Most Recent Additions

a review of

Hell, No, We Didn’t Go! by Eli Greenbaum. University Press of Kansas, 2024

The U.S. invasion of Indochina not only unleashed horrific death and

destruction resulting in the murder of millions of Vietnamese, but also engendered massive domestic opposition. One of the significant flash points was the military draft.

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a review of

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton. University of California Press, 2023

When Heather Ann Thompson’s account of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, Blood in the Water, was published in 2016, I was one of the readers who was overjoyed to see that historical turning point brought back to life after decades when it seemed to be slipping from popular consciousness.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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(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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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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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 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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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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a review of

To Rob a Bank Is an Honor: Lucio Urtubia, (translation Paul Sharkey) AK Press, 2024.

Lucio Urtubia’s name is not well known in anarchist circles. He produced no philosophical or polemical writings, and is mainly remembered for a successful scheme to rob–not with guns, but with fake checks–one of the world’s major banks.

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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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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a review of

Taking the State Out of the Body: A Guide to Embodied Resistance to Zionism by Eliana Rubin. PM Press, 2024

A disclosure at the outset: Parts of this book lie outside the competence of this reviewer, notably sections at the end of each chapter called “Embodied Practices.” These are hands-on exercises intended for collective and individual healing from various forms of trauma and harm resulting from our colonial-settler, sexist, and oppressive system. Interested readers can evaluate their use for themselves.

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FILM

FILM: April 1, Luis Bunel’s “EL” (This Strange Passion -1953) at 8:15 p.m. in Community Arts Aud. WSU Campus. Adm. 75 cents for students and $1 for general public. Info: 831–4310

FILM: Friday, April 7^th — Movie Night. “Way Out West” Laurel and Hardy, “La Chein D’Angelieu’ (dir. Dali 1928) & ‘Music Box” Laurel and Hardy. Lower DeRoy Aud., WSU campus. 8:15 p.m. Free.

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Sol Plafkin is way off-center in his remarks about Congressman John Conyers, Jr. and the Powell case [FE #26, March 15–31, 1967].

He forgets that Mr. Conyers was against stripping Powell of his seniority, even to breaking with the Democratic Study Group over this; he apparently does not know that Mr. Conyers fought vigorously for the most lenient recommendations of the special committee and voted to seat Powell on all votes that were taken. His judgment in accepting appointment to the Special Committee cannot be questioned—Powell needed his advocacy there.

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WANTED

for attempted murder of the New Spirit of Detroit

VAHAN KAPEGIAN ALIAS “LOUIE” OFFICER NARCOTICS BUREAU, DETROIT POLICE

Description:

Kapegian is approximately 30–35 years old. He is of medium height and build; has brown hair and eyes; he has a dark complexion. He has been a member of the Detroit Police for 13 years; 4 of them as an undercover agent. When working in a role as an informer he may appear as in the photos above. However, when he is in Recorders’ Court testifying against innocent marijuana smokers he will appear in a suit and tie and be clean shaven. Look for him, and others like him, in either garb.

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“Quack, Quack

I am a duck,

You are probably human

You can wear White Levis

Some people have all the luck”

—The Jefferson Airplane

Some people aren’t so lucky. Strikers against the Levi-Strauss Company in Blue Ridge, Georgia have called for a national boycott of all Levi products.

The strike action was called after 460 of the 570 Strauss workers walked off of the Blue Ridge plant to protest terrible working conditions there. The workers, mostly women, charge that the Strauss plant had located in Blue Ridge in order to exploit the underemployed workers of that region.

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The anthropologist James Campbell Scott, who passed away on July 19, 2024, approached the world from an egalitarian perspective. While not identifying as an anarchist, he brought an anarchistic sensibility to his study of the dynamics of power relations and the varied ways peoples have resisted authority in the past and present.

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a review of

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

Naomi Klein’s most recent book is a worthwhile analysis of fascist and reactionary organizing that began with the Covid-19 pandemic and continues to the present. Encompassing both liberatory and electoral politics, her jumping off point is the persistent confusion in public between herself and highbrow feminist-cum-MAGA acolyte, Naomi Wolf. But this is like the McGuffin in a detective story: it’s the animating ghost—doppelgangers often showing up as poltergeists—that takes us through a much more interesting journey than the initial question portends.

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W.D. Snodgrass, professor of English at Wayne State University and a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, will be the third poet in the “Dialogues on the Art of Poetry’ series at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 4, in the Community Arts Auditorium on the WSU campus.

Snodgrass’s volume of poems, “Heart’s Needle,” won both the Pulitzer Prize and the $1,000 award in poetry of the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

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Trans-Love Members Pose on Top of Artists’ Workshop

A group of Detroit artists and craftsmen have banded together to form a cooperative called Trans-Love Energies Unlimited. The participants will work to draw the local “underground” community closer together and help market its services in the aboveground world. Included in the organization will be rock bands, jazz groups, graphic artists, photographers, hip merchants, light-show companies, and other individuals and groups who can make use of its services.

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“This is a lot of shit,” was the reaction of one Cass Technical High School student to a recent Underground addition to the growing number of publications at Detroit’s largest inner-city school.

South Hampton Illustrated Times, better known to the student body as SHIT, arrived on the scene without the thunder and lightning that usually accompanies the appearance of an unsponsored (or rather, uncensored) school publication. Officials were concerned, but didn’t know who to blame, and the students were more than slightly tongue-in-cheek in their acceptance.

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I couldn’t believe it when they shook me down at the door of the Grande. A cop insensitively feeling my pants. It didn’t exactly make me feel welcome. They said they were looking for booze and weapons. What! It seems our psychedelic love-hall has turned into a greasy high school drink arena.

The MC 5 came on, though, and I got under the strobe light and just grooooved. They turned on waves of love-energy onto the people, who I hope were listening to the music. It’s too bad the hippy population here can’t support a showcase for good sounds where people could feel safe to go and get out of their minds. It can’t happen soon enough.

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EDITORS NOTE: In addition to serving as the Fifth Estate news Editor, Frank Joyce is the Executive Secretary of People Against Racism (PAR). According to its literature, PAR was formed several months ago by those who agree that the problem of race relations in this country is much more a white problem than a Negro problem and that the responsibility of whites is to eliminate white supremacy, discrimination and prejudice in the white community.

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Every revolution in jazz is fundamentally a revolution in the mode of sensing jazz rhythms and that is of course as true of the jazz revolution of today as it was of the bebop revolution of some two decades past.

The first thing that one does in striving to grasp the essence of a revolution—social or aesthetic—is to compare the new synthesis with the one it replaced. With respect to jazz rhythm, the transition is from the unvarying 4/4 pulse of bebop to a fragmented and polyrhythmic fabric which juxtaposes patterns of three beats, four beats, and beats of other bases against one another.

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a review of

Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: The FBI vs. The Earth Liberation Front (Second Edition) by Craig Rosebraugh. Microcosm Publishing 2024.

Burning Rage of a Dying Planet is a history of the rise of the radical environmental movement the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as told by Craig Rosebraugh, who served as the spokesperson for the ELF during its arguably most consequential years, 1997 to late 2001.

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It’s a grey, wet day, so everyone who can find a spot is packed into the warehouse instead of spreading out across the grounds outside. In pockets around the space, people are skilling up or building art.

Doc is teaching a small group how to be street medics. Mass arrests, street battles, teargas, and more rain will come in the days ahead and people are readying themselves for the tens of thousands arriving to fight the machinations of global capitalism. It is April 2000, Washington, D.C.

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a review of

Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time by Rasheedah Phillips. AK Press, 2025

In a discussion during the early winter of 2024 with radical political scientist Richard Gilman-Opalsky facilitated through Incite Seminars, there arose the essential thread of imagination and its usefulness as a tool for decolonization, along with the reaffirmation of future potentialities hidden within playful and creative anti-capitalist exercises.

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All those charged by police in the January 4^th “Great Reefer Raid” have by now been arraigned and examined and, with one exception, bound over for trial in Detroit Recorder’s Court. The exception is Magdelene Sinclair, charged with possession of marijuana, whose March 14^th examination was continued until March 31^st.

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(Special to the FIFTH ESTATE) LONDON—From the suburban sprawls of America where the language of LSD and grass is used to sell cars and discotheque tickets, the appeal of the country that produced Tolkien, “Morgan!,” and George Harrison is strong and readily fulfilled.

Unfortunately after nearly six months in “Swinging London,” I am willing to face General Hershey and his clerks of conscription and the napalm aces of the USAF rather than stay another six.

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The second annual Detroit Jazz Conference will be held on Saturday, April 8 and Sunday, April 9 at Wayne State University’s McGregor Memorial Conference Center, the Community Arts Auditorium and the Music Wing.

More than 75 musicians and speakers will participate in the week-end program of live performances, discussions and lecture-demonstrations. Headliners include conference artist -in-residence pianist Cecil Taylor and his quartet, guitarist Kenny Burrell, critic-author A.B. Spellman, and Frank Kofsky, FIFTH ESTATE jazz columnist.

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Editors’ note: The following interview by FIFTH ESTATE film editor Joe Fineman took place at the recent Ann Arbor Film Festival. Participants in the interview were film judges Henri Chapier, critic for COMBAT magazine; Gerard Malanga, superstar; and Andrew Lugg, U of M Cinema Guild. The winners of the festival will be shown in late April by FNCC Lower DeRoy Aud. on the Wayne Campus.

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