Fifth Estate 39, October 1-15, 1967 Add to the Bookbuilder

The sphere of politics has gone full-circle with the newly organized Oakland County Chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom.

In the past, YAF has been considered a right-wing, conservative organization. Recently, the Oakland County YAF under the chairmanship of Terry Epton passed resolutions against the draft and against “laws regulating the sale possession and use of marijuana.”

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d.a. levy, 1960s

(UPS) The following is an interview with D.A. Levy, the nationally prominent young Cleveland poet who was twice arrested early this year because of his outspoken poetic opinions of the good mayor and his mucked-up administration of that city.

L.B.: When were you arrested on obscenity charges?

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Editor’s Note — The San Francisco Mime Troupe will perform Saturday, October 28 at 8:15 in The Detroit Institute of Arts Auditorium in a benefit performance for the Fifth Estate. The Mime Troupe was in Detroit last Fall and received rave reviews (from us) for their “Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.”

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(UPS) One of the most feared (and most frequently fantasied) of sexual activities is the orgy.

Right now you are probably fantasizing one of your own, right?

The word “orgy” is ambiguous. In its broadest sense it connotes a sensual activity which is pursued without restraint of appetite, or an “unbridled exercise of passions,” as my dictionary would have it.

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Well, the Detroit Teachers’ strike is over—and guess who got the royal screwing? About 175,000 black kids whose basic conditions of instruction were not improved more than a piddle.

The matriarchy of Union President Mare Ellen Riordan triumphed again. She and her Marygrove Mafia have succeeded in developing such tight control of that organization that it’s almost impossible to move without an approving glance from her.

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(UPS) FE note: If you read last issue’s column, (“Better Living—Thru Chemistry,” FE #38, September 15–30, 1967) please read this one also. Our advice would be that anything that can explode should be forgotten unless you are really into [sentence not finished in the print edition]

Further information on Superpot. If you heat lighter fluid near an open flame you’ll blow yourself up. In a pot of boiling water put the solution.

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Minnesota has by far the largest acreage of wild grass of any state in the nation, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics figures show.

Last year county weed inspectors reported that they had discovered 1,723 acres of Cannabis in the state. To the inspectors it’s “just another weed”.

This spring an inspector attended a town meeting in a small Minnesota community. “Did you know you have marijuana growing in the town?” he asked.

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Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Can long continued use of spray deodorants cause cancer of the armpits?

ANSWER: At first, I thought your letter was a put-on. In fact, that might have been your intention but, nevertheless, you raise an interesting question. Certainly there has been no epidemic of cancer of the axilla or armpit. But spray deodorants have not been in use for very long. Cigarette smoking causes cancer of the lungs but it takes about 20 years for it to develop. We don’t yet have 20 years experience with spray deodorants.

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a review of

Pot: A Handbook Of Marijuana, by John Rosevear (University) Books, $4.95).

I first met John Rosevear when I was dealing grass in 1964. He came to my apartment with two notorious Ann Arbor dealers who had a bag of imported Panama Red, the finest grass to hit Detroit since I’ve been here. It seems they were in the habit of flying to Panama to pick up the grass themselves, to make sure nothing went wrong in the shipping. At that time Rosevear had just recently been turned on to the joys of marijuana smoking and he told me of the plot of pot he was growing in a vacant lot across from his house in Ann Arbor. He was already working on his book of grass, which he claimed ecstatically would turn on a lot of straight people to marijuana.

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FE note: The following is excerpted from an interview with Mike Bloomfield, lead guitarist of the Electric Flag. In deleted portions of the interview, which will appear in its entirety in the next issue of Scene magazine, Bloomfield traces his musical development and his split with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to form the Flag. He discusses some of his favorite musicians, tells why he canceled his recent Bowl appearance with the Mamas and Papas, and some of the joys and hangups of his art.

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If your government is waging a criminal war do you serve the country best by cooperating?

Who served Germany best under Hitler? Those who obeyed orders and helped kill the Jews? Or the handful of Germans who chose prison and even death rather than cooperate?

Who upheld Russian honor in 1956? Those who obeyed orders, marched into Hungary, and shot down students and workers—or those troops who refused to fire?

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It is hard to reach you guys. Once you go through the doors of that induction center it is almost impossible to get to you. Well, you are inside now. Maybe you are at some base in the U.S. getting your basic training. Maybe you are stationed in Germany. Maybe you’ve gotten your orders for Vietnam. Maybe you are already there.

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London (UNS) By Mail — Stokely Carmichael participated in the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London at the Round House.

During his stay here, he also spoke with Black people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies.

On Sunday, July 23, he addressed a massive, mostly Black, session of the Congress and announced he would be unable to attend further meetings next week because he was leaving unexpectedly.

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A massive national denouncement of the continuing war in Vietnam and the Selective Service System is being readied for the week of Oct. 16–22, and by all indications it should well be the largest demonstration of its type in American history.

The Resistance does not recognize deferments, for they are part of the system. By accepting a deferment, a person does nothing to change that system.

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Over the weekend of September 8–10, a Detroit Area High School Anti-war Conference was held. Many concrete resolutions came out of it, including “support of the October 21^st demonstration in Washington; support of all activities based around the confrontation; that a call go out to all high school students to participate in the march and organize around it. That they march in it under their own banners.”

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There may be no smoke signals on the horizon or the beat of drums within earshot—but the United States has a candidate for President on the Indian ticket, once he is accepted into the tribe.

The candidate is Austin Burton, who is best known to Fifth Estate readers as the man who sent a brochure for the United Artificial penis to Luci Johnson’s husband and was arrested for mailing obscene matter and held on $200,000 bond. (See Fifth Estate, April 15–30, 1967). Burton is seeking to represent the New York state tribe of Oneida Indians and is being aided by Princess Sunbeam of that tribe.

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“The American war machine reaps a whirlwind that engulfs our country and threatens the world. Three billion dollars a month, which could be spent to attack the intolerable conditions of our disinherited cities is spent instead to kill and destroy in Vietnam. The insulted’ and injured at home have no choice but to act out their despair by rebelling.”

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Sept. 25, 1967

Dear Fifth Estaters,

The Spike-Drivers almost became America’s first folk martyrs while doing an innocent gig in Burlington, Vt. The club manager freaked out and demanded we stop playing this “Psydillik” music, because it irritated a few of his beer-swilling regulars. He craved our last year’s soft pap rock sound. When we told him it was impossible to go backwards, he plied the local gorilla movement with free beer to get them to harass us and goad us into quitting the gig so he wouldn’t have to pay us.

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Jim Garrison is looking for the man whose photo appears on this page. Garrison thinks he may be one of the conspirators in the assassination of President Kennedy. [Web archive note: the photo does not appear in the original FE print edition.]

The photo, first published almost four years after the event in the September 15 Berkeley Barb, is a blow-up of part of a frame from a film which shows him seized by police and released.

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Probably one of the most unusual groups ever to meet in Detroit is the Aetherius Society headquartered at 20771 West 8 Mile Rd. The Aetherius Society is a worldwide non-profit organization which was organized says Miss Edna Spencer, head of the Detroit Branch “at the command of the Cosmic Masters who inhabit Mars and Venus and other highly-cultured planets in this solar system.”

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After two years on the corner of John Lodge and Warren Avenue the Artist’s Workshop (now known equally as Trans-Love Energies) has moved to the campus side of the expressway and will set up shop in a long-vacant former doctor’s office on the corner of Second and Forest.

The workshop, which had its original home in a house at 1252 West Forest, was founded three years ago this month by John Sinclair, Robin Eichele, George Tysh, Charles Moore, Jim Semark, Larry Weiner, Ellen Phelan, Magdalene Sinclair (then Arndt Martine Aligire, and a group of other neighborhood people). At the Forest Avenue headquarters the Workshop established itself through an eight month series of free Sunday afternoon concerts and poetry readings before the house was abandoned after being struck by fire on Memorial Day 1965.

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To be a teenager in western Europe today is to enjoy a freedom of movement only dreamed about by American young people. During the summer, while most American kids are sitting home watching reruns on T.V., their European counterparts are out on the road.

Of course, the geographical makeup of the Continent makes travel not only possible, but irresistible.

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A middle-aged friend of mine helps keep his sanity by giving, on occasion, an extra 25 cents to the man in the toll booth on the bridge. Then he says, “This is to pay for my friend who is in the car behind me.” As he drives away he can look in his rear view mirror and laugh to see the policeman and driver of the following car gesturing and scratching their heads.

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Admiral Arnold E. True will address a forum entitled Vietnam—The Wrong War to be held at Cobo Hall at 8 p.m. Wednesday, October 11.

Admiral True has been an outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and has clearly stated his reasons for supporting a withdrawal of U.S. troops. The admiral served as a general line officer in the U.S. Navy for 26 years. He was Staff Commander-In-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet during World War II and has been awarded a variety of decorations, including the Purple Heart.

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A local demonstration is set for October 31, Halloween Night in protest against the war and LBJ, It will be a “grotesque, flashlight parade” by costumed marchers. The march will be in the form of a “provo demonstration’ according to Jon Schwartz, organizer of the protest.

“A provo demonstration,” Schwartz said, “takes advantage of local circumstances and traditions and in this case, combines the holiday spirit of Halloween with the tragic effects of the war in Vietnam.”

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The Draft Resistance Committee has pulled off a minor victory in an attempt to stop some of the harassment directed at it by landlords, vigilantes, and the City of Highland Park. (See Fifth Estate, Sept. 15–30).

On Sept. 22, the Committee brought their landlord, Tom Jewell into the Circuit Court room of Judge Carl Weideman in an attempt to keep Jewell out of the groups storefront headquarters at 12820 Hamilton. Jewell had entered the building several times and had torn down signs and done other damage.

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To the Editor,

As the yearly retreat to the diploma mills nears I thought your readers would like to know of the continued existence of some essentially less repressive alternatives.

Especially since 1960, there have existed an increasing number of very small, essentially student run, institutions that would now most aptly be considered “counter-community” colleges. The first was Mark Golden’s experimental personalist college, Emerson, in Pacific Groves, California, which is mentioned in Saul Landeau’s anthology on the New Left.

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SAT., SEPT. 30

PLAY: Pantageize, APA repertory company, Michel de Gheldero’s “farce to make you sad” Lydia Mendelssohn Theater, Ann Arbor, 8:00 p.m. 9/30

SUN., OCT. 1

PLAY: Same as 9/30 2:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. adm. 10/1

CONCERT: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Premiere of a new work by Roger Sessions commissioned for the U. of M. Sesquicentennial Celebration. Hill Aud., 2:30 p.m. adm. 10/1

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