Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

Author:John Markoff [Markoff, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

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When he was back in San Francisco at his apartment on Rose Alley, Brand felt as if he were turning a corner. The world was changing. LBJ had died. Abortion was legalized. The Paris Peace Accords had been signed. And Jennings announced that she was filing for divorce and was involved with Keith Britton, a British engineer and explosives expert, whom she planned to marry.

A weight was lifted.

Although Brand retained a political aversion to the New Left, he made exceptions for people he considered friends, like Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner. Krassner had originally moved to the West Coast from New York when Brand had convinced him and Ken Kesey to edit the final Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. They in turn had persuaded the counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb to illustrate the cover, making it look like a very raunchy Last Supper.

When Brand moved to Rose Alley, he let Krassner move into his second bedroom on the condition that their “lifestyles” didn’t conflict. Krassner later described their relationship as the “New Age Odd Couple,” a contradiction in lifestyles that reached a peak the day they conducted simultaneous interviews in their separate bedrooms, Brand with Gregory Bateson, Krassner with Squeaky Fromme, the member of the Charles Manson family who several years later attempted to murder President Gerald Ford.[5]

The “odd couple” description was apt in several other ways. Krassner had a tendency toward paranoia, fueled in part by his friendship with Mae Brussell, a leftist conspiracy researcher who published frequently in the Realist. When Krassner told her he was planning to share an apartment with Brand, she warned him that the former Whole Earth Catalog publisher was a “government pig.” When Krassner asked her if he would be in physical danger, she replied, “No, but he’ll try to psych you out.”

Krassner ignored her warning; however, there were moments when it seemed she might have been correct.[6] One day Krassner came back to his room and sensed that something was different. He puzzled for a while and then realized that it was his giant Nixon poster. The former president’s eyes, which had been looking to the left, were now peering to the right. He looked at the poster carefully and discovered that the original eyeballs had been whited out and new ones drawn in.

He confronted Brand, demanding to know if he had tampered with his poster. His roommate replied that, no, he hadn’t, but that Ken Kesey had been around for a while that afternoon.[7]

On another occasion, Krassner decided to read the journal that Brand was keeping, and then found his feelings were hurt when he read how he had been described.

As much as he was struggling to find balance, Brand was often the more reliable of the two. One night he was in his bedroom using an electric saw to build a bed while he listened to Krassner in the hallway brushing his teeth and complaining about his battles with the Church of Scientology. Suddenly there was a

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