Most Recent Additions

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.

...

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

...

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.

...

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.

...

“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.

...

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?

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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?

...

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.

...

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.”

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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

...

NIGREDO

Our darkening world has dressed itself up in vestment of blue Void. Has lain on its self-discrowned head the lazy eyelid corpse. Vacuum abhorrent naturam. That’s what they say. What they say. Forests burn in a world that has become an alchemist’s fire. In this stage, our naked feet are frozen, are hard. And we watch with drooping gaze a silent shadow, drifting allway over Deep. Hope? The hidden bedbug, mere bit of lice. And the Spectacle has hired itself a team of talented, well-trained exterminators. We are vampirized by our own atmospheres here, sucked well and through by selfset traps.

...

This cry for justice appeared in the Fall 2011 Fifth Estate. In almost 13 years, little has changed. The article is available in our online archive at fifthestate.org.

Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA!

We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and in difference like the Israeli F16s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in.

...

a review of

A Cultural History of The Punisher: Marvel Comics and the Politics of Vengeance by Kent Worcester. University of Chicago Press, 2023

Literally hundreds of comic books and graphic novels bear the imprint, directly and indirectly, of one luminous character: the Punisher. Most of us know little about this ultra-violent global icon who has been around since 1974 and continues to draw millions of readers. That the Punisher seems so deeply ambivalent, heroic or anti-heroic by turns, is obviously key to his status.

...

There ought to be a test

to see if someone is suited

to be a cop: a simple test

of just one question.

Do you want to be a cop?

If the answer is yes

kick their asses out the door.

“Next!”

Kaz Sussman is a carpenter and disaster response worker who lives in a home he built in Oregon from abandoned poems. He has published in Nimrod, Kingpin Chess, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Prodigal, The Healing Muse and Gastronomica. kazsussman.com

a review of

Reeling by Lola Lafon, translated from French by Hildegarde Serle. Europa Editions 2022

When violent acts seem isolated, rash, inexplicably singular, this gives all those forced to witness or have knowledge of it a way out. To rest somewhat easy in the knowledge that the particular and specific circumstances under which the violent acts took place are unlikely to reoccur.

...

a review of

Notes from a Holocaust: 20 Songs, 2024 David Rovics

Growing up on punk rock music as part of my introduction to anarchism, I always understood punk to be a variant of folk music.

Having missed the most prolific heyday of the people’s folk music of the 1960s, singers like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs and their lesser-known contemporaries performed melodic, catchy, and often more accessible versions of what the underground papers (like this one) were doing with their radical articles. Passionate storytelling and principled advocacy are what make music a meaningful force for community and change.

...

Before anything can be said or written about what has happened in Palestine and Israel since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, recognition must be given to the enormity of the crimes Israel’s merciless army has committed against the Palestinian people.

This is being written in late May 2024 and hopefully Israel’s genocidal intentions have been stilled by the time it is read.

...

a review of

Human Rewilding in the 21^st Century: Why Anthropologists Fail by James M. Van Lanen. Birch Top Hill Press, 2024

Recently, there has been somewhat surprising interest from mainstream media in topics of domestication and rewilding.

On January 1, National Public Radio devoted an hour to a conversation with Woniya Dawn Thibeault, whose book Never Alone recounts her victory in the televised “Alone” arctic competition, with a very sympathetic moderator.

...

a review of

Pirate Enlightenment, or the New Libertalia by David Graeber. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023

David Graeber left us one last book before he died, sadly, at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Pirate Enlightenment, or the New Libertalia, originally published in French in 2019, brings together the related projects that bookended his career: the anthropology of Madagascar, including how its highland communities avoid (one of David’s favorite words) the state, and the many ways that humans have organized themselves into complex, nonhierarchical societies throughout history.

...

Fifth Estate

Radical Publishing since 1965

Vol. 59, No. 1, #415 Summer 2024

The Fifth Estate is an anti-profit, anarchist project published by a volunteer collective of friends and comrades.

www.FifthEstate.org

No ads. No copyright.

Kopimi — reprint freely

Sharks dive deeper before hurricanes. Wolves howl when a storm is approaching. Snakes slither away from earthquakes. Something’s happening here, and definitely, what it is ain’t exactly clear. Unfortunately, our intellects don’t provide us the instinctual early warning system our animal cousins possess.

...

The calendar will be a regular FIFTH ESTATE feature. We know that there is more happening in the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas than what we have listed, so we need your help. Send us information about what your group is doing or just anything you hear about. We think the items listed below disprove the contention that “nothing ever happens in Detroit.” The deadlines for the calendar are the 8^th and 23^rd of each month.

...

Special to the Fifth Estate from Satyrday Publications, Toronto

Toronto—as well as most large Canadian cities—is becoming a haven for youthful Americans who, for reasons of their own, don’t want any part of U.S. President Johnson’s war on the Vietnamese people.

“It’s not that I’m scared to fight... I just don’t believe in killing people for the phony cause that our leaders tell us we’re fighting for,” one U.S. draft-dodger told Satyrday magazine recently. He preferred to remain anonymous because Federal Bureau of Investigation officers, hand-in-hand with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Canada’s FBI), are trying to keep tabs on draft-dodgers.

...

That Artists’ Workshop Public Notice in your last issue — Public Notice for more members — I found somewhat amusing [see FE #18, November 15–30, 1966]. Especially where it said “There is no hierarchy, no exclusiveness, no formal structure ...”

Reminds me of the Holy Roman Empire — which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

...

The best advice I can give anyone about the ARMY and the U.S. GOV’T in general is not to get involved with these maniacs in the first place. This however is becoming increasingly difficult to do unless you leave the country altogether.

Chances are that you’ll get a letter as I did saying “Y’all come on down for a physical.” This was particularly traumatic for me as I had successfully avoided these people for 27 years.

...

I concluded last issue by saying that, whereas in previous ages, nonconformists were able to “escape” society by taking refuge in an agrarian life, etc.; nonconformists in the interdependent society cannot escape. They can only rebel. And their rebellion demonstrates the absolute contradiction between the Social System and the Human Id (as a symbol of human freedom and satisfaction).

...

a review of

Vietnam! Vietnam! by Felix Greene, Fulton Publishing Co Hardcover $5.50, Softcover $2.95.

“Whatever the military outcome of the war in Vietnam, its moral outcome has already been decided...America has the ignominious role, whether she wins or loses.”

—Arnold Toynbee

In war-time, it is easy to forget about human beings. In the case of the war in Vietnam, this seems to be especially true. For those who sympathize with the war, pictures of torture and cruelty become commonplace (after all, war is hell). For those involved in opposing the war, heated arguments about slogans and feverish planning for mechanical demonstrations too often take precedence. We have all forgotten the Vietnamese and their humanity.

...

American heoroes, the Fort Hood Three: (l. to rt.) Mora, Samas, Johnson

PFC James Johnson, Pvt. David Samas, and Pvt. Dennis Mora, three antiwar GIs court-martialed two months ago refusing to go to Vietnam have been transferred from Ft. Meade, Md., to the federal military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

...

Rainbow

Can you float through the universe of

your body and not lose your way?

Can you lie quietly

engulfed

in the slippery union

of male and female?

Warm wet dance of generation?

Endless ecstasies of couples?

Can you offer your stamen trembling in

the meadow for the electric penetration of pollen

...

Andy Warhol, slightly built with frosted blond on his hair and perpetually with shades, doesn’t grind out the pop culture he’s noted for.

It flits forth from his head instead.

Warhol, the man who started the whole pop art movement with his painting of a Campbell’s soup can, who filmed the epic kiss, who swathed the under-round in velvet, and brought the nation’s first wedding in a happening to this midwestern town, is thinking of following Leary into the Village Theater in New York with his own religion.

...

The Image was there, the sacrifices and the paid assassin, the screaming mobs of idiot droolers, the expressionless expressions passing for cool, the magic gimmicks and trickery, the grey recorders and their cynicism who will later let everyone know what “really” happened via the tube; all there in a building that once flourished better when it was full of cows. The midwest may never learn.

...

Mod came to the Midwest Nov. 20^th as two young Detroiters were united in the bonds of holy matrimony in the nation’s first mod wedding ceremony.

A capacity crowd of Teeny-boppers in miniskirts and bell-bottom trousers jammed the Michigan State Fairgrounds Coliseum to watch Randy Rossi, 19, a go-go girl and Gary Norris, 25, a free-lance artist, take their traditional vows. However, that was about the only link with tradition in this free — wheeling improvisional ceremony.

...

From the “Action Line” column, Detroit Free Press, Wednesday, November 23, 1966:

I saw a bumper sticker on a car that read: “Stamp Out Reality.” Any idea where I could get one?

—M.R., Ferndale.

Fifth Estate Book Store on Plum Street is sending you one. They’ve got the most off-beat selection, about 100 messages to choose from. Caution: Some folks might find a few of ‘em offensive. Proceeds go to a left-wing publication. Most popular stickers are anti-Johnson and anti-Vietnam: “God is Alive—He’s in the White House,” “Draft Beer, Not Students.” Other big sellers: “Support Your Local Batman,” “If You Drive, Don’t Drink (You Might Hit a Bump and Spill Some).” For the uncommitted, there’s one that says, “Bumper Sticker ”

...

Editor & publisher

Harvey Ovshinsky

Managing Editor

Peter Werbe

News and Political Editors

R. Fleck & F. Joyce

Art & Layout

Gary Grimshaw

Editorial assistant:

Cathy West

Circulation

Wilson Lindsey

Photography

E. Bacilla, Willson Lindsey, Magdaline Sinclair

Travel editor

Sheil Salasnek

...

Progress Report: The first reorganizational meeting of the Artists’ Workshop Society took place as scheduled on November 22, with encouraging results. That is to say, enough people expressed working interest in continuing the work of the Society that the Artists’ Workshop will endure—and, hopefully, keep growing.

...

When Cecil Taylor spoke at a panel discussion at the University of Pittsburgh prior to his concert there, it apparently came as a shock to his collegiate audience that he and his fellow musicians no longer wish to undergo the demoralizing experience of presenting their music in nightclubs. How could the musicians not want to play in nightclubs? the students wanted to know. What was going to happen to jazz then?

...

The American Civil Liberties Union has called on 900 college and university presidents throughout the nation to deny the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) information concerning the makeup of anti- Viet groups on their campuses.

The civil liberties group’s plea came in the wake of subpoenas of membership lists of anti-war groups at the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley last summer. The ACLU called this “one of the most serious breaches of student academic freedom in recent decades, including the McCarthy era.”

...

OUTRAGED! That’s what we are. Consider it. Think of what it means.

London Bridge. The Eifel Tower. The Arch d’ Triumph, the Vatican; even that monument to hypocracy, the Statue of Liberty. What does Detroit have?

A fifty-five foot spark plug at the intersection of Woodward and Eight Mile Rd.; gateway to the suburbs. The World’s largest and ugliest stove gracing the State Fair grounds. A giant grinning cow’s head on the Edsel Ford Freeway. A forty-foot bow tie, badge of a losing politician. The symbol of the city; THE SPIRIT OF DETROIT, in front of the City-County Building; a joke off a can of peas contorted in pain perhaps by something he ate—or something he saw.

...

The calendar will be a regular FIFTH ESTATE feature. We know that there is more happening in the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas than what we have listed, so we need your help. Send us information about what your group is doing or just anything you hear about. We think the items listed below disprove the contention that “nothing ever happens in Detroit.” The deadlines for the calendar are the 8^th and 23^rd of each month.

...

Dear Great-grandfather [sic],

I am writing to you because I feel that you have an honest desire to understand. You lived in a time of much confusion and you felt the need to seek new solutions to many problems. You sought your own solutions to your own problems so you must realize that you could only find your own answers.

...

The article in your last issue—“Playboy’s Tinseled Seductress”—I liked [FE #17, November 1–15, 1966]. The pointing out Playboy’s magnificent superficiality was, I thought, sound and much needed. But the conclusion!—ugh!—that the marriage institution suffers thereby—that “somehow the glow has gone out of marriage.” How sad!

...

Scenes from the November Mobilization for Peace, Jobs, and Freedom march held in downtown Detroit, Nov. 5^th. Demonstrations and rallies were also held in over 50 other cities across the nation the same day.

Photos by Emil Bacilla and Wilson Lindsey.

...

A drug which is readily available on prescription has been shown to have the same psychic effects as LSD. The current issues of Diseases of the Nervous System and the Archives of General Psychiatry carry articles on the efficacy of Sansert in producing the same effects as LSD.

Sansert is a drug which has been used for the prophylactic treatment of migraine headaches. It’s method of action is the inhibition of serotonin production, a long known effect of L SD.

...