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Update -
5/24/07:
 ''Hippies,''
the latest documentary film from Easton-based Lou Reda
Productions, premiered this month on the History
Channel. Among the 40-plus people they interviewed were
singer-songwriter Country Joe McDonald, famous for his
Woodstock cheer; Mountain Girl, the second wife of
Grateful Dead founder Jerry Garcia; San Francisco police
officers who patrolled during the 1960s; Steve Wozniak,
co-founder of Apple Computers; Rick Brookiser, senior
editor of ''National Review,'' and our own Coyote, a
former Haight-Ashbury Digger who also serves as the
film's narrator.
Through archival footage, home movies, photos and
interviews, ''Hippies'' is a look back at the youth of
today's boomers and gives other generations a peek into
the past.
Ed
Vulliamy of the UK's Observer recently wrote an
article on the Summer of Love on its 40th
anniversary and discussed Peter's involvement - "The
Digger movement, named after the English 17th-century
revolutionaries, was, as Coyote writes in his memoir:
'an anarchistic experiment dedicated to creating and
clarifying distinctions between society's
business-as-usual and our own imaginings of
what-it-might be.' Such an enterprise involved 'new
forms of creative expression' charged with political
content, and led to performances by the Mime Troupe - a
'Commedia Del'Arte of life-actors', as they called
themselves - and spectacles and direct action in pursuit
of a 'Free City'. There was free food, a free bakery, a
'Death of Money' parade with a dollar sign on the side
of a coffin - 'things with a message that cannot be
misunderstood,' Coyote says in conversation. 'The
Diggers were a highly evolved art project. We never
pretended to be a viable political ideology. You have a
vision, and you make it real by doing it,' he says. 'I
was and am still happy to be called an anarchist, so
long as it is understood - which it usually is not -
that anarchism does not mean anarchy. It is a method of
devolved social organisation. And although none of our
political aims were achieved - ending racism,
imperialism, capitalism - almost all of the cultural and
social agenda has become mainstream: environmentalism,
women's rights, organic food ... well, if not
mainstream, then sufficiently present to create tension
where before there was no tension. A situation in which
people like Dick Cheney have to stumble over their own
lies.'"
Update -
5/08/07:
 Friday
was Magic Theatre Day in San Francisco by
proclamation of Mayor Gavin Newsom in honor of the
company's 40th anniversary. Magic staff, members of its
board of trustees and assorted friends gathered at the
Presidio's Golden Gate Club to celebrate. Peter, the
evening's honorary co-chair with his wife, Stefanie, was
seated at the "True West" table, fittingly enough. The
1980 world premiere of what has become one of Sam
Shepard's most popular plays was the last of several
shows Coyote performed in at the Magic, before moving on
to film and TV. Asked, by more than one person, if he
had any plans to return to the stage, he said he'd been
seriously thinking about it but wouldn't be able to make
the necessary time commitment for about five more years.
  Nearly
6,000 bikers turned out to the second Legends of the
Motorcycle show in San Francisco over the weekend to
witness the great and the good of the two-wheeled world.
Setting out to become the premier motorcycle show in the
world, this year’s event demonstrated every facet of
motorcycle sport and culture. Several awards were
presented including the People's Choice Award given to
our own biker! Peter has never lost interest in
motorcycling since the sixties when he first began to
hit the roads on his Harley. More than any other work,
Peter's book, Sleeping Where
I Fall, lends the best historical overview of
Northern California 's contribution to the developing
motorcycle scene in the sixties, and a chapter of it was
reprinted in Gino Zanetti's immortal anthology "She's A
Bad Motorcycle".
Congratulations
are in order in celebrating Peter's lay ordination
as a Buddhist priest. Though Peter comes from a Jewish
heritage, he has been practicing Buddhism for over 32
years.The event took place on April 22 when Lew Richmond
performed the ceremony. He was given the name Hosho
Jishi - Dharma Voice, Compassionate Warrior. How
appropriate!
 Back
on January 12, Peter participated in a fundraiser event
called "Poetry for Water". Acclaimed writer Roger
Housden gathererd celebrity presenters to help raise
enough money to supply the village of Njagbema in Sierra
Leone with a hand pump and rainwater collection tank.
The project sponsor was Wherever The Need and included a
program of original music by Lewis Richmond, as well as
an hour of poetry recited by several participants, which
included Peter, Anne Lamont, Nina Wise, Shepherd Bliss,
George Taylor, Claressa Morrow, Kim Rosen and Lewis
Richmond. You can watch Peter's contribution
at this link.
Update -
5/03/07:
It was a funny, often slightly raunchy, emotional and
star-studded party on Tuesday
night at the Beverly Hills Hotel, as Geena Davis
received the annual USA Today
Hollywood Hero Award for her work with See Jane, the
program she founded that works
to improve gender portrayal in children's media.
Plenty of Geena's pals turned up
to shout her praises including her "Commander in Chief"
Vice President, Peter Coyote. Not
only is Geena an Academy Award-winning actress, she is also a MENSA member, archer,
linguist, activist, loving wife and mother of three
small kids. Besides Peter, guests included Mimi Rogers,
Adam Arkin, Polly Bergen, and Helen Slater, who all waxed poetic on her
accomplishments, especially in
setting a standard for playing powerful women and
helping change the vision of women
shown in the media. Peter admitted that he wished the
See Jane program had existed sooner. Though he joked, he
hadn’t done too badly since his daughter is now a PhD
and has a daughter of her own.
Peter
and wife Stefanie will be joining forces as co-chairs
for the Magic Theatre's 40th anniversary celebration
and fundraising gala tomorrow evening at the
Presidio's Golden Gate Club. Two decades ago Peter
appeared in some notable roles for the theatre, which is
known for producing new plays and playwrights. This
event, called Hot Cool New Party, will feature a
performance by Broadway's Billy Porter, a silent
auction, cocktails, dinner and a raffle.
 On
Sunday, April 29, the San Francisco International Film
Festival hosted the world premiere of "Fog City
Mavericks", a documentary about the San Francisco
Bay Area's contributions to film from Chaplin to Pixar.
Directed by Gary Leva, the two-hour film takes on nearly
130 years of San Francisco film history, with spotlights
on names such as Clint Eastwood, Chris Columbus, Saul
Zaentz, Philip Kaufman, Carroll Ballard, Francis and
Sofia Coppola and George Lucas. Many of the filmmakers
were present at the Castro Theatre along with celebrated
names like Robin Williams, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
and naturally the narrator of the film - Peter!
Journalist Craig Phillips, who took in the screening,
writes, "Coyote, ubiquitous to San Francisco film
narration and doc narration in general, certainly has
the perfect, strong but soothing voice for it." The
documentary will be aired on the Starz network later
this year.
For a peek at the film and some
footage from the evening,
visit this link. The festival, now celebrating
its 50th year, runs from April 26 thru May 10 and
not only presents films, but also hosts an array of
events. Peter also participated in a homage to Jack
Kerouac with a program of readings, testimonials and
images while his wife Stefanie, the SF Film Commission's Executive Director,
was among the panelists in a discussion called Film
Culture Confidential.
On
Sunday, April 22, the Atlantic Film Festival hosted
the premiere of "Soldiers of Conscience"
narrated by Peter. This illuminating 85-minute
documentary by Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan
about conscientious objectors to the Iraq War shows
the moral sacrifice we demand when we ask our
fighting men and women to kill in our name. Despite
the historical fact that large numbers of soldiers
never fire their weapons during war, choosing at a
decisive moment not to take another life, America
suffers from the mass delusion that it is easy or
justified to kill. Weimberg and Ryan focus on the
soldiers: both recent recruits and gung-ho career
military men who have a change of heart and endure
the shaming, difficult process of speaking their
minds.
Made with official permission from the US Army,
this film is a realistic yet optimistic documentary
about war, peace, and the power of the human
conscience. Here
are some great photos from some of Peter's scenes as
college professor Mark August in the ABC TV drama,
BROTHERS AND SISTERS.
The Sunday night series has no
patients to save, no crimes to solve, no bodies to
autopsy and no cryptic clues to decipher. What it
does have is family and lots of it. Peter has been
playing the love interest of Nora Walker, played by
Saly Field. Nora is the matriarch of a multi-faceted
family that has strong appeal. The show is one of
the few successes of this year's television season,
averaging more than 10 million viewers per new
episode. It was recently picked up for a second
season. Executive producer Greg Berlanti explains
its success - "We all, as viewers, mark our lives by
these characters. We watch them screw up and make
mistakes and fall in love and fall out of love, and
it reminds us of ourselves, and we grow up with
these characters. The themes we deal with are very
universal and the show transcends any social,
economic or cultural boundaries."
 The
DVD for "Summer of Love" will be available on
May 8th. Filmmakers Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco
examine the social and cultural forces that sparked
the largest migration of young people in America's
history. In the summer of 1967, thousands of young
people from across the country flocked to San
Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to join in the
hippie experience, only to discover that what they
had come for was already disappearing. By 1968 the
celebration of free love, music and an alternative
lifestyle had descended into a maelstrom of drug
abuse, broken dreams and occasional violence.
Through interviews with a broad range of
individuals, including Peter and politician Willie
Brown, as well as police officers, teenage,
non-hippie residents and scholars, you'll see a
complex portrait of the notorious event that many
consider the peak of the 1960s counterculture
movement. You can presently view the documentary at
PBS, which aired it last month. Peter shares
his thoughts - "Whatever we learned, we learned from
making a complete commitment... The search for some
kind of moral stance... the search for justice
and some kind of economic equity... trying to leave
a smaller footprint on the planet... exploring
alternative spiritual and medical practices... they
were all valid searches and they've all been
completely integrated into the culture today.
They're so integrated that you don't even notice
them. No, we didn't end imperialism. We didn't end
capitalism. We didn't do a lot of things we wanted
to do. But there's no place you can go today where
you can't find organic food, where you can't find
yoga lessons or a chiropractor or you can't find
some kind of spiritual alternative or some kind of
acupuncture or alternative medicine. We did that,
our generation. I'm proud of that. I wish we'd been
omniscient. You know, I wish we hadn't made any
mistakes or been able to do everything we wanted to
do. But that would have probably meant that the
world would come to an end because there'd be
nothing left for the next generation to do. So -- I
did my part. I'm still doing it."
Update - 4/17/07:
Last week Peter kicked off the
Literary Festival at Mercyhurst College in Erie, PA.
Embodying the festival's theme, "The Counterculture and
the Arts: Then and Now", he began his presentation
on Thursday by discussing the nature of art and creative
thinkers as well as his experience of the counterculture
movement of the 1960s and '70s. He explained that the
artist has an important role in today's money-driven
society to encourage a new way of living - "In today's
culture it is the pursuit of wealth that is psychotic.
There needs to be a healthy, ordered and creative way of
life in all aspects of society from politics to family.
Artists should pay attention to sobriety and health and
the healing influence of art." Peter also read from his
memoir, "Sleeping Where I Fall" and the following day
Mercyhurst creative writing students had the opportunity
to attend a workshop where he further discussed the
nature of creativity and the practice of writing. One of
the students who attended said, "He was extremely
encouraging of the group, and he told us to be
unapologetic about the origins of our creativity. He
stressed the idea that everyone has different writing
habits, and that no particular style or starting point
is necessarily any better than the rest." In an article
called "Peter Coyote's
Maelstrom" by Dave Richards of the Erie
Times-News , Peter described himself as wiser, more
seasoned. ""I don't feel like my values have changed at
all. I've never taken a film that really offended my
ethical standards or political standards. I've mutilated
my aesthetic standards, but I'm just a migrant laborer.
(Peter laughs noting he's never made even close to $1
million for a film) To me, it's not what the movie's
about that's so important, it's the way I make the
movie. I never lose my temper, I'm patient, I treat
everyone the same way, from the star to lowest guy on
the set. I try to be kind to everyone. I've been a
Buddhist for 32 years."
Dmitry
Sitkovetsky, Russian-born violinist and orchestra
conductor of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra in North
Carolina, has called on Peter, a longtime friend, for
his help in celebrating the city's bicentennial
celebration in 2008. After learning that O. Henry, the
famous short story writer, was born in Greensboro in
1862, Sitkovetsky thought it would make perfect sense by
honoring him for the bicentennial so the orchestra
commissioned composer Jakov Jakoulov to write a work
based on O. Henry's classic Christmas story, "The
Gift of the Magi." Peter will narrate the work for
its premiere May 1 and 3, 2008.
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