Other Scenes

SEX: Fifteen couples fucking simultaneously under the guidance of a clinical psychologist who told them how to get more out of it was one of the features at a recent encounter weekend at Ed Lange’s Elysium Institute ranch in California’s Topanga Canyon. Elysium (5436 Fernwood, L.A. Calif. 90027 for info) recently won its court fight to operate the first nudist camp within the LA city limits, overturning a law that had made nudity illegal even with your own family in your own backyard...

Beyond Computer Dating is the theme of Francine Slate’s course at Menlo Park (Calif.)‘s Mid-Peninsula University. Slate says she’ll do the interviewing and matchmaking...

What is The Expanded Family? It can’t be defined in a few words, you’ll have to discover for yourself. Write P.O. Box 415, New York 10032 for info...

Why anybody needs any help in finding sex literature these days I wouldn’t know, but Baltimore’s Central Sales Ltd. (P.O. Box 42, Baltimore, Md. 21203) has produced what must be the most comprehensive catalog of tits & ass magazines in existence. How reliable they are I wouldn’t know...

A new dice and board game called simply S.E.X. is being advertised in Berkeley as “a total non-stop adult sex game where two, three or four couples roll the dice to determine who does what to who. S.E.X. takes over where strip poker left off.”

The Weatherman clique may well be bold and courageous—on the other hand they may well be suicidal martyrs; which remains to be seen. However, undoubtedly there’s a desperate need for new tactics by the so-called Movement to break the frustrating deadlock that exists at present. After all, frustration breeds suicide doesn’t it? (It breeds creativity, too). Tactically, what’s needed is to convince the great American middle-class that the society as presently constituted just doesn’t work efficiently. And the way to do that is literally to make things inoperative. Spread chaos, not death; prove the rulers can’t rule. Let the dreamers build The New World.

BAD GUYS: Devoting three pages to a parody of Svetlana Stalin’s autobiography (how could she know her dad was a killer?), Bombay’s 200,000 circulation tabloid Blitz alleges that both her books were written under CIA direction...

Frank Zappa’s record company, Straight Records, is apparently financially pressed: it placed record ads with underground papers but as yet has been unwilling or unable to pay for them. The ad agency has turned the account over to a collection agency...

Now that New York Scenes is folding what’s going to happen to the Howard Smith Unmasked story that the magazine had scheduled and that had gotten the Voice’s plastic hippy so uptight (he told friends not to answer questions about him)?...

Richard Watts Jr., the dinosaur of the drama critics, writes: “Air hijacking is the latest field for the desperate adventurer.” How do you think he managed to figure that out?...

With a mahogany cover and a sandpaper bookmark, Paul Reps’ newest book, “Ten Ways to Meditate” (Walker/Weatherhill, $3.50) preaches the message: Still Not Kill. “Man’s problem is to manage his jumping, jerking, killing mind that’s like a wild horse.”...

First of the half-dozen books about the underground press in the works will probably be Ethel Romm’s The Open Conspiracy (Stackpole Books, $6.95) which is being publicized as “an introduction to the new culture”...

Travel magazine (Oct.) carries a story from a family who learned how to cook roast beef (wrapped up with onions and seasoning in thick aluminum foil) under the manifold of their car engine while driving. A four-hour trip is apparently just right as long as you turn over the meat halfway. If you make a small hole in the package, the aroma will taunt you appetizingly,

ARTIFACTS: Electronic artist Nilly Apple joined two East River islands with “a bridge of light” in NYC’s recent Avant Garde festival...

Still working in Tokyo but long overdue for a New York show is the Italian artist Paolo Carosone whose specialty is electronics and laser beams: artworks that are light sensitive and make music according to changing vibrations...

Vancouver artist Thor Todoruk has encased a kilo of grass in plastic and is offering it for sale as “an art object” at a mere $200,000...

Forty-nine artists whose current medium is plastic, in one form or another, have been collected into a show based on the premise “that there is a plastic aesthetic.” Opening at NYC’s Jewish Museum late November the show will then proceed to Milwaukee and San Francisco...

And talking of plastic, TWA’s nine-channel music program is the major candidate for aerial muzak. As bland as its possible to make it, the TWA program features a section called The Young Sound in which its own characterless house orchestra re-records major hits, thereby depriving them of any substance. TWA’s nauseating advertising program (vote for its employees to get a bonus) is just about on a par with the rest of its sloppy, inefficient, arrogant service.