In the May issue of Arthur, Erik Davis tours Druid Heights, a freaky bohemian community in Marin, California that peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. The article is an expanded version of a chapter in The Visionary State, a book Erik and photographer Michael Rauner are completing for publication next year by Chronicle Books. From Erik's article:

Arriving in Marin County, (New York poet Elsa) Gidlow holed up in a derelict house in rural Fairfax. She was forty years old. Facing winter solstice alone and unsettled, she decided to perform what she later described as a "transforming ritual." As a storm raged outside the leaky house, she built up a roaring blaze of madrone logs. Slowly, Gidlow sensed the room fill with the spirits of all the mothers and grandmothers who have ever tended fire, all the way back to the Paleolithic. "I knew myself linked by chains of fire," she wrote, "to every woman who has kept a hearth." In the morning, Gidlow honored this rather neo-pagan vision by wrapping some of the cold coals in foil and red ribbon, and keeping them for next year's solstice fire.

In 1954, Gidlow brought one of these solstice charcoals to her new home, a junky five-acre patch of rural hillside on the edge of Muir Woods, lying at the end of a precarious road more clay than dirt. Shadowed by a looming wall of eucalyptus to the southwest, a few tumble-down frame houses and barns were already returning to earth, and there was no plumbing to speak of. Gidlow dubbed the place Druid Heights, and it would soon blaze into a hidden hearth of bohemian culture, a "beatnik" enclave years before the term was born or needed, and later a party spot for famous freaks. Scores of sculptors, sex rebels, stars and seekers lived or visited the spot over the decades, including Gary Snyder, Dizzy Gillespie, John Handy, Alan Watts, Neil Young, Tom Robbins, Catherine McKinnon and the colorful prostitute activist Margo St. James. Too anarchic and happenstance to count as a commune, Druid Heights became what Gidlow jokingly called "an unintentional community:" a vortex of social and artistic energy that bloomed out of nowhere, did its wild and sometimes destructive thing, and, for the most part, moved on.

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A jogger in a London park was attacked by two crows on Wednesday. Justin Keay was sent to the hospital for a tetanus shot after the crows pecked and clawed his head for several minutes. Experts are now warning runners about the birds "mobbing," basically ganging up on a possible predator. From the Evening Standard:

Stephanie Fudge, of the Wetland Centre in Barnes, said Mr Keay was probably close to the bird's fledglings, which may have fallen out of a nearby nest.

"It is quite common at this time of year for fledglings to try to fly," she said. "There was probably one about somewhere nearby which he was not aware of.

"Runners should be extra careful at this time of year. Crows can be aggressive - as these two have shown. If a jogger sees a baby crow they should stay well away."

Joanna Leonard, an interior designer, saw the birds - which she thought were ravens - in the same place an hour after their attack on Mr Keay.

"I thought they were very nasty, sinister things."she said. "Two of them focused in on me as I walked past. I couldn't help thinking of that Hitchcock film."

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UPDATE: Mike Smith points out that a flock of crows is also called a "murder." Creepy. Link

Futurismic's latest story is online, "Real Death" by Terry Hayman. It's quick, snappy read about a dynastic family that controls the production of an immortality drug that has unbalanced the rich into the short-lived super-poor and the infinite super-rich:

I jerked up my chin to see my uncles had already cast down their shovels. Their piles of dirt were done, their overcoats rebuttoned, their faces not even perspiring. And for just a second I knew they looked... wrong. George, still the stopped-22 he’d been at my birth, stood long-limbed and golden-haired, an Olympic diver. Bradley, s19, constantly aroused, a sexual predator. William, s15, plagued by recurring acne despite the medications I’d prescribed. And finally Castor, the eldest uncle. He glowered down at me with all the weight of his s28 years and position as CEO of the family business.

Freaks.

I swallowed dryly. My mother talking. She’d hated the drug that had made her so very rich after my father died. MSODI. Em-Soddy. She’d made me put off my own injections so long that now I was stuck in my sixties forever.

Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Loic sez, "In 24 hours, about 40 bloggers from around Europe created wiki pages to get a better picture of the European blogosphere. Everybody is welcome to correct and add information so that we bridge Europe with blogs faster." Link (Thanks, Loic!)

This is screamingly funny video of Counter-Strike players in battle-dress running around with fake guns, pretending to be Counter-Strike characters -- they fall over and their legs continue to run, their guns are fixed at shoulder height and move with them, etc. Best of all is the game audio, which they badly lip-synch to. Link (via Yoz)

Click image (or here) for full-size. When the artist Space Invader warned "I will invade L.A." in that robotic drone-voice, he wasn't kidding. The Rubikubism invasion opens tonight at sixspace and takes many forms. Thanks to quick thinking on the part of gallery co-owner Sean Bonner, we now know that one will be the gigantor cube monster shown here. Sean just barely escaped its attack last night, snapping this on his Treo before the 12-foot-tall creature closed in for the dreaded Chomp of Death. Join me this evening in welcoming our new alien overlords, will you? Link to show info, opens tonight and runs through July 9. OR WHENEVER THEY RUN OUT OF FOOD.

This website from the Japanese space agency features several models of satellites and celestial objects -- sweetu! Link (Thanks, Tony!)

Here's Ben Hammersley's entertaining slides from his hilarious presentation at Reboot, "Etiquette, and the singularity," about the eerie similarities between micropublishing and coffeehouse culture in Enlightenment England and the current state of blogging. 1.2 MB PDF Link

This downloadable PDF has step-by-step instructions for folding an amazing, lifelike Yoda: "Bad grammar have I you think? When 700 years you have, talk like your Zadie you will too!" 270K PDF Link (Thanks, Mozai!)