Fifth Estate 24, February 15-28, 1967 Add to the Bookbuilder

“Everything I say will come out just a little bit different, I don’t mean on the transcript, but as it leaves my mind and comes through my mouth, it gets a little bit messed up just around about the mouth, where the words start doing it.”

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Miles: Are there any particular influences on your music?

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FIFTH ESTATE subscribers almost didn’t get their last issue because the Post Office couldn’t make up its mind whether the paper was pornographic or not.

A Postal Inspector Brown called the FIFTH ESTATE office and invited us to come down and discuss a new bulk rate. When our people arrived, the Inspector told them that he had to call the state postal authorities. Specifically, Brown objected to the ‘Poem for Warner Stringfellow’ by Detroit poet John Sinclair. The post office was upset about an alleged statement by Lt. Stringfellow that Sinclair was a “worthless prick.”

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On Tuesday night the 24^th of January 56 Detroit citizens were arrested and held at least overnight in the City Jail. Most of these arrests—43—were entirely illegal and unconstitutional, and there is considerable doubt as to the legality of the arrests of the 13 people who were subsequently charged with selling and / or dispensing (giving away), and/or possessing, varying quantities of marijuana.

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EDITOR

Harvey Ovshinsky

MANAGING EDITOR

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

NEWS EDITORS

Robert Fleck, Frank Joyce

ART

Dave Carlin

CIRCULATION

Wilson Lindsey

TRAVEL EDITOR

Sheil Salasnek

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR

John Sinclair

CALENDAR

Rhona Whipple

ADVERTISING

Leon Brenner

FILM EDITORS

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There will be a meeting of the people who were illegally arrested and detained in the January 24^th “great marijuana raids” to discuss the possibilities of bringing suit against the Detroit Police Department for violation of their civil rights.

Attorney Dennis James will address the group and will answer questions about the legal problems involved. All those arrested who wish to look into this matter are urged to attend. The meeting will be held at the Artists’ Workshop, 4857 John Lodge, at 8:00 p.m. Monday, February 20, and will be sponsored by the 24^th of January Movement. People desiring more information can call the chairman of the subcommittee, Rita Cole, at 358–0425.

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The “great narcotics hoax” was pretty weird any way you look at it, and I’m happy too that this issue carries a “fact sheet” on the big “raids.” The daily “newspapers” and the idiot TV and radio interests do a good job as police propagandists, as well they should (like, when you consider the Commissioner Ray Girardin was a “newsman” for 30 years on the Times, you get the idea), and as usual the only source for anything even resembling the “facts” is this paper. But they know they haven’t got long now, and they’re doing everything in their power to hold off the revolution—which revolution, however, will not be stopped. Like the cop said to me, “I just hope those kids aren’t listening to you,” and all I could tell him was, well, they’re YOUR kids, baby, and they don’t HAVE to listen to me at all—you’re doing a pretty good job of alienating them all by yourself. They don’t NEED me to tell them anything. Yes.

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In a spasm of concern for the political education of Oakland University students, the O.U. Young Dems invited Donald Lobsinger, chairman of the ultra-rightwing Breakthrough organization, to address the student body on Monday, February 6.

It was a circus. Over 400 people packed Oakland’s Gold Room to point, gape, and laugh at the Superfreak. All the campus hippies were there. SDS came to chuckle. A festival atmosphere pervaded the crowd.

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On Thursday, February 23 at 8 p.m. the editorial board of GUERRILLA will present a program of new Latin American poetry in Lower Helen DeRoy Aud. at Wayne State University. The program will include a film on the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle and a lecture on Hugo Blanco, the imprisoned Peruvian peasant leader. The evening will be presented in cooperation with the Committee To Defend Latin American Political Prisoners.

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Smiling and serene Michio Kushi arrived in Detroit Tuesday, the 31^st day of January to talk about his life work, Macrobiotics. To audiences that night at the residence of Bill Reid and Ken Burns and at Jim Semark’s the next, he explained that Macrobiotics is a dietary approach to living based on the principle of yin and yang, two terms for which he has been unable to find an equivalent in our language.

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Surprise “hero” of the recent narcotics bust—Recorder’s Court Judge Frank Schemanske. Lena Sinclair (John’s wife) and three others were going to be held a second night without being formally charged, pending a chemical analysis of the stuff seized in the raids. When Lena’s pregnant condition was pointed out to the judge, he called the Narcotics Bureau and ordered the prisoners’ immediate release without bond of any kind.

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The draft law (Universal Military Service and Training Act) will expire in July of this year. Because this country is supposedly run democratically, there will be debate on the renewal of the bill in Congress. Because there is a war being waged in Viet Nam, the flow of men to Southeast Asia will not be hampered.

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Nothing demonstrates more clearly the intertwined nature of politics and the new music than a concert that I had the good fortune to be able to attend over the recent holidays. The concert was in New York’s Village Theatre, and it featured, besides the artistry of Jackie McLean, Marion Brown, Archie Shepp, and their respective groups, a short speech by none other than Stokely Carmichael.

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I visited the Grande for the first time in quite a while. Seems to have grown up. The lights are better, more people, wild pop clothes, and less self-conscious of ‘freaking out.’ The MC-5 played what has got to be the sound of the Big City. They come on with a rush of muscle; like being in the middle of a factory. It crashes and bangs and swirls you around; and it’s not a particularly easy trip. You sweat with them through some hard music.

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One doesn’t expect to read much about spectator sports in the Fifth Estate. The multi-underground nature of professional boxing today, however, makes it and perhaps cock-fighting, an apt subject for followers of deviant American culture. Moreover, there is something of a tradition of writers, self styled or otherwise, commenting at least on heavyweight championships.

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Dr. Sheil Salasnek addressed a crowd of over 130 people at the LEMAR Legalize Marijuana meeting Feb. 2^nd in Lower DeRoy Auditorium.

The paranoia from the recent bust was evident as everyone originally sat in the back of the room, avoiding the (bugged for what?) front rows of seats. However, after Joe Mulky urged everyone to move UP, and the doctor started talking, the meeting turned to a relaxed and comprehensive discussion of LSD and the psychedelics.

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Are the officials of Dow Chemical Company, the local Selective Service system, and the Wayne University administration guilty of complicity in war crimes? This will be the subject of public hearings to be held at Wayne University between April 8 and 15.

The decision to hold the hearings was made unanimously at a planning conference for Vietnam Week in late January. The conference was called by the Wayne Committee to End the War in Vietnam and was chaired by Charles Larson, president of the Student-Faculty Council at Wayne. Also represented to the Conference were Detroit and Oakland Students for a Democratic Society, the Fifth Estate, the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Detroit Citizens for Peace in Vietnam, and the Young Socialist Alliance.

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To the Editor:

The recent bust of the Artists’ Workshop and surrounding area is indeed a tragedy. [See Narco Agents Raid Artists’ Workshop, [FE #23, February 1–15, 1967.] It’s a sign of the times too, for we are presently living under a totalitarian police state system and it’s getting worse all of the time.

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Having surveyed the recent New American Cinema products, one might easily be tempted to remain silent until an achievement of greater substance presents itself for evaluation. Yet, since an authentically New American Cinema is the concern of any conscious film artist, he must accept what is available as a concrete basis and subject it to a definite scrutiny, before he can discard or transcend it. For, assuming the existence of talent, it has precisely been a view of life without ideas, and a conception of art without theory that has prevented most of the New American Cinema film-makers from becoming true artists and thus the true spokesmen for their generation.

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FILM

FILM Famous Early Movie Series. Bringing Up Baby, with Cary Grant & Katherine Hepburn (1938). Henry Ford Museum Theatre. 2 & 4 p.m. Adm. 2/19

FILM Famous Films of Famous Directors III. Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, at Rackham Educ. Mem. Aud. 80 Farnsworth. 8:15 p.m. Adm. 2/25

FILM Film Arts International. Sadko, Liberal Arts Bldg. , Marygrove College, 8:15 p.m. Adm. 2/17

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