Good evening. My name is Peter Field. I'm a former suist. I'm a survivor of the San Francisco suicide club in the San Francisco Cacophony Society Participated to my eternal regret in some community events managed to survive it I'm gonna retire in four months, and I'm still living in the same apartment. I've moved into in 1986 in San Francisco. Yes And I work with homeless people as as a mental health case manager Which is what I've done most of my life in San Francisco But tonight I've asked John and Carrie to let me introduce them and their topic here because in my avocation as I'm a San Francisco Neighborhood historian, and I wanted to put what they're introducing you tonight in its historical context That may sound highfalutin and a little snobbish, but it's actually true in terms of San Francisco neighborhood history The Santh, the community and the San Francisco suicide club started here in the Sunset District When there was a small colony of oddballs I speak mainly of myself living in the inner Sunset in the 1970s and We met each other out at Gary Warren's Circus of the Soul bookstore on Judah between 9th and 10th Avenue back in those old days and One night John Gary Warren whose bookstore it was help me out here John Adrienne Burke and Yes And Gary Warren we're sitting around one night the bookstore Very good So they were sitting around one night in the store kind of bored and the weather was nasty And it was kind of windy and blowy and a little rainy and stuff and you know What the hell do you do the stores closing? Where the hell do we go? So they said wouldn't it be cool to have an adventure and they decided to go out to the big Old I'm having a senior second fourth point fourth point that big massive brick and from the Civil War and Stand in front of the chains looking over the bay and stand there and let the giant waves Break over their heads and see how that worked and that's what they did that night And they had such a good time doing it that when they got back and were warmed up with coffee and other things Decided we want to do more of this. Let's form our own club Gary who was who was the most literate of the bunch He owned a bookstore for God's sake Came up with the idea of naming at the suicide club after Robert Louis Stevenson short story of the same name And that's how the suicide club started going Gary had started the bookstore in the sunset being a San Francisco State unit State Student which is also a sort of in the Sunset District and it started his own free University back in the late 60s and early 70s when those kinds of things were popular And community University was one of the looser Versions of that dynamic where people were doing all sorts of interesting things ranging from serious discussions of philosophy All the way to one night when I did a class in which people were supposed to come up and Do anything they were afraid to do with the support of a group and among other things we ended up in a saloon on Irving Street because two two guys in the group were afraid to meet women in a bar by themselves So we all went into a bar to meet women by ourselves and these two met two women Guess what the women told them? They were there on assignment from their group therapy to learn to meet men in bars San Francisco in the 70s So the suicide club had several good years of people doing urban adventures things like oh Climbing bridges at night Infiltrating the Mooneys high fights Locking yourself in a room all night to see if you and another group of people can agree with each other All sorts of all sorts of challenging fun adventurous types of things the suicide club eventually went the way that most social clubs go and Eventually out of that chaos and detritus came the cacophony society when five members of the old cacophony society got together There you go There you go Decided to get together and let's start this over again And so they did it was a wiser gentler sort of suicide club in which people were now drinking instead of being abstinent we're hanging out in bars with each other instead of socializing in people's houses because nobody had any money and the and we We had a somewhat more organized and Nicer and more scheduled newsletter than we used to have in the suicide club and it lasted for another several years and made quite a Name for itself in the Bay Area But all of this stuff was happening and started here in the Sunset District, which is why we're here in the Library tonight to appreciate this as you probably have figured out a number of old suicide club members are here tonight And if you have any questions, they'll doubtless be at be happy to answer your questions Ladies and gentlemen, I give you John Law and Carrie Galbraith. We're doing this tonight There's a compilation that a filmmaker Olivier Bowden did and Was put together for the Around the time of the premiere of this book which Carrie Galbraith who's coming up here right now and Kevin Evans And I put together Starting I don't know God when we start on this when did we start on this carry Okay, and we're getting recorded so we want to speak right into this So, yeah, we start working on this in 2010 things about three years to write it and So we try to cover the history like a 34 year history in in this book And it's it weighs I don't know like two two and a half three pounds and you know three three points three pounds six ounces Three pounds six ounces and you know, it's a dangerous book if you could kill somebody with it by punching him in the throat But when we started putting the book together, we didn't want to Tell our personal stories we wanted to do the best pot we could to tell kind of it You know as objective as we could the story of this group the groups that came out of a little bit the history where it came from and Where these act these kind of how do we all these different people do all this shit? You know, I mean, it's how did it come about it didn't just start from one person didn't start from one group I mean it was inspired by a bunch of different things and it's Really starting in the inner Sunset neighborhood and thanks to Robin and the inner Sunset Library for asking us to be here, but you know the suicide club Was a group that came out of I guess we could start going through some Photos and I you know, we're gonna go on cacophony first. So let's see this thing. Yeah, here we go So you want to you want to talk about the slides that we're going to Ethel Ethel ketone Ethel ketone which was the name that Kerry used and still use occasionally for cacophony and other illegal activities It's actually the best pseudonym you could ever find in your life I picked it up during the punk era when I was Ethel ketone in the methyl esters It was my fake band and I'd make fake band flyers and put them up all around the mission when I lived out at the old Sears building and Even now if you if you Google Ethel ketone, you'll get 25,000 pages of chemistry before anything comes up with me So it was like the greatest idea that I didn't even plan So We put it I put in we're like all this weird stuff that happened in San Francisco So this is a st. Stupid's Day parade Bishop Joey been going on for 34 years only in San Francisco event It happens down in the financial district and it's there to celebrate the stupidity the one common denominator of all humankind Which is stupidity? Critical mass started in San Francisco. You probably know what that is some of you. They're love it or annoyed by it probably both Sisters of perpetual indulgence, which there's a lot of crossover with the cacophony society with this group Sisters kitty and sister Dana edited the cacophony newsletter Lit quake started here I mean what other town would you you know like start drinking in bars? You know and like talking about books and then all of a sudden they're like another 10,000 people doing it with you You know punk rocker ran for ran for mayor and got 14,000 votes Yeah, and the veil on the left there with William Burroughs veils started research publishing here with a hundred dollar Grant from Lawrence for olongeddy and another hundred dollars from Allen Ginsberg And he started one of the most amazing underground publishing endeavors in the country search and destroy which turned into research books Pranks book Robin Kravl's got a pranks to book in the back which has a lot of suicide club Cacophony yeah Survival research labs machine art group we don't have time to go into but they started here in San Francisco Basically the most amazing machine art ensemble in history Not in the inner sunset, but they did start in the they started the mission Bayview church of the subgenius didn't start here, but one of its main contingents was here And You may or may not know what they are, but you should know they're another wonderful religion people have Tennessee You want to start religions?  It's like anything The cockettes a wonderful group and there's a crossover from the cockettes to the suicide club Lewis Brill Was taught who's in a suicide club? I don't see him here tonight. Unfortunately, but he was the tumbling instructor for the cockettes or for the angels of light Which is a theatrical troop that was made up of cockettes in the mid 70s Winston Smith the friend of ours who the cacophonist you can talk about Winston Maybe some of you well if he did all the album covers for the dead Kennedys. He also did our flyleafs for our book When when he got very involved, he's one of my best friends and he got very involved in the cacophony society for a while Winston You know, he has great ideas. He never really Oh the the food fighter McDonald's or no the robotic no, no, but he might have been done there for that But he's got great ideas. Yeah brilliant ideas so and his his artworks kind of similar in a lot of ways to the Events and cacophony in the suicide club. He did a lot of art for the rough draft newsletters Ant Farm was a group that was here a little bit before us and had a big influence on on Gary Warren and the suicide club That's few years later Media burn, which is a wonderful event that they did which we tried to recreate many years later Yeah John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow with you who started the electronic frontier foundation both were in the suicide club briefly And then went on to do some fairly interesting important things to fight the government on encryption issues Brewster Kale who started the internet archives. It's a big cacophony fan his wife married big cacophony fans And they were the first people married at Burning Man the second year. We're on the desert the Negative land group which was kind of concurrent with a lot of stuff that we were doing Real instrumental and sound mixing and hugely influential group and Just trying to set the context with sandwiches all this should happen in San Francisco or Oakland Berkeley But mostly in San Francisco. So now we're gonna go into some of the cacophony stuff. Okay, and you know Yes, and This is the work of Kevin Evans and the whole thing about this book I Remember John and I talked in the mid to late 90s about doing a book about cacophony and John kind of looked at me And we both said no, it's too soon and then in 2010 or 2011 Kevin had done this art and he showed it to a group of people who came over to his house And that was it. I was like, I'm on board. I'm there. I'll design it I'll do anything I have to do to be a part of it So I ended up working on you know this with Kevin and John and Sebastian Hyde helped out Dean Gustafson Seagal wrote a lot of peace Eagles here wrote a lot of stuff for the for the book Peterfield contributed a lot of photographs. Yeah, it was a joint effort. Oh, yeah Hugely joint effort. So these so there's 46 of these factoids and the idea was to play off of Ripley's believe it or not and Kevin did 46 of these and there's there's interspersed throughout the book I would just like to say the book's not for sale now. It's out of sold out So there I yes, I'm actually trying to find the publisher for a second edition. Yeah Most often you can find copies Yeah, we did like 12 copies for green apple The bookstores may still have some yeah, yeah a few of the bookstores had like 10 or 12 copies and they might not be sold out But I'm looking at publishers to do a second edition. That's a trade paperback And since I know publishing better than most people because I've been doing it for 30 years I'm gonna make a proposal to a bigger publisher with more distribution because right now this book costs more to mail to Europe than it Ways. Yeah. Yeah, it's a $40 book a $40 list price book, which is a lot But it's a it's 40 bucks for the book But it'll cost you, you know $50 to mail it to you know your friend and right which is too bad You know, so we'd like to see it in a trade paperback. Yeah, so if any of you work for Harcourt Brace or random house, please And then the rough drafts. Yeah, rough drafts was something that actually these are probably Louisa's Oh, yeah, Louisa's in here. Yeah, we're a major part of the rough draft and also a founder of cacophony I'd like to point that out It was the newsletter that came out every month and you could subscribe or you could pick it up at a cafe I subscribe when I first picked my first one up I think I sent a note in this at hey rough. How about a draft and I put my $5 in it, you know So it was and it was also and I just like to point out on the left here It was I was already by the time I found cacophony society. I was already a Mac user Pretty hardcore like making money off of working with max in 1986 and one of the other people doing the editing who's now the He's the head of acquisitions at the at Bancroft library He was also a Mac user So this a lot of what we did for them for the early rough drafts was all done on computer Which at the time in 1986 8788 was kind of pretty new so Yeah, this is from the first atomic cafe where we took over a bunker in The Presidio and we put our own locks on it and cleaned it up and painted in it And then we it was still military Presidio was still military And we sort of snuck everybody in for a whole night of party as if you were a bunker culture The idea was that you were a bunker culture that you lived in bunkers and you got together like once a year to survive the Holocaust to trade or You know and so that was what this this all these people got snuck in Literally, the bunker was across the street from military intelligence Still occupied building. Yeah, which yeah, the military was still there. So this is part of what we were doing See, there's Louise Carol Carrie Louise anti-culture Michael Michael and Yeah, that's just a group of people but anyway, we can move on If you have any questions, please don't hesitate. So y'all have heard of food not bombs, right? This is another thing actually one of the suicide club members Jason Wector used to get dressed up as as a Rabbit on Easter and we'd go into Golden Gate Park Suicycle event hand out carrots to kids and harangue their parents for giving them chocolate bunnies or Jason Jason would in his Brooklyn accent like Hey kid have a carrot the chocolate bunnies your parents are giving are any good for you have a carrot and shove it in kids face Louise Dermilowitz who was a major organizer in the suicide club and later cacophony But yeah, she still lives right there in that apartment 243 Lincoln Way you probably still have that outfit Gary Warren's clown outfit. Okay. Yeah, and also this is a very informal talk So if you want to yell at us throw something or interest interject something, please feel free.  Oh The zone trip. Yeah, well You know, I don't think it's such an original idea, but people seem to think it is I don't know but I'm I'm this huge Eastern European and former Soviet film fanatic I mean, I'm a walking dictionary basically and Was many many years ago as well and Before you know now I see people talk about Tarkovsky all the time Well in those days there'd be like six people in the at the Red Vic For one of his movies and I would drive hundreds of miles to see a movie. I hadn't seen him his yet He made six movies So, you know, I would drive 200 miles to see his from his student films So I was this huge fanatic and this particular film is all about going into this roped off cordoned off zone where all rules and all bets are off and I thought it would be a great translation to do this for Cacophony because I was by then pretty comfortable with doing a lot of cacophony events and So it was just something that I tried to I also read the book this was based on by the Sturgatsky brothers and It's called roadside picnic if you ever get a chance they might have it here at the library I don't know but it's just between all of that and Kind of the idea of the zone I just started thinking well We can leave San Francisco and go somewhere else and all bets are off the minute we cross over the line It's like a psychic kind of barrier that you literally get together in a group and agree to cross into this zone Where you would feel that anything was possible? Yeah, so it just kind of took on a life of its own anybody could be a stalker and take people to the zone Zone trips went to Mexico They went to LA they went all over the place. They ended up going to lots of different cities Steve There's a chair right here in front of you what? So that was and if you ever get a chance to see stalker now there's a new print that just got struck So you know Anyway, go ahead. Yeah, so this was part of a zone trip as a matter of fact That was the first one or the second one to LA the center count Second one because Steve was there and Steve it was Steve's idea to go to the camera of scurra this fellow right here and we we've managed to get in it and then we watched I remember we watched on the the Yeah, we watched a drug deal happening in the Across the street in the parking lot that was actually pretty funny This is part of the one of the first few zone trips This is on the roof of the million-dollar movie building in downtown Los Angeles Which is across the street from the Bradbury building both buildings were used as sets for the movie Blade Runner And this building was 90% unoccupied the time that we went it we snuck into it We're creeping around in it and we went into the offices of Harry M. Popkin Productions, which is a film office from the 50s the B movie film producer. It was completely abandoned It's like they just walked away and leaving the doors open with all the movie posters Photographs all the correspondence lying on the floor the windows open and Harry Popkins known for producing the movie DOA Which is set partially in San Francisco just a little sign This was actually right around the corner from where I grew up Um There there was another cacophony member who I believe was part of the suicide club Then the reason we ended up going to this zone first is because we found out that we were both from this town in LA And I just would like to mention Phil Buley because I miss him every day. It's been gone for a while Dear friend of ours who passed away a few years back Yeah, but this was right literally right around the corner of the Watts Towers Yeah So we went there on Sunday morning I remember going to the Watts Towers on Sunday morning because we thought it would be the safest time to go there Yeah, so the with the zone trip in LA we had all been And we had not all of us had been LA some of us hadn't been there others Had never been there had only seen it in the movies other people grew up there But it while we were there on these on these two zone trips went to LA It was like literally we would go anywhere that any one person came up with there's no there's no rules There was no preset agenda and so the the feeling the essence although it was Los Angeles and some people were quite familiar with it It was a genuinely an alien landscape a psychic alien landscape I can't even describe it and I feel like we were all in a different I felt like I was in a different mindset at the time I was there I had always wanted to climb the Hollywood letters I like to climb things and we just went there and climb them, you know, it's Lance Alexander Another And this is the this is the zine that Kerry put together for yeah I this is for the first the first zone trip. I tend to be a zine maker. I still do so I Would always do zines first for events so so Moving along sannarchy is that that's one thing that cacophony started that with very mixed feelings about It was actually originally the original idea was in the suicide club and Gary Warren had run across an article in Mother Jones magazine of all places about of about a Dutch group called soul Vogue Nyon that did a political Santa Claus protest in Copenhagen Denmark where they went in with 40 sannas into the biggest department store around Christmas time and Started giving they started giving all presents and stuff off the shelves to the kids and saying here Santa in the store I want you to have this and it wouldn't stop They were pretty radical and so the cops came in tried to get himself They wouldn't stop so the cops started beating them up and taking the gifts away from the children So all those kids who are now in their 40s. They've never forgotten that ever in their entire lives So Gary thought this was an interesting event and wanted to do something to kind of replicate it It never ended up happening like so many ideas in the suicide club. We were so replete with crazy ideas already We didn't get a chance to do everything that we wanted to and that was one thing It was a later reprise by Santa Rob in the cacophony society came up with the idea And then we ended up doing it in 1994 in San Francisco and it ended up and you know crime and disillusion and you know Horror you know bad sannas and you know the whole thing so Of course there was joy as well This was in New York in 1998 on the first New York Santa con and This is where he met this for my German PowerPoint This is a Chuck Pollinac Who wrote Fight Club based on partially on the suicide club in cacophony society mostly in cacophony because he was a member of Portland cacophony Project mayhem and Fight Club. Yeah, it was based on cacophony and one of Kevin's wonderful You know factoid about that I know I don't know if Kerry when you talk about 1907 or if P. Siegel wants to talk about 19 So you're certainly welcome to if not we can wax poetic about it, but if you want to say anything P Yeah It turned into a zine called Prusa that Just for the record P. Siegel also developed decompression Yes, if I may make an historical Content I am If I may make an historical content this multi-story flat, which was As you can see is basically Edwardian in style, which means it was built somewhere around just before just after the 1906 earthquake Was originally for well-off people and had even had servants rooms on the top floor by the time P had moved in it had been the domain of all three stories of it had been the domain of a welfare mother Who was going around to different welfare? Departments in San Francisco collecting welfare checks for something over 20 different kids all of who lived in rooms Inside this place if you went inside to visit the place You looked at all the doorways and scratched your head because the things you noticed were first of all They're all the drill holes from all the locks and hasps on each separate door And obviously nobody trusted anybody else in that building in those days and the second thing you couldn't but help it notice the bullet holes Then miss P moved in took it over and turned it into a an oasis Right so when Pete when P moved into the building then eventually ended up being 20 dysfunctional artists living in there Who she was taking care of? So that's that's the building where the Burning Man event was plotted almost and I'd say probably 50% to 80% of planning for that event took place What years were you in there from and we started hanging out there about 88 I'd say about 88 and then Burning Man was being planned there in 8990 There's another one the salmon run another cacophony event that Still going on I think Yeah, and Once again, this is another idea that Santa Rob came up with so don't be too mad at him for Santa con This is just this is exactly what it looks like And that is that that's the same that those are the salmon running against the tide at the beta breakers in San Francisco Oh, yeah, yeah, the Sam the Samans would Samans would run into the shark runners who were going in the opposite direction And there was always blood Yeah costumes designed by Annie Coulter This is another cacophony event the Golden Gate Bridge they're getting up to close to a thousand jumpers and Anyway, we ran out to the middle of the bridge with several people and and a baby and Attempted to be the thousandth jumper off the Golden Gate Bridge and Suicide Suicide Club and cacophony were both I mean sewer sewer walks were pretty common in both I would say and and Here's the later cacophony society sewer walk Jason Rackerby and Louise Dar millowitz once again This is the zone trips we're talking about okay Carrie invented this concept of the zone trip after reading the watching these, you know Russian films and reading Russian novelists and So the zone trip number four was the first trip to the Black Rock Desert with the Burning Man and Can I make one quick? Oh, please absolutely. There's one other influence on the zone trip. If any of you have not read it I highly recommend it. It's a book called gravity's rainbow by Thomas pension So that's as much about the zone as anything else. I've ever read Pinchin So and this is you know, we're not gonna talk too much about Burning Man But a little bit the first few years out in the desert were basically it was a cacophony zone trip and Here's some different shots from oh, this is a rough draft with the first write-up Blackrock zone trip number four, which you can't really read there, but This is raising the cacophony flag on the edge of the play at the 11 mile turnoff 1990 crossing the line Dean Gustafson and Bobby Gelman in 1991 the second year at Burning Man when they were the they were the drummers. There were no there were no Kind of poor poorly Rhythmically challenged white guy bongo players that year. They had a couple of really good jazz and rock and roll drummers Um No, it's that Dean was the first drummer that's correct in 1990 and the last one on Baker Beach as well Steve Mobia and Dave Warren At the first year first year in the Black Rock desert David left us some years ago and I remember David so many stories about David Warren He ran the giant camera out on out at the cliff house He and Chris de Monterey rescued it from oblivion and restored it ran it for many many years I remember when I I came in the suicide club David was 42 years old I was 18 and I thought my god this guy who's this ancient guy? I mean might as well have been 90 years old right? I couldn't believe that I was hanging out with somebody's 42 years old It was really annoying and I remember one time he gave me I was taking out on a hitchhiking trip around the country And he gave me a giant rubber thumb. He said hey kid. You'll need this That was Dave Warren and he was a spirit of chaos for the suicide club We're gonna talk a little bit about the billboard liberation front Which is a group that started in the suicide club Gary Warren and Adrian Burke did a suicide club event Altering a billboard that then kind of morphed into the billboard liberation front when Dave Warren and I with the help of Jason Wector and Bill Kastura and Steve Mobia and Bob Campbell and Now and and Benjamin Friedman a bunch of other people did the first billboard hits Jason Wector although he would deny it now Pretty simple to change a billboard and change the Right Dmitri and Safron Josie R. Skewer were there as well pretty easy to change a billboard sometimes more difficult other times What was the what This one here Anyway, it's that simple This is a little bit more elaborate. Am I dead yet with a six-foot? Neon skull over Joe Camel's head That you know they really missed a ticket with Joe Camely should have done a Saturday morning children's cartoon with Joe Camel Would have got more smokers Golden Gate Bridge dinner the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge were big things for the suicide club and later Cacophony Anybody the idea with the suicide club and Cacophony's anybody could do an event Anyone could do an event and Catherine Baker in the suicide club had never really organized anything with a bunch of people before but it was it was her Her birthday in 1977 and she thought well I want to do something special for my birthday and why don't we have a big pot like dinner with everybody on the pedestrian walkway the Golden Gate Bridge, so we did we went there and then that was an ongoing event for 26 years every year we went there until the bridge district finally figured out that we were coming there and Cut us off. This is from I don't know what we're the 87 88 maybe 89 Yeah, this is the group on the on the Golden Gate Bridge, so the idea is anybody you know This is what we'd like to pass along. That's what we wrote this book. It's kind of a how-to manual anybody can do these events I mean some of the stuff, you know We got into later was a little bit more elaborate more difficult and you know You'd have to work up to it, but you don't have to it's doing a billboard I mean you can go with a crayon you can go on a subway or a bus and change whatever whatever the message says It's not it's not rocket science, so and the idea was like non-commercial you know Communing and non-commercial creation of events with with other people of a like mind we climb the Golden Gate Bridge a lot And this is I'd like to point out here Bill Kastura Mark North Cross and Jean Mishofsky climbing the pipe formidable woman And one of the co co-founders co-founders of the cacophony society No, that is outside the tower if she let go of that She would fall into that plate metal below and then bounce off of it and fall 150 200 feet to the to the concrete stanchion below Under the roadway that's correct Golden Gate Bridge With John Gilmore Joe Weinstein, and I don't know who else on the top many many years ago fuzzy photo We weren't really into recording things that much in the suicide club more into doing them Billboard liberation front One of Kevin's factoids for that and This is kind of a break in between this and the suicide club stuff So you want to go over anything with cacophony or anything any questions about anybody have anything to offer You'll be tested later. So see your notes Kathy Kepman So people brought their Emily Dickinson poems and we sang them to the tune of the yellow rose of Texas Cacophony It's still there Simple pleasures, and I'm here to tell you that simple pleasures has never had anything as funner as good except that night when Kathy Let us all Doing all that Well, that was one thing about cacophony that I think it depended on the people, but I think there was so much Influence influence like that Marcel Proust support group Kowski support group. I was heavily influenced by tons of literature You know we did those poetry breakfasts all the time And you know all of that was part of it At least I got a lot of my source material from that and it sounds like a lot of other people did too. Yeah, you had the Dorothy Parker That was a good event Peter that was a good literary One of the expressions of that tendency was when I decided I had to have my own book club Because that's what everybody else was doing But I couldn't quite get myself around to quite taking myself as seriously as I wanted to about it So I named it Dorothy Parker's perpetual perambulating pedagogic paperback How wow that's what it was We had our We had our we had our first meeting we had our first meeting in that wonderful Chinese restaurant the Hong Kong restaurant on Church Street Where like God 20 or 30 people showed up and then after that it sort of perambulated from house to house Kathy Is it still going on? Anyway, we had a lot of we had we had a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun insulting each other's literary taste over the years Was the suicide note writing workshop Where you were to bring suicide notes your favorite suicide notes, but you weren't allowed to bring guns or knives And the whole point of the workshop was to write your own suicide note and then carry it with you for the rest of your life Leave him guessing I think was the point Do you still have the official booklet the art and science of billboard improvement? Well, actually that's online you can find that online on the billboard billboard liberation calm and We do have a bunch of the pamphlets left there Yeah, there were five different editions of it that I know of And various anarchist bookstores carried them at different periods of time But yeah, it's a how-to manual on how to improve billboards that we wrote Back in the mid 80s late 80s So that was that question Bound together books on hate Street three dollars. It's a it's a real bargain. So To illustrate what was intentionally a More serious aspect of the suicide club, although I think it had farther reaching serious ramifications than anybody ever really dreamed of at the time And I can do it either leave it up to you to I can do it either through the billbook through the first billboard Liberation front night or I can do it through the night that you and I scouted out the Golden Gate Bridge John which one Okay, so John I'm a recovering control freak in case you couldn't already tell from see me on up on stage So and the first time John law who is a non-recovering control The first time John and I ever set eyes on each other was in Gary's bookstore And you know those situations in which you walk into a room and because two people of similar character who are never ever gonna Like each other because it's like holding they're like holding up mirrors in front of each other's faces It was one of those and it took John and I a long long time to warm up to each other John John was Give to his credit John was the one who made the move and what he did was he walked up to me one evening and said Quite belligerently so field. Are you gonna? What are you gonna explore?  And I looked at him and I've always loved adventures in exploring But I've always put John is much less physically challenged than I am and I look him straight in the eye and said of course So what was ostensibly the two of us? Going down to the Golden Gate Bridge to explore it for to client to lead a bunch of Suicide clubbers up the thing and in an event But was in reality John sort of halfway leading me along We went down underneath the thing figured out how to climb up into the thing and spent the night climbing around the damn thing I for me it was the up until that time in my life.  How long did I keep us sitting there? It's until I recovered myself so I could actually walk again And what the suicide club did that for quite a lot of people By it expanded our boundaries in terms of what we were willing to risk doing and ways that I think affected a lot of us In ways that are still figuring out today for what it's worth With the name Phil Belize come up a few times and because he's no longer with us. I just wanted to Say for this record one of my all-time favorite events was Phil's clown event There's a there used to be this hamburger joint in North Beach called Clown Alley So it was Phil's idea that we would all dress up like clowns and Go in you know one or two at a time and sit at different tables and Phil had this gorgeous satin perfect Clowns outfit with perfect makeup and he had this cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth like he had just had a hard day at the circus and was I just wanted a beer and a burger and there was like a Two dozen of us and passersby kept stopping and looking in the windows and pointing and the employees were cracking up and and Afterwards we went to the lusty lady the famous strip joint in North Beach and Collective yes, and There were like 12 of us crowded into one of those little booze with a pretty girl and then there was the bigger dance room that had window shades and You put money in this in the thing in the window shade we go up and you could see the dancing girls and We could see them pointing at the windows and say look there's more clowns We couldn't hear them, but we could tell what they were saying and it was One of my all-time favorite events to me. It's sort of epitomizes Cacophony and Phil was brilliant and we all miss him Yeah, that was what Peter and And what Peter and Peter were both saying is very true And that's what that was a genius of the suicide club I think of Gary and Adrienne and any other folks who put that together was they figured out a way that they could get a Group of people together to work collaboratively to challenge their fears and do stuff that they would not do By them by themselves and everyone was encouraged to do events based on whatever ideas or fantasies that they had and it was a really was a it was a really brilliant simple but very brilliant kind of Context that they would put people in and I'd encourage that a lot and So, you know, I don't know any other questions about cacophony So here's a bunch of people dressed as clowns in rush hour San Francisco at seven in the morning scattered up and down the region district on Gary each of them waiting to get on a bus dressed in dressed in the style of Somebody going to work but as a clown and The idea was that the first cloud was going to get off get get on the bus said at the bus end of Alboa and the ocean and Then as the bus went along it would pick up these individual clowns as the bus stops went on This was great idea in theory Unfortunately what the bus the organizer of the event got so nervous that they forgot to check the Destination sign on the bus and didn't realize they were getting on an express bus So what happened was and I've used I know this was I was dressed as a clown with my friend and 25th Avenue And waiting for the bus. I'm sorry. I'm 33rd Avenue and the What happened was that the bus would go flying on by each bus stop with the Clowns waiting on the bus stop seeing the clowns already in it and thinking something had gone round the clowns would suddenly start running after the bus So by the time they hit 25th Avenue, there was this huge crowd of clowns Running down Perry Street to the bus trying to catch up to the damn thing So finally at 25th Avenue instead of this carefully Staged and stage managed one at a time bus to make the other bus right I scratched our heads and think the hell is going on here instead Here was this crowd of sweaty dish have old Trying to catch their breath Clowns Gasping their way onto the bus with everybody looking and saying oh San Francisco so We're gonna go we're gonna go so we don't keep you here all night We're gonna go into the suicide club portion of this little thing suicide club Robert Louis Stevenson If you have questions or comments or epithets, please feel free Stevenson wrote, you know many books Adventure books kidnapped treasure Island Suicide club is about a group of men who put their worldly affairs in order to live each day as over their last drew drew us But there was a process by which one of them was chosen to be assassinated by one of the others and no one knew Gary Warren at the Circus of Soul bookstore for 411 I think Judah at 10th David Warren who was the spirit of chaos for the The the suicide club David and Gary met there. You couldn't find two people who were more different Gary was very logical very controlled believed in Agreements and being on time. He's always on time He's the first person I ever met that every moment of his day would incrementally Scheduled and he made all the schedules almost always on time David was complete with the most chaotic human beings I've ever known and the spirit of chaos in a real sense and we were talking about the giant camera earlier which David Got and restored with Chris de Monterey who's in the back back back of the room right here He just showed up a little while ago And so David's spirit of chaos and if onward going forward thinking and just line of baloney and talking to people into doing Whatever he wanted to talk them into and Chris's steadfast, you know nature and actually making things happen Allow that the giant camera to be restored and it's probably the reason it's still here today Yeah Yeah David could drink an entire gallon of vodka a day and still appear to be completely sober Oh, yeah, me too many times and and David was one of the founders of the suicide clone He was pretty good at he's pretty good at counting Yeah, so David Gary met him because Gary collected people and he's heard about David and saw articles about him doing things like Going down dressed up as a as a salvation army dude with a pot full of money to give it away Now he didn't he wasn't a rich guy. Okay. He just thought it was a funny idea Um University one which I want to touch on community was a free school part of the free university movement of the 60s Which is inspired by and started in? 1964 when the free speech movement got rolling and by 1965 SF State had a free university I forget the name of it right now, but it lasted for about five years and then many Universities around the country had free universities the idea was the educators would put this out there where students could have a free school It would engage students in a way that might get them interested in education during a very, you know like a period of upheaval and and anguish in education and so a Community started in 1970. It was an adjunct of SF State They had a little trailer on the San Francisco State campus and they had a stipend and they had student Administrators Gary Warren came on the scene about 73 and became the student administrator for a community and there were a bunch of free classes and maybe a hundred hundred and fifty and there may be fifteen hundred people on their mailing list and They kept doing weirder and weirder classes. I mean in addition to the conversational French and Theoretical physics and VW repair and how to make tofu. They would do things like pie throwing classes They do You know like weird underground like a midnight walks on the on the beach and things like that They also did parodies death school was a parody of the kind of the Bay Area New a new-agey kind of life school kind of thing where everybody's hugging everybody else all the time So there's a good deal of sardonic humor in the suicide club while embracing some of the 60s Better elements of the 60s like the ideas of free diggers were a big influence on on us Influenced on some of the people in the group and the idea of giving away free food and diggers of course had their problems but the basic ideas were sound and Community this is the one on the left of the community calendar on the left is the first time the suicide club was mentioned in In print and it says charter membership in the San Francisco suicide club. It was listed as a class in a free school And then quickly became a secret society This is a Deb Palfas and Peter Field and I rigged a Traverse at the old Harkness Hospital across from the DMV at the end of Panhandle Park And we just made it, you know, that was a photo for the cover of the community calendar We just make up whatever we wanted to pick up I mean a lot of fun I'm there are a lot of different interrelated groups Briar Patch was a small business group in San Francisco that kind of came out of the hippie movement But there there's a lot of crossover with the community and and the suicide club It was a button small business people who would barter their services and goods rather than pay taxes and spend money lasted for some time the idea was It was a good idea, but like so many things that are free I mean it can last only so long in our society the New games foundation which was a started by kind of like a little idea that Stuart Rand had and then he kind of walked away from And a bunch of people took it over a really good group of people took it over and did new games foundation for 15 years Traveled all around the world collecting weird stories weird games and tribal games national games and whatnot and Compiling them in this book and they would teach these games around the country as a nonprofit educational institute This started that their offices were in the inner sunset and the hate The garage sale the way we raised money for community was we had a giant garage sale everybody would donate all their stuff every three times a year we'd have this giant-ass garage sale and and You could pay anything you wanted to for the stuff in the garage sale anything So what would happen is like for every dick who would come in and give you like 50 cents for a stereo that was worth 20 bucks Which would be like a hundred bucks now You'd have 50 people who'd give you like a buck or two for something that was of no value So it kind of worked out. We made our roughly seven hundred dollars every every three times a year Which is enough to put out the calendar the catalog of classes So it's a club newsletter became the newsletter for obvious reasons And it was edited by somebody different every month the idea was that a different person would edit it every month and Kathy her Kathy Kate did the one on the right or the left Okay, and left and and so some of the some of the Newsletters would be well-designed and the graphics would be good. Others would be others would be not so well-designed I didn't put a picture in the court, but Don Heron did the logo up above the little suicide club dead guy logo Some of the events let on the left was the Union Square parking garage. We took over three parking garage elevators put different scenes in each elevator including Including a gorilla with four people bound and gagged hostage on the floor waving around a toy gun and in a Spaghetti dinner scene with two young people sitting at a table With a full spaghetti dinner and a guy playing violin and tails top hat as eighth or dinner So people would get ready to go in the elevator and they see that and they like oh wait for the next elevator And then there's like a girl in that elevator So this is the kind of thing ideas ideas that people would come up with that the naked cable car Which is Nancy Prussia one of the founders of the group Wanted it should be fun to get naked on a cable car. So we kind of plotted it out. Pardon This is the 70s everybody got naked whether you wanted them to or not So, you know we did they're about 40 of us and we got naked on a cable car and Challenging your fears is a big part of Gary Warren's philosophy And he would like for people to do events and he tried to do events where he was challenging something that frightened him or you know maybe frightened somebody else and So I climbing the Golden Gate Bridge would be very frightening to most people But most anybody in this room could have done it at one point because it's not that physically difficult for a person A fit person, but you wouldn't know that until you do it, right? Once you've done it. It's like, oh, okay That wasn't so scary.  Worst thing that could happen in all 40 of us and they're not gonna arrest Yeah, and they wouldn't arrest all 40 people either.  So when I could show up in San Francisco in 1976 everybody told me the party was over like yeah, the party's over kid. You might as well go home It was eight nine years ago. I never listened to hippies since then but so Kathy Hardy had an idea to do a 10-year anniversary of the Summer of Love Which is kind of a parody but also an homage and so the suicide club got dressed up like hippies and went around the hate They ran into a photographer Greg Mancuso who shot them as though they were genuine hippie revisionists and put it in high-times magazine Another we've climbed stuff Peter field over here on the left. That is Peter field repelling off of Hartness Hospital Bob Campbell in the parking lot off of 7th Avenue Oh more hippies more hippies more hippies, okay Roxy theater one of the only events the suicide club did that was an above-ground event that was advertised We showed Gary Warren had a had an event there showing two movies. He called it tribute to paranoia We showed the movie 5,000 fingers of dr. T and another movie called to catch us catch can about an Italian film about a guy who Every animal in the entire world is trying to kill him. So it's like the ultimate paranoid movie I can't you have to see it to see it believe it to believe it a Vittorio gasman was a star on the left This is an important event. This was in the Follies theater, which is now known of as a Victoria theater and Carla Wood bless her bless her she wanted to do an event for the suicide club But she didn't seems like I don't know how to climb bridges or go into sewers or whatever But I'd like to do a burlesque show because he was it had been a burlesque dancer in her in her in her earlier years And she used to perform in the Follies theater Steve Please feel free to correct me with any with any if yet She was still a bird out were less dancer. Okay? Anyway, Carla's a blessed dancer and she wanted to do a show With her friends and people that she liked rather than creepy guys with their hats in their laps So she got together with Steve And Pia Baral and who's a guy around that Bruce Bruce Collins and some other folks and And and and they figured out how to sneak into the Follies theater Victoria theater now you may have been to it down on 16th and cap and she organized this giant event with all of her stripper friends and performer friends and So we snuck a hundred people into this abandoned theater for a for an abandoned burlesque And it was Carla. She just I just wanted to do an event and the suicide club came together and helped her figure out How to organize it she produced it and we and we did this event in an abandoned theater Wonderful, I've never forgotten it there. We didn't record a lot of stuff in the suicide club We did not record it as it were art. We did not self-consciously record it You know for to sell anything or pitch anything so there are a lot of events There were no photos for some events. They're like little Polaroid snapshots and that's it Decoite Street wonderful event where Steve Mobia Living on Minna Alley had was walking across the street noticed a prostitute bleeding on the street went over to help the prostitute Realized that the prostitute's wound was a plastic fake wound and it wasn't indeed a prostitute No, it's a good now wasn't a prostitute was a drunk guy on the street, right?   Yeah, Peter's here. It was a decoy decoy and Steve Mobia It was that I was a decoy molested MC nightclub manager or something like that Don Herron was an original early member of the suicide club and like so many people in this group He was he had certain interests, but he never really shared them with other people And he was a big fan of mystery fiction So in the suicide club he was encouraged by other people to start doing events So he did these elaborate Detective he ended up doing these kind of natural ever then it became elaborate detective games Which then also grew out of his interest in the writings of Dashel Hammett and he started doing the Dashel Hammett walking tour in the tenderloin downtown area in 1977 and today it's the longest lived literary walking tour in America He's been covered by every media outlet. You can think of Peter Field who's here also works for with the The library and does that to correct me if I'm wrong City guides and does ten days probably one of the most knowledgeable people in the country about the tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco and does Historical tours of the ten so people grew into their interests and were able to share them whether people were encouraged and Emboldened to really become more themselves through this group I certainly did many people that I know did Louise Jermilowitz who was just a natural Costumer ended up becoming a professional costumer over time doing costumes for the sisters of perpetual indulgence the opera and whatnot People were encouraged to do is Bill Castura who's not here. He's not here But he he was an unemployed dishwasher when I met him and a science fiction fan We were sneaking into abandoned buildings and he liked abandoned buildings He started studying them He became an expert on abandoned buildings started writing books about them Frank Jordan appointed them to the landmarks board in San Francisco And he became that he became the historian for Caltrans You know go figure because he was sneaking into abandoned building So this is why this stuff so important because you don't have to be anybody could do this Basically, you just need a bunch of other people are dumb enough to go with you, you know, and have their own crazy ideas Band of buildings, you know once again See Bill Castura right here Yeah No, that was the same building that we got arrested in you're talking about the the federal building 42 or 42 of us were arrested in formal Where in a 20th floor of an abandoned skyscraper, but that's another story Whose idea was this event John? The exploring the building Yeah over over on fell street Yeah, we always saw that building What was it was a 20-story skyscraper So down to the Empire Empire state building and we used it for all kinds of events We would repel off that we would repel off the roof practice repelling on the side of the building like a Steve and I organized an event in it and then the What do we call it we call it the federal building 42 or whatever But yeah 42 of us were arrested in this building That's a long story, but Yeah Back of the walls Suicide club rediscovered in 1977 what you're looking at in that picture is The steps leading up to where the altar used to be in the church section of the building Is a very strange place people may remember Was in the same space. Yeah, George. So we're gonna keep moving along because we don't have a lot of time We don't we don't have all night. So anyway fair play for rabbits I think we already went over that blindfold event on the bus. Everybody's blindfolded on a muni bus Billboards we already this is the first this is a suicide club billboard not the billboard liberation run This is the billboard that inspired the billboard liberation front and see we voted on the caption We're on the roof of the building we're on the roof of the building with 26 people and we voted on the caption it took about three hours it was a really annoying process and Everybody's arguing about what to change it to and so the one side the bigger the bigger billboard on the one side was changed to This which I thought was a very concrete and not a very interesting message the one on the other side Which is a smaller billboard was changed to this which I preferred myself But of course a couple of other family we did press releases for the billboard liberation front We immediately started getting press for it and in this one Our spokesman Simon Wagstaff, there's a picture of him over there I said the alteration remain by gluing letters and at one point I remember he told a journalist that there are 300 people in the billboard liberation front We all worked in the advertising business and they printed it Which is which keep in mind if you're ever reading a news article And then one of the things a kind of a suicide club corollary hit Charles Colson Who's Richard Nixon's hatchet man in the face of the pie during the pie and craze and the in the late 70s early 80s This is the staff of the guerrilla grotto, which is a group which is an ancillary Organization came out of the suicide club the Gary Warren Sardis a storefront over right next to Polly High on Frederick Street and Adult Environment cafe play playground weird museum, you know climbing bridges Bill Castura once again there on the bridge mark North Cross Jason Jason on that climb. I don't know if Jason was on that climb. Maybe he was No, Jason Rackery is not no he wasn't around then So and this is a little bit later This is a later cacophony society climb of the ambassador bridge in Detroit Which is the only bridge a major suspension bridge in the world with a giant neon sign on top of it Not sure this was in Gary Warren's bookstore, and I don't know like nobody will tell me what happened at this particular event But I have no idea Steve But things like that it was the 70s and things like this did happen and whenever any 20-30 year old people get a little snotty or anything. I just tell them yeah the 70s you heard about them everything you heard was true It's better if we don't know what it was So like I say it was the 70s Some of the inspirations for what we're doing I put in a couple of slides and then we get some more cacophony stuff If people want to keep going we're inspired by the surrealist and the Dada's Surrealist and that's where big inspiration to Gary Warren and some of the other folks Cacophony later cacophony event that Dean Gustafson did predating Banksy by about 20 years going into the MoMA and And going from fire extinguishers to toilets to what not as though they were art objects Not a poetry readings Kathy K says and pre like I say predating Banksy we're being ahead of your time as a curse At the at the MoMA at the moment. Yes So since we didn't call it art I guess The diggers were yeah, I think a pretty good influence on the suicide club the idea of things being free You know, we didn't charge for suicide club events We charged enough money to pay for whatever the expenses might have been theoretically usually like be 50 cents or quarter for gas or whatever We were a bit heavily inspired both in cacophony in the suicide club by Pulp fiction by weird movies by The ice man was a bit very influential book in the suicide club as a wonderful book. I suggest you read it It's about Taking each and every important decision you have to make in your life and throwing the dice to choosing Like whatever 12 different potential things to do and literally doing the one So it's like should I should I kill my partner?  Should I just leave walk out the door? Should I go get a burger and literally doing it and it's a really pretty pretty interesting book Pulp fiction Lovecrafts is a giant influence on the suicide club Action in Victorian action adventure fiction big influence on the suicide club Hitchcock huge influence on the suicide club. I remember one weekend in the first month or two of the suicide club We had done we'd gone to the cities the letters of the city of South San Francisco to slide down them on pieces of Cardboard these giant concrete letters. We'd gone on a sewer We got like an in a sewer tunnel walk and we ended up climbing around on the underside of the Golden Gate Bridge and I remember at one point looking over at the just the imagery at night and it just seemed to me that I was in This movie that's a scene where carry carry granted and even resaint are hanging off the side of Mount Rushmore Just hanging on this wall and just like I had this synesthesia between movie reality and real reality And that was a part of what this stuff was and when events really worked in the cacophony in the suicide club that it clicked First for me first and for other people. I know The third man big influence on the sewer walks that we did Texas chainsaw massacre cute we went to we Gary Warren had a 16 millimeter movie projector And we would rent movies from this little place down a lusk alley 16 millimeter films show the movie and then do an event Based on the movie plan. He's out ahead of time. We watched the Texas chainsaw massacres and went to sleep in a cemetery in Marin County Meet pray this is a later. This is more cacophony stuff if you want to go We already talked about it. Yeah, we already kind of talked about cacophony. There's some the meat parade in Berkeley Which would you saw in the in the film?  It was Berkeley right at the home of PC I thought they were gonna beat us up. They invited us back three years in a row. We were the most popular We were the most popular Float in the entire parade You have to in Berkeley you have to have your counter protesters.  We were held up as an example of my god. They're protesting Fantasia for being politically incorrect What are they gonna do next in California? Thank you for that by the way, Peter One of the most brilliant things ever There you go and people you know many people thought this was deadly serious Yeah, Peter right right here Spasm sensitive parents against scary movies and I remember it was it was made up of Several groups bad rap Bay Area drought relief assistance program Which was protesting the water wasting segments in the Mickey Mouse Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence because we were in the middle of a drought There's Massa museums Musicians against sappy arrangements, you know who are protesting the stikowsky boulderization of the original classical pieces anyway went on and on and on brilliant That was the one Yeah, and the anatomically incorrect satyrs they didn't have genitals So they're ever protesting all that terrible stuff. Oh, we're getting kicked out of here very soon How what do we got Robin how much time we got we're gonna we're gonna push it as far as we can Okay, Bart lounge another Dwayne neutron special where we got on Bart and and did a lounge act I don't have any photographs for it, but I'm also let them eat cake Which was another Peter Doty Dwayne Neutron or Peter Doty special. Let what was your name for that? Pierre Le Marquis de Gato and we would go out with the Let with the food not bombs folks who had been feeding poor people and then we would give them with your wonderful cakes And then we'd deliver the crumbs to the mayor's office on a silver tray as a kind of a political statement Frank Jordan is the only mayor in San Francisco history to be beheaded twice Yeah, here's here's Peter Doty and Vivian Perry in the city hall right after we delivered the crumbs to the mayor Jordan Urban I did a rod start as a cacophony event, you know running around from bar to bar with Go figure Oh, yeah soul train going to coma urban I did run You know, I only did I never I went on a couple of these but I kind of hung out for a little bit I wasn't really my event, but it was an awesome fun event hundreds of people came on it different times There's also like a golf like a golfing event where people urban golf where they golf through different urban locations and People come with any point you come with any idea and all your crazy knucklehead friends will go Let's do it and then you would go help them with their crazy idea. I mean, it's pretty simple concept It's how burning man got started You know, this is the urban I did a rod running around, you know, Jesse Street Chinese New Year's treasure hunt Some of you may know that event started as a suicide club event by Gary Warren Rick Lasky And Adrian Burke worked on it and then it went on it was a yearly event Most of our events were not yearly. We didn't like to do events over and over again unless there's a reason for it This was a wonderful one. It took place giant treasure hunt in the middle of the Chinese New Year's parade And then years later Jason Wachter who was in the suicide club Started doing it and turned into a much larger charity event wonderful event But quite different from the original event which ended in a pie fight with about a hundred people Jason does it today every year at Chinese New Year's and raises thousands of dollars for charity-based nonprofits Cars were part of cacophony. Here's the 504 p.m. Special most famous car in San Francisco for many years Giant wall fell on it in the Loma Prieta earthquake Car hunt event that I put together with Robert Burke and people hater a wonderful group of very huggy guys We put together our little car remote controlled car With steel wheels plate steel wheels made by Pepe Ozon the wonderful artist Pepe Ozon There we are hunting this vehicle down on blue wing playa about 40 miles from the Black Rock with live ammunition in a variety of weapons Chip Flynn a people hater one of the evil geniuses who remote control this car so they could run it from a futaba controller Same thing you'd run your little miniature car from William Abernathy who's great one of his many great Epithy remarks was when asked if his gun was loaded. He said it's just a stick if it's not loaded Me and Vanessa back 95 I guess it was Chris Radcliffe who's a much better-looking woman than he is a man There we are on the truck going about 40 miles an hour Shooting at the car along the way Pepe Ozon driving the chase vehicle Chris Radcliffe on the left shooting There's 5,000 bullet holes ish in the car Licensed plate legally licensed and registered car hunt. That's Anyway, that's kind of it


Hello, my name is Matt Clark, and I'm the commander of the Denver Police Department's Major Crimes Division. This critical incident debriefing is intended to provide you with information regarding an officer-involved shooting that occurred in the area of South Federal Boulevard and West Harvard Avenue in Southwest Denver on Wednesday, May 19, 2021. You are about to see relevant video footage and learn about other evidence and police procedures related to the case so you have an understanding of the details of this incident. The use of deadly force by a police officer demands a thorough investigation be completed. The Denver Police Department is committed to ensuring a full and timely investigation of these serious incidents. This allows for a comprehensive examination of the officer's actions to determine compliance with state statutes and department policies. In accordance with legislation passed in 2015, the investigation of police shootings in Denver are conducted by a multi-agency investigative team made up of members from the Denver and Aurora Police Department Homicide Unit, as well as the Denver District Attorney's Office. All critical incident investigations are actively monitored by the Office of the Independent Monitor. A word of caution. The images and information you are about to see may be disturbing. When a police officer uses force to arrest a suspect or defend against an attack, it can be graphic and difficult to watch. In addition, there may be strong language used by those shown in the video. Your discretion is advised. On Wednesday, May 19, 2021, at approximately 6.45 p.m., the Denver Police Department received a 911 call regarding an individual with a knife on the east side of South Federal Boulevard near Harvard Avenue. The caller advised the male was under a tree and appeared to be cutting himself. Okay, and tell me exactly what happened. What's going on, sir? There's a guy that got a razor knife and he's maiming himself right now. Officers Katie Phillips and Jordan Archuleta were promptly dispatched to this call. Both officers were wearing Denver Police uniforms and were driving marked Denver Police vehicles. The officers approached from the north and passed by the subject, who was later identified as 52-year-old Raul Rosas Zarsoza. As the officers drove past the subject, they recognized he was bleeding from his neck. The officers proceeded south, one block to Vassar Avenue, where they turned around and stopped their vehicles. The officers intentionally blocked the northbound lanes of Federal Boulevard at Vassar Avenue to prevent vehicle and pedestrian traffic from accessing the area while they worked to resolve this incident. The location where the officers stopped their marked police vehicles was approximately 105 feet away from where Mr. Rosas Zarsoza was located. The officers were concerned for Mr. Rosas Zarsoza and recognized he needed medical care for his self-inflicted injuries. At the same time, the officers observed Mr. Rosas Zarsoza was still in possession of a knife he was using to cut himself. When the officers exited their vehicles, they were both carrying less-lethal tasers and Officer Phillips was also carrying a less-lethal pepperball system. The less-lethal pepperball system is a tool that allows officers to attempt to de-escalate situations or gain compliance from subjects at greater distances. The system shoots spherical projectiles that are filled with capsaicin powder. The officers directed an uninvolved individual who was walking a dog back to their location so he could not be at risk. As the officers were developing a plan to safely approach Mr. Rosas Zarsoza, he stood up and directed his attention towards the officers. Mr. Rosas Zarsoza began approaching the officers at a steady pace while holding the knife in his hand. The officers gave clear direction to Mr. Rosas Zarsoza to stop and get back. Get back! Get back! Get back! Mr. Rosas Zarsoza disregarded this direction and continued on his path towards the officers, quickly closing the distance. Officer Phillips moved back to a location where a police vehicle was positioned between her and Mr. Rosas Zarsoza. Mr. Rosas Zarsoza continued walking towards the officers, ignoring their verbal direction. At one point, while Mr. Rosas Zarsoza was walking towards the officers, Officer Phillips utilized a less lethal pepperball system to attempt to gain his compliance and de-escalate the situation. Officer Phillips discharged 10 pepperball rounds at Mr. Rosas Zarsoza, striking him in the chest multiple times. Despite being struck by the pepperball rounds, Mr. Rosas Zarsoza continued towards the officers.  The taser was not effective in stopping Mr. Rosas Zarsoza because one of the two taser probes did not make contact with him. At about the same time the taser was deployed, Officer Phillips, who had transitioned from the pepperball system to her duty handgun, discharged multiple rounds from her firearm. Mr. Rosas Zarsoza was struck by these rounds and fell to the ground. Mr. Rosas Zarsoza threw the knife he was holding to the side as he was on the ground. An ambulance was already at the location and provided prompt medical aid to Mr. Rosas Zarsoza. He was transported to the hospital where he was later pronounced deceased. Following a police shooting, any officers involved in the incident are separated and assigned to a supervisor once a situation is stabilized. Involved officers remain in the company of the assigned supervisor throughout the initial investigation of the incident. Through the investigation, it was determined that a total of five rounds were fired by Officer Phillips. At the scene, investigators recovered a red Milwaukee utility knife. This was the knife that Mr. Rosas Zarsoza used to cut himself and also the knife he held as he approached the officers. All officers assigned to uniform patrol duties in Denver have been issued body-worn cameras. These devices are generally worn at chest level by patrol officers and are capable of recording both audio and video. Prior to being activated by the officer, the body-worn camera maintains a 30-second video buffer. Once the officer activates the camera, the 30-second buffer video is captured and the camera starts recording both audio and video. It is important to note that a body-worn camera captures a general perspective of what is in the camera's view. However, this footage may or may not be what the officer actually saw or perceived. At times, an officer's movement or hand positioning may inadvertently block the camera's view. Additionally, the camera may not capture light in the same way as an officer's eye. Here is the relevant, raw, body-camera footage that was captured by the involved Denver police officer's body-worn cameras. Again, viewer discretion is advised. He's tossed the knife. He's sitting in my car. How about we take a, get over here. We'll take a car up further. Get on this side of my car. He tossed the knife. He tossed the knife. He tossed the knife. Hold on. He tossed the knife. Sits one at him. We're Harvard and Federal. Got one suspect down. We need a bus. Code 10. All right. Officers are OK. He has tossed the knife. We need a bus. We need the EMS to move up. Are you good? Yeah. You OK? Yeah, yeah. All right. All right. Hold up. Listen to me. Sir, hands out to your side on your stomach. Hands out to your side. Hands out to your side on your stomach, sir. Hands out to your side. Hands out to your side. We have cars coming now. We're going to start taking them into custody. Sissy, glove up. Where's the gun at? He has a knife right there. Do a search right there on his backside. All right, buddy. Stay on. Stand for now. Do we need a supervisor on? I took your weapon. Did you shoot? I didn't shoot. I got a taser. Yeah. So you have to take my car. He has a taser pro bottom. Just so you know. Am I going to turn off now? West, I need you to follow this ambulance, please. Go to the pipe. Am I going to shut off now? Yes.  All right. The Denver District Attorney will review the details of this incident and determine if the officers' actions were in compliance with Colorado law. After the district attorney renders a decision, the Denver Police Department's Internal Affairs Bureau and Conduct Review Bureau will complete an administrative review of this case. The details of the case will be presented to a use of force review board, which is made up of community members and police command officers. This board will determine whether the actions of the Denver Police officers were in compliance with the high standards expected of every Denver Police officer related to policies, training, and tactics. For additional information regarding the investigation of critical incidents or the Denver Police Department's use of force policies, you may visit denvergov.org slash police. Thank you for taking the time to view this critical incident briefing.


So, good morning. My name is Heert Erthruven. I will present to you about getting device pass-through working on embedded arm. First, something about me. I started on real computers a long time ago as a hobbyist, Commodore 64 Amiga, and then about 25 years ago, I switched to Linux on various platforms. Most of that was on real hardware. There was some virtualization on IBM mainframe at university with VM. When I worked for Sony, I worked on many things. One of them was Linux on cell broadband engine on the PS3. That was also some kind of virtualization because Linux run on top of a hypervisor, and about five years ago, I became self-employed offering consultant service for embedded Linux work, and I've been mostly working doing upstream kernel work for Renesas on their ARM-based SOCs. In 2001, I went to an interesting small present conference here in Brussels called OSDEM. It was really great. The next year, it changed to FOSDEM. I attended, of course, and I continued every year, and in 2004, I joined the Embedded Track Program Committee. This year, unfortunately, there's no embedded track due to some miscommunication, but next year, there will be again, and next year, it will be the 20th anniversary of FOSDEM, so better be there. So, LEDs. I guess you all know LEDs, and you all like LEDs. If you take an embedded engineer, the first thing he wants to do is blink an LED. So, I made a presentation about that, and I got inspiration for the title, Getting to Blinky from a video series from Electronics Consultancy Company. They have a video about making your own board with LED using KeyCat. That's really fun and cool, but this is a virtualization desk room, so I'm not going to talk that much about hardware, but about virtualization. So, how did I get to this? So, as I said before, I'm doing consultancy work for Renesas. So, they have ARM SOCs with lots of components inside like GPIO, IOMMUSata, more about that later, and they were interested in doing virtualization. They didn't really know what the use cases were. They said, well, let's start with something simple. So, what can be more simpler than getting a blinking an LED? So, if you have an LED connected to a GPIO, then you can control it from Linux, from user space by exporting the GPIO and writing values to it to control it in CISFS. Yeah, some people have probably commented I should use the new Cardef GPIO API, but this is working fine. So, that's how we can do it on real hardware. Now, the question is, can we control the LED from a virtualized guest too? And that turned out to be a bit more complex, because there didn't seem to be any existing solution for that yet. So, let's first talk a bit about virtualization. So, one of the ways to virtualize systems is using QAMU. So, if you have real hardware, on top of that you run your operating system, which is, of course, Linux, and then you can run lots of applications on top, and one of them is QAMU. QAMU will create for you virtual guest hardware, and it will emulate CPU, RAM, IO blocks. And on top of that, you can run just Linux, like on real hardware, and applications as well. Of course, because everything is emulated, this is not that high-performance. So, fortunately, we later got kernel-based virtual machine, or KVM, if your CPU has virtualization extensions, that it means that you can just have CPU and RAM access directly from the guest without any emulation involved. So, KVM and the virtualization extensions will make sure that the normal memory management unit is not only used to maintain separation between OS and user space, and between multiple users on user, but also between the guest and the host, and multiple applications and operating systems running on the guest. That's only for the CPU and RAM. With the advent of virtual function IO or VF IO, you could also have direct access to the hardware. So, VF IO will use the IO MMU at the bottom here. So, VF IO will use the IO MMU, so IO devices that use direct memory access, and does have access to RAM, will only access the RAM that's allocated to the guest and not interfere with other systems, because the guest will access the hardware directly. Performance can be much better. Now, let's try this in, yeah, so there are multiple types of virtual VF IO. The most common one is the PCI-based, which is used already on servers. It's working well, it's a mature solution. It's fairly standardized thanks to PCI configuration space. You have vendor and device IDs. You can easily identify the hardware that you're having. The base address registers indicate what parts of the hardware are being used, some capabilities in the config space as well. If you want to use a device from a guest, you first have to make sure that Linux no longer uses the device itself on the host. So, the first thing you do is, so the first thing you have to do is unbind the PCI device from the driver on the host. For that you need to know the PCI domain, the bus, subsystem and function it's represented by. Then you have to tell Linux that you want to bind this device to VF IO PCI and do the final binding. After that, you can launch QEMU and you just pass some special options where you specify the device to use, and that's it and QEMU will take care of the rest. Now, I have to say there are other ways as well like this VF IO for AP and CCW, which are used on IBM mainframes. There's also something for the ARM AMBA bus, but that don't seem to be any support for that in QEMU yet. Maybe they use other solutions, other virtualization techniques. Now on ARM embedded systems, you typically don't have a PCI bus inside the SOC. There may be some external PCI bus where you can plug in PCI express cards or something like that. But you have on SOC devices that are described in the device tree. So there's a compatible value that specifies what kind of device it is. There are special properties to specify what resources you use like register address space and interrupts. That's quite similar to PCI, but there are also can be lots of other properties that may be device specific. You can have P handles which are basically references to other device nodes in the systems for interrupt controllers and whatever other things, especially for multimedia devices, this can be quite complicated. If you have endpoints and things like that, you can have subnodes describing things connected to the device. And all of this is much more complex than a simple PCI device. And it's also less standardized. And so far, there's very limited hardware support for that. So I noticed that there's support for two 10 gigabit internet adapters from AMD and Calxida in both Linux and in QAMU. But that's about it. To export the device from the host to the guest with using VFIO platform, it's very similar to VFIO PCI. So you just have to unbind it, override matching and tell it explicitly bind to VFIO platform. After that, you launch QAMU and pass the device and that's actually very similar and it sounds simple. So how does this work in practice? So on the Renaissance board I had, I had the GPIO block, now multiple GPIO blocks, but one of them is connected to LED. It's described in DT like this. So first you have compatible values, register, range, interrupts and GPIO cells to indicate that it's a GPIO controller. Those are the most important parts or other things like some of the GPIO ranges is related to the pin controller, but we don't care about that. And there are some clocks, some power domains and resets, but they don't seem to be that interesting at first. Most important part is you have register range and if you don't use input, you don't care about interrupts neither. So let's try that. So first you tell it which GPIO controller you want to unbind. You get some scary warning from the system if you unbind it because some other GPIOs on that chip are in use for other things, but we don't care. You tell your platform driver to buy into that specific device and that's it. Oops, we get an error. There should be a reset function. What's that? Let's talk about resets first. So in virtualization, they want to play it very safe. So the idea is that before you export hardware to the guest, you want to reset it so it's in a known state. After the guest has used it, you also want to reset it so you know it's in a same state for further use. So that's solved by having a device specific via via your reset driver to be written for each and every device to be exported. So currently in the Linux kernel to support for these two 10 gigabit internet adapters, they can be reset and there's nothing else. So can we do better? So if you look at a typical modern SOC, you have lots of components there and in many cases there's actually a single reset controller that can reset all of those modules. But you have to be a bit careful there because the topology can be annoying. So in the case A, you just have a module with a single reset, that's fairly something simple. If you assert that reset, that module will be reset. Okay, you can have a reset that's shared by two modules like B and C. That's definitely a no go for virtualization if you want to export device B to the guest. It means that you cannot reset it without also affecting device B, which may be used on the host or exported to a different guest or something like that. So that's a no go. You could have a device with multiple resets, also very complicated because you don't know in the general case, which device, which reset you have to assert first or maybe some ordering requirements. Or you could have some deeply connected two devices, A and B, E and F, for example, that have multiple resets impacting both devices that's complicated. So Linux has a reset subsystem where you can just reset devices if the reset topology is described correctly in the D. So I was wondering, do we really need a device-specific reset routine? For the case A, we can just use the standard Linux reset subsystem and do that. So I wrote a patch for that, that's still not yet accepted upstream because people are still worried about implications on some systems with couple reset topologies. But the solution I have there will only allow to use reset in case A where you have a single dedicated reset line for the device which should be safe. So with that patch, we can continue and see what happens. Oops, we need IO-MMU group. So as I said before, the IO-MMU allows to use devices from a guest, that devices that use DMA and will read and write from memory. Of course, you want to prevent that the device controlled from the guest will access memory that's not allocated to the guest. So the IO-MMU takes care of that very similar to a normal memory management unit that does similar things for accesses from CPU to memory. Now, in our case for the GPIO control, it doesn't have the DMA. Fortunately, there seems to be a VFIO, no IO-MMU mode in Linux and we can enable that. And then we will be set later. This GPIO device does not use DMA. So in general, can you know whether a device uses DMA? Because you will need IO-MMU only if it uses DMA and else you can do without. For PCI, it's always assumed that there's IO-MMU available. The IO-MMU hierarchy, how it's connected to the system, it's always well-known from the bus hierarchy. So that's very simple. For platform devices described in DT, it's a bit more difficult. So there's a special IO-MMU's property in DT which you can, which you have to use to indicate that the device is connected to IO-MMU. So if that property is present, the device will use DMA for sure. Some devices, they don't do DMA themselves. They use a DMA controller that is indicated in DT by using a DMA's property. And if that property is present, then you know that the device uses DMA. You have to be careful there because the DMA will be handled by the DMA controller. So ideally that one should have IO-MMU's property too as it will use DMA without IO-MMU, which is unsafe. If none of these is present, then it's not safe to assume that the device doesn't do DMA. Perhaps it's a device that is not connected to IO-MMU and then it's unsafe to use from a guest. Or perhaps IO-MMU support is not yet enabled for the device in the device tree. That's also a problem. So better safe than sorry, we only want to use export devices to the guest when they have IO-MMU support. But for this CPIO example, it's safe to not use one. So with that patch to use VFIO without MMU, Linux is happy and we have the device exported to the guest. So let's start launching QMU. So as I said before, for now there's limited support in QMU for instantiating devices. So I wrote some code to instantiate minimal GPIO device node for the Rcar GPIO controller, which basically adds this to the device tree of the guest. And then we can launch QMU, we'll pass it with the device we want to use. It fails, oops, it cannot open a VFIO file. All right, we don't have that file. There's a def VFIO no IMMU zero file instead of a zero file. So while Linux has support for this VFIO no MMU mode, that never got accepted into QMU. So I'm wondering who's using it, perhaps some other virtualization techniques. Fortunately, you can find a patch on the mailing list archives to enable support for that. And after that, yes, Linux in the guest initialize the GPIO driver, and we're happy. We can control the LED from the guest, similar like we do on the host. And wait a bit, nothing happens. That's annoying. It turns out that we forgot some important details. So how do as you'll see is do power management. So typically you have lots of devices, there and they're all controlled to power controller. And the power controller can turn off power to one device when it's not in use to save power. Usually in embedded people care about power consumption in service space, they also care, but it's less. Of course you cannot use a device when the power is turned off. One other thing they may have is a clock controller where the, which supplies a clock to each module. If the module is not in use, the clock will be turned off. Of course the module won't work without that clock. You could have real complex system with hierarchical power areas, clock domains, and whatever, and that's actually what we have on the Renaissance embedded SOCs. So we need to control the clock domain and the power domain and whatever because if the device is off, the hardware manual calls that undefined behavior. If you're lucky, like in my case, nothing happened, but if you're unlucky, it could cause exceptions and even crush the whole system, including the host, which is definitely not something you want. So how do you control clocks? Many drivers still do that using explicit clock management, but that doesn't work well because Linux has this nice system called runtime PM where it will take care of that automatically. For power areas, there's no other option than to use runtime PM. You cannot just tell the Linux that power on this power area. So the solution there was to add runtime PM support to the VFIO driver in Linux that one did get accepted upstream and after that, we have clock control. One question there to ask is, can't we delegate this to the guest because the guest knows better when the device will be used and will not be used so it can power off the device when not used, it's like that. So yeah, that sounds interesting, but yeah, since it may crush the system if it does wrong on some SOCs, that's not a good solution. So what did we get? No, it's working, great. We have an LED that works. Now the question is does this work for inbuttons too? And yes, it did, we needed some patch that was fortunately being developed in parallel by somebody else. Can we get this to work for other devices as well? Some people try that, works well. I tried it for serial atta and then I discovered some other issue that it only works with standard ARM IOMMUs in the system, so we need patches for that. The SATA drivers still use explicit clock management instead of runtime PM, all things we can fix. But so it means we can add devices support in QMU but all of that required adding new code. Can we do that in a generic way? So I wrote code to try to do that in a generic way, just by copying the device node from the host to the guest. So the register and inter properties are remopt. All simple properties can be copied from the host. Basically simple properties are the ones that do not have P handles. They do not refer to other nodes, so they can be copied. Unfortunately, DT does not have a system where it provides type information so that was a bit difficult. So the solution I took was only copy properties without the size because they cannot have a P handle or properties that are in a white list. Properties handled by the host like power management, isolation, IOMMUs, reset, ping controls, they can be ignored. Clocks, I reject them if there's no power management going on. Subnotes, no that's too complicated but for simple devices it works. So I have a patch for that. It worked with serial atta device I had. So it will transform the above device node from the host to the one below for the guest. So our conclusions. So Cs we usually don't have PCI but we have IOMMUs and people are interested in virtualization so it makes sense to use device pass through there for high bandwidth devices. For simple devices I've shown that we can have a generic code to handle that. For more complex devices you will still have to need a device specific instantiation code but probably the best way there is to provide some help is that it's easy to write those routines. There are still some small difficulties to handle. Clocks are not always used for power management. Some drivers really need to know the clock rate and maybe multiple clocks for that we may need some other solution. This is not yet support devices that don't use DMA themselves but you do the DMA controller. Another typical things like yeah is your hardware suitable for virtualization? Are there things using devices that share some resources and you cannot export one device of it to the guest because it will interfere with the other device that uses similar resources. So we really have to teach the SOC and both designers to take virtualization into account. Yeah, which devices are suitable for exporting to the guest? Maybe the new D binding schematics can help there in doing something. Now back to the GPIOs for one more minute. So in real world GPIOs can be useful for devices as well so you may have a guest that wants to control a relay or power switching on the host. But using device pass through is probably not the best solution there. I did a proof of concept using emulation where I used the existing PLO61 GPIO controller that's in part of the standard QAMU ARM virtual machine. I wrote support that it uses the lib GPIOD back end on Linux so you could just tell it for example with the command line there that you want to export GPIOs 11, 12 and 13 on the GPIO controller specified there to the virtual GPIOs 012 on the PLO61 in the guest. Probably we want something better there than emulation. Some per virtualization that mimics the lib GPIOD API would be good to have. And we may want to expand this to similar systems like the Pulse Width Medulation system in Linux which uses a similar way to export PWM outputs to CZFS like GPIO did. And then we can do motor control and control RGB LEDs. So basically that's it. Thanks and acknowledgments. Questions, I will have to take them. Yeah, sure. Yes. So you mentioned in your talk that the Renaissance were interested in virtualization but didn't find the application. Did you find that? No, not really. Yeah, so the question was that Renaissance was interested in virtualization and what I found out in the meantime what they really want to do and so far we don't. But they have many customers and we're not always aware of what the customers actually want. But... Thank you.