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A series of free entertainment on Friday nights has been organized at Wayne State University by a group of students known as the Friday Night Coordinating Committee (FNCC)

On February 3 there will be a classical music concert at Community Arts Aud., at 8:00, presenting Dr. & Mrs. Hockberg of the Wayne State University School of Music.

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The New Age of man finds more and more people interested in living together for the mutual benefit of one another’s growth and development.

While many communes have been set up in the past they have generally been of limited success. Despite all the difficulties that one encounters in communal living it is the belief of many that it is only through such living together and the sharing of lives that man can achieve his maximum potential.

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I have never talked with anyone knowledgeable about Harlem affairs who does not believe that Esther James, the woman who sued Adam Clayton Powell for libel, was a bag woman as the Congressman had called her.

The problem is that in order to prove it, since the defense against libel is the truth, Adam Clayton Powell would have had to produce witnesses willing to testify about corruption in the New York Police Department. Where is the policeman who is willing to admit that he took the payments from Esther James? Or that the N.Y. police department runs the numbers racket in Harlem? So when Esther James admitted on the witness stand, as she did that she was a police informer, that in itself was a tacit admission that she was a bag woman.

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Once, one approached Truffaut with satiate expectancy, awaiting only to be chewed up and spat upon beneath the marquee. In stark wonderment and in bitter tears one expected to be engulfed by the pleasures of cinema at its best. The mystery about him is depleted and this precious auteur now rates the same scrutiny as his far western brothers with only a slightly higher handicap. His reputation has been defiled through the medium of “Farenheit 451,” Truffaut’s latest endeavor, from the novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury.

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America—the world—lives in a period of transition of its entire way of life. On the one hand we live in utter confusion and yet on the other we are beginning to see the immense possibilities that are now available to us to construct a HUMAN society, a society in which man will be released from thousands of years of struggle and toil he has put himself to. Moreover, we live in a period of great spiritual discovery. We find ourselves at the beginning of a human epoch that will see each of us—all men—MAN flower into the beautiful creative animal he is.

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James Dickey, in his delightful book of essays The Suspect in Poetry, distinguishes four main ways of reacting to poems which are worth repeating as they may be applicable to film.

In ascending order of importance they are 1) “This probably isn’t so, and even if it were I could-not care less,” 2) “This may be true enough as far as it goes, but well ... so what? 3) “This is true or at least convincing, and therefore I respond to it differently than I do to poems in the first two categories, and 4) “This is true with a kind of truth at which I could never have arrived by myself, but its truth is better than the one I had believed.”

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I mistrust people who smoke pot loudly. Bragging, yelling, telling.

I don’t think it’s wrong to turn new people on. I’d just never thought of trying to sell marijuana in mass form. It seemed that LEMAR was trying to prove that psychedelics were safe “for the whole family.” I think they’re right, only I instinctively shrink away from anyone trying to lay something on me. American TV commercials did that to me.

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Special to the Fifth Estate

San Francisco — Hippies, Hippies, Hippies, and when you turn around, more of them were sitting on the grass, perched on fences, standing on benches, straining for a look, or entwined on the ground.

People carrying odd pennants, flags and signs, seeing colored smoke bombs going off. People dropping into the crowd by parachute, souls filing through the crowd handing out L.S.D., others handing out sticks of incense.

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Saturday night, January 14, at the Meadow Brook Theater was a Brechtian evening in more ways than one. A youthfully middle-aged audience, whose appearance and intermission conversation would have been classified by Brecht as bourgeois, reacted enthusiastically to a first-rate production of his ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle.’ Despite the fact that it was an opening play for a new company, it was in some respects better than the production by the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater in New York last year.

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“Why the Dearborn Referendum?” was the subject of a talk given by Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, January 26.

The lecture was presented by Citizens for Peace in Vietnam as part of their Spring educational series. Other speakers will include William Pepper, who wrote the article in the January Ramparts on U.S. napalm effects on Vietnamese children and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, who recently returned from Hanoi.

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In his recently published book FOUR LIVES IN THE BEBOP BUSINESS, A.B. Spellman relates that Buell Neidlinger, former bassist with Cecil Taylor, told him: “I think Cecil Taylor is potentially the most important musician in the Western World ... And I’m basing this,” the “legitimately” trained Neidlinger went on, “on my experience with some of the very best of the new composers and the new orchestras ... Cecil has it, to my mind, clearly above all of them.”

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1920s Chilean workers scene from El Montaje. ¿Quién conoce a Gómez Rojas?, Teatro Fresa Salvaje (Chile), at 2016 Theatre Festival Photo: Alvaro Pachec

A longer version of this article is available on the Fifth Estate site at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/416-spring-2025/the-montreal-international-anarchist-theatre-festival/the-montreal-international-anarchist-theatre-festival-long-version/

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As forecast in the FIFTH ESTATE (Dec. 15–31, 1966) federal, state, and local “narcotic” agents swooped down upon Detroit’s underground community Jan. 24^th to enforce Michigan’s archaic and repressive narcotic statutes. The late night raids resulted in the arrests of 56 persons ranging in ages from 17 to 33 years old.

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So you think the Michigan Chronicle, Detroit’s only Negro newspaper, is conservative, its green color reflecting its primary purpose of making money rather than informing the community?

How does the idea of a Negro paper published by a white racist, who may have John Birch Society money behind him, grab you?

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A news article in the January 21, 1967 MICHIGAN CHRONICLE, a Detroit Negro paper, reported their paper had received several phone calls complaining about the use of the word “nigger” in an anti-draft display at Wayne University.

The display, sponsored by the Wayne chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), outlined different alternatives to the draft including conscientious objection (CO) and going to Canada. Also, the display suggested potential draftees could “cop out” by displaying erratic or disagreeable behavior at the induction center.

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THE POEM FOR WARNER STRINGFELLOW

OCTOBER, 1966

Detective Lieutenant, Detroit Narcotics Squad, who has been single-handedly responsible for busting me on two separate occasions for possessing & selling marijuana

and who stumbled into my new apartment last night by accident

over a year since the last time he saw me

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Militant Negro leaders in Detroit have called for a nation-wide strike and boycott by black communities in support of Adam Clayton Powell. Over 600 people attended the rally at Central United Church of Christ on January 24 calling for the boycott.

Comedian Dick Gregory, feature speaker at the rally, called for a “new attitude by Negroes.” He pointed out that while white southern senators were elected illegally and still remain seated, Congressman Powell was ousted because he was black. Gregory also said he would not mind if treatment were equal, but “please, Mr. President, don’t let Bobby Baker take the rap alone.”

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MUSIC

CONCERT. Spikedrivers, Upper DeRoy Aud., Wayne Campus, 8:00, adm. benefit for 5^th Estate, 1/20

CONCERT. Scandinavian Symphony, Scottish Rite Cathedral, Masonic Temple, 8:20 adm. 1/21

JAZZ CONCERT: THE ANDREW HILL QUARTET, Saturday, January 21, 8:00 p.m., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

DANCE/CONCERT to benefit GUERILLA, presented by the 1967 Steering Committee. Sunday, January 29, 4–12 p.m. Grande Ballroom. Music by the MC-5, SpikeDrivers, Detroit Edison (formerly the Down-Home Tyrannosauraus of Despair), Livonia Tool & Die, the Lyman Woodard Ensemble, Joseph Jarman, the Ron English — Bud Spangler Unit, and others. Lights by the High Society and the Bulging Eyevalls of Gautama. Poetry readings by Bill Hutton, Allen Van Newkirk, John Sinclair, Jim Semark, Bradley Jones, Art Rosch, Don Moye, Jerry Younkins, Gary Grimshaw, and others. For a new civilization. Donation $2.50.

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Editor’s note: Henry Waldorf is the pseudonym of a physician practicing in the eastern United States. Dr. “Waldorf” agreed to write the following article out of a sincere belief in his work and asked only that his real name be kept from appearing in print.

As the circle of people who have had psychedelic experiences continues to expand at an ever increasing rate it becomes more and more common to encounter young people with many questions about the drugs. These are the people who are vaguely aware of the message behind the allusional terminology of expanded consciousness. They are so curious about themselves and the world around them that their gravitation toward psychedelic chemicals is inevitable.

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LEMAR’s second meeting happened Jan. 4^th at the Artist’s Workshop and I mean IT REALLY HAPPENED, over fifty people showed up. The place was full of happy, alive, enthusiastic human beings. It was just downright out-of-sight. We’re getting together—here’s what came out of the last meeting:

1. A committee was formed to produce a one page flyer/bibliography. This will be a handout to make the people aware of us, what we are trying to do, and where they can get more information.

2. A research group was formed to compile material for a lengthy ten-to-twelve page booklet which will deal more extensively with some of the studies done on marijuana.

3. There will be a fundraising concert at the Workshop coming soon—watch for notices in this paper.

4. Plans for a Midwest Conference on Consciousness Expansion in the spring, and a symbolic puffin on May 1^st are still going ahead. Plus lots more.

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Leaving aside his descent into scatology and personal abuse, Shelley Manne’s letter [FE #21, January 1–15, 1967] claims that I am in error regarding the degree of integration in 1) his group; 2) his club; 3) the movie-TV-recording studios.

As evidence for 1), he informs us that he offered Teddy Edwards, a black tenor player, a job in his group. So? If true, and if Edwards had accepted, that would have raised the number of Negro musicians in Manne’s group for the last dozen years to 4 instead of 3 (assuming Down Beat is correct in reporting that pianist Hamp Hawes has joined Manne). That hardly makes Manne a flaming integrationist: Dave Brubeck has had a greater percentage of black musicians in his quartet during the same period.

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A “dark-horse,” William Cahalan, has been named new Wayne County Prosecutor to replace the evasive Sam Olsen, who captured a Recorder’s Court post last fall, and hopes are up that there will be a more liberal spirit in law enforcement.

Cahalan, another alumnus of the University of Detroit, appears to be another crony of Mayor Cavanagh—and that’s neither good nor bad in itself, except that it adds a little more fuel to the potent “Irish Mafia” political machine in Wayne County.

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Detroit’s own SPIKE-DRIVERS, having just finished a mind-blowing engagement at the Living End Lounge, are now preparing for their first concert appearance in a benefit for the FIFTH ESTATE.

Besides doing their unusual brand of folk-rock (including their new Reprise release, “Baby Let Me Tell You”), they will add two amplified violins and a flute on several tunes to produce strange and mysterious sounds.

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When most Detroiters think of the organized right-wing in this city they immediately conjure up images of Don Lobsinger and his lunatic organization, Breakthrough, throwing Soviet flags at speakers, disrupting concerts because groups from the Soviet Union are playing there, or trying to break up (or through) peace demonstrations. Certainly, the Breakthroughers are spectacular and through their bizarre actions guarantee headlines. However, less spectacular, but perhaps -much more effective are the activities of the John Birch Society. Although there is an overlap in membership, Breakthrough and the Birch Society express ‘scorn for each other; the former saying the latter is not militant enough in dealing with the ‘communists’ in Detroit.

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On opening night of the Fourth Annual New York Film Festival, back in September, there appeared a ‘band of outsiders’ picketing the fountain on the plaza of Lincoln Center. There were maybe four or five men, dressed in black, wearing gas masks, carrying coffins on their shoulders.

A few days later, people attending the Special Events program on the Independent Cinema at the fest were handed flyers printed on pop-art orange paper entitled Engaged Cinema in the United States. When I read this statement of purpose, I found it to be one of the most compelling and sobering calls to arms to emerge in this country in the area of film. I later discovered that the opening night pickets were affiliated with Cinema Engagé, as they are called.

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Detroit is going through a lot of changes. Plum Street has made the inner city a nice place to visit and the Grande Ballroom has made tripping out a routine. But the most important change is at 2555 Burns Avenue, home of the Court Players.

The Court Theatre is headed by Clyde Vinson, speech instructor at Wayne. His resident acting company consists of thirteen University students, most of whom are Detroiters. Their current production is Joan Littlewood’s OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR.

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[Web archive note: “Ripes” as it appears in the original print edition]

She stands five feet seven inches in her Courreges boots. Her face is as smooth and unreacting as a billiard ball. She wears miniskirts four inches above her knobby knees, and hip-huggers which hug skinny, unrelenting hips. Her favorite people in the whole wide world are Bobby Dylan, the Beatles, and Mick Jagger. She gets high on anything that’s handy—bennies, methadrine, grass, acid. She is known as a Groupie. Want to ball her?

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Yes it IS a New year. This year Detroit will be born into flesh and spirit and we will have what we want finally. It’s been a long time acomin’, but it IS here. Yes. Last Friday night I was able to go out to a place of business (the Wisdom Tooth on Plum Street) and hear the Lyman Woodard Trio, playing its own music, and a joyful occasion THAT was. I mean it’s the first time anyone has HIRED a forward jazz unit for the public to hear, in Detroit, and that’s just ONE sign of what will come. Woodard’s trio includes the master himself on organ, alto saxophonist Charles Miles, and drummer Norman Roberts, who is really amazing. Norman plays regularly with the Temptations, and can handle ANY kind of music like he was born to it. He was. The Trio will be at the Wisdom Tooth every Friday and Saturday night after hours, that is from 2:30 to 6:00 a.m. The cover charge is $2.00, which is fine, as the money goes to the musicians. And they need it, just as you need them.

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In my last column [FE #21, January 1–15, 1967] I enumerated some of the more outstanding malfeasances on the part of the leading representatives of the jazz critics’ Establishment. In what follows I intend to go beyond mere individuals, to make clear the pivotal institutional role played by DOWN BEAT magazine in helping to perpetuate the reign of white supremacy in jazz.

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A Conference in Chicago of Dec. 26–29, student and anti-war activists has called for National Student Actions April 8–15 against the war in Vietnam. This will culminate in the transportation of as many students as possible to New York and San Francisco as part of the general Spring Mobilization of the anti-war movement on April 15.

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During the past few months, the peace movement has become aware of the fact that it must pass into a new phase of protest, a phase closer to resistance than symbolic demonstrations.

Draftees at Ft. Polk, LA. Is this the only way? photo: THE TOY

Especially within the context of the draft, the most oppressive mechanism of the military apparatus, it has become clear that real support and aid should be given to those young men who, realizing that they cannot participate in the immoral Vietnam war, must search for alternatives to the draft.

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Provo! Provo! Provo! Provo! Provo! Provo! They used to be called “Nosems,” the Dutch beatnik. The new word rides out of France. The Provo is the new young style in Holland—the Provocateur—the Hipster. They stopped being Nosems when the big changeover came about a year ago; when the kids started paying more attention to style than to content.

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in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

THURS APRIL 2

JOHN SINCLAIR, White Panther Party Chairman, appears in Recorders Court at 9:30 am to seek an appeal bond on his marijuana case. Come and show your support! at Frank Murphy Hall of Just-us, Gratiot and St. Antoine.

They’re making REMARKS ON THE PERSONALITY OF MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI in the Det. Inst. of Arts Lecture Hall (for $2.50 no less). “They” are psychoanalysts Richard& Editha Sterba. 2:00 p.m.

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Dear Friends:

The murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago have awakened many Americans to the campaign being carried out against the Black Panther Party throughout the country. Since April 1968, 28 Panthers have died and countless others have been imprisoned. But the “search and destroy” operations against the Black Panther Party do not always take such dramatic forms.

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Behind the surface appearance of every beauty contest, from Home Coming Queen to “Miss World,” exists an entire framework that represses and objectifies women. That framework had produced the idea that exposing one’s flesh, with proper techniques of body exhibition, is a desirable skill, to be rewarded with prizes and tribute.

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

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

About restaurants that prohibit nude feet. Am assuming hygienic rationale: Are shoes more hygienic per foot?”

ANSWER: Shoes are more likely to track in disease from the street than bare feet. Some restaurant owners cite health codes but the truth is they just don’t like barefooted customers.

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America moves closer to a labor crisis as other unions enter or poise for strikes throughout the country. Air travel has been seriously crippled by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) walk-out in many major U.S. cities, and they have affected air travel throughout the world.

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The government of the Bahamas has recently instituted a so-called courtesy campaign aimed at making the natives more respectful to the American and European tourists who frequent the islands. The program is, in effect, one of the most fascist official proposals from a government since apartheid became a way of life in South Africa.

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MANNHEIM, West Germany—In a violent clash with military police, imprisoned G.I.s staged a massive riot at the Army stockade in Mannheim, West Germany. On March 19^th, the U.S. Command there fought with imprisoned soldiers for 5 hours and the reported damages inflicted on government property amounted to $10,000.

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Charles Costa, an Inner City slumlord that lives in Southfield, has a habit of always trying to grab the media limelight. Through his hustling, Costa has gained a favorable reputation with Detroit’s straight papers.

Among the people that he exploits in this community, however, he is branded for the pig that he is. His latest publicity ruse is to offer a 20 cent bounty on dead rats to all local residents.

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Washington, D.C.—After nine months of pre-trial hearings, a date was set today for the trial of anti-war sailor Roger Priest. Priest, the first serviceman to face court-martial for statements made in an anti-war newsletter, will stand trial in Washington on April 14^th, the day before the nation-wide demonstrations against the war.

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LOS ANGELES, Calif.—An Air Force Academy graduate, Richard T. Hubbard, under orders to go to Vietnam on March 30, says he will risk courtmartial and endanger his professional career as a physician rather than obey those orders.

Hubbard is a practicing Methodist whose home town is in Mt. Gilead, Ohio. As a result of his religious background, he is morally against the war. Hubbard stated, “I am opposed to the War on an emotional basis...I am opposed to military life on a religious basis...I accept nonviolent resistance as a form of Christian Witness.”

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WABX DJs Larry Miller and Dave Dixon both emphatically deny the report of last issue that they came to blows over station policy. “The real miracle of the station is how well we work together,” Miller said. Sorry fellas, we had thought that the info came from a “reliable source...

The ad for the Chicago Conspiracy trial that appeared on the back page of our last issue was refused by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. Several other major dailies did accept the ad...

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Broadly conceived, ecology deals with a balance in nature. Inasmuch as nature includes man, the science basically deals with the harmonization of man and nature. Ecology is an integrative and reconstructed science in that it deals with the most radical systems of political economy.

This intrinsic characteristic of ecology, carried through to all its implications, leads directly into anarchic areas of political and economic thought.

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On November 9, 1969, the GI Press Service placed in the New York Times an advertisement signed by 1,365 active duty servicemen. The ad announced the GIs’ support for the November 15 demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, and called for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Vietnam.

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a review of

Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners, Editors: Eric King and Josh Davidson; forward by Angela Davis. AK Press, 2023

“I was told that I would be dead by the time I finished my sentence.”

—Oscar Lopez Rivera, sentenced to 55 years for 130 FALN bomb attacks in 1974–1983

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a review of

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin. Penguin Press, 2023

Historian Arnold J. Toynbee once insisted that history is not “just one damn thing after another.”

Joe Strummer, lead singer of The Clash, once insisted that, “The future is unwritten.”

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a review of

It Did Happen Here: An Antifascist People’s History, Editors: Moe Bowstern, Mic Crenshaw, Alec Dunn, Celina Flores, Julie Perini, and Erin Yanke. PM Press, 2023

We Go Where They Go: The Story of Anti-Racist Action by Shannon Clay, Kristin Schwartz and Michael Staudenmaier. PM Press, 2023

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from The Great Speckled Bird

Radical women across the country are demanding an end to the male supremacist attitudes and policies of the underground press. It is essential that these demands be recognized and met as a political priority; not only for the women who are struggling against male supremacy in this country but for the Movement as a whole.

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In a virtually unprecedented move, Reverend Robert Morrison, rector of St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, has called for the resignation of Richard Emrich as diocesan Bishop of Michigan, calling him “unchristian, inhuman and irresponsible.”

This call comes in the wake of the decision of the Episcopal diocese of Detroit to cut off funds for Reverend Morrison’s church because he allows the Gay Liberation Front, a homosexual group, to meet at the Church.

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