Fifth Estate Collective
Terrorism in the Home Early Detection

LNS/Peoples News Service, London — As part of its ongoing hysteria campaign against both “terrorists” and their “sympathizers” (that is, literally, anybody who refuses to condemn the “terrorists”), West Germany’s notorious Bild Zeitung (a Springer newspaper) has now offered its readers a chance to predict whether their children will wind up on the most wanted list some day.

...

Alan Franklin
Terrorism: The State Marches On

From South Africa comes the news that what even conservative observers took to be a very bad joke on the part of “Justice” Minister Jimmy Kruger turns out, on closer analysis, to be the certified honest-to-god truth.

Kruger had expressed complete ignorance of the source of the ‘train damage which had brought about the death of imprisoned black resister Steven Bike, suggesting that if as Kruger suspected, Biko’s head injuries were self-inflicted, he could nonetheless sympathize with the unfortunate man because he often felt the strains of his job to be akin to “banging my head against the wall.”

...

Margie Stamberg
Terrorists Invade Bridal Fair

NEW YORK (Liberation News Service/Guardian) “Love starts at Chase Manhattan,” said the psychedelic lettering on the plastic shopping bags given to the girls attending New York’s first Bridal Fair at Madison Square Garden on Valentine’s Day weekend.

In a back stairwell, house dicks, rent-a-cops, some of the city red squad and independent heavies had isolated 10 radical women who were disrupting the day’s slave trade and were busy throwing them down the steps, slamming them up against concrete walls, twisting their arms, and screaming, “You’re sick, you’re sick, you’re sick.”

...

anon.
Terrorists’ Revenge

While waiting at a traffic light in the city of Karlsruhe, West Germany, Chief Prosecutor Siegfried Buback was assassinated just as the light turned green.

Along with his chauffer and a bodyguard, Buback was killed by two people riding a stolen motorcycle, when they drove up to the right side of his limousine and emptied more than thirteen shots into the car with a submachine-gun.

...

Tomas MacSheoin
Test-tube People

a review of

Test-Tube Women, What Future for Motherhood? Rita Arditti et. al., Pandora Press, 482 pages.

“Human beings will end their second millennium since Christ perfecting the means to tamper, for the first time, with their own nature and existence,” The Economist of London editorialized recently. And it is hard to imagine an area more important for political debate and action than this one which will determine the fate of our children and their children.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Texas Anti-Nuke Activist Murdered

The ambush-style shooting death of an anti-nuclear activist in Houston, in April, has sent waves of alarm through the Texas anti-nuclear community. The victim of the assault was 28-year-old Michael Eakin, who was formerly the editor of the University of Texas newspaper and founder of the Austin Sun, a weekly alternative paper.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Texas Anti-Prison Gathering Set for June

A second Convergence Against Toxic Prisons will take place June 2–5, 2017 in Fort Worth, Tex., the city where the Carswell Federal Medical Center is located. The gathering will feature speakers, panels, workshops, protests and cultural activities, including an art show and hip-hop performances, and demonstrations.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Thank you! Fundraising & benefits bring in needed cash

Since the Fifth Estate refuses to publish the voice of capital, advertisements—the normal source of financing ‘newspapers—we depend on you through your subscriptions, newsstand purchases, and donations to insure our survival.

This issue was made possible through a combination of the above sources as well as a series of regional benefits held on our behalf. The most recent ones occurred in Chattanooga, Asheville, “Punk-n-holler,” and Detroit and combined raised over $1000, with $850 coming from the latter event alone. This provided us with almost half of what we needed to print, mail, and ship this issue. So, thanks to the many performers, organizers, and attendees who made them so successful.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The 1988 Election Nobody Won!

The 1988 Presidential electoral farce was all over by midnight on Tuesday, Nov. 8. Vice-President George Bush victoriously declared, “The people have spoken.”

Bush was right in one regard: the people had spoken but in a manner reported virtually nowhere. Those eligible to vote avoided the polls in record numbers to the point where Nobody won an absolute majority among the potential electorate for the first time in 64 years.

...

Peter Werbe
The 2020 Election What to do while waiting for the Revolution

The 2020 Michigan presidential primary on March 10 marked the end of the progressive fantasy that the American political landscape could be altered by supporting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders as the Democratic Party nominee.

Instead, it was bye-bye, Bernie, as Joe Biden swept every county in the state as voters overwhelmingly went for a candidate they thought had the best chance of defeating the execrable Trump in November.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The 26th of March

National days of protest March 25–26 constituted the largest concerted world-wide action for peace in history. Demonstrations to protest the war in Vietnam took place in 30 countries, according to the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam—initiator of the campaign.

In the United States, the protests surpassed those called by the NCV last October, indicating that the anti-war movement has grown significantly in response to the Johnson Administration’s escalation of U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

...

Tad Zatlyn
The 400 Blows Film Review

In THE 400 BLOWS, recent feature at the Varsity Theater, Francois Truffaut telescopes in on one small but very human subject, picking up the story almost at the height of its conflict, rather than methodically building up to it, which might very well have been the “soundest” way to attack the story. Free of the conventional straight jacket of getting in the proper exposition at the proper time, and also acting this exposition out, he is able to give us a greater human close-up. It is as if he were applying a zoom lens to the entire script. And at the final scene, which is the height of the close up, he frames on the face of the boy. Nothing is really resolved--as in life things seldom are.

...

Bernard Marszalek
The ‘60s, 40 Years Later No Chicago in Denver

Forty years ago, like today, the country found itself in an unpopular war of imperial domination to vanquish, not “Islamo-Fascism,” but Communism. And, like then, the political system was thoroughly corrupt and in the hands of a cabal of stooges with nightmarish plans.

Like so many others, when an election year rolls around and party politics rules the “news” with its loathsome trivia and journalistic manipulations, I long for refuge in an idyllic retreat deep in a forest far away from all media. But that isn’t an option for me, nor, I suspect for most people.

...

the Curious George Brigade
The Abolition of Outreach

The following is an excerpt from Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs by the Curious George Brigade (see facing page for a review). For more information, see www.ageofdinosaurs.net or contact yellowjack@ageofdinosaurs.net

Race is an issue that has long scared and perplexed radicals in the US. White anarchists today are especially dismayed by a lack of racial diversity, especially of blacks, among the folks who join them in the streets and collective work.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The Absurdity of Politics (cover text)

The voter is a man who comes where he is summoned one day like a flunkey, to one who whistles for him as for a dog trained to obey, who comes on the said day only and not on any other day. He is a man who comes when authority says: “The moment is here to sanction one more time a system established by others and for others than yourself.

...

Jerry Rubin
The Academy Award of Protest

This is the greatest honor of my life. It is with sincere humility that I accept this federal indictment. It is the fulfillment of childhood dreams, climaxing years of hard work and fun.

I wish to thank all those who made it possible: my mother, my father, brother, wife Nancy, Stew and Gumbo, Spartacus, Tom Paine, the Boston Tea Party, Ho, Che, Fidel, Huey, Eldridge, Lenny Bruce. Walter Cronkite, and last but not least—Richard J. Daley.

...

Jim Feast
The African Road to Anarchism? Will the collapse of government rule in countries like The Gambia lead to... The African Road to Anarchism?

My experiences on a recent trip to The Gambia on Africa’s west-central coast, brought to mind the historic leftist dream that the state will wither away once workers have overturned capitalism.

Here’s an irony of history. In the last 15 years, in the industrially undeveloped world, the state has withered away, not because of its supersession, but due to the extension of global capitalism. Talk of state collapse on capital’s periphery doesn’t mean governments have completely vanished, but that many states have diminished from being the totalized agencies of control we experience in Northern tier countries.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The Aftermath of Toronto’s Anti-G20 Demos A legal circus and the criminalization of dissent

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Militarized police attack unarmed demonstrators at a protest against the G20 meeting in Toronto, June 2010

In a packed Toronto courtroom, November 23, the prosecution dropped all conspiracy charges against the so-called “Main G20 Conspiracy Group,” 17 organizers from Southern Ontario and Quebec.

The G20 Summit, a meeting of international finance ministers held in Toronto in June 2010, was met with huge protests, followed by unprecedented mass arrests: 1105 people detained, and over 300 charged. Countless others were targets of police brutality and violations of fundamental human rights. Of those charged, almost 200 had charges dropped.

...

Peter Lamborn Wilson
The Alchemy of Luddism

for Diane di Prima

St. John’s Eve (Midsummer) 2006

1.

It’s the idea

of code that’s cool not the actual

bother of decipherment: the utopia

of not having been in a state of

anticipation or regret. The Dowager Empress

took fresh honeysuckle petals in her green tea — yes even Civilization had its finer moments

...

James D. Nixon
The Algiers Motel Incident book review

a review of

The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey. 397 pages, Hardbound, $5.95 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Paperback, $1.25, Bantam Books

Language is loaded with euphemisms, and the title of John Hersey’s The Algiers Motel Incident is a prime example. “Algiers” suggests an Afro-orientation, but “Incident” is the stinger. Albert Cleage writes of “the Algiers motel massacre”, and in mid-August of 1967 Doc Greene began a Detroit News column with a sentence which contained a likely title: “The thing that gets me about the Algiers Motel slayings of Aubrey Pollard, Fred Temple, and Carl Cooper is the superb manner in which the police set about solving these homicides.” The irony builds in that article.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The American Dream A Synthetic Society

Plastic settled in river

“SARNIA, Ontario—A cloud of plastic powder that was released into the air and settled in the St. Clair River poses no health threat, says a Canadian spokesman for the Midland-based Dow Chemical Co.

“The estimated 4,000 pounds of the polyethylene powder used to make milk jugs accidentally was released by the company about 10 p.m. Thursday, Dow Chemical Canada Inc. spokesman John Musser said Friday.

...

Various Authors
The Amish, “Obnoxious Machinery” & Community an exchange

In response to “Secular Antinomian Anabaptist Neo-Luddism,” FE #372, Spring, 2006]

Dear Fifth Estate,

When I saw the cover of FE which promised an article on the Amish and Anarchists, it piqued my interest. I live in Amish country, Pennsylvania. An Old Order Amish family are my next door neighbors.

...

Bill Weinberg
The Anarchist Alternative in Cuba

A former community center that hosted a youth rock scene is now being occupied by activists, seemingly ignored by the authorities. A few blocks away, urban farms are bright patches of green in the landscape, producing vegetables and fruits for the community.

Oakland? Detroit? Manhattan’s Lower East Side?

...

Robert Knox
The Anarchist Poet of Exarcheia What We’re Gonna Do Is Read Her Poems

a review of

Now Let’s See What You’re Gonna Do: Poems 1978–2002 by Katerina Gogou; translation by A.S., forward by Jack Hirschman. fmsbw press 2021

A biographer of Katerina Gogou terms her “the anarchist poetess of Exarcheia,” the so-called “edgy alternative” Athenian neighborhood with its political murals and anarchist bookshops. I have been to Athens, once, but the tour guides never pointed us that way. So, I will take on faith a biographer’s description of Gogou, who died in 1993 by her own hand, as “Greece’s greatest anarchist poetess.”

...

Murray Bookchin
Dena Clamage

The Anarchist Revolution Interview with Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin is the editor of Anarchos magazine, a periodically appearing journal of anarchist thought published in New York City. Copies of his magazine and other writings are available from Anarchos, P.O. Box 466, Peter Stuyvesant Station, N.Y., N.Y. 10009 or may be picked up in person only at the Fifth Estate office.

...

David Porter
The Anarchist Spectre in Eastern Europe As Old Regimes Collapse

Rarely is an entire region of the world so caught up in the collapse of hierarchical politics as Eastern Europe of a year ago. The infamous “spectre of anarchy” astonished and horrified Communist, dissident and Western politicians alike as millions suddenly demanded control of their own lives. [1]

Tragically, but predictably, politicians of all sides—Party members and bureaucrats of the old regime, oppositional leaders and Western “advisors”—moved rapidly to protect their interests. Thus, Polish General Czeslaw Kiszczak, Interior Minister of the Jaruzelski regime, began talks in February 1989 to restore Solidarity’s legality in order to prevent the “anarchy and destruction” of its original phase (1980–81). [2]

...

Margaret Killjoy
The Anarchist Utopian Imagination Second Reality: What the future could look like.

“There’s a kind of desire that, whenever it arises, is censored scientifically, morally, politically. The ruling reality tries to stamp it out. This desire is the dream of a second reality.”

-- P.M., bolo’bolo

In the introduction to his anarchist utopian book, bolo’bolo, author P.M. describes why we need visions of positive futures. Second realities, as he calls them, are necessary, else we find that “the only choice [is] that between the Machine’s own dream and the refusal of any activity.”

...

Jesús Sepúlveda
The Animal Hungers

The animal hungers

for light and strength

He hungers

.

Killing himself while hunting

Groaning

fatally and the last

.

Hunger springs

Sleepless

.

There are beasts without burden

that dance / grow fiery

They warily drink water

.

Famine distorts

Tea or sugar or bread

or fuel

or a tender hand?

.

The animal hungers

for goodness

.

The famished grow fat

leaving scraps for neither him

nor her

who remained with her cubs

.

The animal hungers

Tramps through trenches

.

up slopes

Sets out

.

He rears up on both paws and ransacks a beehive

Spreads his wings and throws himself from a cliff

.

The animal hungers

when he moves with the flock

or sells his lungs, his eyes

his goodness, his fury

hangs from meat hooks

.

There is no slaughterer without slaughterhouses

there is a journal. a story. a bus

.

and the barrio where he who writes grew up

.

There are massacres

.

Slaughterers dressed as generals in plastic aprons

or doctors in white coats

the chemists the priests enrobed

.

Or gold buttons / stripes

or suits

Bare-chested

or sweaty

.

When the animal hungers

Everything trembles

Books crumble

The earth quakes

.

Autumn flowers bloom in the garden

In the gazebo unreal and necessary

the breeze rushes

people stroll by

.

Home is one

who smokes sitting in the patio of his house

or in a hotel

or silently waits in the corner of his

infancy

or lingers outside

until they open the door

.

Hunger squeezes through crevices

Cuts grooves

Breathes

Climbs fences

Feeds

.

But the animal doesn’t wait

grows weak or devours

He is hungry

and cold

.

He doesn’t know how to live

with pain and anguish

but tries

.

He prepares tea / bathes

or doesn’t

.

He has had enough

.

Slurps

Dips his bread

.

Sits still a moment

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The annual EF! Round River Rendezvous will be June 27-July 6 in Wisconsin’s Nicolet National Forest

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A 1990 Earth First! Redwood Summer blockade. Judi Bari’s key role led to the attempt on her life. The annual EF! Round River Rendezvous will be June 27-July 6 in Wisconsin’s Nicolet National Forest. Contact the RRR committee at 731 State St., Madison WI 53711; (608) 250–8378 or see the next EF! Journal for information.

...

T. Fulano (David Watson)
The Annunciation of the Papal Visit to Detroit

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Collage by Freddie Baer

All the city mourns, and the crumpled masses languish at the gates, and the cry of all the freeways has gone up.

The politicians have sent their runners to the waters, but they have come with all their vessels empty.

The limousines fester in long lines like links of meat waiting to be roasted in the devil’s barbecue.

...

anon.
The Appeal of Anarchy

Amidst ecstatic visions, Anarchy appears. She says:

Whenever you need anything, once a month at the full moon, assemble in the wilderness—in the forest, on the heath, by the seashore—for the state of nature is a community of freedoms. Recognize the imminence of total liberation and as a sign of your freedom, be naked in your rites.

...

John Moore
The Appeal of Anarchy

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Amidst ecstatic visions, Anarchy appears. She says:

Whenever you need anything, once a month at the full moon, assemble in the wilderness--in the forest, on the heath, by the seashore--for the state of nature is a community of freedoms. Recognize the imminence of total liberation, and as a sign of your freedom, be naked in your rites.

...

George dePue
The Arrangement, John & Mary Film review

Newsreel-ARM — Hollywood began to appreciate some years ago that the vision of life it was projecting for the people was increasingly irrelevant to their lives and uninteresting. It was a basic marketing problem—how to catch up with a broad social process that has some of the aspects of pre-revolutionary alienation from the system, without giving into it and confirming its concrete revolutionary potential?

...

Peter Lamborn Wilson
The Art of Not Being Governed

a review of

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press, 2009, cloth, 442 pp., $35

How could any black-and-red-blooded anarchist resist a book with this title?

Admittedly, it’s an expensive treat, but I’m very glad at last to discover a writer I should already have known: James C. Scott, who (like David Graeber) is an anthropologist at Yale and a self-confessed anarchist.

...

Phil Bailey
The Art of Richard Levins Morales Telling our stories and holding our ground

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The art of Ricardo Levins Morales is rooted in the soil of the struggles that shape our lives. Inspiring, empowering and validating, his images both document and embody collective visions of unity in the face of power.

As a result of working with the Northland Poster Collective in South Minneapolis for over thirty years, Levins Morales has developed core insights about how art can be a powerful part of strategy in movements.

...

Mitchel Cohen
The Assault on the Pentagon The 1967 March 25 Years Later

October 21, 1992 marked 25 years ago that a huge anti-war demonstration swept past the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. and over the bridges into Virginia, wave after wave of young anti-warriors crashing against the walls of the Pentagon.

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GIs blocking entrance to the Pentagon, Oct. 21, 1967. Some demonstrators tried to levitate the structure while others put flowers in the soldier’s gun barrels. FE photo/Frank H. Joyce

...

Frank Dedenbach
Theatre A Thurber Carnival

On September 2, 3 and 4 the Lafayette Park Players presented their production of “A Thurber Carnival” at the Chrysler School Auditorium. The cast has worked together only once before last fall in “Monique”; and, although the program notes show that many members have extensive background in other plays, the amateur character of this attempt was painfully obvious.

...

Frank H. Joyce
The “Bad” Americans Editorial

The events of the week of anti-war resistance which began October 16, and which have continued to this writing—including the assault on the war profiteers at the Rackham Building on Wayne State’s campus on October 24 and 25—are of profound significance for the nation and the Movement.

Thousands of whites have in fact moved from protest and dissent to resistance. As many black people were forced to do some years ago, increasing numbers of whites have been forced to conclude that the government is illegitimate. The “legal” structures for change which are presumed to exist in this country are in fact meaningless. White people, in short, do not have any power either—or at least they do not have the power to change anything, only the power to acquiesce. Congress has been petitioned. The Executive has been implored. And still babies die. “Napalm is Johnson’s Baby Powder,” said one sign.

...

anon.
The Banning of the Mural

In fall 1997, in Sechelt, a small coastal town in southwest British Columbia, Canada, Jamie Elder, owner of the Unity Skateboard Shop and drop-in point for local youth, approached me about painting a mural on the side of the trailer that housed his store which faced the highway directly opposite from a McDonald’s.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The Barn Infoshop, bookstore and clubhouse

In the hills of Tennessee, about an hour east of Nashville, on the outskirts of Dismal (population zero), there exists a barn. It’s an ordinary old barn from all outward appearances—except for a few anti war banners and the buzzing, whirring hum of electricity. Inside, the scene is anything but what Ma and Pa Kettle would have intended.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The Barn Infoshop, Bookstore & Clubhouse

Books

Bill Ayers

Fugitive Days (2001) $10

James Bell

The Last Wizards (2002) $5.00

Alexander Berkman

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist $15.00

— What Is Anarchism? $14.00

Hakim Bey

Millennium (1996) $8.00

— Immediatism (1992) $10.00

— T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991) $8.00

Bureau of Public Secrets

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The Barn Infoshop, Bookstore and Clubhouse

Send check, money order, or well concealed cash to:

Fifth Estate Books

PO Box 6

Liberty, TN 37095

Please add $2 shipping/handling for first item, $1 for the second and subsequent one, etc...

Thanks for your recent order!

Most book and CD purchases come with a surprise sampling of current zines and radical propaganda.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The Barn Infoshop, Bookstore & Clubhouse

When you order books from the Barn, you support a collective and help keep the Fifth Estate physical space solvent. With your help, we’re trying to sustain an alternative to the commercialism of retail or web-based booksellers.

Books

NEW Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World. Edited by David Solnit. Almost 500 pages! City Lights. 2004. $18. See the review on page 50.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The Barn Infoshop, Bookstore & Clubhouse

The barn is bursting with new titles & more to come. If you’d like us to review and/or distro your independent publication, bring it on

BOOKS

Midnight Notes, Auroras Of the Zapatistas (2001) $14.00

James Bell, The Last Wizard (2002) $12.00

Paul Garon, The Devil’s Son-in-Law: Petiie Wheatstraw (2003) $15.00 (w/CD)

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The Barn

Book distribution has been a mainstay of our collective for many years. We believe that reading can be a revolutionary activity, and in that spirit, we continue this service.

We feature books by Fifth Estate editors, contributors, collaborators, friends, and other books that have either been read or recommended by members of the collective. If you have a book you’d like to see offered here, send it along. Like the magazine, this project is volunteer-run and all proceeds go back into the collective.

...

Liberation News Service
The Battle at Brockdorf First Person Account from W. Germany

<em>

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Staff Note:</em> The following is a first-hand account of the demonstration and events leading up to it. See also in this issue: West German Protest.

BROCKDORF, Germany (LNS)—Up to now we have used only legal ways—filing lawsuits and so on—but have always made it clear that if legal means didn’t work, we would occupy the site, as was done in Whyl.

...

No Picnic
The Battle for France May/June 1968

FE Note: What follows are thoughts on the revolutionary upsurge which shook France 20 years ago. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the message is that revolt is possible in modern society. In ours today, it is not the cops which prevent revolt, but the inertia of what is--the weight of the present.

The introductory section is from the fine new magazine, No Picnic, Spring 1988, Box 69393, Stn. K, Vancouver BC, Canada V5K 4W6; $1.50 per issue. The piece from Fredy Perlman, written from a participant’s viewpoint, appeared in Worker-Student Action Committees, co-authored by R. Gregoire, 1968, $2 from FE Books. The excerpt from Jacques Camatte appeared originally in FE #295, November 3, 1978 and is available at $1. Also recommended is Paris: May 1968, by Solidarity, available from FE Books for $3.

...

Dennis Raymond
The Battle of Algiers

a review of

“The Battle of Algiers”

How surprised we were three years ago by the success of “To Die in Madrid,” Francisco Rosi’s remarkable compilation of old news films from the Spanish Civil War. The distinction of that film was the poetic way in which it shaped and explained the ironic progress and outcome of the struggle. And now we have a new film, though in much the same vein, which is historically more immediate.

...

Rick London
The Battle of Chicago

Editors’ Note: The Fifth Estate contains virtually no news coverage of the Battle of Chicago. For once the overground media did its job and to repeat the horror stories here would only be redundant. Rather, we feel that it is important to put the Chicago events within a perspective and provide an analysis of the events that occurred.

...

Caw! Magazine
The Battle of France: May ’68

FE Introduction

During the months of May and June 1968, the mass strikes and uprisings that occurred in France shook the foundations of an unsuspecting world. This crisis for capital appeared at a time when newspapers like The New York Times and le Monde were describing the French people as bored and lethargic and they weren’t completely inaccurate—the French were bored with their lives under capitalism and their boredom exploded onto the streets of Paris on May 18th creating a new reality for several weeks.

...

Marie Mason
The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle

A review of

The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit, AK Press, 2009, $12, www.akpress.org

Having been in Seattle for the “insurrection” against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, I looked forward to reading David Solnit’s account of the days leading up to November 26 and his interpretation of the aftermath of those events. I took part enthusiastically in many of the demonstrations and blockades of which he writes, and ran in the Black Bloc.

...

Jason Rodgers
The beasts of the Southwest desert have a message for us

a review of

A Desert Pilgrim’s Bestiary by Anthony Walent, author; Maurice Spira, Illustrator. Eberhardt Press, 2019

A Desert Pilgrim’s Bestiary is both archaic and modern. Anthony Walent has been employing this very tension in his zine, Communicating Vessels, for many years, that is assembled and designed using functioning, but antique typesetting equipment.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The Beatle in the Circus

LONDON (PWS) Beatle John Lennon is scheduled to head the list of guest stars set for the Rolling Stones’ first American television special, “The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus.” Lennon, along with Eric Clapton, Keith Richard, and Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, will form a supergroup especially for the show.

...

Larry Miller
The Beatles in Detroit Teens Climax Hectic Evening

There I was, right in the exact middle of it... most of that which had gone before merely served to strain my patience... had to go out several times for a cigarette, drink of water...when they finally came on, it was several seconds before I realized that this was it...every single one of these hideous creatures standing on top of the seats, screaming... the light from the thousands of popping flashbulbs was like some strange acid-inspired lightning, accompanied by this strange high pitched squealing thunder...retreated to the balcony, shaken by the intensity of the pure energy unleashed there in that weird electriarena... Migod, it was Romans and Christians and Lions all over again...once safe up above, away from the insane mass orgasm, I could see just what was really happening...the music was probably the worst pap they could have done... the reason obvious...these savages just would not LISTEN to the good stuff, the real art...they don’t have the vaguest idea of what these Beatles can do With sounds and words...so they get just exactly what they deserve, the crap, the screamers, the noise and shouting...and according to the ritual, the girlies faint and charge the stage, actually throw dangerous weapons at them...an attempt at communication with the fantasy come to life. So the Beatles concert turns out to be a big slap in the face, a musical screw-you aimed at the pre-pubic non-minds who sleep with their John Lennon dolls, trying to work off the forbidden orgasms. Money or no money, I do not want to be a rock-and-roll star. These cats were lucky to escape with their lives. And this was a lot quieter than the last time around.

...

E.B. Maple (Peter Werbe)
The Berkman Conference

A few days before the commencement in Pittsburgh of the July 23rd conference, “A Remembrance of Alexander Berkman, The Man Who Shot Frick,” Sunfrog and I headed for a little town on the Pennsylvania/West Virginia border called Confluence where several rivers come together. We figured if rafting was good enough for Earth First! founder, Dave Foreman, maybe we should give it a try as well.

...

Andrei Codrescu
The best human gift is perspective

it’s also the worst

when used in circumstances calling for a closeup

or in circumstances that call for detachment

it is only a gift when it employs the appropriate distance

that minimizes pain

between the observer and the observed

.

we have a school for teaching appropriate distance

it’s called a slum a favella

...

Fifth Estate Collective
The Big March Cover story

On Saturday, March 26, demonstrations protesting the war in Vietnam were held in Detroit as this city’s effort in the Second International Days of Protest. In preparation for this event, sponsored by the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Women for Peace, Detroit Citizens for Peace and Trade Unionists for Peace, more than 20,000 leaflets were distributed and advertisements appeared In the Detroit News and various campus and community newspapers.

...

Hank Malone
The Big Party The anatomy of a grand party in Detroit where we find a famous visiting poet, a famous black revolutionary, and a famous psychiatrist talking with the rich and the bored and everyone else.

I.

Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish’s original monkey dinner was held at 19 Gramercy Park in New York in 1908, wherein Mrs. Fish invited the “haute monde” of her day, according to writer Tom Wolfe, to a dinner in honor of the Prince del Drago.

Of course, nobody bothered to ask who the prince was, but they all came, and there was the Prince, a full-grown Chambezi baboon in evening clothes, fitted in a wing collar and tails. This grand gesture was Mrs. Fish’s way of showing how strange “society” had become in her day, willing to go anywhere for whatever purpose, if it seemed grand and gay enough.

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A. R.
The Big Picture about the Bad News You’re in it! You see it all! You know where you stand.

2-j-fe-268-3-alienation.jpg
...millions are plagued throughout their lives by a gnawing emptiness or meaninglessness expressed not as a fear of what may happen to them, but rather as a fear that nothing will happen to them...

Under the dull security and passive spectacle characterizing the total routine of everyday life in modern society lies the unmistakable framework of a withered and decayed social structure evading the grave in frantic pursuit of an eternal market of subservient: human beings. No such market exists anymore. Capital’s-own child, technology, has seen to that.

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Fifth Estate Collective
The birds, the bees, and anarchy Issue Introduction

The theme of this issue is Sex. The very word can elicit emotions from delight to anxiety. However, those reactions aside, the central function of sex, from mega fauna to microbes, is the reproduction of the species. It is only human sexuality which is over laden with social scripts that translate into pleasure or pain, often on a large cultural scale.

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Vachel Lindsay
The Black Hawk War of the Artists (1914)

August 2, 2007 was the 175th anniversary of the Bad Axe massacre, when US soldiers, settler militias, and army gunboats slaughtered Sauk (Osakiwug), Fox, and Kickapoo Indians following the Battle of Wisconsin Heights. This mass killing effectively put an end to the Black Hawk Wars.

The wars, named for what the British had given the indomitable war chief Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, began with conflict over long-simmering objections to the 1804 treaties. Black Hawk was captured, imprisoned, and put on public display all over the US. He later fell ill and died in Iowa.

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Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party Program What we Want, What we Believe

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black community.

2. We want full employment for our people.

3. We want an and to the robbery by the white man of our black community.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day Society.

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Guyora Binder
The Black Sea Monster

There is a monster outside of our window.

The monster roars and shudders; threatens, blusters; blows off steam and rusts. It is a beast of the sea; it is a massive machine; it is dangerous; it is explosive; it has no jaws, but a smaller subtler and more secret weapon... It is crawling with maggots.

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Carrie Laben
The Booksellers of our Better Nature

New York City. March 2020, the first days of the crisis that would define the year. The words “mutual aid” began to appear where they’d not been seen before, from lamp post flyers to Reddit neighborhood forums.

Everyone from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to Britney Spears was using the expression. Loosely organized groups ran errands and made deliveries. Friends sewed masks for friends, then for friends of friends. And well before the summer’s boiling-over of righteous rage at police brutality, sustained protests attempted to hold Cuomo and the prison system accountable for leaving incarcerated at-risk people in facilities like Rikers Island, which became a hotspot for COVID.

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David Gaynes
The Boxer

Here are four records you might want to have:

  1. Otis Spann: Sweet Giant of the Blues, Bluestime BTS-9006.

  2. Harmonica Slim: The Return of Harmonica Slim, Bluestime BTS9005.

  3. T-Bone Walker/Joe Turner/Otis Spann: Super Black Blues, Bluestime BTS-9003.

  4. Earl Hooker: Don’t Have to Worry, Bluesway BLS 6032.

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Dennis Raymond
The Bride Wore Black

a film review of

“The Bride Wore Black”

Francois Truffaut’s “The Bride Wore Black” is terrific. Infused with his patented brand of gentle humor, the film is a modern horror story in which lovely Jeanne Moreau goes about methodically murdering five gentlemen with an iron calm and comic sunniness. Essentially an entertainment movie, a minor effort for Truffaut, other films of similar genre pale beside it.

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Carl Hughes
George Lakey

The Brighter Side of Conflict Interview with Activist George Lakey

How Conflict Encourages Growth

Most of us don’t like dealing with conflict in movement politics. There are times when our projects are rolling along smoothly and then we hit a point of contention and suddenly the room is full of tension and discord.

For many people, the reaction is to try and restore order by quelling the discontent and moving onto other matters.

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Helen Keller
The Burden of War “Menace of the Militarist Program” (1915)

The burden of war always falls heaviest on the toilers. They are taught that their masters can do no wrong and go out in vast numbers to be killed on the battlefield. And what is their reward? If they escape death they come back to face heavy taxation and have their burden of poverty doubled. Through all the ages they have been robbed of the just rewards of their patriotism as they have been of the just rewards of their labors.

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Don LaCoss
The Car Bomb Poor Man’s F-16

reviewed in this article

Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, by Mike Davis, 2007, Verso, 228 pp., $22.95

Mike Davis argues forcibly that the “vehicle-borne improvised explosive device” (in Pentagon parlance) is a weapon of mass destruction. Keying in on the terrible effectiveness of this weapon (“an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a high-value target”), Davis underscores the inevitability of its proliferation as globalized capitalism industrially overdevelops every corner of the world, “like a kudzu vine of destruction taking root in the thousand fissures of ethnic and religious enmity that globalization has paradoxically revealed.”

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John Zerzan
The Case against Art

Art is always about “something hidden.” But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it.

During the first million or so years as reflective beings, humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that “unfallen social reality” because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliché about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid.

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Alon K. Raab
The Centralia Massacre Following World War I a Wobbly is lynched by the American Legion

As we travel north on Oregon’s Highway Five, from Portland towards Seattle, places and names go by: Castle Rock, Cougar, Mt. St. Helens, Onalaska. A November rain is falling, light rain, blessed rain. We cross the Chehalis river and then approach Centralia, Washington.

There are places whose names remain connected with the past, with a specific event that will forever remind strangers of their existence. Bhopal, Selma, Auschwitz, Soweto and Chernobyl are such places. People begin lives anew on those sites, building houses, giving birth, loving, but the associations persist. Centralia also has its beast of memory.

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Sylvie Kashdan
David Brown
Ron Reed

The Challenge Accepted Comments on Prisons & Prisoners

In response to “A Challenge to the Prison Movement,” FE #307, November 19, 1981.

“Prisons are part of the central model for social control.”

Sylvie Kashdan, Seattle

In its mirror image negation of some positions of the prisoner support movement, the anonymous article highlights weaknesses of such single-issue politics. In focusing so completely on this one institution (the prisons), it becomes impossible for people to imagine its elimination.

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Chris Singer
The Chicago Conspiracy

CHICAGO—The repression that many have forecast may have come.

On September 9, 1968, Judge William J. Campbell charged a 23-man grand jury with the job of investigating the violence in the streets of Chicago that occurred during the week of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Last week the grand jury, in a remarkable political balancing act, returned indictments against 17 persons: eight Chicago police; eight persons allied with the movement; and, one member of the fourth estate, a suspended NBC News executive.

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Shirley Hamburg
The Cinephile

Film Editing

“We’ll save it in the editing.”

Though true of James Cruze, Griffith, Stroheim, this maxim was hardly any longer true of Murnau, Chaplin, and becomes irretrievable untrue with sound film. Why? Because in a film such as Eisenstein’s “October” (and still more so with “Que Viva Mexico”) editing is above all the supreme touch of direction. Elena, just as Mr. Arkadin, is a model of editing because each in its class is a model of directing.

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Shirley Hamburg
The Cinephile

In adapting a bulky, densely detailed novel of seven volumes, Mai Zetterling has extricated the following schema in her movie, “Loving Couples:” her three women have in common a place and a time of arrival, the hospital, set immediately at the beginning of the film; a starting time, childhood; a central time and place, the chateau and the longest night, Midsummer. This schema orders and disorders brilliantly the destiny of the three lives in which childhoods, love affairs, childbearings correspond to one another.

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Carlos Semprún Maura
The CNT in Modern Spain The Weight of the Dead and Dead Weight

Note: The following article was translated from the readers’ soapbox page of the June 1, 1978 issue of Solidaridad Obrera (C/. Princesa, 56, entlo, 1a, Barcelona, Spain), organ of the C.N.T. of Catalonia.

Since last May, Solidaridad Obrera seems to have gone through quite a change in its content and has found itself in conflict with the C.N.T. nationally. In a recent issue of the bulletin Echanges (no. 16, July 1978), they state: “...this is an official paper of the C.N.T. it appears that the editorial staff of this paper has undergone changes incorporating elements who do not support any union including the C.N.T. It remains to be seen how long they will keep the editorship of the paper, for it is clear now that the C.N.T. nationally (headquarters Madrid) is pursuing a more and more strictly syndicalist line, expelling or criticising sections or groups considered to be ‘assemblyist” i.e. for the power of the mass meeting.”

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John Sinclair
The Coatpuller

Detroit is full of openings! Last weekend: Uncle Russ’s Gran-de Ballroom broke into the open with the MC5 and the High Society’s light show, both of which were just as they have to be—TOO MUCH. (William Blake: “Enough! or Too Much.” Charles Olson: “We must have / what we want.”) We are getting it. The Gran-de will be the place again this weekend, and hopefully for a lot more weekends, with the pounding MC5 and the great new band from Lansing, the Woolies, who just recorded their first sides on the West Coast last month with one of the heaviest guitar players anywhere, Ron English, featured. The High Society will be there too.

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John Sinclair
The Coatpuller

The WSU Artists’ Society’s fall concert/reading series is now set and will continue with a concert by the Contemporary 4 at the Community Arts Auditorium Thursday, November 3, at 8:30 p.m. Charles Moore will introduce his new band, featuring Kirk Lightsey, piano, and Ron Johnson & John Dana, the regulars. Former pianist Stanley Cowell left Michigan for New York City in August and has been working with Marion Brown (including a recent recording session for Pixie) among others. The concert will be introduced by yours truly. There is no admission charge per se, but a donation of $1.00 will be appreciated.

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John Sinclair
The Coatpuller

News of a new independent artists’ group in Detroit: The Instage, a gathering of musicians, dancers, painters, and others to present their own work in their own context, has been drawn together by pianist Kirk Lightsey, bassists Ernie Farrow and Dedrick Gover, trombonist George Bohanon and others. Now in search of their own performing facilities, Instage will present a program of its members’ work at the Community Arts Auditorium, Wayne State University, on Sunday, October 2, at 8:00 p.m. Featured will be paintings by Gloria Bohanon and seven others; a dance event featuring Barbara Willis, Don Hellimus, and Jackie Hillman, backed by Lightsey’s band; and a concert of music by the groups of Ernie Farrow, George Bohanon, and Harold McKinney. Tickets are on sale for $1.50 per person, $2.50 for couples, from Instage members and at the WSU box office.

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John Sinclair
The Coatpuller

THE MFS MESS: Emil Bacilla’s article on the Midwest Film Society last issue touched off a lot of under-the-table shit, which was, even weirder since Emil was in SF when the paper came out and couldn’t see what was happening. Briefly: Noel Cooper of the MFS contacted me through Peter Werbe about screening the MFS films at the Artists’ Workshop, which was for me a happy occurrence and was immediately implemented. JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS was shown at the Workshop Saturday, September 17, to a good-sized crowd, and flyers were passed out advertising the MFS fall lineup at the Workshop. Everything was groovy.

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John Sinclair
The Coatpuller

I want to take this space this week to tell you of some of the work the Detroit Artists’ Workshop is doing, because I think you should know about it in as much detail as I can give you here. I have been home two weeks now, and there has been such a beautiful mass of forward action going on here that I have been kept alive by it and kept happy to be a part of it again.

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John Sinclair
The Coatpuller

It’s good to be back with you again. The Festival Sunday was one of the most beautiful things I have ever experienced, and I think a lot of the people there had the same experience as myself. There were SO many people there, all day long, And everyone was really grooving. Joseph Jarman started the Festival off just after one o’clock with a spoken introduction and music trumpeter Peter Bishop (also of Chicago) and bassist Doug Riggs. The readings began with Dave Sinclair, J.D. Whitney, and Mike Litle, all of whom opened the people up for the biggest human sound ever to come out of Detroit—the Lyman Woodard Ensemble of the day, a totally integrated musical blast made up of Lymie at the organ, Jim Semark, piano and trombone; Ron English (Lansing), guitar; Doug Riggs and John Dana, basses; Byron Lyles (Lansing), drums; Charles Moore, cornet; Pete Bishop (Chicago), trumpet; Joseph Jarman (Chicago), alto saxophone and clarinet; David Squires, tenor saxophone; Jerry Younkins, tambourine; Bud Spangler (Lansing), tambourine; and, after the music started getting GOOD to me, I had to run home and get my own alto saxophone so I could get in there too.

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John Sinclair
Magdalene Sinclair

The Coatpuller a column by John & Magdalene Sinclair, for once

“any image around which any people concentrate & omit themselves is a usable one just because it is theirs.”

—Charles Olson, Apollonius of Tyrana

I am talking to you people who read this paper. Are you there? What then do you want? You have it in your power now to create a vital living situation here in Detroit and make it in your own image—-if you have the will & commitment to such a situation. If you don’t care if Detroit ever gets to be such a place, it won’t. It will stay just as it is now—a burgeoning police state, with isolated groups of people fighting each other and ignoring each other but never working together to make a decent place of this place. And this newspaper, which could be so great and such an important community newspaper, will continue to flounder because its editor gets so little help, and there is so little response to calls for help, aid, participation, etc., that are issued in it. I am thinking particularly of the Artists’ Workshop Society, which is part of my own life, and which is about to die out because my wife and her few helpers have received so little support from you while I’ve been gone these last four and a half months—just when they’ve needed help most. If you want to have Detroit as a real, alive, worthwhile place to live and work in, you’ll have to make it that way yourselves, since the city rulers aren’t going to help, they’ve proved that, and the commercial interests never want to make a place for something new and vital but will capitalize on it when it appears and grows. You dig? What I mean is that we are all going to have to start working with each other on all fronts, help each other out, and take advantage of what are our local possibilities—like this newspaper, like the Artists’ Workshop and the West Central Organization, the Concept East Theatre, the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the SDS Free University, Kenneth V. Cockrel for state representative, etc., etc. —all of these are manifestations of the same essential concerns, that Detroit be a vital human place for all of us.

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John Sinclair
The Coatpuller

The most important event of the last few weeks was a concert by the Joseph Jarman quartet from Chicago. This was Joseph’s second concert in Detroit. The first one, on March 18 in the Lower DeRoy Auditorium at WSU, was such a success (not financially, certainly, but meaning that the music was so beautiful that the people who came to hear it wanted to hear more of it) that the WSU Artist’s Society decided to sponsor these Chicago musicians again. With Joseph Jarman, who plays alto saxophone, bells, whistles, & other musical instruments, will be Christopher Gaddy on piano; Charles Clark, bass; & Thurman Barker, drums. A ‘delegation” from the Artists’ Workshop fortunate enough to be in Chicago on May 13 to hear Joseph Jarman’s concert entitled “TRIBUTE to the HARD CORE” at the University of Chicago & will not soon forget that historic performance.

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John Sinclair
The Coatpuller

5-m-fe-4-2-coatpuller.jpg

On the 24th of February, John Sinclair was sentenced by Judge Groat of the Recorders Court to six months in the Detroit House of Correction and three years probation for possession of marijuana. He’ll have to go before Judge Krause on Thursday, March 3, to be sentenced for violation of probation. This is why he is not writing the column today. Hopefully he will be able to continue writing for the Fifth Estate when (if) he goes to the “House” as they call it. I will help him out as well as I can with the local news items that he should tell you about.

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John Sinclair
The Coatpuller

4-f-fe-4-2-coatpuller.jpg

There’s a lot of very interesting “cultural activity” coming up in the next couple months in Detroit, but nothing definite is set as far as dates and times, so I’ll try to give a few teasers and come back with more specific information next time.

The success of Andrew Hill’s and Marion Brown’s concerts for the WSU Artists’ Society has spread around New York and, as a consequence, a number of forward New York musicians are writing about arranging concerts for themselves here in the immediate future. Pianist Paul Bley, one of the original members of the Jazz Composers Guild and the possessor of a number of fine recordings (among them FOOT LOOSE, on Savoy; BARRAGE, on ESP-Disk 1009; and appearances with Jimmy Guiffrie on Columbia and Verve labels) may be coming toward the end of this month. Then another exciting pianist, Burton Greene, another of the Jazz Composers Guild, whose ESP album will be out next month, will be here in early March, featured with the Detroit Contemporary 4. So those are things to look forward to, music lovers.

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John Sinclair
The Coatpuller

The Jefferson Airplane concert will be in Ford Auditorium Friday, June 30, at 8:30 p.m. Tickets run from $3.00 to $4.50 and can be got at Grinnells, Discount Records, the Ford Auditorium box office, and other places, including probably the Grande Ballroom. Featured with the Airplane will be the MC-5, the Rationals, the Apostles, and Ourselves though I’m not sure why all of those bands are Necessary.

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Fifth Estate Collective
The Coatpuller

Lots of good music coming up for the summer, June 8th, the new Spike Drivers will present a huge three-ring circus type show at Community Arts Auditorium, WSU, featuring the MC-5, the Passing Clouds, the Magic Veil Light Company, classical guitar, poetry by this correspondent, a karate exhibition, psychedelic ping-pong by Billy Reid, mantra chanting with musical accompaniment, and a story line by Larry Cruse and Sid Brown to tie it all together. Tickets at $1.50. Sponsored by Trans-Love and the WSU Artists’ Society.

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John Sinclair
The Coatpuller

A lot has happened since the last time I wrote this column, and I still don’t know what’ll come of it, but all we can do is ride it out and see what we can do with it. My own situation has changed a great deal even though I certainly don’t feel any different as a human being, but it sure is weird to walk or drive down the street and have strangers smile and wave because they saw me on TV and were given to believe that “John Sinclair is the high priest of the hippies in Detroit” or whatever.

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John Sinclair
The Coat Puller

An Open Letter to George Romney

Dear Sir:

As a free man and a revolutionary, and as a citizen of the state of Michigan with strong roots in my own Michigan community of Detroit, I’ve been interested to follow your recent career as a “national” politician. I haven’t really been too interested in your work as governor of the state of Michigan since that office has little or no relevance to my life nor have I ever been very interested in the office of president of the United States, since that office has even less relevance to my life. But the combination of events that has marked your entry into the national presidential race scene has captured my attention and my imagination, and I wanted after yesterday to say something about the whole thing.

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John Sinclair
The Coat Puller

The news this time seems to be that many people are getting busted for grass in a lot of funny ways and don’t know what to do about it when it happens. I have gone through three marijuana arrests and two “trial” scenes so far (including probation since December 1964 and 6 months in the Detroit House of Correction in 1966) and have come to learn some things about (1) police methods, aims and goals; (2) court procedures, including attitudes of judge, prosecutor and jury); (3) lawyers and how they operate; (4) the bail bond system; and (5) what you can do to get through all these dangerous traps relatively unharmed. It is to the last point that I want to speak here, in hopes that it might help some young people who are “in trouble with the law” over their marijuana smoking.

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John Sinclair
The Coat Puller

First, thanks to all of you who responded to our plea for help last issue—the Defense Fund is growing slowly, and hopefully, I’ll be able to turn it all over to our long — suffering attorneys when things get rough. Again, if everyone who reads this and is at all sympathetic to marijuana smokers who are presently heavily penalized by Michigan’s, cruel and unusual presently statutes, would sit down and send off a dollar or whatever you can spare to the John Sinclair Defense Fund, we could easily raise enough money to cover expenses in the trial.

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John Sinclair
The Coat Puller

Editor’s note: Brother Sinclair’s Coatpuller column is re-printed here exactly as it appeared in this paper one year ago. It was written at the height of the July Rebellion and contains one of the best impressionistic sketches of that week.

You know that it would be untrue

You know that I would be a liar

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John Sinclair
The Coat Puller

I was speaking of the change taking place in this nation, and would say that in America the change is most evident in two sectors or subcultures of the civilization. In the black stinking ghettoes of the poor and exploited, and in those sections of cities and land where the enlightened young have gathered for all intents and purposes outside the rigid general social framework of this America. These two sectors illustrate the two “major steps” outlined in this column last time.

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John Sinclair
The Coat Puller a column

It looks like straight people will do just about anything in their power to keep the love organism from growing and spreading, just because they can’t “understand’ it and don’t know what’s happening in the world around them. If you haven’t noticed, straight people are always putting love people down, sending their kids to psychiatrists to get “straightened out, calling the police on their kids, beating hippies who try to start honest and loving business operations, stealing from hippies and terrorizing their homes and gathering places, hitting and kicking people who have no eyes to fight back, and things like that. I’m tired of it, for one, and I just wish these people would wake up and start seeing what their stupid lives are all about and how vile they are being in their relationships with each other and with us.

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John Sinclair
The Coat Puller a column

Live (i.e. alive) musical activity continues to grow here in Detroit, and on its own terms, which makes it all the more valuable. Pianist Andrew Hill made his first concert appearance in this part of the country here last month, under the sponsorship of the WSU Artists’ Society and his Detroit-based agent, Lutz Bacher. In doing so Andrew also became the first major artist of international stature to be sponsored by the young student organization (only six months old), and the first such musician to undertake a totally cooperative musical venture outside the New York Area. The most significant extra-musical fact about Andrew’s concert is that he (& Bacher) worked directly with the society, on a person-to-person (rather than businessman-to businessman) basis, with music rather than money as the determining factor in the arrangement. This is the only way the rotten music-as-business situation is going to be overturned, and it must be revolutionized—and fast—if the music is going to be as an art form otherwise all anyone but the most privileged listeners will be able to hear in public performance will be the tired “entertainment” music that clutters the “jazz clubs” now.

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John Sinclair
The Coat Puller

“Do you love it, do you hate it

There it is, just like you made it”

—The Mothers of Invention

You have to live in the middle of the city to know what is really happening there—otherwise all you have to go on is what the “newspapers” and people tell you, and they very definitely have a vested interest in keeping the real news from you. The official responses to the Detroit insurrection have very little to do with what was actually happening, and people will soon find that out, although it may prove to be too late to do them any good.

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John Sinclair
The Coat Puller a column

You know that it would be untrue / You know that I would be a liar / If I was to say to you / “Girl, we can’t get much higher”—/ Come on baby light my fire / Come on baby light my fire / Gonna set the night on/FI-YUR

—“Light My Fire,” The Doors

“Light My Fire” rises through the radio ranks for weeks and, when it hits number one on the stations, the people respond and burn the city down. Or play Archie Shepp’s “Fire Music” album as background music for the Detroit purification: the scope and feeling of the people’s mood is there; an elegy for Malcolm X.

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John Sinclair
The Coat Puller (a column)

It shouldn’t be news to anyone--but it probably is--that the local gestapo is responsible for ending the performance of LeRoi Jones’ “the toilet” and “the Slave” at the now shut-down Concept East Theatre. The plays, directed by Woody King (who is now back in New York) and performed brilliantly by such Detroit actors as Sam Blue (Toilet) and Harrison Avery (Slave), began their run in August, made it through a couple of weeks, and then were brutally closed by the guardians of law & order--and “morals”--in our fair city.

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Magdalene Sinclair
The Coat-Puller

The Sunday night sessions at the Artists’ Workshop (4857 John Lodge) have been getting better both in audience attendance and in presentation. Last Sunday’s (July 17) featured poet Tom Mitchell and the music of the Workshop Music Ensemble, this time composed of Lyman Woodard on organ, Charles Moore on drums (!), Jim Semark on piano & trombone, and Doug Riggs on bass and piano. You should have heard the sounds this band produced! Sunday the 24th of July will feature poet Mike Little and the Workshop Music Ensemble again. The Ensemble, in case you have been wondering about it, is the new houseband of the Workshop, and is composed of whoever happens to be playing that particular night. You can be sure the band will never sound the same twice. And if you don’t want to miss their most exciting session, you should be at the Workshop every Sunday night at 7:00 p.m. (Admission is free.) There will be a very important happening, a FESTIVAL OF PEOPLE, at the Workshop on August 5. (See details on that in the special article on the festival in this issue).

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