Most Recent Additions

Dear Julius,

Although our actual contact has been infrequent, I have felt very close to you since we first met, and our shared experiences, including writing for the same papers, added to this. But in recent months your columns have puzzled and confused me. I don’t know you any more; I don’t know where you’re at; I can’t imagine why you are saying (writing) the things you are.

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LONDON (PWS)—Traffic, one of Britain’s most highly rated groups, officially disbanded last week. The announcement was made here last week just as the group’s new single, “Medicated Goo,” was released and as their current album, “Traffic,” continued up the charts.

Originally formed in early 1967 when singer Stevie Winwood parted company with the Spencer Davis Group, to join forces with Jim Capaldi, Chris Wood, and Dave Mason, the group scored heavily through live performances and several hit singles.

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compiled by Naomi Epel

THURS. DEC. 26

MC5 at the Fillmore East, New York, free tickets obtainable if you happen to be heading in that direction. Call Trans-Love 1/769-2017.

GUERRILLA THEATER: a pacifist play by Sam Cohen performed at the Red Roach at 9:30 pm. Followed at 11 pm by Father John’s Purple Cone, a light-sound-motion poem performed by Tamara and Peter. And at Midnight Body Decorating for Xmas. All at the Red Roach. Don’t be put off by its location at Plum and Fifth. It’s what’s inside that counts. Free!

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White middle-class America now has a President it can call its own. This is the middle-class America of people who have “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.” It is the middle-class America of the Puritan virtues of all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, but so what? It is the middle-class America of housing subdivisions midway between the cities and the suburbs, the middle-class America of rectangular lawns that are mowed on Saturday morning and car washing in the driveway on Saturday afternoon and a drive out in the country on Saturday evening. It is a respectable world which believes in the system because the system worked for them.

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

A reader recently asked if I knew of any slang terms for “clitoris,” which she found too technical for bedroom talk. I didn’t know of any so I asked readers for their suggestions. Here are some of them:

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Due to a surprising thing to come, I wish to cancel my subscription.

I’m on a heavy cruiser off the DMZ (Vietnam) coast. On 18 Jan. 1969 the ship returns to the United States and I am to be released from active duty.

Upon my return home to Detroit I will again be in the groove. This will enable me to buy the Fifth Estate at my local hangouts. Thus, I won’t need your subscription at my current address.

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It was brought to my attention last week, that each of the various astrological signs [vague as any such sun-sign delineation can be] has its own particular sexual proclivities and positions. Indeed, it would be quite possible [if not desirable] to create an astrological Kama Sutra, designed to insure sexual fulfillment and certainty for all possible combinations of signs. Here follows a brief capsule description of astrological intercourse [blow by blow, as it were].

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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.

Overground paper: Independent Eye, a newspaper of southwest Ohio. P.O. Box 20017, Cincinnati, Ohio 45220. 6 issues for $1. Remember, the Queen City.

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I was seven years old when my mother fell in love with our landlord. The apartment we lived in, in retrospect, was a slum.

It was a three story red paneled building with eight units, two on each floor, all occupied by cartoonish caricatures of poverty, myself and my mother included. My father was battling alcoholism, and my mother, yearning for stability, filed for divorce and moved us into the red apartment. She got a job down the street waiting tables at a restaurant, and we lived in that apartment for the next five years.

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Which local all night disc jockey wards off the most obscene phone calls, brings down the most listeners who get sick on STP, and plays stud to all the lonely night people who listen to his show with one hand on their Buddhist prayer candles and the other in their pants?

Dave Dixon does it all.

He is ABX’s “Night Tripper” and his thing is done every day (except Tuesday) from 2:00 to 7:00 in the morning.

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from Guerrilla, free newspaper of the streets, Volume 2, Number 2 (Surrealists, 1925 — Artists & Writers Militia, 1968)

Guerrilla is edited by Allen Van Newkirk and Susan Hodges and published occasionally as a broadside of poetry and revolution. It is reprinted here as a special supplement. The newspaper is distributed free in the immediate community. Mail subscriptions by donation. All corporations, federal and state agencies by minimum $10.00 donation. Free to any human being held against his will in any army or prison. Guerrilla, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

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“How can one speak of the present, when one feels abandoned by it?”

—Lara Mimosa Montes, Thresholes (Coffee House Press 2020)

“Grief is not always sharp, but grief is always.”

—Mairead Case, Tiny (Featherproof Books 2020)

“How did we get entrenched in this insidious wage labor relationship—where we’re servants to that really repulsive phrase, ‘making a living’? I hate that phrase. We have a living—we have lives. How dare that wage labor relationship—how dare work—overlay itself onto life—and even pretend that it is life?”

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On A-29, the legendary anarchist collective The Living Theater performs the “Code Orange Contata” in the streets (photo by Sunfrog)

On December 12, 13, and 14, The Living Theatre, an amazing theatrical community numbering over 35, performed three of the four productions of their repertoire: “Mysteries and Smaller Pieces,” “Antigone,” and “Frankenstein” (“Paradise Now” is the fourth) at the Detroit Institute of Arts. These productions were, to use Julian Beck’s phrase, a revolution disguised as theatre.

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[Web Archive note: This centerfold insert is a two-sided 15 x 22 inch poster, of which this page can be considered the back side. The other side of the poster is rendered at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/69-december-26-1968-january-8-1969/poetry-2/ .]

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John Cassavetes’ “Faces,” currently at the Studio North, is the best American American movie since “Bonnie & Clyde” or “The Graduate.” By that I mean that this movie could not have been made outside of the United States and still strike us with all the honesty and impact and pain that is possesses. For the problems that Cassavetes has chosen to explore in “Faces” are, I believe, peculiarly American, deep rooted in our contemporary society: in particular, this country’s almost fanatical preoccupation with sex.

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PARIS (LNS)—At first glance the only visible change resulting from the May revolution in France are some repaved streets and felled trees.

DeGaulle’s use of the two-sided club of repression and reform seems to have succeeded in placating the dissatisfied majority and in silencing militants. But the lull in political activity is deceiving; the movement is now perhaps at its most crucial stage, preparing the educational and organizational groundwork for a successful revolution.

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Remember “Mademoiselle,” the Tony Richardson-Jean Genet collaboration in which lovely Jeanne Moreau raced around the French countryside in stiletto heels heaping destruction on a poor little town, and all because of sexual repression? Then there was Jules Dassin’s 10:30 p.m. “Summer,” the agonized tale of a traveling menage a trois.

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“The duty of the revolutionary is to make revolution.”

The duty of a musician is to make music. But there is an equation that can’t be missed: MUSIC IS REVOLUTION. Rock and roll music is the most vital revolutionary force on earth—it blows people all the way back to their senses and makes them feel good. That’s what the revolution is all about—we have to establish a situation on this planet where all people can feel good all the time. And we will not rest until that situation exists.

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NEW YORK—The Jefferson Airplane’s filming of a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s “One American Movie,” on location here, resulted in a minor riot, a skin show, a visit from New York’s finest, and an impromptu performance for midtown Manhattan office workers.

Out of the welter of confusion come these facts, according to eye witnesses. The group along with the cast and crew of the film were filming on the rooftop of the Schuyler Hotel, directly across from the filming headquarters. The filming started with lead singer Marty Balin delivering an impromptu and richly amplified “Wake Up New York, Wake Up. Free Music. Free Love.”

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Protesting the threat of the removal of their school performing arts curriculum, about five hundred students from Cass Technical High School demonstrated at the Schools Center Building on Woodward November 26.

Mrs. Betty Gittlen, a parent, asked simply for the board to “state clearly that it will maintain Cass Tech as an undistributed, city-wide, specialized high school with its present curricula intact.”

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Florida state police arrested Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver yesterday as he sat smoking a cigarillo and reading the Works of Chairman Mao in the lobby of the Hotel Fontainbleu in Miami Beach. He is being held for extradition to California and has been charged with violating a statute which makes crossing state lines to save your life a federal offense.

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Power authority creeps have reared their puffy bourgeois heads once again in the Detroit area, this time at Clarenceville High School in Livonia.

Any Clarenceville student caught displaying the Fifth Estate inside the school will have his copy of the paper confiscated and his parents will be informed.

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By the time you read this I will have gotten through Christmas, but as I write I haven’t yet.

I sort of have a tradition which I sometimes wish I could stop. Anyway, I have this tree trimming party every year where everyone who comes for the first time must bring an ornament which somehow expresses the “real” them.

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I had a groovy Thanksgiving that I’d like to tell you about: Some of my friends asked me if I’d like to cook for about 30 people.

What I took on as a challenge turned out to be a great night of eating for over a hundred people. Charlie Auringer, Myron Green, Steve Swainson, Eric Morrice, and Barry Kramer all live and work out of a huge studio loft on Cass which easily accommodated our friends and guests.

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Big changes at the Fifth Estate. As you can see by the staff box above our paper’s decisions will be made by an Editorial Group rather than by the two former co-editors. This represents an attitude on the part of the people working full-time on the paper that decisions should be made collectively by those most closely involved in its production.

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a review of

The Beatles, The Authorized Biography, by Hunter Davies, McGraw Hill, 1968, NYC, $6.95, 357 pp.

Here, for the first time in book form, is all the hoo-hah publicity bullshit about the Beatles. Now you can throw away all your old lipstick-covered newspaper clippings and sea-smelling scrapbooks. Mild mannered journalist and novelist Hunter Davies (creator of Georgy Girl) has assembled most of the “authorized” Beatlememorabilia in a neat slick historical package.

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Six years ago, Robert Enrico directed the award-winning “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” This short film told of a condemned man during the Civil War who, seconds before he is about to be hanged, fantasizes his escape. Enrico’s current “Zita,” at the Studio New Center through December 18, carries this same theme even further.

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Fri. Dec. 13

GRANDE BALLROOM: Deep Purple, Lee Michaels, and the Candel w1 headline the super psychedelic floor show. Groove to the bands, magic Jerry’s light show and visit the hippy bullshit counter. $3.50.

LIVING THEATER presents “Antigone,” at the Detroit Institute of Arts Audit. 8:30 pm. $4.50 and $3.50.

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What a good year this has been for farce. We’re talking about theatre here, not politics.

The Hilberry Classic company at Wayne State has been very successful in its productions of Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear” and Labiche/Marc-Michel’s “An Italian Straw Hat.” Moliere’s “Tartuffe” made Shakespearean plays take a back seat at the Stratford, Ontario Festival last summer; it was worth a special trip and it is returning next year.

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Reprinted with permission of The Guardian, independent radical weekly, NYC.

A student movement has its own built-in limitations, both in terms of how much it can do and how much it can understand. In some ways, a student Movement tends to be artificial, because the student lives in an artificial environment—the university. Thus, it is natural that a student movement generally concerns itself with issues that the majority of society has hardly any time at all to-be concerned about. This is good to a point. Without the student demonstrations against the war, there would’ve been no antiwar movement. Without student consciousness of racism, blacks would be even more isolated and vulnerable to attack.

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

“My first year at Stephens College all the girls were getting weird diseases. They were just starting to make it with boys and went to the college dispensary with a whole lot of vaginal complaints—trichomonas, fungus infections and strange discharges that didn’t seem to have a name.”

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Marches, demonstrations, and other anti-war actions are a credit to the Peace Movement, but have not had enough impact on the men in uniform. This is the view of a group of Vietnam veterans opposed to the war who have formed an agency to build communication between servicemen and peace organizations. They call themselves the Servicemen’s LINK to Peace.

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Fifth Estate

A newspaper of Detroit

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Harvey Ovshinsky

Tommye Wiese

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

PHOTO EDITOR

Mike Tyre

CALENDAR

Resa Jannet

STAFF

Laura Straight

Marlene Tyre

Marilyn Werbe

The FIFTH ESTATE is published every other Thursday of each month by the Fifth Estate Newspaper, Inc., 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201. Subscription rate by third class mail is $3 for one year; $5 for two years. Canadian is $3.50; all other foreign are $5 per year. Ph: 831–6800.

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NEW DELHI, India—The ascension to the throne of Richard Nixon has not been greeted with enthusiasm in India. Most of the papers think he is a drag—“the winning candidate who took the greatest care not to commit himself—others that he is a menace. A literary and political mag called Shankar’s Weekly calls him “the obedient robot of the American conservative establishment” and says his election has put the American clock back by twenty years. Bombay’s flashy weekly Blitz goes further and attributes Nixon’s election to “the notorious J. Edgar Hoover... the master-brain behind the two Kennedy executions.” This factor, says Blitz, “added to his own unseemly record on which the FBI is bound to have complete files, will make the new President a convenient tool in the hands of the Police Chief and the State-within-a-State he commands.”

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The biggest mistake in bringing Shakespeare to the screen is to construct some sort of stone effigy to him. But France Zeffirelli’s film production of “Romeo & Juliet,” at the Studio 8, pulsates with a life all its own.

In translating a stage drama to a visual medium, much of the dialogue has been cut in favor of the action. Surprisingly, this works beautifully. “Romeo & Juliet” is a remarkably visual movie that could stand on its own for the imagery alone. The result is a thoroughly “cinematic” film adaptation.

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Ted Lucas knows exactly where he wants to be in relation to his art: “You can’t b.s. on an instrument—it’s impossible! Everything that’s there just comes out. What I got to do is just get my head together enough so that when I play I can just be what I am—Hey! What a groovy title for a song! ‘I Wanna Be What I Am!’ Where’s a pencil?”

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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.

Overground paper: Independent Eye, a newspaper of southwest Ohio. P.O. Box 20017, Cincinnati, Ohio 45220. 6 issues for $1. Remember, the Queen City.

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ANN ARBOR, Dec. 5—White Panther Minister of Information John Sinclair announced today that the newly-formed revolutionary organization has named its first Central Committee.

In their first formal meeting the Committee discussed matters of immediate importance to the White Panthers and to the world, including the threatened imprisonment of Brother Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information, Black Panther Party, and the arrest and imprisonment of 13 brothers and sisters in Detroit for alleged “conspiracy to place explosives with intent to do damage.”

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Well, here we are at the advent of yet another season of goodwill and love to all men, etc. I wish you a very happy something. Did you ever think how many people, at Christmas, celebrate the birth of someone they don’t believe in?

Congratulations, firstly, must go to Audio Arts of Detroit for the fine way in which they turned Hendrix’s thing into a superfluous shamble of chaotic hostility. Special thanks to Phil Ober of Audio Arts who, having denied me an interview with Hendrix (an interview arranged with Hendrix’s manager over a month before the concert) on the grounds that there wasn’t time—which there wasn’t—and told myself and a photographer with me “But you can stand right at the front to get some good shots!”

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NEW YORK (LNS)—The media of the revolution is mushrooming through America.

The growth of the underground and movement press is phenomenal. Equally notable is the outrage and fear which it creates in those whose interests it opposes. As the radical media grows, so do the attempts to repress it.

In recent weeks, the minions of law and order have been beating on the doors of the underground press. The Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta has been threatened with grand jury indictments for obscenity. Dallas Notes has seen its office torn apart by the cops and its equipment confiscated. Bloomington, Indiana’s Spectator and Ithaca, New York’s First Issue, have had their editors busted for resisting the draft.

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“If we want to do much more fucking, we’re going to have to start fighting. If we want to be able to live we have to start fighting and not let ourselves be fucked around any longer by this shitpile society. We are the only hope in a crumbling world of lies and deception. Young people look to us—the dropouts, the radicals, the freeks—for information only we can provide. The Black Panthers are our brothers and sisters and point the way for action. We see their situation and realize it is ours too. Our music and our lives are the same. One is not possible without the other. The Music must go on.”

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LONDON (LNS)—The Beatles are considering doing a series of free concerts in the U.S. next spring or early summer, according to a report in the rock tabloid, Rolling Stone. The concerts would be an expression of the Beatles’ thanks for support from their American fans.

The latest issue of Rolling Stone is chock full of other good Beatle data, such as:

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CHICAGO, LNS—City Hall sources were buzzing this morning as the mayor’s office shamefacedly admitted to what may be one of the greatest blunders in the history of law enforcement. A mud-splattered blue Chevrolet van carrying 14 dangerous political criminals had passed through the clutches of the city’s police and was allowed to escape through what Mayor Daley called “criminal negligence” on the part of his force early Sunday morning.

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When the President appointed a Commission to study violence after Chicago’s freak-out Convention activity last August, not even the most turned on prophet in the movement could have suspected the bombshell report which would become, after a single day on the stands, a runaway best seller.

Maybe hippies, Yippies, Panthers, college students, politicos, and assorted freeks have been saying it all along, but now the Establishment has come out and said it.

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Nothing much to report or rap about; so just a few brief notes.

Our abortive record deal with ESP records is still fouled. We wrote the record company in New York and asked if they could mail the bonus records to our new subscribers, but they have not answered to date.

A few people have come into our office to pick up their albums, but the majority of them remain here in the office confronting us accusingly. If you live in the Detroit area please come and get your record or if you live a distance away write us a note and we will send it to you.

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A “National GI-Civilian anti-war Action Conference” has been called for Chicago on December 28^th. This conference is part of a weekend series of meetings between GIs and civilians to plan joint projects and call a mass anti-war action in the spring.

The conference will be held during the Christmas holidays and in centrally located Chicago to make it easier for GIs to attend during their holiday leaves.

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Since their seems to be some controversy about calling police “Pigs,” I would like to say that when you call any group any one name, that you are generalizing.

Whether you call a policeman a pig, a long haired freak a hippy, or a black man a nigger it’s all the same.

Believe it or not police are people and by classing them together as one name, you are guilty of exactly what their doing. Not to say that the majority of police aren’t sadists, I’m sure they are, but you have to realize that police work naturally caters to sadists.

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Last issue we hinted that perhaps Detroit Police Commissioner Johannes Spreen was trying to do something about the brutal and racist nature of his police by disciplining officers involved in incidents of brutality at the Veteran’s Memorial Building and Poor People’s March. Criminal charges were even brought against two officers for their roles in brutalizing two teenagers.

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Fifth Estate

A Newspaper Of Detroit

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Tommye Wiese

NEWS EDITOR

Alan Gotkin

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

PHOTO EDITOR

Mike Tyre

ART DIRECTION

Blallen

ADVERTISING

Gunnar Lewis

CALENDAR

Resa Jannett

DISTRIBUTION

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MIAMI (LNS)—A variety of musicians and singers will get together for the 1969 Miami Pop Festival set for Dec. 29–30 at Gulfstream Park, Hallandale, Fla.

The following will perform:

Saturday, Dec. 28: Jose Feliciano, Country Joe & the Fish, Buffy Saint Marie, Chuck Berry, Infinite McCoys, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Booker T and the MGs, Dino Valente, Fleetwood Mac and the Blues Image.

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