Fifth Estate 28, April 15-30, 1967 Add to the Bookbuilder

A dinner to celebrate the Fifth Anniversary of the American Civil Liberties Union will be held at the Rackham Building on Saturday, April 29.

The dinner will feature a tribute to Dr. Walter G. Bergman, a Detroit educator for more than 40 years and a leader in civil liberties organization in Michigan.

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Twenty-five members of the Detroit Amsterdam Committee walked down Cass avenue on April 1 to protest the pollution in our city.

Headed by Monteith professor Jonathan Schwartz, the protestors wore surgical masks and carried signs demanding that “Citizens, Reclaim your City.” Professor Schwartz told the FIFTH ESTATE, “For the future, we need music. I propose that we develop rhythm bands with extra instruments so that anybody who wishes to join in can do so.”

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“Hey people now smile on your brother.

Let me see you get together and love one another right now.”

The Detroit tribes will gather together for the first time in many moons for the first modern Michigan Pow Wow on Belle Isle, Sunday, April 30.

The gathering, which will begin at noon and continue through into the night, will center on the Belle Isle bandshell and spread out from there. Everyone will be safe and in the company of friends, in many cases friends he never knew he had. Detroit, the city of instant paranoia, will overcome its self-induced fears on that day and move into the future with the fire of love burning through its citizens’ beings.

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Arrangements are being completed for 100 poetry readings in the classrooms of 43 inner city parochial and public junior and senior high schools by 26 locally and nationally known poets. The Poetry Readings are being sponsored by DETROIT ADVENTURE and the Academy of American Poets in cooperation with the Detroit Public Schools.

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As part of Vietnam Week, April 8–15, there are activities taking place in hundreds of communities across the nation. Everything from teach-ins to demonstrations have occurred giving evidence of increased opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Locally, Vietnam Week began early with a scheduled debate between the Wayne Committee to End the War in Vietnam and Wayne University Young Republican Club on April 5^th.

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Abortion is the current controversy in the Michigan Senate.

Senator John E. McCauley, Wyandotte Democrat is sponsor of a new abortion bill, and feels it could be passed, if released for discussion by the Judiciary Committee. The bill, somewhat limited in its scope, is nonetheless liberal in its attempt to revise the existing laws.

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The Detroit Love-In, to be held on Belle Isle April 30^th, will be the first large-scale manifestation of the New Spirit of Detroit, and everyone who feels that spirit and believes in it, and everyone who doubts it or would deny it, should be there to make it public once and for all.

Other events scheduled for the Trans-Love weekend include a tree dance/concert Friday night in the Mart Room at WSU (on the second floor of Mackenzie Hall, Cass and Putnam), with the great Seventh Seal donating their music and energy for their people. Everyone is welcome. On Saturday night, the 29^th, Trans-Love will sponsor a huge music explosion in the Community Arts Auditorium, Cass and Kirby, on the Wayne campus.

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EDITORS: Harvey Ovshinsky, Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Cathy West

NEWS EDITOR: Frank Joyce

ART: Gary Grimshaw

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR: John Sinclair

CALENDAR: Rhona Whipple

FILM EDITORS: Joe Fineman, Shirley Hamburg

ADVERTISING: Leon Brenner

CIRCULATION: Wilson Lindsey

TRAVEL EDITOR: Sheil Salasnek

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At first glance, Les Biederman doesn’t appear to be the martyr type. He requested an assignment several years ago in the so-called “inner-city.” Placed in Jefferson Junior High School, just across from the Jeffries Housing Project, he found a sufficient challenge with those now popularly termed the “disadvantaged.”

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Over 70 major multi-media artists, poets, dramatists, dancers, happening and event producers, scientists and musicians will be involved this summer in an extensive inter-arts collaboration near Woodstock, New York.

Participating intermedia artists include Lindsey Decker, Dean Fleming, Daniel Larue Johnson, Peter Forakis, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kirby, Jay Milder, Marta Minujin, Charles Ross, Carolee Schneeman, Michael Snow and Phyllis Yampolsky. Other representatives include Dizzy Reece (jazz musician and European critic), Steve Reich (tape composer), John Vacarro and the Playhouse of the Ridiculous. Directors of the poetry and film projects at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, Joel Oppenheimer and Stanon Kaye. Editors Dick Higgins (the Something Else Press), Alan Katzman (The East Village, Other) and Richard Schechner (Tulane Drama Review).

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UPS — The San Francisco Mime Troupe seems to be out of the frying pan and into the fire, Canadian style.

The Troupe, which performs social satire, had just been acquitted on an obscenity charge in Denver (FE #26, March 15–30, 1967) and had left for the University of Calgary in Canada for a scheduled performance of their production of “Minstrel Show, or: Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.”

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The champion fighter for civil liberties in this town may turn out to be that famous right-winger Donald Lobsinger, chairman of Breakthrough. His sometimes puerile and offensive tactics may help fortify our always precarious constitutional rights.

The latest Lobsinger incident raises a host of exciting issues which must elicit the sympathies of the civil libertarian.

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Every third corner of Paris has a commemorative stone to honor those who died for the liberation of the city in August 1944. Every provincial town has some plaque to name its mort pour la France. As testimony to the nation’s suffering, these slabs of stone and steel are laudable, but as remembrances of glory and duty they should be destroyed.

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John B. Logan, a professor at Notre Dame University, has been named the Miles Memorial Poet for 1967 at Wayne State University.

Professor Logan, currently a visiting professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, will accept the honor, which includes a $1,000 grant, at 8-p.m. Sunday, April 23, in the Community Arts Auditorium on campus. Logan will also read his poetry at the event which will climax the 21^st Annual Miles Modern Poetry Week at WSU.

A team of medical men is in South Vietnam on a mission that might result in a group of napalm-burned children coming to Detroit for surgery and treatment.

The team consists of Dr. John Constable of the Committee of Responsibility and four other doctors. Doctor Constable is a plastic surgeon.

According to Dr. Paul Lowenger of the Lafayette Clinic here the medical men are doing a survey of badly burned children in the war-torn land. They are preparing dossiers on children who are to be brought to this country.

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Reviewed

The Marijuana Papers: A comprehensive reference work of the essential classic and contemporary documents on marijuana. Edited by David Solomon. New York: The Bobs-Merrell Company. 448 pp. $10.00.

If one considers the huge tax loss that would result from a substantial public shift to marijuana from alcoholic beverages and the power of the liquor lobby, it is easier to understand why this mildly stimulating and relaxing herb has been the victim of such repressive laws.

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The title of this article suggests an attitude, which has characterized a generation of adolescents, recently departed. It is, as far as I can tell, a lost attitude, upended and overwhelmed in the maelstrom of homogenized eyes and freak-outs.

Considered as a species, I have to refer to them as The Science Hipsters, young people, like myself, who grew up surrounded by the romantic aura of modern science.

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Federico Garcia Lorca’s folk tragedy, “Blood Wedding,” opened on Friday, April 14, and will continue for seven performances at Wayne State University’s Bonstelle Theatre.

“Blood Wedding” is a poetic play in the tradition of peasant rituals. On her wedding day, a bride runs off with a man from an enemy clan. The bridegroom hunts them and both men are killed. The bride and the bridegroom’s mother are left face-to-face in a mystery of passion and death.

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From LA Free Press (UPS)

Get 15 pounds of bananas and scrape off the insides of the peels. This will take one person one hour to finish.

Put peeling in pots, add water and boil for two to three hours—until you get a solid paste.

Spread on cookie sheets and dry in oven for about fifteen minutes. Final product is a fine black powder.

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In about one month Expo 67 will open in Canada on Montreal’s Ile Sainte-Helene. It will last until October 27, with April 28^th as the opening day. One expects 35 million visitors during this half year of “Happenings” on a grand scale. The Montreal Gazette writes that Expo 67’s network of canals will be filled with water from the River St. Lawrence, which will be tinted blue.

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Belle Isle at springtime is a world in itself.

Go with some friends and rent tandum bikes (make sure you wear something you don’t mind getting wet), and head down Central towards the Scott Memorial Fountain. The main fountain is a gigantic monstrosity with beautiful turtle statues; further down is a step fountain that’s fun to climb on. All that water ends up in the lagoon that makes a pretty nice foot bath if you can get into it without a guard seeing you.

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Detroit LEMAR will organize and sponsor a May Day Smoke-In to take place in Grand Circus Park on May 1 at 12 noon.

The Smoke-In will be held to demonstrate the strength of those who would have the archaic Michigan and Federal marijuana laws changed and have marijuana made legal for all. Free banana joints and other legal herbs will be passed out, along with pro-marijuana literature explaining the LEMAR position to passers-by.

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(Washington Independent) On August 5, 1966, Austin Burton was arrested in New York City, where he lives, for “mailing obscene matter in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1463 (1964).”

Bail was set at a modest $200,000. (Contrast this with the $10,000 bond set on Clay Shaw accused by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison of taking part in a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.)

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A Man For All Seasons may not be a play for all seasons, but it certainly is a godsend in this particularly impoverished one. A good deal has been written elsewhere about this commendable but somewhat less than considerable play.

In adapting his work for the screen, Robert Bolt once again both idealized and oversimplified Thomas More, who was, at times, both more religiously fanatical and broadly facetious than Bolt’s protagonist. By giving us such a flawless man, Bolt gives us a flawed play and film. From the film, moreover, some of the play’s strongest and wittiest lines have been excised.

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The American Civil Liberties Union has hailed the recent action of a Federal District Court Judge in Denver temporarily barring the U.S. Air Force from ordering into combat service a Captain who objects to serving in the Viet Nam War.

Judge William E. Doyle, on March 29, ordered a temporary restraining order which would temporarily prohibit the Air Force from assigning Capt. Dale Noyd to any combat, combat training or combat support activities until at least April 19. Judge Doyle set that date for a hearing on the preliminary injunction sought by Capt. Noyd.

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Cleveland poet D.A. Levy is in jail. He was arrested March 27 for publishing obscene literature and contributing to the delinquency of minors, which means he was reading poetry to kids under 18. Bail has been set at $1,000. Levy can’t raise it. “Poets in Cleveland make 89 cents a day,” he says, “on good days.”

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After reading an article in the FIFTH ESTATE entitled “Detroit’s Shameless Old Lady, the Eastern Market” [FE #27, April 1–15, 1967], I was a bit pissed off at all the lies.

I was very interested in the ‘old Lady’. last summer, so interested that I worked alongside these ‘black gypsies’ for 2-1/2 months. After reading this article, I feel that these people were terribly underrated.

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