Other Scenes

Who says the New York Times favors the status quo? After a recent story listing “narcotic addicts, drunks, panhandlers, homosexuals and drifters” a staff memo was circulated explaining: “Times have changed and ‘homosexuals’ is no longer universally considered a term of opprobrium”... Meanwhile former Times editor Herman Dinsmore (editor, International Edition, 1951 through 1960) has written a Red-baiting book “documenting what anti-Communists have long known” billed by the Conservative Book Club as “Former Times Editor Exposes Own Paper!”...

Will the real killer of Martin Luther King ever be discovered? Peter Dawnay’s current piece in Penthouse implies that the wrong man was framed...

New London ad agency for a firm that manufactures showers took the line that people who take baths (most Britons) “wallow in dirty water” and heading their ad, The Great British Public Must Be Stinking” promptly ran into trouble from a London evening paper which rejected the ad as offensive...

Reporter Tom DeBaggio who used to publish a penetrating newsletter in Washington D.C. just quit because the revealing story he wrote for a Delaware morning paper about chemical biological warfare research at the U. of Delaware, was heavily censored...

A visit to Oaxaca’s legendary curandero, Maria Sabina, to sample the “magic mushrooms” and Tim Leary’s report on his original psilocybin experiments with prisoners in a Massachusetts jail make the current issue of the Psychedelic Review one of the most interesting for a long time...

The N.Y. Times is rumored to be buying a big London publisher...

Somebody wrote to ask Plain Truth (that vaguely biblical and rightwing magazine that offers free subscriptions to all who ask) where all their money came from and publisher Herbert ArmStrong devoted two pages to an equivocal answer that explained the money came from “co-workers.” The super-glossy mag’s circulation is now more than two million so the next question would seem to be where do the coworkers get their money from?...

Wretched Mess News, one of America’s most amusing magazines, offers a gift catalog (P.O. Box 68, West Yellowstone, Montana 59758) with such items as bagvelopes, potted peanut plants, Enrico Caruso movie posters and greeting cards painted by worms.

POTPOURRI: When the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company decided to start marketing their Salem cigarettes in England they discovered that a British tobacco company had already registered the name. Which sounds like a good way to pick up some spare change: registering American trademarks in other lands and then selling them back to the originators when they’re ready to expand.

A book listing more than 20,000 car license plates has been published by London’s Garnstone Press...

The new homosexual computer dating services, Tangents charges, are heterosexually-owned businesses which have decided to branch into the homosexual market “using the same Stale methods and means of meeting people that have long been available.” The lists of names and addresses they are compiling, the magazine charges, could be dynamite in the hands of law enforcement agencies so long as homosexual habits remain a crime in most states.

ENTERTAINMENT: Nine fucking scenes, including one between a priest and a young girl he’s just confirmed, are in a new Swedish film, “The Naked Winds of the Sea”, which even Swedish censors have banned ...

Art Napoleon’s The Activist, filmed on location in Berkeley and Oakland, is a color film that doesn’t cop out, partly because the two leads, Michael Smith and Leslie Gilbrun, were genuinely in love and into campus politics...

Harry Smith’s inside-publishing The Newsletter ($10 a year from 5 Beekman Street, NYC 10038) reports that Lennox Raphael’s Che! is being turned into a musical by Ed Sanders—“the first singing fuck for theatre-goers”...

John and Mimi’s Book of Love by Les Levine features the couple reading from the Kama Sutra while color slides of them fucking are projected on a screen behind...

MGM’s still-to-be-completed The Strawberry Statement, based on James Kunen’s book about the Columbia University risings, is already provoking soul-searching in the movement. A Berkeley Tribe reporter devotes a fascinating three pages (Nov. 14 issue) ‘to an examination of whether’ or not it’s a capitalist ripoff of the revolutionary subculture. (He can’t quite make up his mind)...

It isn’t enough to buy a lot of random footage of different groups doing their thing and then slap it all together, as the makers of the movie Popcorn must have discovered by now...

Oscar Brown Jr.‘s first musical, five years ago, had a nothing plot and some great songs. His latest, Big Buck White, has a charismatic Muhamed Ali playing (almost) himself and a nothing plot in )which stereotyped spades play roles just far enough removed from real life to be non-credible. But Ali (ne Cassius Clay) in “natural” wig—could it be real?—is undoubtedly a star, with or without Broadway.

The week-long Music & Peace Conference of the World on land bought by John Lennon near Killaloe, 250 miles from Toronto, looks like being the bigger-than-Woodstock event of next spring.

DROP-OUTS: A group of young Australians and Uruguayans have announced their plans to hold a Congress of Hippies this month in the Brazilian city of Jequie.

How to build your own dome from old automobile frames plus lots of other dope about living off the land will be featured in John Shuttleworth’s monthly Mother Earth News (Box 38, Madison, Ohio, 44057) due next month...

A Latvian youth who set himself on fire in an unsuccessful suicide attempt to protest Russia’s invasion of Czechoslovakia last spring has been charged with endangering those around him.

Looking for a meaningful job change? Best source is still Vocations for social Change (send postage for monthly bulletin to Canyon Calif 94516)...

The fate of man-made islands is still rather chancy is if you give the bureaucrats a chance. An Italian builder constructed his own island off Rimini last year but it was illegally wiped out by Italian authorities as a “threat to national security” even though outside the 12-mile limit. The sad story is recounted in a fascinating newsletter called Ocean Living (Box 17463, L.A. Calif. 90017) dedicated to helping “floating pioneers.”

The long growing season along the southern Alaska coastline, reports the Berkeley Tribe, is responsible for the successful harvesting of a potent new breed of grass, already christened “Alaskan Thunderfuck” by Bay area heads...

Big kick out West is buying packets of the Marijuana Awareness Wafer from California’s F. Ritter Co. (4001 Goodwin, L.A.) and burning them around the place whenever you’re smoking grass. If the fuzz happens to call you, point to these little smoldering wafers (which were developed so that square schoolteachers could demonstrate to their class what pot smells like—as if any kid over 12 didn’t already know).

Sidebar

Dear Captain Medina;

You must be the first military officer in history who wanted it known that you were nowhere near your men when they went into fight. You were half a mile away, you say, and you didn’t even know there was a massacre? And the GI’s quoted by Time and Life saying that you were right there joining in the slaughter are telling $110 million dollar lies?

Sue away, you lying, murderous butcher. Goose your high-priced legal talent (by the way, who’s paying his bill? the Pentagon?) and sue me and everybody who accuses you of being responsible. Perhaps you’ll get what your men meted out—a bullet in the back—before your case comes to trial.