Retort is a community of about forty writers, teachers, artists, and activists, all self-styled opponents of capital and empire, which has been based for the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Retort is a motley crew - writers, artists, teachers, artisans, scientists, poets - joined in a web of sustaining friendships, who share an antagonism to the present order of things.
Retort has been meeting on a regular basis for the last two decades, for the most part to eat and drink together, but also to discuss politics, history, aesthetics, and the terms and tactics of root-and-branch opposition to capital, empire and the various versions of barbarism currently on offer.
There is a deep appreciation of old cafes and city taverns, competing with a tendency to favor the open air - rambles, the back country, tidepool picnics, wild swimming.
Retort's printing press had belonged to the eloquent Wobbly agitator Carlo Tresca, before he was assassinated on the streets of Manhattan, perhaps by agents of Benito Mussolini.