Fifth Estate 16, October 16-31, 1966 Add to the Bookbuilder

The poster announced a mass rally at Rev. Cleage’s Central United Church of Christ, where the “friends of Snick” present STOKELY C. CARMICHAEL, Chairman, Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee.

The spelling is different now though—“Snick” (picked up from TIME magazine’s bastardization & turned back on H. Luce) brings to the ear the sound of a knife clicking open, a guillotine swipe at a fat red neck & the head plopping softly into a basket full of identical heads, a nice fitting name indeed. In/deed.

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No matter what his choice of words, every newspaper editor is aware that he is bound to offend someone. The arrest and trial of Peter Zenger two hundred years ago and the bombing of the office of the WORKER in New York 4 weeks ago bear witness to this. The FIFTH ESTATE has not made everyone happy, nor would this be realistically possible. Some kind of people we displease send us threatening letters and make anonymous phone calls. Even our friends have had bitter words for us at times, as evidenced by our Letters to the Editor column, but this is to be expected and is a welcome indication that we are being read and thought about.

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Detroit is full of openings! Last weekend: Uncle Russ’s Gran-de Ballroom broke into the open with the MC5 and the High Society’s light show, both of which were just as they have to be—TOO MUCH. (William Blake: “Enough! or Too Much.” Charles Olson: “We must have / what we want.”) We are getting it. The Gran-de will be the place again this weekend, and hopefully for a lot more weekends, with the pounding MC5 and the great new band from Lansing, the Woolies, who just recorded their first sides on the West Coast last month with one of the heaviest guitar players anywhere, Ron English, featured. The High Society will be there too.

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Underground newspapers, books & magazines & records & posters

buttons & bumperstickers

all kinds of things you need

ESP RECORDS!! The FUGS Broadside album — the FUGS second album — Timothy Leary Speaks on LSD Albert Ayler Spirits Rejoice! New York Ear & Eye Control

Patty Waters Sings!

Marion Brown Quartet!

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[two_third padding=“0 20px 0 0”]Another window gone at the office of the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

RING — RING!

“Hello--Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam.”

“You Commie son of a bitch! If you have any more marches, you’re all going to wind up dead!”

Click!

And so it goes at the local office of one of the groups trying to bring about an end to the war in Vietnam. Committee members say this type of harassment increases when the organization is particularly active. Since last week the Committee announced in the FIFTH ESTATE its plans to hold a four — day long series of protests against the war, they are now bracing themselves for the inevitable bricks and phone calls.

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The Fifth Estate

923 Plum Street

Detroit, Michigan 48201

962–9336

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER

Harvey Ovshinsky

NEWS EDITOR

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASST.

Cathy West

ART EDITOR

Gary Grimshaw

PHOTOGRAPHY

Lena Sinclair

CARTOONIST

Rob Derminer

The Fifth Estate is a member of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS).

Maybe film was only playing possum. It sure looked dead, though... Nothing was happening. The few people I had managed to find that were interested in film were leaving town. Most of the good theaters were closing. There was obviously no hope. Then I wrote a couple columns for The Fifth Estate and BHANG, the floodgates opened. Things started happening. So many things that I can’t really cover them in depth, because of a lack of space and information; I just haven’t had time to learn all that I want to learn about them. All I can do is mention them and promise to elaborate sometime in the future.

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Please send one year’s subscription of this thing you call “The Fifth Estate’ to me. It gets pretty cold out here in the wintertime and I gotta have something to burn in my fireplace. Ever tried to heat a 3 room house with a flaming draft card?

Oh, Yea! One other thing. Please try to keep your columnist out of jail (i.e. John Sinclair). Now that I got MONEY invested in your organization (and I use the term very loosely), I would like to see it go somewhere. And I don’t mean prison.

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The men who play the new styles in jazz frequently tell me that they don’t like to call their music that—they see nothing desirable in having their art identified with the gin mills, criminal activities, hustling, and ruthless entrepreneurship and exploitation that characterize the jazz scene today. (Or for that matter, yesterday. Haven’t black artists always been forced to create in these circumstances?)

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Last month the Fort Hood Three were convicted and sentenced to prison terms of three years for Mora; and five years for Samas and Johnson. The Fort Hood Three, to perhaps refresh a few memories, are Pvt. Dennis Mora, Pvt. David Samas and PFC James Johnson—the three U. S. soldiers who refused to serve in Viet4 nam believing that the war is “immoral, unjust and illegal.”

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“The free election of masters eliminates neither the masters nor the slaves.”

—Herbert Marcuse

American politics, as has been noted here before, is the politics of non-alternatives and pseudo-choices. If we needed any evidence, the present election provides it. Search and fantasize as we might there simply are not any radical possibilities. Consider the following:

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Due to the incompetence of the Post Office bureaucracy the subscribers did not receive their FIFTH ESTATES until a week after they were mailed. This is a double drag since our office staff really busted their asses trying to see that the mailing got to the subscribers before the papers hit the streets. Well, have faith, God and the old P.O. willing you should have this in your paid subscriber’s hands the day after we get it back from the printers.

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The psychedelic dance concert, long an institution among San Francisco hippies, came to Detroit Friday and Saturday nights. Oct. 7^th and 8^th, at the Grande Ballroom, Grand River one block south of Joy Road. Judging from the enthusiasm of the crowd who made it, the venture was a success. It looks like this new form of entertainment is here to stay.

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A drug is known by the controversies that it raises as a person is known by the enemies he makes. The first argument around LSD was the kind of mental abnormality that it produced in research subjects. Some scientists contended the loss of contact with reality resembled schizophrenia while others said that it was comparable to a toxic mental condition such as may be seen with a high fever in a physical illness. The LSD psychosis was eventually conceded by most to be different from schizophrenia. It remains of scientific importance to study the changes associated with LSD but it cannot serve as a model for schizophrenia. It was hoped that drugs which cut short or prevented the LSD state of mental distress would be effective against schizophrenia. This was only partly true. Wishful thinking, attempts to find a short-cut to fame, poor observation and a lack of training in scientific method were responsible for the early conclusions that the LSD psychosis was like the schizophrenic illness and similar factors have led some workers to conclude that the medical use of LSD is a cure for illnesses ranging from neurosis to drug addiction.

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Saturday October 15

FILM. Famous Films of Famous Directors: Part. II. Akira Kurosawa’ s “Yojimbo”. Rackhman Aud. 80 Farnsworth, 8 p.m. Adm. 10/15

Sunday October 16

FILM, Famous Early Movie Series. Henry Ford Museum Theatre. 2 and 4 p.m. Adm. 10/16

PROGRAM. Student Sunday Program, movies and dancing. International Inst. 4–6 p.m. 10/16

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Unwind and uncomplicate. Let go, on Oct. 7 the Mime Troupe did. They touched on all the touchy issues. They gave us a quick look at ourselves, black and white.

The exaggerated makeup, the powder blue satin tails, the bentwood chairs were all an integral part of mime in the classic tradition, satirizing the minstrel show and putting us all down.

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In the last issue of the FIFTH ESTATE John Sinclair put down “acid rock” in favor of new-thing jazz, implying that Coltrane is really where it’s at and that rock is nowhere. His opinion revolves around the term “psychedelic”. Sinclair feels that jazz is truly psychedelic while rock merely exploits the term. I asked Robin Tyner, lead singer of the MC-5, now appearing at the Grande Ballroom, what he considers to be the true psychedelic music.

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On Thursday, October 6, two people could have gone to Cobo Hall and for one hundred dollars had a dinner and heard Vice-president Humphrey give a speech. If the political viewpoint of the two people was slightly skewed to the right they could have gone down the hall to the “Romney-Griffin Bandwagon Ball” for only one hundred and twenty-five dollars. The difference in price was because the Romney people had to pay the band.

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