Full list of texts

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.”

...

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.

...

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.

...

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

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.

...

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.

...

A Man For All Seasons may not be a play for all seasons, but it certainly is a godsend in this particularly impoverished one. A good deal has been written elsewhere about this commendable but somewhat less than considerable play.

In adapting his work for the screen, Robert Bolt once again both idealized and oversimplified Thomas More, who was, at times, both more religiously fanatical and broadly facetious than Bolt’s protagonist. By giving us such a flawless man, Bolt gives us a flawed play and film. From the film, moreover, some of the play’s strongest and wittiest lines have been excised.

...

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

...

Having surveyed the recent New American Cinema products, one might easily be tempted to remain silent until an achievement of greater substance presents itself for evaluation. Yet, since an authentically New American Cinema is the concern of any conscious film artist, he must accept what is available as a concrete basis and subject it to a definite scrutiny, before he can discard or transcend it. For, assuming the existence of talent, it has precisely been a view of life without ideas, and a conception of art without theory that has prevented most of the New American Cinema film-makers from becoming true artists and thus the true spokesmen for their generation.

...

“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.

...

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.

...

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.”

...

The Detroit Love-In, to be held on Belle Isle April 30^th, will be the first large-scale manifestation of the New Spirit of Detroit, and everyone who feels that spirit and believes in it, and everyone who doubts it or would deny it, should be there to make it public once and for all.

Other events scheduled for the Trans-Love weekend include a tree dance/concert Friday night in the Mart Room at WSU (on the second floor of Mackenzie Hall, Cass and Putnam), with the great Seventh Seal donating their music and energy for their people. Everyone is welcome. On Saturday night, the 29^th, Trans-Love will sponsor a huge music explosion in the Community Arts Auditorium, Cass and Kirby, on the Wayne campus.

...

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

...

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

...

The Marijuana Scare is getting weirder and weirder, with the grass police moving backwards faster every day, trying to bust everybody they can before the laws won’t let them do it any more. As far as I’m concerned the busts first in Detroit, and now at Grosse Pointe and Livonia high schools, are the best thing that could have happened at this time—short of legalizing grass altogether, of course. Because the only way the police have been able to keep up their screen of lies and fear is by keeping it all “under ground,” where no straight people could see what was happening. Now, with the silly narcotics police breaking in on their sons and daughters almost every day, the middle-class citizens of our time are beginning to wonder about marijuana prohibition—and it’s just about time.

...

THE POEM FOR WARNER STRINGFELLOW

OCTOBER, 1966

Detective Lieutenant, Detroit Narcotics Squad, who has been single-handedly responsible for busting me on two separate occasions for possessing & selling marijuana

and who stumbled into my new apartment last night by accident

over a year since the last time he saw me

...

The “great narcotics hoax” was pretty weird any way you look at it, and I’m happy too that this issue carries a “fact sheet” on the big “raids.” The daily “newspapers” and the idiot TV and radio interests do a good job as police propagandists, as well they should (like, when you consider the Commissioner Ray Girardin was a “newsman” for 30 years on the Times, you get the idea), and as usual the only source for anything even resembling the “facts” is this paper. But they know they haven’t got long now, and they’re doing everything in their power to hold off the revolution—which revolution, however, will not be stopped. Like the cop said to me, “I just hope those kids aren’t listening to you,” and all I could tell him was, well, they’re YOUR kids, baby, and they don’t HAVE to listen to me at all—you’re doing a pretty good job of alienating them all by yourself. They don’t NEED me to tell them anything. Yes.

...

Yes it IS a New year. This year Detroit will be born into flesh and spirit and we will have what we want finally. It’s been a long time acomin’, but it IS here. Yes. Last Friday night I was able to go out to a place of business (the Wisdom Tooth on Plum Street) and hear the Lyman Woodard Trio, playing its own music, and a joyful occasion THAT was. I mean it’s the first time anyone has HIRED a forward jazz unit for the public to hear, in Detroit, and that’s just ONE sign of what will come. Woodard’s trio includes the master himself on organ, alto saxophonist Charles Miles, and drummer Norman Roberts, who is really amazing. Norman plays regularly with the Temptations, and can handle ANY kind of music like he was born to it. He was. The Trio will be at the Wisdom Tooth every Friday and Saturday night after hours, that is from 2:30 to 6:00 a.m. The cover charge is $2.00, which is fine, as the money goes to the musicians. And they need it, just as you need them.

...

A new year coming up, the end of one era and the move into a new one. 1967. The year that will make history begin again, with some relevance to our lives. What we are. I mean I can feel it in the air, the vibrations are so strong now and when they are united it will be truly beautiful. Believe me. Believe yourselves. Believe in what you feel.

...

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.

...

The Gran-de Ballroom gets better and better every week, and it’s my own opinion that anyone who doesn’t go out there at least one night a week is just crazy. Frank Fox says so too. Likewise the MC5 keeps taking off for further spaces—this is the best thing that could have happened to them. Any band that is based on human principles rather than strictly musical ones, i.e. any group of musicians who are concerned with exploiting their own possibilities for expression as human beings with instruments and not just as guys playing “tunes,” have to have the opportunity to work together over an extended period of time, and in front of a sympathetic audience too.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

“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.

...

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.

...

On the 24^th 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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

Lots of good music coming up for the summer, June 8^th, 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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

“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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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 24^th 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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There seem to have been a lot of very hip things going on in Detroit lately, though from my (disad-)vantage point I can only read about them or hear of them on the radio. I heard very beautiful things about the Archie Shepp et al. concert last month—anyone who missed the happenings in Ann Arbor should be locked up here in my place. Archie brought trombonist Roswell Rudd, the strongest man on his instrument today, from New York City; bassist Charlie ** Haden, now living in San Francisco after getting straight at Synanon; and drummer Beaver Harris, of NYC, with him for the big Ann Arbor affair, and all reports indicate that they all got into some very moving music. After the concert proper a mammoth session took place under Ron Brooks’ auspices—participating were some of the strongest voices in the country—Rudd & Harris of NY; Haden of SF; altoist Joseph Jarmon, tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, trumpeter Bill Brimfield, bassist Charles Clark, and drummer Steve McCall, all of Chicago (they had played, under Jarmon’s name, for the WSU Artists’ Society the night before); and cornetist Charles Moore and drummer Danny Spencer of Detroit. These men worked in a lot of combinations, including 2 bass-2 drums teams (Moore’s setting), and enough music was made (as I hear it) to fill the whole midwest.

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a review of

The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State by Eric Laursen, Foreword by Maia Ramath. AK Press 2021

Politics in the U.S. are so skewed to the right that tepid reformers such as Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) and Senator Bernie Sanders are characterized as the radical left for advocating universal health care and free college tuition.

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“Winter is yours, Spring is ours!”

—Solidarity

Painted across a thousand walls in Poland, this promise reminds us that the democratic upsurge there is far from buried. A certain phase of the movement has ended. When the movement reappears its form will be different, advanced by the lessons of a year and a half in the open air, and by the lessons of December’s defeat.

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FE Note: The article reprinted here first appeared in the Armed Forces Journal, June 7, 1971, and is excerpted here from The Movement Against the War, Ramparts Press, 1972. Col. Heinl’s hawkish military columns were a regular feature in the Detroit News during the 1950s and ‘60s.

From original Introduction to article: When Colonel Robert Heinl published this article in the Armed Forces Journal in June 1971, it drew national attention. Hints of near-mutinous conditions among U.S. combat forces in Vietnam and in the fleet off its coast had occasionally surfaced in the press. There had also been some coverage of the week-long April encampment in Washington of a thousand Vietnam veterans, who had chanted pro-Viet Cong slogans outside the White House and hurled their hundreds of Purple Hearts and combat medals at the Capitol. But relatively few Americans were aware that by this time the anti-war movements at home and within the armed forces were often working in coordination, nor did many think of the U.S. military as close to “collapse.”

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The fear of communism comes with the notion that the State will take away our things, force us to share with unworthy neighbors, and leave us without self-determination. That contributes to why we need to replace communism with communalism.

To avoid old-school communism and the welfare office, the working-class and middle-class servants of post-industrial capitalism willingly suffer all sorts of indignities, while tolerating, for the global underclass, an unprecedented neo-slavery of staggering horror. A unipolar, neoliberal, global capitalism has emerged, and we face the accelerating influence of a global junta motivated by purely mercantile interests. The crushing one-world economic system has resuscitated the need for a revolutionary alternative; to counter the new boss, radicals might create a sustainable, communal opposition. To reclaim the communal alternative, we must un-hinge communism from its authoritarian baggage and purge forever the tendency to form vanguardist bureaucracies when voluntary, horizontal associations are all that we need. Abolishing wage work and private property, socializing all necessities such as food, land, and water: these demands continue the classic precepts of anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian communism. But today, we can extend these classic notions and envision an even more radical gift economy as the only alternative to capitalism.

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This man is not from KQA-TV as his camera indicates, but rather he is from PIG-TV. It is one of six portable video-tape units that Police Commissioner Johannes “The Lover” Spreen has wasted $19,000 of the taxpayers’ money on.
This little toy is used at demonstrations to provide photographic proof of police actions and “individuals engaged in the commission of illegal acts.”
The American Civil Liberties Union thinks that their use is probably unconstitutional. Next time you see one of them at a demonstration put your picket sign in front of it or stand in their way, but be careful not to knock one to the ground because they are very expensive and break easily. Photo by A. Gotkin.

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There is a growing movement in this country to end the exploitation and oppression of the people in our own country and the people of the world. As it grows, so do the attempts to squash that movement and its supposed leaders.

The latest attempt is to blame the trouble that arose on the November 15 march on Washington on a conspiracy of the leaders of the New Mobilization Committee.

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Monument to the anarchist Haymarket martyrs, Waldheim Cenetary, Chicago

Last issue, the Fifth Estate announced a ceremony where the famed Haymarket Martyrs Monument in Chicago was to be declared a federally designated National Historic Landmark. Unbeknown to us, there had been intense agitation by local anarchists against this. G.L. Doebler attended the dedication ceremony and his report makes clear why the opposition was so intense.

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(Left photo) From left to right: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Tricky Dicky

(Right photo) From left to right: Nelson Rockefeller, Jimmy Carter, Happy Rockefeller, Muriel Humphrey, Nancy Kissinger, Walter Mondale and Henry Kissinger

Never is such joy brought into the homes of so many people as when a high-ranking state official decides to pack his bags and catch a one-way train to the never-never land.

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Nationalism was proclaimed dead several times during the present century:

—after the first world war, when the last empires of Europe, the Austrian and the Turkish, were broken up into self-determined nations, and no deprived nationalists remained, except the Zionists;

—after the Bolshevik coup d’etat, when it was said that the bourgeoisie’s struggles for self-determination were henceforth superseded by struggles of workingmen, who had no country;

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Industrialized nations have procured their preliminary capital by expropriating, deporting, persecuting and segregating, if not always by exterminating, people designated as legitimate prey. Kinships were broken, environments were destroyed, cultural orientations and ways were extirpated.

Descendants of survivors of such onslaughts are lucky if they preserve the merest relics, the most fleeting shadows of their ancestors’ cultures. Many of the descendants do not retain even shadows; they are totally depleted; they go to work; they further enlarge the apparatus that destroyed their ancestors’ culture. And in the world of work they are relegated to the margins, to the most unpleasant and least highly paid jobs. This makes them mad. A supermarket packer, for example, may know more about the stocks and the ordering than the manager, may know that racism is the only reason he is not manager and the manager not a packer. A security guard may know racism is the only reason he’s not chief of police. It is among people who have lost all their roots, who dream themselves supermarket managers and chiefs of police, that the national liberation front takes root; this is where the leader and general staff are formed.

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Every oppressed population can become a nation, a photographic negative of the oppressor nation, a place where the former packer is the supermarket’s manager, where the former security guard is the chief of police. By applying the correct strategy, every security guard can follow the precedent of ancient Rome’s Praetorian guards.

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Climate change, global warming, the undeniable and irreversible global-scale reconfiguration of global chemistry, from the land, to the water, to the sky, we are awash in a multitude of changes. Each one compounds and codevelops with the other crises of civilization. Loss of ecosystems, extinction of species, obliteration of the land that runs in tandem with production weaves with the consequences of hydrocarbon use.

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In another age, in a different lifetime, David Watson (under the name, George Bradford) wrote in the Spring 1984 Fifth Estate:

“While there may be reason for concern about computer threats to privacy, it is generally overlooked that deepening privatization, with a computerized television in every room as its apotheosis, is itself at least as great a threat—a threat which makes the police almost superfluous.”

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a review of

The Coors Connection, Russ Ballant, South End Press, Boston, 1992, 149 pp., $9.00

Not only does Coors make lousy beer, but it’s bankrolling just about every right-wing extremist group it can find.

However, Detroiter Russ Ballant doesn’t critique Coors products in his book. He goes straight to the Coors family’s sponsorship of far-right groups ranging from the Heritage Foundation to Pat Robertson’s snake-oil-and-politics caravan.

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On February 6, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported on the unsuccessful attempt by University of Ottawa Professor Denis Rancourt to eliminate the need for a grading system in his courses by awarding all of his students an A+.

The physics professor wasn’t the first to do this in academia, and like similar attempts, some dating back to the 1960s, was an effort to shift the focus and aim of the university back toward learning.

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“Your day has come. You may laugh, Mr. Sinclair, but you will have a long time to laugh. I sentence you to not less than and not more than ten years in the state penitentiary.”

—Judge Robert J. Colombo, July 28, 1969

John Sinclair is in the State Penitentiary at Jackson, Michigan, where he is supposed to spend the next decade.

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A few years ago on my last job I kept waking up in the morning with big bubbles in my head, eat a bowl of corn chips and go to work, checking out the storm sewers for leaks and patching them with quick- ‘ dry when I found one. I was very good and could hold my breath under sludge for seven minutes with my eyes open, but I had these bubbles in my head and that bothered me.

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“History’s political and economic power structures have always abhorred ‘idle people’ as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

This year marks the one hundredth birthday of the Industrial Workers of the World union, but it is also the seventy-fifth anniversary of an event that symbolizes everything that the Wobblies battled against: that is, the perverse concept that work is ennobling, righteous, empowering and essentially has no bearing on class relations.

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On May 16, 1871, one of the most famous monuments in Europe, the Vendôme Column celebrating Napoleon’s imperial regime, was toppled to the cheers of thousands. It was one of the largest public ceremonies of the short-lived Paris Commune, where revolutionaries controlled the city, establishing a free and egalitarian society that lasted a little over two months until suppressed by force.

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The recent mass suicide by 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate group created a fabulous media feeding frenzy of apocalyptic proportions. An occurrence as certifiably weird as this could not be confined to the check-out-counter tabloids: it was top-of-the-hour evening news wacky, cover of Time and Newsweek creepy. At the height of our virtual age, not even the scribes of comic books, pulp fiction and B-movies could cook up a scenario this fantastic.

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The United Nations Charter bans force violating state sovereignty; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD) guarantees the rights of individuals against oppressive states. The issue of “humanitarian intervention” arises from this tension. It is the right of “humanitarian intervention” that is claimed by the US/NATO in Kosovo, and that is generally supported by editorial opinion and news reports.

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Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley has strongly defended the actions of his police department during the Democratic National Convention. A specially prepared 77 page report issued Sept. 6 by the mayor’s office stated that the disturbances and police actions were provoked by demonstrators led by out-of-town “revolutionaries.” The report also stated that police used the minimal amount of force necessary to control the protesters and added that demonstrators were encouraged by the news media to prolong confrontations with the police.

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a review of

Daughters of Albion, Fontana (SRF-67586)

In these troubled days of “super” musicians, I find myself turning more and more to the finer facets of newly released albums.

Whereas previously I could really get into many lengthy virtuoso instrumental solos, I now discover that second-best Claptons are myriad and that no one plays Clapton as well as he, so why bother?

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I.

“Of the heavy losses we have sustain e d”, author-sentimentalist Charles Beaumont once said, “none can be regarded with more melancholy than the loss of the great movie theatres.” A generation ago they proliferated, today they exist like brontosaurus, slipping into the churning swamp of American history.

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FE Note: The essay below explores and criticizes the theory of the “decadence of capitalism,” a view held by several ultra-left sects here and in Europe. This view contends (a la Marx) that capital once had a dynamic phase in which it created the material base for a transition to socialism, but since the advent of World War I in 1914 has entered a decadent phase marked by cycles of war, reconstruction, depression and war again.

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The landscape of capitalism is a global one, existing everywhere with only minor variations. But this universal reign of the paycheck and the price-tag is approaching a state of crisis, becoming noticeable to all but those whose idea of politics excludes everyday reality.

Naturally enough, this crisis of the spirit, this nearing collapse of daily routine, is reaching its most acute forms thus far in America, capital’s most advanced arena.

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FE Note: This is an excerpted version of Halmos’ article which appears in Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society (Dell 1962)

“One may judge of a King by the state of dancing during his reign.”

—Ancient Chinese maxim.

Artistic expression, even when dilettante, is one of the most satisfactory forms of objectifying and thus projecting inner tensions. The dance is undoubtedly the most ancient form of artistic expression; its unique position among the arts is guaranteed by more than mere seniority: as we have seen, the dance is essentially a cooperative art, an art of the group and not of the solitary individual. Though there are isolated examples of solo and couple dances among primitive peoples, they are not truly solo or couple performances; they presuppose the presence of singing and rhythmically tapping audiences who open the dance or who join in it later. In pre-cultural human society, dance must have been a universal form of expressing strong emotions collectively. Admittedly, there have been reports of some danceless peoples, yet so long as we accept testimonies from observers on animal-dances—e.g., Kohler’s reports that his apes had danced too—we cannot be far wrong in concluding that the dance was a universal play-form in pre-cultural communities.

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a review of

A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings: On the Sovereignty of Life as Surpassing the Rights of Man, Second Edition by Raoul Vaneigem, Translated by Liz Heron. PM Press, 2019

“The freedom to live like a human being annuls the supposed freedoms of commerce and predation.”

So begins Raoul Vaneigem’s preface to the second edition of A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings. Originally published in 2001, this second edition is his attempt to create a foundational document asserting the primacy of humanity against the dominance of commerce and state power.

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Our backyard bonfire crackles, dimly lighting the faces of neighbors and their dogs emerging from the shadows. Secure with our bottled water, red wine and campfire grill, over a dozen of us trade clumsily barbecued chicken, whitefish, and green peppers, along with vignettes of the worst power outage in American history.

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For more than 30 years, a secret arm of the Detroit Police Department was tracking citizens to “root out” and “expose” subversives. Their targets were political activists, Vietnam War opponents, black nationalists, labor unionists, civil liberties advocates and many others engaged in social, cultural and other “dissident” activities.

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According to a certain conventional wisdom, there has been an unfortunate disenchantment of the world, and what is desperately needed is that we rediscover and recreate an enchanted world. This is, however, at best a half truth, and perhaps even a dangerous one.

True, there is a battle between disenchantment and re-enchantment in which we must rally to the aid of enchantment. But there is also a war between contending forms of enchantment that already exist, here and now This is the ultimate world-historical conflict that must engage our creative energies.

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Reprinted from Off Our Backs (February 27, 1970), a Woman’s News Journal.

This article is the second in a series on birth control, compiled and presented with the aid of the Women’s News Co-op. The first article, which dealt with “the pill” and the recent unsettling facts brought to light surrounding its use, clearly indicates the necessity for information on other birth control means. Because of the capitalist media’s big push for the pill over the last few years, little information has been readily available on other birth control methods. We will endeavor, in this series, to rectify this situation.

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a review of

The Diary of Anais Nin: Vol. 1 (1931–1934) and Vol. 2 (1934–1939). Edited by Gunther Stuhlmann. Swallow Press/Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.95 each.

“Creation,” says Anais Nin, “is a source of action, a directive which alters the course of human life.”

And anyone who reads these diaries will find them revolutionary, destined to take their place with the great transcendental works.

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a review of

The Diary of Che Guevara, edited by Robert Scheer, Bantam Books, Inc., NYC, $1.25 paperback.

The recently-captured Bolivian diary of Dr. Ernesto “Che” Guevara has now been published on the heels of his death. Since his canonization is nearly in full swing, it will probably be a long time before an objective un-handwringing account of the broad “meaning” of the diary will be apprehended. So before I wax into his charisma myself, I should like to make a few remarks I consider important about the diary.

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“Let the politicos with their deals, their puerile ambitions, their desperate greed, their advance division of the spoils, not meddle with the revolutionary process. Let the hack politicians become revolutionaries if they will! But let them not transform the Revolution into degenerate politics, because too much of our peoples blood is being spilled today, and too many enormous sacrifices have been made to deserve such a worthless deception tomorrow.”

—Fidel Castro

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Each step in a revolutionary’s development is a result of a definite experience. The role of a revolutionary is forced on the man, the man who knows the truth and can do nothing but live it. Gaining this truth is the hardest part of the development, the continual struggle for truth; the truth may come early or late in life or it may never come at all, but until it comes the man struggles, he struggles with his fellow man, but most of all he struggles with himself, and he never seems to know why he always loses.

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If we are truly hungry we will eat anything, anywhere. In Aushwitz, philosophers killed each other for the bones in the gravel-pits. They ate the soup made of their brothers’ bodies.

If we are only moderately hungry we are rich. More than half the world’s population knows no other feeling but hunger. They spend their time searching for food, as we in America spend our time searching for the Apocalypse.

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In an airport recently, I idly watched the 24-hour cable TV news that they pipe into the waiting lounges. A big report on the current financial market smashup noted that the US stock market had tumbled 40% in less than 365 days; this, the telegenic blonde woman on the screen told me in her “No, I’m really serious, now” voice.

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“The Dogs Hold an Election” is a legend of the Brule Sioux.

We have a little story about elections. Once, a long time ago, the dogs were trying to elect a president. One of them got up in the big dog convention and said: “I nominate the bulldog for president. He’s strong. He can fight.”

“But he can’t run,” said another dog. “What good is a fighter who can’t run? He won’t catch anybody.”

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Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn’t. And everybody is always somewhere else. Maybe it was the city, being in the city, that made him feel how queer everything was and that it was something else. Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the names of the things. The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were flex and oid or they were duroid (sani) or flexsan (duro), but everything was glass (but not quite glass) and the thing that you touched (the surface, washable, crease-resistant) was rubber, only it wasn’t quite rubber and you didn’t quite touch it but almost. The wall, which was glass but thrutex, turned out on being approached not to be a wall, it was something else, it was an opening or a doorway—and the doorway (through which he saw himself approaching) turned out to be something else, it was a wall. And what he had eaten not having agreed with him.

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The following two letters were recently received from fugitive draft resister Paul Jacob and from his support committee, the Paul Jacob Action Group. Paul was indicted in September 1982 for failure to register for the draft and has been the subject of an unsuccessful nation-wide search by the FBI for refusing to submit to arrest. We are pleased to report that at this date Paul Jacob is still “at-large.”

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Hanging above the entrance way to the Town Hall of Brno, the capital of Moravia, is a Dragon. The famous Dragon of Brno. The Monster, which stares down through glassy eyes upon all who enter this seat of political power, was brought back long ago from a strange and distant land.

Some might call this awe-inspiring beast a mere “crocodile.” But to the good citizens of Brno of an earlier age, it must have represented everything exotic and remote. In all probability, it was precisely such a creature that was called “Leviathan” in Biblical times.

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The struggle for political power within the United Auto Workers Union between the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the entrenched, conservative, white bureaucracy continued at the recent elections at Dodge local 3 of the Hamtramck Assembly Plant.

Held March 18 and 19, in the shadow of the grey, ugly plant on Joseph Campau, the incumbent leadership of local 3 turned to ballot stealing and cheating to insure the continuance of their racist leadership in the predominately black factory.

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Hello. My name is Car. I am the new world citizen. My arrival in your neighbourhood brings with it a new kind of peace and prosperity.

You now find me, with minor variations in appearance, everywhere in the world. I am possible only because modern technology has been liberated from its historical restraints. The contemporary political and economic climate has fostered an exchange of technical information and an availability of natural resources that all previous national chauvinisms, physical barriers, and antiquated cultural taboos made impractical.

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A high school diploma. Whether it’s meaningful or not is your own trip, but I think you’ll have to agree that it’s often an essential ingredient in getting a job or going to college in this bizarre country we inhabit.

If you’re a dropout and have been putting aside the idea of going back because of the hassles involved then read on brothers and sisters, it’s a whole lot easier than you’d think.

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