Most Recent Additions

a review of

My Secret Life by a Victorian Gentleman. New York: Grove Press, $1.75

My Secret Life ranks alongside other erotic novels such as The Story of O, Last Exit to Brooklyn, My Life and Loves, Candy, or Fanny Hill.

The first public edition lifted its head above the blanket of U.S. censorship in 1966 even though it was written about 1820 by an unknown author. The first edition contained 2,400 pages of large magazine page size which probably makes it the longest erotic autobiography ever written. This edition is abridged but unexpurgated and considering the size of the original edition, an unexpurgated edition is welcome. If a person wishes to include masochism in his erotic readings, he can attempt to read the entire edition.

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Let’s have a few more words about Mel Ravitz (then, I hope to close this subject for a while).

Councilman Ravitz personifies, on a local level, the true “devil” to the Black community and to striving and alienated whites.

There is no question that Ravitz, a professor of sociology at Wayne State University, has made a substantial contribution to the community. In 1961, a lot of good people worked very hard to put him on the Common Council and his close election, with the simultaneous elevation of Jerry Cavanaugh to the Mayors’ chair, gave many hope for a “new day” in Detroit.

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Fourteen people were arrested and a number of assault charges are pending after two days of protest by Wayne University students, Oct. 24 and 25, at the site of a Defense and Government Procurement Conference set up to bring more defense business into Michigan.

John Chiodo (Ieft) of Mello Consultants, after having just struck student to his left. Also pictured is Allen Fisk (with camera), Jim Harrington of WXYZ-TV over his shoulder and James Ford of the Draft Resistance Committee

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The events of the week of anti-war resistance which began October 16, and which have continued to this writing—including the assault on the war profiteers at the Rackham Building on Wayne State’s campus on October 24 and 25—are of profound significance for the nation and the Movement.

Thousands of whites have in fact moved from protest and dissent to resistance. As many black people were forced to do some years ago, increasing numbers of whites have been forced to conclude that the government is illegitimate. The “legal” structures for change which are presumed to exist in this country are in fact meaningless. White people, in short, do not have any power either—or at least they do not have the power to change anything, only the power to acquiesce. Congress has been petitioned. The Executive has been implored. And still babies die. “Napalm is Johnson’s Baby Powder,” said one sign.

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“The question is always how to move from a social insurgency to an anarchistic society?”

—Voline, The Unknown Revolution

In early October, as the Russian military assault on Ukraine enters its eighth month, radical publications have been reporting on anarchists participating in the popular struggle against the invasion. Surprisingly, several mainstream journalists have also published articles presenting anarchists in a positive light.

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When U.S. President Joe Biden called MAGA Republicans “like semi-fascism” in late August, then gave a speech in Philadelphia a few days later on a set decked out in martial aesthetics (including actual Marines), he embodied a contemporary troubling paradox.

We are in a curious historical moment in which it is easy to name the enemy as fascist, even while enacting fascist tendencies. Associating Trump with fascism has been in play for years before Biden’s half-hearted accusation. Meanwhile, QAnon Christian white supremacists call Biden a Nazi. And all of them are troubled by antifa. Anarchist antifascists find ourselves caught in the cross-hairs of these other so-called antifascists.

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October 16 was the first day of massive draft resistance in Detroit and throughout the United States. From coast to coast thousands of Americans demonstrated against the Vietnam war and against draft slavery.

The rain didn’t stop draft resisters from demonstrating on Oct. 16.

In total, over 2,000 young men returned their draft cards to the Federal Government. In San Francisco over 200 cards were returned; in New York over 300; in Chicago, 250. Similar actions were held in Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Des Moines, and Philadelphia. In Washington D.C. prior to the giant Mobilization almost 1,000 young men said no to the draft by depositing their cards at the office of the Attorney General.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. Liberation News Service—On October 21, 1967, the white left got its shit together.

The gala Pentagon confrontation, long billed as a move from “protest to resistance,” was a dramatic and intense political event. Many had been dubious; few can now deny that a new stage is upon us.

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a review of

On the Poverty of Student Life, Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, And a Modest Proposal for its Remedy: Members of the Situationist International and Students from Strasbourg. Edited by Mehdi El Hajoui and Anna O’Meara. Common Notions, 2022

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a review of

The Lady Anarchist Café: Poems and Stories by Lorraine Schein. Autonomedia, 2022

Lorraine Schein, a friend of long-standing, has just published her latest book, The Lady Anarchist Café: Poems and Stories.

This writer has toiled for years within stultifying bureaucratic confines of the workaday world while maintaining sharp anarchist perspectives in her creative endeavors.

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O.K. now, I got to tell you about what I am writing about. It is 3 books and another one, and I guess, another one. They are called Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar and all three of them together (they cost about 2 dollars each in paperback or you can buy (ed. note: steal) all three of them together in hardcover for about 8 dollars. All from Delacorte Press, I guess, and The Confederate General from Big Sur (a buck ninety five from Grove Press) and they were all written by Richard Brautigan who is a crazy man.

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Socialist Workers party presidential nominee Fred Halstead was in Detroit Friday, October 6 to kick off his campaign at a rally sponsored by the S.W.P. campaign committee.

Halstead spoke about the positions of the Republican and Democratic presidential aspirants on the Vietnam war before an audience mostly made up of young people. Picking up on Governor Romney’s statement that LBJ had “brainwashed” him on Vietnam, Halstead pointed out that even the “dove” candidates and mass media evidenced brainwashing in the unconscious racism of assuming that somehow the U.S. had a mission in Vietnam.

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Through the efforts of many the Detroit music scene is growing in fantastic leaps and bounds. Not only are the local bands getting it extremely together—the MC-5, the Rationals, Scot Richard Case, Billy C. and the Sunshine, the Up, and a lot of others—but the promoters and proprietors are doing their thing too and bringing music into town that hasn’t been happening here before.

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The Committee for Nonviolent Action has issued an urgent request for additional financial backing. CNVA and the War Resisters League are mutually considering a merger and the CNVA Executive Committee has already authorized the partnership. The major obstacle, however, seems to be the current CNVA deficit of about $7500 which must be greatly reduced before the merger can be completed. UPS member, WIN magazine, currently behind in its printing bills, will be unable to publish an October issue unless new and immediate financial help becomes available. CNVA staff members have not received salaries for the last several weeks.

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The Underground Press has opened the eyes of many Americans to much of life that they otherwise would not know of. But many of the more intelligent readers still do not understand homosexuality, especially some hippies who, due to their long hair, etc., have been falsely accused of being gay.

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Probably one of the dirtiest jobs in the world is being a police commissioner in a large American city.

Even the most enlightened and liberal person in the world would have a bad time presiding as a civilian director over what is essentially a military operation designed to physically, socially, and psychologically suppress urban Blacks and poor whites.

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a review of

Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback Laurie Penny. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022

“This [book] is an exercise in pointing out the obvious. There is a slow-moving sea change happening in gendered power relations. It’s been building for decades now. And it has to do with economics; it has to do with imbalances and rebalances in structural violence and how power is organized and operates. And the reaction to that sexual revolution explains a great deal of modern politics.”

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The Fort Hood Three Defense Committee announced September 30 that the U.S. Court of Military Appeals turned down the request for a review of convictions of the Fort Hood Three.

PFC James Johnson, Private Dennis Mora and Private David Samas, the three who refused orders to ship to Vietnam, were court-martialed in September, 1966. All are now in the Federal Military Prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, serving three years at hard labor.

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a review of

Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS by Janet Biehl, PM Press, 2021

This is a remarkable graphic novel that could be described as part of an emerging genre of comics journalism. Joe Sacco famously showed the way with his on-the-scene descriptions of conflict in the Balkans and the West Bank, graphic novels that reached all the way across the world in many languages.

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Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible).

DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

All unclassifieds must be paid in advance by mail. Or personal delivery

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The calendar is prepared by Fifth Estate calendar girls Karen Kovac and Naiomi Epil with cooperation from Detroit Adventure. Copy deadline is the 6^th and 22^nd of each month and should be sent to the Fifth Estate, Calendar 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

SUN OCT 15

DANCE/CONCERT. The Cream plus the Rationals, the Apostles, the Thyme in a no — age — limit show at the Grande Ballroom, Grand River at Beverly from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Adm. 10/15.

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Special to the Fifth Estate

Ed. Note: Jeffrey Shero is a former national vice-president of Students for a Democratic Society. He recently returned from an extended journey to the Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe.

They used to whisper, “Pssst, soldier! Dirty pictures?”

But times have changed. Just as likely now that long-haired kid hanging around the European train station or soldier’s bar is offering abettor deal—Freedom. “Hey, man, FTA, (Fuck the Army), take one of these.” That’s the new hustle.

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A national movement has been developing in Detroit with accelerated momentum since the summer rebellion, according to an analysis by Grace and James Boggs in the October 7 issue of the independent radical newsweekly NATIONAL GUARDIAN printed in New York City.

The movement, according to the authors, “is conscious of itself as being in the process of creating from all elements of the black community a self-governing nation which will control and determine its own destiny.”

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It is usually unwise and often physically dangerous to laugh at another man’s religion. When a person believes fervently in something, no matter how absurd the object of his faith appears, there is no safe way to tell him that he is wrong.

Therefore, when one attacks the movie “Bonnie and Clyde,” there is no way to avoid infuriating the worshipping instant cult that the movie has produced.

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The Fifth Estate has obtained a copy of a letter, one paragraph of which states: “As far as I am concerned, the local police in every community must be prepared to draw fast and not let the bleeding hearts again accuse them of being brutal. In my opinion, the future must be planned by real, practical and statesmanlike people.”

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On October 16, young men in Detroit and in cities across the United States will have turned in their draft cards to federal officials.

In Detroit, at least 20 men are expected to take part in the actual resistance at Cadillac Tower in Downtown Detroit, site of the Selective Service System while a support demonstration will take place outside beginning at 3:00 p.m.

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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: Is it possible to get high on morning glory seeds? If so, is it dangerous?

ANSWER: Morning glory seeds contain ololiuqui which is basically lysergic acid monethlamide. Ingesting the seeds gives an LSD-like experience but there is also almost invariably a prolonged period of severe nausea and vomiting. A real bummer.

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Editor’s note: Dave Dellinger, editor of Liberation magazine, arranged in Hanoi last spring for a group of Americans to meet with the North Vietnamese and members of the NLF in a midway meeting point—which developed to be Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. The Americans were drawn from the peace movement, the black liberation movement, university professors, community organizers, clergy, artists and film-makers. Raymond Mungo, former editor of the Boston University News, participated and spoke on behalf of the Liberation News Service.

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THE FIFTH ESTATE

1107 W. Warren, Detroit 48201

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

NEWS EDITOR

Frank Joyce

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION MANAGER

Tommye Wiess

ACE REPORTER

John Sinclair

ART AND LAY-OUT

Gary Grimshaw

FILM EDITOR

Joe Finemen

CALENDAR GIRLS

Karen Kovac

Naomi Epel

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The San Francisco Mime Troupe is readying their actors and props to zap the minds of motor city residents for the second year. The group, as part of its international tour, will bring its current production, “L’ AMANT MILITAIRE”, to the Detroit Institute of Arts, October 28, at 8:15 p.m., in a special benefit performance for this newspaper.

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LOS ANGELES (UPS)—Transcendental Meditation came to UCLA September 30 and October 1 in the person of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. However, the Beatles’ famous Himalayan guru blew some of his believers’ minds during the two sessions at Royce Hall.

As soon as the Maharishi was seated Saturday night, a student appeared onstage and commenced to verbally hassle His Holiness. Immediately, several aides attempted to drag him away but the audience protested. The student was allowed to leave by himself.

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There used to be a big debate within the peace movement about whether or not to call for immediate withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Some thought this was too radical a demand and one that would find no acceptance with the American public.

Even today there is an organization called Negotiations Now! which considers immediate withdrawal to be an untenable position even though they are opposed to the war.

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Our great affluent society produces excess. Just go down to Hudson’s or walk into E.J. Korvette’s and much of what is on display is either an unimportant frill or junk.

The record industry is not unlike that. Most of what is being released is not worth the time it takes to listen to it.

Almost all record companies are signing and recording anybody who has the slightest possibility of selling. The few exceptions seem to be Elektra, Vanguard, and Verve.

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The news this time seems to be that many people are getting busted for grass in a lot of funny ways and don’t know what to do about it when it happens. I have gone through three marijuana arrests and two “trial” scenes so far (including probation since December 1964 and 6 months in the Detroit House of Correction in 1966) and have come to learn some things about (1) police methods, aims and goals; (2) court procedures, including attitudes of judge, prosecutor and jury); (3) lawyers and how they operate; (4) the bail bond system; and (5) what you can do to get through all these dangerous traps relatively unharmed. It is to the last point that I want to speak here, in hopes that it might help some young people who are “in trouble with the law” over their marijuana smoking.

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Dave Dellinger, Chairman of the Mobilization Committee, predicted that the response of the American people would be to speak out even more forcefully against the war and to insist on their democratic rights to do so. He reported that the Mobilization office had already received a flood of phone calls from persons who indicated that they would go to Washington on October 21. In a number of cases, people not previously planning to go to Washington on that date have phoned in to say that now nothing can keep them away.

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A telephone call at noon on September 29 from Elektra Records confirmed our plans for an interview with Tim Buckley. His second album (GOODBYE AND HELLO) was just released and Tim was here to play the Canterbury House in Ann Arbor.

Elektra Records said we would all meet later that afternoon and cross over to Canada where Tim had to tape a “Robin Seymor Show” on CKLW.

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“It’s getting better all the time. I admit it’s getting better.”

—The Beatles

Things are getting better at the Fifth Estate, although you’d never know it by looking at our office windows. Last week we lost them to a fire bomb at 3:00 in the morning. The front part of the reception area was gutted and bundles of old issues were destroyed.

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WASHINGTON, October 3 (Liberation News Service ) — Something’s happening, and you won’t know what it is, General Jones, because you think that only Angry Mothers and bearded students march and that hippies stay in Haight — Ashbury and the East Village. Look out your window on October 21 and freak out at what will be marching towards the Pentagon:

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On October 19 to 21, Wayne State University will sponsor a conference titled “New Perspectives on Race and the City.” Featured speakers include G. Mennen Williams, Jerome P. Cavanagh, Hubert Locke, Roger Wilkins of the U.S. Justice Department, Community Relations Service and John Spiegal, head of the Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis University.

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The latest newspaper to make the UPS scene is Ann Arbor’s LOOKING GLASS. Editor and publisher Jeffrey Hoff, hoping to stress the political more than the psychedelic in his paper, predicts that “the white hippy scene, the black revolt, everyone who feels that a great many young people in Ann Arbor who do not bother to read regular papers such as The DAILY simply because it does not relate to them, will now create a substantial following for the underground press”. “White liberals read The DAILY, black and white radicals read the underground press,” explains Hoff.

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</strong> Sunday, December 11, 2022

The Joseph Déjacque Bicentennial Conference is being held in recognition of the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of this major nineteenth-century communist anarchist political theorist and visionary utopian writer. It is sponsored by La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology and Yes We Cannibal, with the support of the Anarchist Political Ecology Group and the Dialectical Social Ecology Group.

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As WSU enters her centennial year, the big word is “changes.” The time for a change has been reflected in two areas, the student newspaper, and the Student-Faculty Council. The first editorial in the South End, formerly the Daily Collegian, paralleled the changes with the Beatles. The cover of the most recent Beatles album, shows the group declaring themselves to be ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’—standing over their own casket, with the name ‘Beatles’ arranged in flowers over the casket. They are announcing their conversion from a mechanical fixation trivia (I want to Hold your Hand) to a vital concern with real—even if unpopular or taboo—issues. The Beatles, so to speak, are ‘turned on’ to the issues of our generation. This newspaper, so to speak, is ‘turned on’.”

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“Confront the Warmakers” is no idle phrase. Coming together from throughout the nation on October 21 and 22, war opponents will march, demonstrate, petition and culminate the activities by mass acts of civil disobedience inside the Pentagon.

The confrontation will be real and physical. Of the 200,000 plus participants, 10,000 are expected to sit-in to block the doorways of the Pentagon, says the National Mobilizing Committee, “preventing people from entering to work but permitting them to leave. If they are able to enter the building the direct actionists will also block the hallways and staircases.”

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The Detroit Provos are ready to march in their second annual Halloween Night parade.

Led by the strange and mysterious figure, Jacob Odaryan, the festive group will meet at the Mall on the Wayne University campus October 31 at 7:30 p.m. and walk to the New Centre area up Cass Avenue.

Led by musicians and dancers the parade will stop by several Detroit landmarks: the GM building headquarters of international imperialism; Hotel St. Regis, owned by notorious slumlord Al Goodman; WJBK — TV, sponsors of the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. fictionalized accounts of the news and then passing to the Algiers Motel scene of the police executions and ending at Northern High School.

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The calendar is prepared by Fifth Estate calendar girls Karen Kovac and Naiomi Epil with cooperation from Detroit Adventure. Copy deadline is the 6^th and 22^nd of each month and should be sent to the Fifth Estate Calendar, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 98201.

Thurs the 15^th

Muhamed Ali-Lewis Fight. Exhibition. Cobo Hall at 8:00 p.m. Adm. 6/15

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a review of

Night Games

Mai Zetterling strings out her Freudian implications to paper thinness, but then “Night Games,” in plot anyway, is not unlike tissue paper.

It suffices to say that Miss Zetterling’s pen clears a magnificent swath through the intricate Oedipal fantasies of adolesence. Unfortunately this directress is so plagued by Composition and form, her narrative reins up and the two never reach a comparable peak.

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Both TIME and NEWSWEEK have picked up the word that the “largest demonstration in the history of Los Angeles” will greet Lyndon Johnson when he arrives to kick off the 1968 Presidential campaign with a gala $1000 a plate dinner in the Century Plaza Hotel on June 23^rd.

The Peace Action Council is coordinating the efforts of over 60 peace groups, all of which plan to participate in a massive protest march, which, since permits have so far been witheld, may be in violation of the law.

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Editor’s Note: The following letter was sent to us by a subscriber presently incarcerated in Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson.

Mr. Brown is known to the FIFTH ESTATE staff as one who contributed generously to the paper while he was on the “outside.” He has expressed an interest in receiving letters from other readers. Those interested In doing so may write him at the address below.

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Rep. John Conyers, Jr. cast, as he promised, the only dissenting vote in a House judiciary subcommittee against that idiotic, probably unconstitutional, law which would make it a Federal crime to burn, deface, etc. the American flag. (The “offense” is now only covered by individual state laws.)

He predicts that only about 23 congressmen will have the guts to vote against the bill when it hits the floor of the House.

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“Like nineteenth century capitalism, Mass Culture is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, taste, and dissolving all cultural distinctions.”

—Dwight Macdonald

The tribal psychedelic rock culture is today the ripest fruit on the tree of the popular arts, and its roots grope deeply into the much-plowed soil of mass culture. In the Beginning (almost), there was folk art, oral, inconographic, mythic. Industrialism and its inevitably mechanistic culture trampled down the past, creating an urban atmosphere in which the folk arts could not survive.

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