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Up to one hundred young people from South Oakland County have spent three nights of the week of April 17 at the Elias Brothers’ drive-in, at Woodward and Normandy in Royal Oak, informing their elders that they are tired of being pushed around.

The drive-in has recently blockaded their parking lot to make it impossible for cars to cruise through, and soon plans to add a fifty cent cover or minimum charge. As one picket put it, “They have forgotten that we are the attraction here, not the lousy food or the lousy service or their SS guards. If the kids aren’t here, they have nothing to sell.”

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EDITORS: Harvey Ovshinsky, Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Cathy West

NEWS EDITOR: Frank Joyce

ART: Gary Grimshaw

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR: John Sinclair

CALENDAR: Rhona Whipple

FILM EDITORS: Joe Fineman, Shirley Hamburg

ADVERTISING: Leon Brenner

CIRCULATION: Wilson Lindsey

TRAVEL EDITOR: Sheil Salasnek

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During the last few months an increasing number of FIFTH ESTATE subscribers have complained to us that they receive their mailed issues either very late or not at all. Others complain that they receive their copy in a mutilated condition.

This is particularly disturbing since our office staff makes every effort to get the paper out to subscribers as soon as we get it back from our printer. We publish a paper for people to read not to lay in a back room of the post office.

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A benefit for the Be-In was one of the most beautiful events I’ve ever participated in in my life. The Grande was just full of loving people all dancing together in circles, under the strobe, individually, or in all kinds of freaky numbers, showing that in the end when someone asked how many people came it was obvious that everyone was one. The Family Medicine Chest, Billy C and the Sunshine and the Back and Back Boo Funny Music Band supplied sounds that I couldn’t believe. Energy just pulsating all over, people hanging on to each other, falling together, laughing, screaming, what can I say. It was just beautiful.

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Web Archive note: John Wilcock’s usual column heading is “Other Scenes”.

Every time somebody steals a masterpiece from a museum or fakes a Renoir or mutilates a Rubens the cause of art is served. Because we are reminded that art, like us, is mortal.

But the screams that arise from the culture vultures remind us of something else, too; that art today has less of an aesthetic value than an economic one.

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a review of

Johnny Got His Gun: A novel by Dalton Trumbo. York: Bantam Books, Inc., 150 pp.

Let’s make America nauseous!!!

In 1939 Dalton Trumbo published a novel calculated at times to send the reader scurrying to the commode to brace his arms against the bowl and retch.

The book is Johnny Got His Gun. It was released in paperback last month by Bantam Books.

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THE FIFTH ESTATE and Translove Energies will sponsor a day-long Mid-West Underground Press Conference in Detroit on Saturday, May 20.

The purpose of the conference is to bring together the already established underground papers and discuss each paper’s techniques and experiences. Hopefully the conference will be the impetus for underground papers to begin in other cities, primarily Cleveland, Windsor, Ann Arbor, and Toledo.

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Nancy Sinatra is Wall Street’s answer to the hippie. She’s a facially beautiful broad that plays the almost fetish sex role to shake up her record sales and overall public appeal; and yet she never seems to really overdo it.

She borders on the absurd in her prolific poses, yet she doesn’t really try as hard as she could to ‘sell’ herself. You know, that Mansfield coax that is so exaggerated it’s comical. But that’s because Papa’s got coin. It’s because of this that she can skyrocket to the top of almost any music survey any time she’s in a mood to bellow out.

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April 28 marked the opening of a new theatre in Detroit. The Tropic Theatre in the Wolverine Hotel began its first season with Harold Pinter’s “The Lover,” directed by John Kinney, and on the same bill, “The Man Upstairs” directed by Edith Carrol Canter.

The new theatre, located at 55 East Elizabeth was organized by three Detroit theatre veterans, John Kinney, Robert Heiple and Robert Jones. Kinney and Heiple have performed at the Un-Stabled and other Detroit theatres. Both are in the art supply business in Royal Oak and Jones is an assistant professor of Philosophy at Wayne State and has appeared with the Irish Hills Playhouse and Greenfield Village players.

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Thronging pulsing Central Park thousands strong—some in trees viewing the love-in—march. Begin in Sheep Meadow near the vendor of fat crunchy pretzels. Twenty cents and that’s a pretzel. It fills you up after 3 salami sandwiches, an orange and lots of turnpike coffee.

Not a baby crying here. Babies and kids love marches and turn on to parades. They help the love thing along. The daffodils helped and so too, the painted faces. A huge yellow submarine in paper mache. A suit, a tie and flowers in the hair. An army jacket, a robe and flower-wreathed halo. Flower power, flower power, Psychedelic bells and Viet Cong flags ring and wave. Sing and beat. Drum beating militants and prayerful Quakers are one. A baby on his mother’s back; a child hiding under a skirt and only the sneakers and dungarees to show on the warm ground.

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On Saturday, April 15 between 400,000 and 500,000 people marched in New York City and in a single voice demanded the end to mass murder in Vietnam.

The Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam described the demonstration as “the largest of any kind ever held in the history of the U.S. for any reason.” In San Francisco another 40,000 marched the same day.

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A possible pleasant alternative to the traditional “tweedle-dum—tweedle-dee” characters bound to run from the two major political parties in 1968 is a combo of Rev. Martin Luther King for President and Dr. Benjamin Spock for Veep on a 3^rd party “peace” ticket.

It would be interesting to know how some of our “radical” Young Democrats would react to this slate.

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Detroit High School students are being sought for a special summer seminar on Racism in America being sponsored by People Against Racism (PAR).

Dubbed “Freedom Schools in White America,” the seminars will attempt to supplement and in some cases counteract the effect of regular school teaching about Negro and white history.

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Paul Krassner, editor of the Realist and Society Editor of Ramparts magazine, will speak on Friday, May 12 at Wayne State University.

Krassner describes himself as the “court jester of the new left.” His talks usually range from soft core humor to hard core reality. His latest Realist features excerpts from the Manchester book on Kennedy, relating how, during the flight from Dallas, Johnson humped the wound in Kennedy’s neck.

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Green peppers, bananas, peanuts and now STP.

This latest addition to the armamentarium of the underground messiah has become a legend almost before it was made available. Reputed to have been named STP by the Grateful Dead “because it lasts so long” this new drug is capturing the imagination of hippies everywhere.

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A national meeting of anti-war student groups will take place May 13–14 in Chicago to evaluate the results of the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam that brought 500,000 demonstrators to New York and San Francisco.

The meeting was called by the Student Mobilization Committee, which is a broad coalition of student groups that participated in the April 15 action. Interested students or organizations can get further information on the conference by writing the Committee at 1101 W. Warren, Chicago 60612. Housing for the conference will be provided.

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An incident involving a Wayne State student and the University’s Security Police touched off a controversy when the student, MacArthur Binion, described his treatment as “outrageous.”

On April 6 Binion was approached, in the Wayne library, by a uniformed Security officer who demanded identification from him. Binion said he refused to do so since the officer gave no reason for his request. The officer attempted to forcibly remove Binion from the building, but the student pulled away and went to a reading area and began studying.

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Joseph Strick’s film adaptation of Ulysses is rather like a high-minded comic-strip version of Stephen Hero or Dubliners.

On the few occasions when a bit of genuine Joycean complexity is allowed to survive in the midst of all that jolly, naturalistic Irishry, it strikes one as self-conscious and out of place. To make the film less expensive to produce, it has been updated, so that all the Celtic Twilight and Irish revolutionism had to be dropped, and much that is left (like the references to England being taken over by a Jew) is out of keeping.

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People seem not to believe me when I say the Artists’ Workshop needs money to operate, or Trans-Love needs money, or the Sun needs money—but it’s true. I know it shouldn’t be that way, people, but this is America and you don’t even get a place to stay without paying some property-owner for it. Month after month we scuffle and hassle to get enough money to pay the rent ($200), the gas and electric (although not the gas any more, since it’s been shut off), the telephone bill ($75 or so), and hundreds of little bills which mount up every time we move to expand the operation in another direction.

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Doc Greene is confused. So are 170 million other white Americans, including Hubert Humphrey and Roy Wilkins.

It all started when they were born white in a society which told them all their lives that they were better because they were whiter. And which then organized itself to make it come true.

In a column he writes regularly for a newspaper which calls itself The Detroit News, Doc Greene spoke for most Americans when he condemned Dr. Martin Luther King for finally coming out against the war in Vietnam.

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My brother Greg the prosecuting attorney advises me to chill

He says the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice

I ask did it bend toward justice for the guy who said that

but he hasn’t a clue who I mean

my clue he harvested those words from a bumper sticker

his rosy perspective hogtied into irrelevance by cobwebs

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a review of

Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal by Th. Metzger. Motgus-sanlux, 2023

Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal is the newest entry in a growing genre of literature, books about having met anarchist author and poet Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey (1945–2022) and how it changed the author’s life.

There was Michael Muhammad Knight and Jacob Rabinowitz before him. This is halfway to the reading list for a college course on the subject.

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is the might of restraint closing in on me simply

a problem of synaesthesia? of this Autistic mind making life

hellish for its inhabitant—or is this unshakable weight

about statism? apparently the control industry &

gatekeepers well versed in verbal bandages

in therapy speak, conditioning into agony

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Where’s my issue?

We’ve heard that question a considerable number of times recently from subscribers, bookstores, and distributors.

No, you haven’t missed an issue. The last one we published was our Summer 2024 edition. The one you are holding is Spring 2025.

This issue marks the beginning of our 60^th year of continuous publication. We used to joke that the Fifth Estate was once a weekly in the early 1970s, but now our goal is a yearly. We met that criterion for 2024. If you are a subscriber, how often can you expect an issue? Subscriptions, which provide the basic finances for continuing publication, are for four issues regardless of when or how often we appear.

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a review of

King Mob: The Negation and Transcendence of Art by David and Stuart Wise. Wise Books, 2024

New York City, 1967. Roaming the streets in debate on the merits of the then-peak vogue art movement, Abstract Expressionism, are Ben Morea, part of a local affinity group, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, and David Wise and Anne Ryder of the English group of cultural subversives known as King Mob.

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a review of

Portraits of Struggle: Photos from 1972–2023 by Orin Langelle. Global Justice Ecology Project 2024

The old newspaper adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” has mostly been vitiated by Photoshop and AI. Photos have joined words in the realm of suspicion as now any image can be manipulated or even fabricated out of thin air with a few keystrokes.

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a review of

Jobs, Jive, & Joy: An Argument for the Utopian Spirit by Bernard Marszalek (Ztangi Press and Charles H. Kerr, 2024)

“Certainly, contending with climate catastrophe and civilization collapse requires a cultural revolution to match the devastation before us.” —Bernard Marszalek

The environmental, health, social, economic and political stresses of the last few decades have spurred the formation of increasing numbers of mutual aid groups for sharing resources and solidarity. Especially since the emergence of the Covid pandemic, people are reflecting on how to move their lives beyond working in the current world’s humiliating, boring, and unhealthy jobs.

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Marius Mason, an anarchist, environmental/animal rights activist, vegan, and trans advocate was denied his scheduled Gender Affirming Surgery by the Trump administration and transferred to a women’s prison. The Republican candidate’s campaign spent $27 million on ads condemning gender surgery for prisoners and the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) quickly remanded those detained back to prisons corresponding to their birth gender.

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a review of

Hurt, Baby, Hurt by William Walter Scott III. University of Michigan Press, 2025

First self-published in 1970, Hurt, Baby, Hurt is a fast-paced and brief yet intimate look into the life of William Walter Scott III, the man credited with inciting the so-called Detroit riots of July 1967. Known to city residents as The Rebellion, the five days of fires and police and National Guard repression resulted in 43 deaths, 1,200 injuries, over 7,000 arrests, and hundreds of buildings and homes destroyed.

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a review of

The Popular Wobbly: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim, T-Bone Slim, Edited by Owen Clayton and Iain McIntyre, Foreword by David R. Roediger. University of Minnesota Press, 2025

There’s a new book out which should be of interest to all fans of poignant and witty anecdotes, whether or not they’re interested in history or in union organizing, and whether or not they’ve ever experienced police brutality, prison, or poverty. But for those who appreciate the written word, who have an interest in history or in union organizing, and especially for those among us who have ever gone to bed hungry and broke, this book will provide you with sustenance of all kinds.

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