church flags, as we all proceeded not-quite-solemnly to Gino & Carlo's...tables set up in the alleyway from 2-5 P.M., and if you want to know what lies beyond that, you'll need to come around and add your unique presence, or you could telephone the bar for updates. We are all better off because Warren Hinckle fought the good fight and was an uncompromising voice for Truth.
Craig Louis Stehr August 30, 2016, 4:30 P.M. San Francisco, California EMAIL: CraigStehr@inbox.com
Aug 30. Family and friends of Warren Hinckle gathered at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church in San Francisco, for a vigil service followed by a recitation of the rosary, with music and singing interspersed, following which were remembrances by the Honorable Quentin L. Kopp, several longtime friends, and lastly gratitude expressed by members of the Hinckle family. Many exceptional stories were shared! The formal funeral service will be held Tuesday August 30th at 10:30 A.M. at SS Peter & Paul. The public is invited.
Warren Hinckle will always be remembered for publishing Ramparts magazine, which began as an essentially Catholic anti-war publication, and expanded to critique much of global politics, always championing for peace and justice. This was a serious literary endeavor, originally responding to the insanity of war, particularly the Viet Nam war in the 1960s, and reported ongoing peace and justice campaigns. Warren Hinckle fought the good fight. His family tonight asked us to continue fighting the good fight for him, and for us.
Craig Louis Stehr August 29, 2016, 9:49 P.M. San Francisco
The funeral is at 10:30 A.M. Tuesday morning. Properly got into the spirit of this last night by visiting Vesuvio's, hoisted two pints and enjoyed a shot of Laphroaig scotch on the rocks. Will always be appreciative of his publishing Ramparts, condemning the criminal bastards in South Viet Nam and the crazies in Washington D.C. who tried to force their stupidity of an hegemony-based foreign policy on everyone. Otherwise, am keeping the mind centered at its Source,
"...I bought a ticket to the FOURTH dimension, purchased at the spiritual crossroads,
boarded the train for glory, handed my ticket to the conductress, a very dark lady with a necklace of skulls, and listened to the divine entertainment hosted by an emcee who was square."
You are invited to add to this, and send it on to others, (as we continue boycotting the 2016 American presidential election). This is a collective literary work in progress. When the piece is sufficiently blossomed, wheat paste it everywhere. I mean, if you are really done with the aggravating, demeaning, fecal matter of a pig culture of consumerism, then contribute to killing the unholy ugly thing off! Wouldn't you just love to walk right up to the monster, punch it in the face as hard as you can with a hatchet, cut its heart out with a can opener, and feed the still warm pumping muscle to a passing vulture? And after that, attend a dinner dance with all of your divinely anarchistic friends? What are we waiting for?
"Whereas I am not attached to the third dimension, because when postmodernism isn't stupid, it's insane...
August 27, 2016. ...You are invited to add to this, and send it on to others, (as we continue boycotting the 2016 American presidential election). This is a collective literary work in progress. When the piece is sufficiently blossomed, wheat paste it everywhere.
I mean, if you are really done with the aggravating, demeaning, fecal matter of a pig culture of consumerism, then contribute to killing the unholy ugly thing off! Wouldn't you just love to walk right up to the monster, punch it in the face as heard as you can with a hatchet, cut its heart out with a can opener, and feed the still warm pumping muscle to a passing vulture? And then attend a dinner dance with all of your divinely anarchistic friends? What are we waiting for?
Warren Hinckle, 77, Ramparts Editor Who Embraced Gonzo Journalism, Dies
Photo
Warren Hinckle in 1994.CreditFred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Warren Hinckle, the flamboyant editor who made Ramparts magazine a powerful national voice for the radical left in the 1960s and later, by championing the work of Hunter S. Thompson, helped introduce the no-holds-barred reporting style known as gonzo journalism, died on Thursday in San Francisco. He was 77.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his daughter Pia Hinckle said.
Ramparts was a small-circulation quarterly for liberal Roman Catholics when Mr. Hinckle began writing for and promoting it in the early 1960s. A born provocateur with a keen sense of public relations, he took over as the executive editor in 1964 and immediately set about transforming Ramparts from a sleepy intellectual journal to a slickly produced, crusading political magazine that galvanized the American left.
With cover art and eye-catching headlines reminiscent of mainstream magazines like Esquire, Ramparts aimed to deliver “a bomb in every issue,” as Time magazine once put it. It looked at Cardinal Francis Spellman’s involvement in promoting American involvement in Vietnam and the Central Intelligence Agency’s financing of a wide variety of cultural organizations.
It published Che Guevara’s diaries, with a long introduction by Fidel Castro; Eldridge Cleaver’s letters from prison; and some of the wilder conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination. The magazine’s photo essay in January 1967 showing the injuries inflicted on Vietnamese children by American bombs helped persuade the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to take a public stand against the war.
The covers became countercultural classics: an illustration depicting Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader of North Vietnam, as Washington crossing the Delaware; a photograph of four hands (belonging to the magazine’s top editors) holding up draft cards that had been set on fire.
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Mr. Hinckle, left, in 1967 at the Ramparts magazine office with Sol Stern, center, an assistant managing editor, and the writer Robert Scheer.CreditAssociated Press
By 1967, the magazine, which began with about 2,500 readers, had a circulation of nearly 250,000 and an ability to wrest coverage, however grudging, from mass-circulation magazines and newspapers.
“What journalism is about is to attack everybody,” Mr. Hinckle told The Washington Post in 1981. “First you decide what’s wrong, then you go out to find the facts to support that view, and then you generate enough controversy to attract attention.”
Warren James Hinckle III was born on Oct. 12, 1938, in San Francisco, where his father, Warren Hinckle Jr., was a shipyard worker and his mother, the former Angela DeVere, worked in the accounts department of the Southern Pacific Railroad. At 10, he lost an eye in a car accident, and for the rest of his life he wore a large eye patch, which became a prominent feature of his buccaneering image.
He attended Roman Catholic schools and enrolled in the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1961.
As editor of the college newspaper, The San Francisco Foghorn, he showed early signs of the flair that would insert Ramparts into the national conversation. On a slow day, he and a friend generated news by burning down a wooden guard house at the entrance to the campus, an incident he described in his 1974 memoir, “If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade.”
After graduating from college, he started a public relations company and ran, unsuccessfully, for the county board of supervisors before joining The San Francisco Chronicle as a city reporter.
In 1962, he married Denise Libarle. The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Pia, he is survived by his wife, the writer Susan Cheever, from whom he was separated; his companion, Linda Corso; another daughter, Hilary Hinckle; a son, Warren Hinckle IV; five grandchildren; a brother, Robert; and a sister, Marianne Hinckle.
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The December 1967 cover of Ramparts, showing the hands of four of the magazine’s editors with burning draft cards.CreditRamparts
His relationship with Ramparts began inauspiciously, when Edward M. Keating, who founded the magazine in 1962, hired him to develop a promotional plan. Mr. Hinckle proposed a splashy party at a Manhattan hotel for leading Catholic laymen and journalists, with models and film stars thrown in for glamour. Mr. Keating, appalled, fired him.
Undeterred, he contributed an article on J. D. Salinger to the magazine’s first issue and, after whipping up press attention for an article on the killing of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in June 1964, was named executive editor.
It was a turning point. Before the year was out, he had transformed the publication from a quarterly to a monthly and hired Robert Scheer, a seasoned foreign correspondent, who wrote some of the magazine’s most hard-hitting antiwar articles and secured the rights to publish the Guevara diaries.
In short order, Ramparts scored some stunning coups. A cover story exposed Michigan State University’s Vietnam Project in the 1950s as a C.I.A. front to train Saigon police and stockpile ammunition. It persuaded Donald W. Duncan, a former special forces sergeant in Vietnam, to describe how he was trained to torture prisoners. (Mr. Duncan died in 2009, but his death became widely known only in May.)
Mr. Hinckle extracted maximum publicity at every turn. When the C.I.A. learned that Ramparts was about to reveal the agency’s secret funding of a long list of organizations, including the National Student Association, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Encounter and Partisan Review magazines, it tried to minimize the impact by holding a news conference to admit the facts.
Mr. Hinckle counterpunched. “I was damned if I was going to let the C.I.A. scoop me,” he wrote in his memoir. “I bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Washington Post to scoop myself, which seemed the preferable alternative.” The magazine received a George Polk Award that year for its coverage.
Ramparts was always in the news, always in chaos, always in debt. The hard-drinking Mr. Hinckle often worked from Cookie Picetti’s, a bar in San Francisco’s North Beach that was frequented by the police. When Mr. Cleaver told him that colleagues at Ramparts objected, he challenged him to name a decent left-wing bar. He spent lavishly, traveling first-class and staying in top hotels. He particularly enjoyed treating investors to sumptuous meals at their expense.
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Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panther Party, on the cover of the January 1970 issue of Ramparts.CreditRamparts
In Feed/Back magazine in 1975, Adam Hochschild, a staff writer and later a founder of Mother Jones, wrote: “All action at the magazine swirled around him: a pet monkey named Henry Luce would sit on his shoulder while he paced his office, drink in hand, shouting instructions into a speakerphone across the room to someone in New York about a vast promotional mailing; on his couch would be sitting, slightly dazed, a French television crew or Malcolm X’s widow (who arrived one day surrounded by a dozen bodyguards with loaded shotguns), or the private detective to whom Hinckle had given the title Criminology Editor.”
With the magazine teetering on bankruptcy, Mr. Hinckle resigned as editor in 1969. Ramparts carried on until 1975, but the end of the Vietnam War and the splintering of the American left left it stranded.
With Sidney Zion, a former legal affairs reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Hinckle founded Scanlan’s Monthly, named for a pig farmer and reprobate whom the two men had heard being toasted, sardonically, in a pub in Ireland.
The magazine lasted only eight issues, but Mr. Hinckle used his platform to his advantage. He ran a scathing profile of the French skier Jean-Claude Killy that Hunter Thompson had written for Playboy, which rejected it. He then dispatched Mr. Thompson to cover the Kentucky Derby, in company with the English illustrator Ralph Steadman. The resulting article, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” put Mr. Thompson on the road to gonzo glory.
Mr. Hinckle briefly edited City of San Francisco, a magazine owned by Francis Ford Coppola. “Insiders joke that Hinckle is the only man who can spend money faster than Coppola can make it,” Newsweek wrote. After that magazine ceased publication in 1976, Mr. Hinckle founded another magazine, Frisco, which quickly died.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as a columnist for The Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner and The San Francisco Independent, he validated his reputation as a free-swinging street brawler. He led a campaign to remove “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” as the city’s official song, calling Tony Bennett “an over-the-hill Italian croaker,” and attacked Dianne Feinstein, when she was mayor, with such gusto that she once tried to empty a drink over his head.
“He’s a man who invents things, who often gets his facts wrong, who gets carried away by the emotion,” Maitland Zane, a reporter for The Chronicle, told SF Weekly in 1996. “He lets his prejudices dictate his writing. He’s not even a good speller.”
In 1993, Mr. Hinckle revived The Argonaut, a 19th-century magazine once edited by Ambrose Bierce, as a thick journal devoted, he told The Times in 1994, to “muckraking, left politics and the willingness to promote new writing and celebrate popular culture.”
In 1969, Mr. Hinckle described Ramparts under his editorship as “totally and absolutely and joyfully biased.” He added: “We went in to hang the Saigon government, to kill the war in Vietnam. That’s what political journalism is about.”
Correction: August 27, 2016
An obituary on Friday about Warren Hinckle, the editor who made Ramparts magazine a voice for the radical left, referred incorrectly to Mr. Hinckle’s marriage to the writer Susan Cheever. Although separated, they were still married; they were not divorced.
Correction: August 30, 2016
An obituary on Friday about Warren Hinckle, the editor who made Ramparts magazine a voice for the radical left, omitted two survivors, based on information from his family. A brother, Robert, and a sister, Marianne Hinckle, also survive him.
August 24, 2016. Please know that Bruce Anderson published in today's online edition of the Anderson Valley Advertiser my type-up of the mahamantram; in the daily menu it is listed as "Repetition", and he headlined the item with "Chant until Totally Insane". I was so grateful, that I have just now added a comment in which I announce that Stevie Thomas contacted me with an invitation to tonight's celebration at Amma's ashram in San Ramon, and I included BART & taxi details, plus the center's address. Indeed, I passed on the invitation to the north coast, inviting everyone to feel free to chant the mahamantram until they are totally sane in an insane world.
As usual, I do not know what is going to happen in the next five minutes, but I do know that every single day I begin chanting the mahamantram before I arise from the bed, and (mostly) silently repeat it until I fall asleep at night. This is an alternative to random discursive thinking, which we have all mechanically followed in the past with various results. This bhakti yoga practice has other incredible aspects, to put it mildly, and is available to anybody anywhere free of charge. JUST DO IT! :-))))))))))
