Most Recent Additions

Following nearly ten years of incarceration and numerous attempts by the State to frame, break and murder him, anarchist prisoner Eric King was released in late December 2023.

Imprisoned for taking direct action in solidarity with the 2014 Ferguson, Mo. uprising, King survived Covid, attacks by neo-Nazi prisoners, and years of abuse from guards. His ten-year sentence was for an attempt to Molotov the Kansas City office of a Democratic Congress member following the murder of Michael Brown by a Ferguson cop.

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The struggle for political power within the United Auto Workers Union between the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the entrenched, conservative, white bureaucracy continued at the recent elections at Dodge local 3 of the Hamtramck Assembly Plant.

Held March 18 and 19, in the shadow of the grey, ugly plant on Joseph Campau, the incumbent leadership of local 3 turned to ballot stealing and cheating to insure the continuance of their racist leadership in the predominately black factory.

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The postal workers’ strike exploded like a time-bomb across the nation. Beginning in New York City, and spreading quickly through every major city in the country.

The massive revolt defied court injunctions, Presidential orders, and the miserable sell-outs in the union bureaucracies. The workers were beyond the control of legal actions and of their union “leadership.” They went out to demonstrate that they intended to win.

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a review of

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant. Little, Brown & Company, 2023

A February arson attack by a mob of Lunar New Year revelers in San Francisco on a Google driverless taxi, to the cheers of onlookers, brings to mind the early 19^th century assaults on factories and industrial machines by newly-marginalized workers who came to be known as Luddites. The attempt of these workers to hold on to social solidarity and community is the subject of Brian Merchant’s timely offering.

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We are entering another new epoch.

Things will only get far worse/much better from here.

No more trying to find the light or poke holes in the darkness. That time has passed.

Nor do we resolve ourselves to moving slowly through the night.

No, let’s just let our eyes adjust.

Eat carrots.

We’ll move in and out of time and plot quietly under the cover of dusk.

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a review of

Manufacturing the Threat, Dir: Amy Miller, 2023

Online archive note: Several paragraphs were inadvertently not included in the printed edition of the magazine, starting with “Still, I do recommend it as a powerful piece of storytelling...”

Below is the complete article.

John “Omar” Nuttall and Amanda “Ana” Korody were arrested July 1, 2013, after planting what they had been led to believe were functional pressure cooker bombs on the grounds of the provincial legislature in Victoria, British Columbia. Their arrests eventually led to the revelation of years of police dirty tricks, manipulation, and abuse in the name of anti-terrorism.

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In a war, no nation loses: the Nation of Man is lost.

In Viet Nam, the unwilling penitents who bear the brunt of that nation’s suffering are those who know least of any suffering but their own.

These unfortunates are the children who, burned horribly by napalm, tossed to chance care by the death of parents, and maimed in a thousand ways, are suffering the fate of Viet Nam in their small bodies.

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EDITOR’S NOTE; Timothy Leary, high priest of consciousness expansion, spoke in East Lansing Nov. 17^th. His talk was covered in our last issue by Michael Kindman, editor of THE PAPER, a sister Underground Press Syndicate publication [see Kill, Leary, Kill, FE # 20, December 15–31, 1966]. The following was written after Kindman and several others interviewed Leary after his speech to a Michigan State University audience.

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Detroit’s own Spike-Drivers are back in town and appearing at the Living End on John C. Lodge after being in New York to cut their newly released record and performing at the uptown discotheques. I was eager to hear what changes the group had made, if any, while in New York. There have been changes and unquestionably they are improvements. Fear not! The Spike-Driver sound is intact but has been enhanced by a tighter performance and the addition of more original tunes by the group as well as some very groovie arrangements of rock and folk classics.

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a review of

Stay and Fight by Madeline ffitch. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019

“I began to identify as an anarchist nearly 20 years ago, after a demonstration where I realized that the people cooking the food, doing the dishes, and administering first-aid were mostly anarchists. Rather than a rigid political doctrine, I understand anarchism as an ethical stance focused on making justice and caring for each other without hierarchy, without asking permission from power-brokers, and with whatever tools we have available. I call on these ethics daily.”

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The Fort Hood Three Defense Committee announced that civil liberties attorneys Stanley Faulkner and Selma Samols went before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Dec. 13, to argue once again, in the case of Pvt. Robert Luftig vs. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Army Secretary Stanley Resor, the illegality of the war in Vietnam.

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Two records which have reached the top spot in the charts recently are the Beachboys’ GOOD VIBRATIONS and the Monkeys’ I’M A BELIEVER.

GOOD VIBRATIONS is a very interesting single due to an excellent and intricate arrangement of music and vocal parts; and the Monkeys come across with a rather nice, early Beatleish simple, clean sound. Both songs are listenable, but on both 45s, featured performers do not play most of the instruments.

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Citizens for Peace in Vietnam, an organization of Detroit area residents opposed to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, was re-activated recently with the holding of its first general ‘meeting since last March.

“There has been a widespread demand for the re-convening of CPV,” stated a committee spokesman, “and the administration’s continued escalation leaves us no moral alternative but to reaffirm our condemnation of the nature and the fact of America’s participation in this war.”

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“Georgy Girl” suffers from the Americanization of Europe. Mediocre photography, a pasty storyline and a camera which adds next to nothing to the telling of the story combine to cook up a movie as flat as a tortilla.

Perhaps Margaret Forster’s milky book is to blame. Basically we are confronted with a flabby, hopelessly homely adoptee who, within the scope of her own unreal world manages to rearrange the lives of her roommate, her roommate’s mate and her benefactor-step-father. As is the American custom, all unreal situations continue through equally unreal conclusions and everyone is left just as they should be. No one has really arrived anywhere.

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Your article called “The Jazz Scene in America” [http://[FE #18, November 15–30, 1966[FE #18, November 15–30, 1966]]] was three columns of misinformation.

For your information, of which you need much, there has not been a succession of saxophone players in my band since Joe Maini died. There has only been one other than Frank Strozier, who is in the band now, and that was Charlie Kennedy, a starving jazz musician and the father of six children. I didn’t look to see what color he was. I listened, something I gather that you never do. Many musicians felt Charlie had enough OBVIOUS talent to be a great alto player if given a chance.

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The first meeting of the Detroit Chapter of Lemar (Legalize Marijuana) met at the Artist’s Workshop Dec. 19^th, and had a good turn out in spite of a heavy snow.

The purpose of the group is to: 1. Disseminate information concerning marijuana (factual studies as opposed to the bullshit printed in the major daily papers), 2. Gather together people in the Detroit area who are interested in seeing marijuana legalized, 3. Help end or reduce feelings of isolation and paranoia by functioning as an organized group.

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Why the critics?

That is a question I get asked fairly frequently, by friends and correspondents who want to know why I expend so much energy on this particular aspect of the jazz Establishment.

The answer is really quite simple. My point of departure is to analyze what services the jazz critic might be performing for the music (which means for the musicians and their audience). I then compare this with the actual accomplishments of the critics. Since the balance thus struck is so wholly unfavorable to the major critical figures—Leonard Feather, Martin Williams, Dan Morgenstern, Michael Zwerin and the entire editorial staff of DOWN BEAT—I conclude that it is my duty to the jazz community to expose (a good 1930s leftist word) their failings, to prevent them from leading their readers even further astray.

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In March of 1966 Michigan Bell Telephone sent the following notice to its customers:

“Your telephone bill reflects an increase in the federal excise tax on local and long distance telephone and teletypewriter services.

“The increase is a result of the Tax Adjustment Act of 1966, enacted to help meet the country’s need for additional revenues during the Viet Nam emergency.

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Firestorm Books, a fifteen-year-old collectively-run anarchist bookstore and community event space in Asheville, N.C., is sending back thousands of children’s books banned from the Duval County Public School system in Florida.

The queer- and trans-owned bookstore has given away thousands of copies each of over fifty different titles exploring topics from racism and colonialism to social movement history and visionary organizing.

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smachtini

comheiri lag

Sar gceannairi

.

police batons

collective semi-erection

of our rulers

Gabriel Rosenstock is an Irish writer who works chiefly in the Irish language. He is a poet, playwright, haikuist, tankaist, essayist, and author/translator of over 180 books, mostly in Irish. He lives in Dublin.

a review of

Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century by Raoul Vaneigem, translation by Bill Brown. ERIS, 2023

While evangelical Protestantism has for generations overwhelmingly been a force of deep reaction in this country and is poised, if Donald Trump regains the White House this November, to instate a situation such as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (and its screen and TV adaptations).

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The chief spokesman for the “independent or underground film-makers” in this country is Jonas Mekas.

He resides in New York where he edits an anti-intellectual (anti-art?) rather ethereal, often pretentious magazine, FILM CULTURE.

“As long as the ‘lucidly minded’ critics will stay out with their ‘form,’ ‘content,’ ‘art,’ ‘structure, ‘ ‘clarity,’ ‘importance,’—everything will be all right, just keep them out.

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As a follow-up to the Nov. 8 elections in Alabama, and as a result of black people voting in those elections for the first time in their lives, the white landowners are retaliating by evicting large numbers of black farm workers from their land.

In Greene County, the Greene County Freedom Organization reports that there have been a series of evictions, resulting in 70 families being evicted from the land which has been their home for years.

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A new year coming up, the end of one era and the move into a new one. 1967. The year that will make history begin again, with some relevance to our lives. What we are. I mean I can feel it in the air, the vibrations are so strong now and when they are united it will be truly beautiful. Believe me. Believe yourselves. Believe in what you feel.

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Why did I translate Raoul Vaneigem’s La Résistance au christianisme: Les Héresies des origines au xviiie siècle, originally published in 1993 by Editions Fayard, into English?

This is a fair question because, after all, the book is more than 600 pages long, not counting the bibliography and the index, and it’s about a fairly esoteric subject: the so-called heresies that were identified (sometimes even fabricated), publicly denounced and ruthlessly persecuted by the Christian Church over the course of nearly 2,000 years.

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Anti-war forces in Detroit are preparing to respond to a call for a national mobilization called at a meeting last month of anti-war groups.

The meeting, held in Cleveland Nov. 26 to evaluate the recent Nov. 5–8 Mobilization for Peace in Vietnam, for Economic Justice and for Human Rights, mapped plans for continuing and enlarging anti-war activities and established a Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

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The Court Theatre has announced the cancellation of its scheduled production of Marat / Sade due to its revival in New York.

As an alternate the Court will present the Detroit premiere of Joan Little-wood’s London hit, “Oh, What A Lovely War.” Subtitled “A Musical Entertainment” the play is often referred to as a music-hall show. Songs and dances of the World War I era are interwoven with actual stories and news events of the War.

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“It is a general policy to expect that teachers will maintain discipline by means other than the use of corporal punishment.”

—Detroit Public Schools TEACHERS’ BULLETIN

“The Detroit Board of Education policy limited the use of corporal punishment is in reality one big fiction.”

This is what one irate Detroit substitute teacher said after witnessing two instances of excessive brutality against elementary school students during one afternoon.

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Translated by Bernardo Bova and Peggy Edmonds

“God sent to earth an animal to tell men that they are immortal, and the animal, either through stupidity or forgetfulness, told them that they must die.”

—St. Augustine

We need a third sex to touch the ecstatic culture. The Europe of 1966 is still sterilized by war, its seminal reservoirs dried up by fascism and the search for an ecstatic culture is its first possibility of refinding its fertility.

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Anarchist theorist and activist Alfredo Bonanno, a proponent of insurrectionary anarchism, died in December at his home in Trieste, Italy at age 86. Together with early 20^th century anarchists, Errico Malatesta and Luigi Galleani, Bonanno was a comrade who greatly influenced Italian and international anarchism.

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a review of

Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2023

“Contrary to prevalent misdefinitions, surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine, nor a philosophical system, nor a mere literary or artistic school. It is an unrelenting revolt against a civilization that reduces all human aspirations to market values, religious impostures, universal boredom, and misery.”

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The calendar is a regular feature of the FIFTH ESTATE. It carries news of what is happening in the Detroit to Ann Arbor area. You can help make the calendar more complete by sending us information about activities you know about or that you are involved in. Deadlines for the calendar are the 8^th and 23^rd of each month.

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I have unfortunately been one of the many observers of that bloated piece of miscarried construction the UNIROYAL TIRE on I-94. [See “Get That Tire!” FE #19, December 1–15, 1966.] It would be best to have the tire destroyed by indirect means, i.e., through use of mind manipulation, have someone destroy it for us.

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In the last few months blues has become very popular with the white coffee house crowds. This blues is a kind of washed out version of what was popular during the forties and early fifties when now familiar names like Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Sunnyland Slim, Little Walter and Jimmy Reed were popular to a different type of audience. Most of the artists mentioned are still turning out albums in the blues city, Chicago, but the music has changed, maybe for the better, maybe not. The old gut-bucket style of delivery, the slurred speech, and the startlingly honest lyrics have been toned down slightly.

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EDITOR & PUBLISHER

Harvey Ovshinsky

MANAGING EDITOR

Peter Werbe

NEWS & POLITICAL EDITORS

R. Fleck & F. Joyce

ART & LAYOUT

Gary Grimshaw

EDITORIAL Assistant

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Wilson Lindsey

PHOTOGRAPHY

E. Bacilla, Wilson Lindsey, Magdaline Sinclair

TRAVEL EDITOR

Sheil Salashnek

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR

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It’s rumored that the Wayne State University Artists Society is planning a film festival. They’ve gotten some money from the University and feel that a festival would be a good way to use it, and, perhaps make some more money. Due to the time thing I’m going to have to beg off on giving more information, since the plan has only been in existence for a few days.

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The National Coordinating Committee against the war has revealed that some major American universities have entered into another phase of noneducation.

The committee says that university involvement in chemical and biological warfare (CBWL) has recently become a major issue on some important campuses.

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“Once the Germans were war-like and mean but that couldn’t happen again.

We taught them a lesson in 1918.

And they haven’t bothered us since then.”

—Tom Lehrer

Playing an oldie but goodie in an age of more subtle tunes of political violence, more than a million of the good citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany have cast their lots in with the National Democratic Party (NDP). Getting 6.1 and 7.4 percent of the votes in state elections in Bavaria and Hesse, the NDP has stirred up some feelings of uneasiness and some fancy political science footwork as to which generation they belong to.

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a review of

Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades that Changed the Country & Its Sounds by Michael Broyles. Norton 2024

in his 1955 book, America’s Music, Gilbert Chase raised a question that has remained of central concern to academic musicologists in this country ever since: What, exactly, is distinctly American about American music?

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An Interfaith group of clergymen who oppose the war in Vietnam will hold a conference for draft age men on Dec. 28 at the Central Methodist Church on Woodward at Adams.

The clergy committee on the draft has called the conference because it believes that churches that have expressed opposition to the war have an obligation to those men who face the possibility of serving in a war they think unjust.

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Editor’s note: Frank Kofsky’s byline was inadvertently left off his piece, “End of Jazz Clubs?” in the last issue. Joseph Jarman, whose picture ran with the article, is a young altoist from Chicago.

It always comes as a distinct pleasure to be able to recommend an outstanding jazz recording. Particularly so with the new music, since, as we shall see, the obstacles in the way of artistic creation for the men of this persuasion are especially severe. Because of these obstacles, the new music, when finally it does get set down on record, is often not presented as advantageously as it might be.

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GI Joe is on the move... rat-a-tat-tat-tat. Ka-BOOM. Blam. Ka-POW. Gasp...arugghhh! Christmas Day or Doomsday, you say? ‘Tis the season, and the next several weeks will abound with GI Joes, uniforms, helmets, missiles, grenades, and bombs, carrying on the fine American tradition of Christmas peace and profiteering.

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Do you have trouble getting the FIFTH ESTATE? You can find it at the Merit Book Center, 14365 Harper; Bookworld, Woodward at Warren; the news stand at Campus Martius and Woodward; Debs Hall, 3737 Woodward; Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, 1101 W. Warren; Facing Reality Publishing Co., 14131 Woodward; Global Books, 4829 Woodward, upstairs; Mixed Media, 5704 Cass at Palmer; Mona’s Restaurant, John Lodge at Forest; Monroe Music, 18981 Livernois at 7 Mile Rd.; Paperbacks Unlimited; 14145 Woodward; Paramount News in E. Lansing; and Bob Marshall’s Books in Ann Arbor. We need more distributors. Know of any stores that would carry the paper?

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It was a Thursday night, December 8, at Wayne State’s Community Arts Auditorium. I was about to hear Lyman Woodward play for the first time...Mustachioed John Sinclair came out of the wings and quietly told us Lyman was going to play and with who and all that. Then Woodward and Charles Miles padded out mumbling to each other. Lyman sat at the piano and Miles stood with his saxophone and they began to play some of the cleanest music I’ve ever heard. Woodward and friends play a kind of free jazz and their concert was hard to describe in ordinary terms at all. The improvisations on the first number lulled one into tranquility and then slid into raucous excitement and then back down again and up and down and when it was all over the audience was too astonished to applaud. Miles stayed, Woodward switched to electric organ, and was later joined by Charles Moore on cornet and Melvin Davis on drums.

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The Michigan State News ran a front-page headline this summer, “Find No MSU Students Using LSD, Dope,” and an article this fall quoting the director of the University Health Center on “Dr. O’Leary,” the man who was deceiving the nation on the dangers of psychedelic drugs. Things may not be as bad at MSU as this makes them seem, but it was into an atmosphere not terribly knowledgeable about psychedelics that Timothy Leary descended November 17, to speak before an audience of more than 4,000 MSU students and faculty on “LSD: Man, God and Law.”

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Word reached the Fifth Estate office last week that FBI and Detroit Narcotics Squad agents met with Wayne State University officials to plan a massive attack on users of marijuana, LSD, and other consciousness-expanding substances in the campus and Plum Street areas in the near future.

Already waves of maniac paranoia are spreading through the city’s psychedelic culture as the police-state fear machines go into action. But as poet Gary Snyder remarked at his poetry reading last month at WSU, “This is no time to be scared.” The narcotics bureaucracy works on one principle only—the fear-guilt-intimidation deal—and it can be exposed by bringing all the facts into the open.

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The Vietnam War has exacerbated what is clearly every generation’s occupational hazard: the desperate dissatisfaction with the ruling clique’s policies by people who lack the power, and often the age, to do anything about it. The frustration has been further increased in our time by the presence of what is probably the most unpopular president in American history. A president who can hear hundreds of thousands of his own people shout in the streets that he is a murderer.

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I load my briefcase (big gold stars, red marking pencils, paper clips, safety pins, string for cheerio necklaces, Conscientious Objector Handbook, Fort Hood Three Newsletter, Substitute Directory, lunch, throat lozenges, cigarettes) and wait for that damn phone call.

Where do I go today? X school—X world—X game to play. Usually I go in my district, referred to as culturally deprived. Deprived only of white middle-class bogusness.

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I keep stressing the LOCAL in this column because it is precisely what we all have to work with—what is in front of us. Our lives are here, at this instant, and we should make the most of our local possibilities. People spend too much time waiting to go somewhere else, getting there, and then more time feeling out the new terrain, so that half their time is spent dreaming and scheming instead of DOING.

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Not going to do it

Or even pretend.

.

Go to church and swear

Obedience to inscrutable

Deities whose very existence

Strains credulity?

.

Not going to do it

Or even pretend.

.

Made-up stories starring

Anthropomorphic, jealous

Super-creatures with

Terrible tempers

Earn nothing from

Reasonable people but

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