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I thank Mr. Kofsky for calling me a major critical figure [“The Jazz Scene,” FE #24, February 15–28, 1967].

I have the feeling that he has rarely read my Voice column because I have often written about the agonies of “abandoning my preconceptions and biases” about the new jazz. I have stated very clearly that I WAS biased but that I realized it and that I was trying to make contact with the new music.

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EDITOR Harvey Ovshinsky

MANAGING EDITOR Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Cathy West

ART Dave Carlin

TRAVEL EDITOR Sheil Salasnek

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR John Sinclair

CALENDAR Rhona Whipple

ADVERTISING Leon Brenner

FILM EDITORS: Joe Fineman, Shirley Hamburg

NEWS EDITOR, Frank Joyce

CIRCULATION, Rita Cole, Wilson Lindsey

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Reprinted from The Berkeley Barb (Underground Press Syndicate).

Did you ever have to

make up your mind?

Pick up on one and leave

the other behind.

It’s not often easy and not often kind.

Did you ever have to make up your mind?

Did you ever have to finally decide?

And say yes to one and

let the other one ride.

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On Jan. 1, 2024, the city of San Francisco sent New Year’s greetings to its beleaguered citizens with the cheery news that a suicide net had been installed under the Golden Gate Bridge thanks to funding from the California Mental Health Services Act.

Heralded as a “suicide deterrent system,” the supposedly solid rationale behind this marine grade stainless steel safety net, upon closer examination, turns out to be not so surprisingly full of holes. The erstwhile proponents of this costly $217 million bridge boondoggle have simplistically argued that if access to the material means of suicide are reduced, then deaths can be prevented. Just put up a net under the bridge to catch would-be suicides...presto, problem solved!

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Over 100 members of Detroit’s Negro population have banded together to form an Afro-American Museum.

Headed by Dr. Charles H. Wright, founder of the African Medical Education Fund, the group is united in a common interest of Black Men in history. The International Afro-American Museum (I.A.M.) hopes to demonstrate how a knowledge of Negro history will restore a sense of pride and dignity to all black Americans.

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At a 9 March meeting of Detroit LEMAR (Legalize Marijuana) Attorney William Segesta spoke to a mixed group of interested hippies, students and a middle-aged stenographer. Segesta discussed the validities and abuses of “Search-and-Seizure” statutes as interpreted by police and law enforcement agencies. Segesta outlined the two main types of arrests, the legal and illegal, describing what to do until the lawyer comes and basic constitutional rights that most citizens were unaware of, such as your right not to speak when arrested, not to sign papers and demand an attorney.

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Profits are the law and life. If survival carries with it struggling with one’s own values than a movie theater must frequently submit to fourth run showings and nudies. In fact, this vain grasp at subsistence usually takes a downward spiral as the drowning business first revives and then submits, meeting bankruptcy its final reward. Sympathetically the owner is on trial. Curiously his jury is likewise his lifeguard and his sentence often is the road of least respect.

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Early last week the Denver branch of the American Civil Liberties Union won a complete acquittal for the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Minstrel Show on charges of obscenity and lewd behavior dating from last November [see “Mime Troupe Busted,” FE #17, November 1–15, 1966].

Bill Linden, Peter Cohon and Earl Robertson were the three minstrels arrested last year when the show started a cross-country tour with performances in Denver. The group performed the same act in Detroit last September without incident. “It was a victory of free speech for all of Colorado,” said an ACLU attorney: “It showed that the vice squad cannot set the standards for free speech.”

“The highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought.”

—Emerson, in “Self-Reliance”

Now that the first stage of the Adam Clayton Powell fiasco is over, it is with great humility that I must point a reluctant finger at a young man of potential greatness and leadership who has faltered, not irreparably I hope, and succumbed to the “traditions” of other “men.”

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The Fifth Estate’s Pittsburgh correspondent, Frederick I (Hohenstaufen) reports that the narcotics raid that hit that city 10 February [see “Pitt Pot Bust,” FE #25, March 1–15, 1967] has had a happy conclusion.

All 55 persons arrested have had the charges against them dropped including those against Frank Goldsmith who had been charged with “possession of a dangerous drug.” The “drug” being 5 prescription cold tablets.

Editor’s note: Detroit poet John Sinclair talked about marijuana at Royal Oak’s Kimball High School, and Royal Oak hasn’t quite gotten over it yet. Below is a story reprinted from that city’s newspaper, the Royal Oak Tribune:

Royal Oak City Commissioners expressed concern Monday night about a speaker last Thursday at Kimball High School who advocated legalization of marijuana sales.

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Veterans Against the War (VAW) a local group of armed forces veterans formed to oppose the war in Vietnam have been carrying out a program to convince other veterans and those presently in the service of their views.

The group has written to over 500 GIs in Vietnam explaining their position on the war and why they as ex-soldiers oppose it. Nick Medvecky, VAW secretary, said he felt that this has been the group’s most successful activity. “We have found that from the replies we receive from Vietnam there is a substantial amount of opposition to the war among the troops doing the actual fighting.”

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The column, “You are a god, live like one” by Timothy Leary that appeared in the last issue of the FIFTH ESTATE [FE #25, March 1–15, 1967] was originally published in our sister underground paper, the EAST VILLAGE OTHER (EVO). The letter that follows is a letter written in response to that column by a New York based group of revolutionary poets calling themselves BLACK MASK.

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MACBIRD by Barbara Garson. The complete text, 75 cents

STUDIES ON THE LEFT. Panel from the Socialist Scholars Conference on The Roots of Slavery, $1

THE LOVE BOOK by Lenore Kandel. Banned in San Francisco, $1

HASHISH COOKBOOK by Panama Rose. Get high on the range, $1 65

ENTRAILS Magazine. Latest issue reads from right to left, comes complete with yamalka, $1

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(Underground Press Syndicate) An inspired madman whose bright blue eyes halt now and then in their rapid pantomime to beam upon you with benevolent love and pity, has rediscovered the ancient secret of the court jester.

General Hershey Bar (an absolute ringer for a great freak-out dancer named Calypso Joe) is the court jester to the War in Viet Nam. For a year and a half now he has appeared at every major protest meeting, on the streets, anywhere a crowd is on hand to listen. He has a strangely ingratiating way of telling the truth to people who would not listen to a serious presentation of the war horrors they would rather forget. And his mannerisms and costume allow you to pretend it’s all a joke. (But later that night, you begin to think, to wonder, and then...)

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The Jefferson Airplane arrived in New York for what is probably the beginning of the San Francisco music “explosion-exploitation.” I still can’t believe I heard them on the radio advertising some thing besides music; but since that was the only time I heard them via mass media I guess I shouldn’t put it all down. Its like color TV, the commercials are better than the shows themselves.

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Two months ago Detroit LEMAR started planning a Law Day (Law Day is May 1^st) Puff-in for Love. The group has written various LEMAR groups in both the East and West coast suggesting that this could be coordinated on a national level with Puffins taking place in love centers across the country.

Rather than limiting the puff-ins to one area, i.e. marijuana, LEMAR will expand it to human be-ins all across the country taking place on April 30^th, the Sunday preceding Law Day. This would bring the local tribes together and still allow the Detroit Community to share the total love-consciousness of all groups across the country.

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London will be the scene for an International Congress known as the Dialectics of Liberation this coming July 15–30. The purpose of the congress, sponsored by London’s Institute of Phenomenological Studies, is to examine societal influence, conditioning, and control of man and the resulting alienation of his true self within that system.

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Detroit is a killer city. It is a city in which radicals and reformers of various political stripes have found it nearly impossible to survive.

Internal difficulties of personnel and finance along with external pressure from the police and other elements of the establishment have combined time after time to murder grass roots community organizations, peace groups, civil rights forces and radical religious organizations.

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Robert Buckeye, Wayne State University English instructor, falsely arrested along with his wife, Nancy, during the January 24 “narcotics” raid while visiting the home of one of his ex-students, is filing suit against the City of Detroit, Ray Girardin and six policemen.

The suit, based on personal damages suffered by Buckeye both to his person as well as his academic career, was filed last week by Attorney Albert Best, and asks for $350,000 damages.

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Detroit has been a stubborn place and does not want to be changed, but as I write now and the sun is shining through my window and the spring is with us, the snow is melting, people are getting together, and there are positive forces at work here that will not be denied. Yes. We can not be stopped, no we can’t, and the sooner the people in power realize our strength the better off they’ll be. Change is in the air, the beautiful people are swarming the streets, travelers are coming home at last, flowers will be blooming everywhere, and all who have eyes to see will tell you it will be beautiful. Yes. And you will believe it when you see it.

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Probably no sector of American capitalism displays more cutthroat competitiveness than the recording industry. Entry into the field is, unlike the case in basic industries such as auto and steel, still relatively unrestricted. Any adventurer with a couple of thousand dollars can get an LP produced (even less for a 45 rpm single) and—who knows?—if he is lucky can make it supremely big. Such is the story of Barry Gordy of Motown Records and, on a much reduced scale, of Bernard Stollman of ESP, for whose label the surprisingly red-hot Fugs record.

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A campus-wide referendum on the war in Vietnam will be held at Wayne State University on April 6 as part of Student Vietnam Week in Detroit. Student Vietnam Week, April 3–14, will culminate in a mass mobilization against the war on April 15 in New York.

In the elections last November, 40% of the voters in Dearborn voted in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. The final vote was 20,667 against withdrawal and 14,124 in favor of it. The high percentage of those voting for withdrawal prompted the Wayne Committee to End the War in Vietnam to decide to hold a campus referendum and compare students’ attitudes toward the war with those of the Dearborn citizens.

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In the 1971 movie, Harold and Maude, a boy-man sewn into an upper class lineage headed by a satirically tyrannical matriarch stages his own suicide again and again. The first scene depicts his fake self-hanging, “OH HARRROLD!” His mother’s admonishment is delivered with all the horror-shock Harold meant for her, but also cloying authority, the absolute order Harold cannot escape.

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Sidney Peck, one of the National vice-chairmen of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and coordinator of the Western Reserve University Circle Teach-in Committee in Cleveland, spoke to a group of over 80 people, Sunday, March 5, at Wayne State University.

Dr. Peck was gathering further support for the April 15^th effort to mass hundreds of thousands of people protesting the war in New York and San Francisco. He made a special plea for unity around the April 15^th action and to broaden support for the mobilization.

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On Feb. 26 a holy celebration was held here in Detroit. The stark grey coldness of the Administrative Services Building at Wayne State University was transformed for a few hours into a magic theater and the secret price of admission was your mind.

People came for many reasons that night. Some were there out of curiosity and some, despite the unfortunate lack of advance publicity, came because they heard that the poet Allen Ginsberg was going to be there. Some came with hope and some with contempt.

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A review of

Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse 1960–1990, Editors: Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan. PM Press, 2024

“Leftist terrorism and state terrorism, even if their motivations cannot be compared, are two jaws of the same mug’s game. The state hates terrorism, but prefers it to revolution.” So says Buenaventura Diaz in the 1974 French/Italian co-production Nada, one of the dozens of films profiled in Revolution in 35mm, edited by Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan.

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The 24^th of January Movement met February 20^th to discuss the possibility of bringing suit against the Detroit Police Department for the illegal arrest of the 43 persons who were seized in the raid and released without charges.

Attorney Dennis James addressed the group, clarifying legal procedures and explaining what is necessary to collect damages in such a suit. He felt that the suffering experienced by those detained was slight, at least in a legal sense, and that a weak case at best could be brought by individuals against the police.

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Hey Breakthrough! We don’t want him!

Breakthrough has been on this kick ever since Mayor Cavanagh ordered the police to crack down on the rightist group. They’ve been trying to make the mayor out to be some kind of leftist.

In an invective issued earlier this month the parapatriots called Mayor Cavanagh a puppet dancing to the tune of the leftists. They implied he is a toady to such organizations as the Dubois Clubs, the National Lawyers Guild, Students for a Democratic Society, for the various peace groups around Detroit. They linked him with such men as Dr. Tracy Pullman, Fr. Maurice Geary, Ernest Goldman and Rev. David Gracie.

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FILM

FILM. “Nothing But A Man,” with Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln, Benefit for SNCC & People Against Racism (PAR). Central Methodist Church (Woodward at Adams), March 4 8 p.m. Advance tickets $1.25 available at 5^th ESTATE Bookstore; $1.50 at the door; $5 patron, $7.50 couple. Also in Birmingham. Northminster Presbyterian Church (Big Beaver, east of Adams Road), March 3, 8 p.m.

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LEMAR has its first publication out—The Case For the Relegalization of Marijuana. It is available at the FIFTH ESTATE Bookstore and Mixed Media for 25 cents. This group’s next major printing project will be the LaGuardia Report. Speakers are available to high schools, colleges, and any interested private groups. John Sinclair spoke before an assembly at Royal Oak Kimball High School on Feb. 16^th to a very receptive audience. If you are interested in a speaker from LEMAR call or write the group at the address below.

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University of Florida co-ed Pamme Brewer was found “guilty,” Feb. 11^th, of “indiscreet and inappropriate behavior” by a Faculty Discipline Committee after the above photo appeared in an off-campus humor magazine, The Charlatan. The Committee’s finding’s triggered student protests with calls for “nude power.” Miss Brewer said she consented to be photographed nude and felt that she had not committed any indiscretion. —photo courtesy The Charlatan and Underground Press Service.

“There’s something happening here

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

There’s a man with a gun over there.

Telling me I’d better beware.

It’s time to Stop! Children,

What’s that sound?

Everybody look what’s goin’ down.”

(Special to the Fifth Estate) The Pittsburgh police’s premature Valentine to the left came in the form of a monster pot (marrywhana) raid on the night of Friday, 10 Feb., that netted a total of 55 arrestees. The bust took place at a reception for the noted anti-war speaker David Dellinger, following a report on his trip to North and South Vietnam delivered earlier at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Chuck Larson, chairman of the WSU Student-Faculty Council (S-FC) was attacked for his participation in the newly formed Detroit Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (DSM) last week. Larson was elected honorary chairman of the anti-war group.

Dr. Richard F. Ward, Vice-Chairman of the SFC felt that “this was a clear conflict of interest and agreement over Larson’s loyalties,” and called for his resignation from either the S-FC or the anti-Vietnam war group.

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The effects of U.S. bombing on Vietnamese civilians will be the subject of a talk given by William F. Pepper, Sat., March 18, at 8 p.m., at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, Woodward at Holbrook.

Mr. Pepper is the author of the recent article in RAMPARTS magazine on the same subject. He recently visited Vietnam and was accredited by the Military Assistance Command. His main concern was the effects of the war on women and children and he visited many hospitals, orphanages, and shelters. He is the executive director of the New Rochelle Commission of Human Rights and an instructor at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

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What has evolved from Rock, besides even better Rock, are magazines about the new music that are keeping up to the fast pace of their subject matter. CRAWDADDY magazine is fantastic. Best pop record reviews and news that I’ve ever read. Love it.

I can’t believe that there are that many people who love good R & R; after all these years of thinking of myself as a minority freak. Their criticism is sometimes Master Thesis heavy, but is worth it. I have to read hard sometimes, to understand HOW MUCH they really get ‘into’ music. They also have tipped me off to some good albums, and I’ve so far pretty much agreed with all their criticisms.

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When Gene Clark left the Byrds sometime last year, an integral, a genuine and soulfully beautiful portion of their sound left also. Gene Clark is more or less on his own now, with a twosome called the Gosdin Brothers. His first album on Columbia (CL2618) is a beautiful experience. The L.P. is simply called GENE CLARK WITH THE GOSDIN BROTHERS. In one cut on the album called “Echoes,” his music is not only heard, but felt, a velvety smooth and pure sound.

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Bulldozers for all of Michigan? This was the fear of liberal delegates to the recent Democratic state convention in Grand Rapids as Patti Knox, wife of “Bulldozin’ Bob” Knox—Detroit Housing Director, was elected vice-chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party.

The Cavanagh “Irish Mafia” was in full evidence on behalf of the candidacy of Mrs. Knox as the “old guard” Democratic leadership of Staebler, Williams, and Scholle left open a big vacuum into which the well-oiled “Jerry-boys” could easily move.

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Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOWUP, to paraphrase Archibald MacLeish, is a film that means more than it is. Even if people are lost souls, as those in the film certainly are, their relationships to one another, to their surroundings, to the work of art in which they figure should be firmly apprehended and made convincing. Instead, the film’s meaning is wide-open, so much so that I wonder if the Detroit release did not have sections necessary to the development extracted.

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JOHN COLTRANE LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD AGAIN! (Impulse 9124) just might be the greatest work of art ever produced in this country -not to mention the greatest selection of jazz music ever to get set down on wax.

Regardless of what you have read, regardless of what anyone has told you, you must give this new music a chance to speak for itself; only you will be the loser if you fail to do so. The place to begin is with this album. Not a day has gone by since I first heard it that I don’t play it at least once, and sometimes twice or even three times. If I were in charge at Impulse, I would sell the record on a money-back-if-not-satisfied basis—it’s simply that good, and that policy would insure that it was heard as widely as it deserves to be.

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A minor illustration of the contemporary disappearance of chivalry is the extensive use of a new rifle by United States forces in Vietnam: the M-16. It shoots a tiny, .223 calibre, 55 grain bullet at the very high muzzle velocity of 3,185 feet per second. Its power to inflict wounds is of the magnitude usually associated with the soft-nose and exploding bullets outlawed by the Hague Conventions.

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“No man knows what vibrations he sets in motion in his lifetime.” —Loren Eisley

So too, it is too early to judge completely the effects of the General Strike for Unity called in support of Adam Clayton Powell for last February 13.

That the city failed to grind to a halt as a result of the strike is certain. Most of Detroit’s Negro community admittedly did not participate. In the absence of any apparently unified sentiment on the part of the nation’s black people the Congress is moving toward a severe punishment of Rep. Adam Powell.

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As is the woeful and morose custom, late February salutes George Washington, who reputedly fathered a nation of sheep, and the motion picture industry boosts itself despite its fathering a low grade of mutton in the disguise of art.

1966 proved the physics maxim that nature abhors a vacuum as the field raised some rather substantial fare to credit with this year’s Academy Awards. No lily white fields for shuffling Negroes to help make nuns in or out of, but rather what approaches an honest effort at resolving the elephantine puzzle of the year’s best performances by actresses, writers, cameramen and directors.

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(This column discusses basic “tune in” methods. The next installment suggests harmonious “dropout” methods.)

Psychedelic drugs make it possible to reach a wide range of consciousness. The experienced psychedelic religionist can move consciousness from one level to another, just like focusing a microscope or telescope.

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The Arizona road dipped suddenly out of a high serpentine ridge and fell straight out like a great javelin dropping ever faster and deeper down, down until it was lost from sight in the blinding rays of a white-hot sun.

To all points stretched the desert. Off in the dim, shimmering distance were the brooding, purple peaks of the incongruously snowcapped Vulture Mountains.

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EDITOR: Harvey Ovshinsky

MANAGING EDITOR: Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Cathy West

ART: Dave Carlin

CIRCULATION: Wilson Lindsey, Rita Cole

TRAVEL EDITOR: Sheil Salasnek

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR: John Sinclair

CALENDAR: Rhona Whipple

ADVERTISING: Leon Brenner

FILM EDITORS: Joe Fineman, Shirley Hamburg

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The DAILY COLLEGIAN (the school newspaper), was the subject of attack at the Wayne University campus this past month. The Wayne Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Students For a Democratic Society, Young Socialist Alliance, National Student Association, Young Democrats and the Wesley Foundation have published two issues of an 8-page paper, the Wayne Reply, to counter the ineffective and inaccurate coverage of campus political events by the DAILY COLLEGIAN.

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On Valentine’s Day at WSU a strange coalition was effected and the Student-Faculty Council ended up sponsoring a “Bitch-In” on campus, which was an honorable attempt to move from the usual “left-hippy” practice of simply haranguing everyone, to pointing out the similarities of concern and interest among all students and young people generally and making those similarities known by attempting to gather the different people together to “bitch” at the University for all its weird practices. The general purpose of the Bitch-In failed to make itself known or felt, but one or two beautiful things happened which made the attempt really worthwhile.

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Violence in our society will be discussed in a day-long conference sponsored by Detroit Women for Peace on Saturday March 18. Beginning at 9:30 a.m. with luncheon at 12:30; the sessions will be held at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, Woodward at King in Detroit. A registration fee of $3.00, $2.00 for students, includes coffee and the luncheon.

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The Conference on Drug Abuse at Oberlin College sponsored by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) came off not quite as planned. The weekend of Feb. 17, 18 and 19 found a gathering of the drug elite crowded into this tiny collegiate community with the purpose of presenting an objective view on the abuse of drugs.

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