The Rag Blog (original) (raw)
Paul Krassner : A Tale of Two Alternative Media Conferences
 |
|---|
| Event organizer Larry Yurdin at the 1970 Alternative Media Conference at Goddard College. Yurdin, who later managed Pacifica radio station KPFT in Houston, also attended the 2013 conference. Image from goddard.edu. |
Returning to the scene...
A tale of two alternative media conferences
In 1970, the keynote speech was delivered by Ram Dass, the delightfully stimulating spiritual teacher. The 2013 event began with a celebration of the original conference.
By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / November 20, 2013
“In the time when new media was the big idea that was the big idea.” -- Lyric from U2 song, ”Kite”
In June 1970, a charter flight was on its way from San Francisco to the Alternative Media Conference at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. The passengers consisted entirely of attendees. Larry Bensky, then KPFA news anchor, recalls, “It was one of the craziest trips ever taken by anyone, anywhere, I’m sure. Many on the plane were tripping on acid.”
Photographer Robert Altman was sitting next to an old friend, Dr. Gene Schoenfeld, also known as Dr. Hip for his weekly countercultural advice column, syndicated to underground papers around the country. He shared a joint with Altman, who says, “It stimulated the good doctor with enough brashness and playfulness that he took over the plane’s entire audio system. As he sent raucous rock’n’roll from his portable player through the plane’s microphone, we were dancing, and the crew loved it.”
In addition, KSAN commentator Scoop Nisker played his signature news collages, and Michael Goodwin from Rolling Stone (then a skimpy 25-cent tabloid) remembers somebody reading Allen Ginsberg poetry. “It might even have been me,” he admits, “and if it was, I hereby apologize.”
Forty-three years later, a few months ago, another Alternative Media Conference took place at Goddard. The keynote speech was delivered by Thom Hartmann, the topflight progressive radio talk-show host. When he was 15, in 1966, he published an underground newspaper, The Jurist.
"Our first issue called for the legalization of pot and for teachers to let us smoke cigarettes in classrooms. That got us really in serious trouble, and we were told, ‘Don’t ever publish this thing again.’ But the next issue was about the military-industrial-complex. That got us kicked out of school."
Hartmann emphasized that,
Before Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, it did not say, ‘If you carry an hour of Rush Limbaugh, you have to carry an hour of Thom Hartmann.’ That’s the mythology that Limbaugh and the right have put out all these years, and what they’ve used to beat up the Fairness Doctrine. But it said that the station has to serve public interest.
In ’88, I was driving down the street, listening to the radio, and a news report came on that CBS had just moved their news division under the vice-president of entertainment. And I thought, ‘That’s it, this is the beginning of the end of any kind of media that is genuine.’ All the networks had been losing money on their news divisions, because they were necessary for radio and TV stations to keep their community service component of their license now that Reagan was saying, ‘Hey, that doesn’t matter anymore.’
In addition, in ’82, Reagan stopped the force of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which said that any organization that gets big enough to basically dominate an industry can’t do that, it’s a crime, two years in prison and a big fine, something like that. So between those two things, and then Clinton just put the nail in the coffin in ’96 with the Telecommunications Act.
It used to be that nobody could own more than 40 radio stations, and so what we’ve seen is that local media has become national media, national media has become corporate media, corporate media has eaten everything, and alternative media has been increasingly marginalized as a consequence of that. And then came the Web, and now much of the alternative media is on the Web. We’ve moved our shows onto the Web, as well as livestream, and we have YouTube channels.
But if we want to have vibrant media again -- real media, functional media -- there should be no mainstream media, that is, the concept of mainstream media, the concept of one corporation basically owning the programming -- the Limbaugh show, the Hannity show, the Beck show -- then owning the points of distribution. This should not be. This was done away with in television in the 1970s or 1980s. The networks had to have at least two hours of prime-time television programming that did not come from the TV networks.
Just this whole concept of there being a mainstream media gives legitimacy to what has essentially become corporate media with a corporate message. There is this thing called the mainstream media that is a giant corporate echo chamber that serves multinational corporations of billionaires, and nobody else. It’s destroying this country. It’s destroying democracy...
In 1970, the keynote speech was delivered by Ram Dass, the delightfully stimulating spiritual teacher. The 2013 event began with a celebration of the original conference. Organizer Larry Yurdin pointed out that Ram Dass, beside his outdoor talk, also “led a workshop on stress reduction and conflict resolution, and his guiding mantra and meditation helped to bring the many different clashing progressive agendas into greater harmony.”
 |
|---|
| Thom Hartmann at 2013 event. |
Or at least he tried. Take, for example, the interruption of a presentation by the late Harvey Kurtzman, the creator and editor of Mad, and later -- after he was fired for demanding 51% of _Mad_’s stock or he would quit -- he became the contributor of a monthly, mildly raunchy full-page comic strip for Playboy titled “Little Annie Fanny.”
Danny Goldberg, who was at the conference as a columnist for Billboard, and is now managing rock artists including Steve Earle and Tom Morello, wrote in his recent book, Bumping Into Genius: My Life in the Rock and Roll Business:
Just as Kurtzman was beginning to describe his take on the Woodstock culture his work helped to spawn, a couple disrobed and started having sex on the floor. Several attendees started clapping their hands in rhythm with the couple’s movements. In response, two feminists angrily yelled at the lecherous attendees to stop clapping. Kurtzman and the other panelists looked perplexed, and the crowd that had come to hear them quickly dispersed.
Art Spiegelman was also there. His first cartoon for The Realist in 1967 depicted a male soldier sitting on the lap of another male soldier, and they’re smooching in front of a sign on the wall, “Make Love, Not War!” Spiegelman has since been the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for his 1991 graphic novel, Maus, and he currently creates covers for the New Yorker, including the poignant one about 9/11, featuring dark ghosts of the Twin Towers against a mournful black background.
“Harvey Kurtzman was the granddaddy of the underground cartoonists,” Spiegelman recalls, "and he was in shock. Basically, it was my first real encounter with feminists. They kind of busted up the underground comics meeting. From my perspective, they were absolutely alien. ‘Why were those chicks so pissed off?’ It was really the very first time somebody was getting so angry in my earshot about the way men treated women. So amazing, what a few decades will do in terms of rearranging your brain circuits."
Indeed, Rona Elliot, who was the PR person at KMPX in San Francisco, recalls, “I told the program director that I’d been invited to the Alternative Media Conference, and he said no woman would go representing his station, so I quit on the spot.”
At that time, the blossoming Women’s Liberation Movement had its own forms of protest: the demonstration at the Miss America pageant; the six feminists taking over the male-dominated underground paper named RAT; Robin Morgan embracing Valerie Solanas, who had attempted to kill Andy Warhol. No wonder a fuck-in taking place at a lake across the road was raided by feminists. “If there’s going to be a fuck-in,” shouted one, “then we’ll decide where and when there’ll be a fuck-in.”
At this year’s conference, one of the participants was Andi Zeisler, co-founder and editorial director of Bitch, the “Feminist Response to Pop Culture.” Their Fall issue features articles ranging from “Helen Thomas [who died after the magazine went to press], Off the Record: A few opinions from the First Lady of the Press” to “Laughing It Off: What happens when women tell rape jokes?” The back cover ad is from She Bop, “A Female Friendly Sex Toy Boutique.”
Nonetheless, Zeisler pointed out that there is still some question on the general utility of print, and that the superficial multi-tasking world of the web has diluted the power of print and constrained the audience power of that medium.
In The Bridge, an independent local newspaper, Dan Jones wrote:
It was evident that the zeitgeist had moved on, and alternative media had been reduced to pleading for access to the mainstream media. One fun session was run by a group of producers from the Onion. What I found truly fascinating was that none of them owned TVs or subscribed to cable. Their news came from NPR and The New York Times. In fact, anecdotal reports from many presenters showed that few admitted watching TV at all. This left me wondering why any of us should be worried about access to the broadcast media if the opinion leaders weren’t even paying attention.
Statistically, a Times survey indicates that one in three millennials watch mostly online video and no broadcast TV. Meanwhile, in a video by a man-in-the-street interviewer, students at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, near Washington D.C., were unable to recognize the names of Vladimir Putin and John Kerry, but they gave detailed explanations on how to twerk.
This article was first published at Alternet.org and was cross-posted to The Rag Blog by the author.
[**Paul Krassner** edited_ The Realist_, America's premier satirical rag and was an original Yippie. Krassners latest book is an expanded and updated edition of his autobiography,_ Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture_, available at paulkrassner.com. Read more articles by Paul Krassner on The Rag Blog_.]_
RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Sociologist, Author, and New Left Pioneer and Critic, Todd Gitlin
 |
|---|
| Todd Gitlin. Photo by David Shankbone / Wikimedia Commons. |
Rag Radio podcast:
Sociologist, media critic, author,
and SDS pioneer Todd Gitlin
Our discussion with the renowned scholar and author ranges from the legacy of the Port Huron Statement and Gitlin's critical take on the later days of the movement, to the role of mass media in shaping social events.
By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / July 24, 2013
Todd Gitlin, an American writer, sociologist, and media scholar -- and a pioneer of the '60s New Left and underground press movements -- was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, July 19, 2013, in the first of two interviews.
Our second on-air visit with Gitlin will take place on Friday, August 9. It will be broadcast live from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas, and streamed live on the Internet.
Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.
Listen to or download this episode of Rag Radio here:
Todd Gitlin, an American writer, sociologist, communications scholar, novelist, poet, and public intellectual -- and an early president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -- is the author of 15 books, including Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street.
He is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia University. He holds degrees from Harvard University (mathematics), the University of Michigan (political science), and the University of California, Berkeley (sociology). He lectures frequently on culture and politics in the United States and abroad
Gitlin is on the editorial board of Dissent and is a contributing writer to Mother Jones. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and many more.
His other books, several of which have won major awards, include The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, The Whole World Is Watching, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives, and The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars.
Todd Gitlin was the third president of SDS, in 1963-64, and was coordinator of the SDS Peace Research and Education Project in 1964-65, during which time he helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War and the first American demonstrations against corporate aid to the apartheid regime in South Africa.
During 1968-69, he was an editor and writer for the San Francisco Express Times, and through 1970 wrote widely for the underground press. In 2003-06, he was a member of the Board of Directors of Greenpeace USA.
On the show we discuss the lasting legacy of SDS and the Port Huron Statement; Gitlin's critiques of the '60s movement and the Left involving issues like violence -- especially in the case of the Weather Underground and later Black Panther Party -- and "identity politics"; the role of the mass media in shaping our understanding of events, including social movements; and some reflections on the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement.
The show has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.
The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.
Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.
Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.
Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, July 26, 2013: Sanford, FL-based political science prof Jay D. Jurie and Austin lawyer Gary Bledsoe, President of the Texas NAACP, on the consequences of the Trayvon Martin verdict.
Friday, August 2, 2013: Linda Litowsky and Stefan Wray of ChannelAustin on the historic significance of public access television.
Friday, August 9, 2013: We continue our discussion with sociologist, author, and New Left pioneer Todd Gitlin.
BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Blake Slonecker's 'New Dawn' Tells the LNS Story
A New Dawn for the New Left:
Blake Slonecker's valuable history of LNS
“By distributing a common news packet to underground outlets, LNS enabled local rags to cover national and international news to an unprecedented degree, curbing their isolation and giving shape to a vibrant Movement print culture.” -- Blake Slonecker
By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 14, 2013
[A New Dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the Long Sixties by Blake Slonecker (2012: Palgrave Macmillan); Hardback; 267 pages; $85.]
It’s hard to imagine anyone paying $85 -- the list price -- for Blake Slonecker’s comprehensive book about Liberation News Service (LNS), its eclectic members, and its curious reincarnations and permutations. Published in December 2012, A New Dawn for the New Left offers a close look at LNS, the radical organization that lasted more than a decade and that provided a real alternative to the manufactured news and information disseminated by the Associated Press (AP).
Slonecker, a professor of history at Waldorf College in Iowa, captures the spirit of the freewheeling Sixties, though he’s also a compassionate critic who recognizes the excesses and the flaws of the radical movement and the counterculture that accompanied it in the 1960s and 1970s.
It’s not that the book isn’t worth reading. On the contrary, it offers a valuable portrait of LNS as a political collective that aimed to put into practice the rousing slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): “building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” The book ought to be available at a reasonable price and not priced out of the hands of readers.
Of course, Slonecker isn’t to blame for the $85 sticker shock. His publisher is.
The book begins where it ought to begin -- with the notorious heist of the LNS printing press by its two cofounders, the legendary Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo. It follows Bloom and Mungo to Montague Farm in Massachusetts, traces the evolution of the rural commune, its deep rural roots, and turn to anti-nuclear protest. At the same time, it looks closely at the LNS collective that regrouped in New York without its troublesome founders.
Slonecker believes that the New York office of LNS was located in Harlem. In the first sentence, he writes, “On the morning of August 11, 1968, something brazen was happening in the Harlem basement of Liberation News Service.” Throughout the book he refers to LNS’s Harlem office.
As a longtime resident of the neighborhood and as a contributor to LNS from 1967 to 1970 who often attended meetings, I can say with a great deal of certainty that LNS was not in Harlem. It was in a basement on Claremont Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, not far from 125th Street and Broadway. Claremont Avenue was a stone’s throw from Columbia University; LNS’s geographical proximity to academia was more significant than its proximity to Harlem.
LNS staff members such as Allen Young, who played a pivotal role in the early days, graduated from Columbia and from the Washington Post and brought to the New Left’s pioneering news organization a wealth of experience in both academia and professional journalism.
Others at LNS came from similar backgrounds: Andy Marx dropped out of Harvard to join LNS; Mark Feinstein came from The New York Times. Not everyone, of course, was an Ivy Leaguer. Katherine Mulvihill, whose picture appears on the cover of the book, was a high school dropout.
Slonecker does a good job of describing the internal politics, including the sexism, at LNS and the role of the collective within the larger political world of the New Left. He looks at LNS and at the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements and at gay and women’s liberation, as well as Third World and working class struggles. He also provides vivid portraits of Mungo and Bloom, Marty Jezer, Harvey Wasserman, Sam Lovejoy, and Allen Young. _The Rag Blog_’s Thorne Dreyer makes a few brief appearances, and so does Vicky Smith.
What Slonecker doesn’t do -- and that he might have done -- is to describe the basement office in more detail. After all, the workplace environment contributed to the state of mind and to the culture of LNS itself. The graffiti in the bathroom was a veritable museum of New Left and counterculture slogans. My favorite was “Stones Cut Beatles.” I also remember the LNS ritual of watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News during the War in Vietnam.
Slonecker might have provided more details about the actual production of the mimeographed LNS packets that went out to underground newspapers all around the country -- to The Seed in Chicago, The Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, The Barb in Berkeley, and many others. The cover photo by Anne Dockery, shows Katherine Mulvihill at a machine; a description of the work itself would help.
If LNS went out to underground papers, the papers also flooded the office. I’d spend many an afternoon sitting around with the roar of the Gestetner machines in the background reading The Seed, The Barb, The Rag, and finding out what was happening on a grassroots level in Chicago, Berkeley, and Austin.
LNS was a kind of living library, a real movement hub and, not surprisingly, movement honchos often visited. The New Left, including SDS and the Yippies, took it seriously. When I wrote a review critical of Jerry Rubin’s Do It!, Rubin called LNS and complained bitterly. How could LNS not rave about him and his book? he wanted to know, and was told that LNS wasn’t in the business of writing advertising copy and blurbs for New Left and countercultural writers. Hadn’t he heard about freedom of the press?
A New Dawn for the New Left offers ample remarks from the likes of John Wilcock, the cofounder of the Underground Press Syndicate, and Teddy Franklin, part of LNS’s early core group. “We’re paying LNS $180 a year,” Wilcock complained, “to send us whatever they damn well feel like sending us.”
Some of my own pieces for LNS were widely picked up by papers -- including a critique of hippie culture entitled “The Children of Imperialism” and a review of a concert by the Rolling Stones I did with Franklin. But other pieces -- about books such as B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre -- hardly proved exciting to editors at the feisty rags around the country.
Still, it was to LNS’s credit that odd, quirky pieces were published -- sometimes by leading movement figures like Abbie Hoffman who wrote with real passion about Marshall Bloom’s suicide.
LNS lasted until about 1980, but by then its glory days had long since passed. Allen Young had moved to rural Massachusetts to live on a commune with other gay men. I’d relocated to California. Thorne Dreyer and Vicky Smith had gone to Houston to start Space City!
By the summer of 1972, veteran LNS members such as Teddy Franklin were lamenting the decline and fall of the underground press and bemoaning the sinking numbers of subscribers to LNS. “I’m hard put to name 10 underground newspapers I have any respect for at this point,” Franklin wrote in 1972. “Let’s be honest, we’re losing our readers out from under our feet.”
In part, what happened was a shift from underground newspapers to what were called “sea-level” weeklies or monthlies, such as University Review and The Chicago Reader.
In the 1970s, papers such as the Village Voice grew fatter and fatter with ad revenue and took over the role that had been played by the underground papers. Moreover, reporters for LNS, such as Mike Schuster, moved to much more reputable news organizations such as PBS. The New Left and its countercultural institutions had provided a training ground for a whole generation of editors, publishers, and journalists who went on to work for mainstream magazines and newspapers.
In a sense, LNS and the underground papers died not because they failed but because they succeeded. As one New Leftist put it, “Nothing sucks like success.”
Slonecker’s book makes a substantial contribution to the literature about the Sixties. It joins the company of recent, outstanding books about the underground press such as John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters, Sean Stewart’s wonderfully illustrated On the Ground, and Ken Wachsberger’s multi-volume Voices from Underground. Along with them and young writers like Thai Jones, Slonecker belongs to the generation of historians reinterpreting radicalism in America.
[**Jonah Raskin**, a regular contributor to_ The Rag Blog _is the author of_ For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman _and_ American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation_. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog_.]_
Allison Meier : Radical Archive Exhibits 'Rebel Newsprint' from the Sixties
 |
|---|
| Image from “Rebel Newsprint: The Underground Press” at Interference Archive. Photo by Allison Meier / Hyperallergic. |
One radical archive offers a
hands-on approach to activist art
The indie counterculture newspapers of the 1960s multiplied to over 500 around the country, with their art and design as radical as their messages.
By Allison Meier / Hyperallergic / March 6, 2013
The intensified activism of the 1960s fueled by the Vietnam War and struggles over class inequality, women’s rights, and black liberation drove the rapid growth of the underground press. Between 1965 and 1969, the five indie counterculture newspapers scattered across the United States multiplied to over 500 around the country, representing and communicating the voices of feminists, the Black Panther Party, gay activists, psychedelic aficionados, and other social movement groups with their art and design as radical as their messages.
"Rebel Newsprint: The Underground Press" at Interference Archive in Gowanus [a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York] is digging into this historic period with over 100 newspapers from across the sixties underground.
The exhibition of ephemera is curated by Sean Stewart, the editor of On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. (2011), and was drawn from his own collection, with yellowed and folded issues of newspapers like the bilingual community publication Basta Ya started in San Francisco in 1969, the experimental San Francisco Oracle published from 1966 to 1968 out of Haight-Ashbury that reflected the area’s psychedelic scene in trippy rainbow ink and spiritual poetry, and the sexual revolution sourced Screw: The Sex Review co-founded by pornographer Al Goldstein.
Most of the newspapers are held in plastic and suspended from the walls of the Interference Archive’s small space, a cascade of counterculture messages like “End the War Now,” “Don’t Mourn, Organize,” and “All Power to the People” blaring out from vibrantly hued cover art and rapid fire text.
One issue of the East Village Other, responding to the 1967 storming of hippies convening in Tompkins Square by police, has an image of a man with a bloodied face, his hands handcuffed and stretching down while text frames him on two sides: ”My God! My God! Where is this happening? This is America!” (You can see this and some other covers in detail on the Interference Archive blog.)
 |
|---|
| The Rag. Image fromInterference Archive. |
The importance of a visually engaging communication device was especially essential for movements that were located outside of the radical coastal centers, like Space City! in Houston. Thorne Dreyer, part of its editorial collective, is quoted in the exhibition text: “Houston was all spread out, you know, there were antiwar people and there were rock ‘n’ rollers but there wasn’t anything to pull them together. Space City! created a place where all these people could come together.”
There was also the relaying of information between distant parts of the world where activism was broiling. Alice Embree, a staff member at Austin's Rag, is quoted: “The importance of Rag and the underground press movement was that it was the connective tissue; it spread the news of what was happening from here to other places. It brought the news of, say, People’s Park or whatever was going on in Berkeley or New York, back.” This extended to movements in Mexico and even across the ocean in Japan and France.
True to the Interference Archive’s mission of providing hands-on access to their materials, there are a few copies of underground newspapers to flip through, such as an issue of the radical California-based Berkeley Barb that includes an article on activist Jerry Rubin and a tantalizing story on “Erotic Lennon.” ”We prioritize use, not preservation,” said Cindy Milstein, one of the members of the Interference Archive collective of volunteers. She also emphasized the archive’s focus on the history of aesthetics and art in activism.
Opened in December of 2011, the Interference Archive is run by a volunteer collective with Kevin Caplicki, Molly Fair, Josh MacPhee, Cindy Milstein, and Blithe Riley at its core. Their small library in Gowanus is packed with materials from around five decades of social movements, with a significant portion of the archives related to activism outside the United States. As a public resource, anyone can stop by during their open hours and dig through boxes of zines, comics, protest banners, books, and some audio and video material.
There are also buttons and t-shirts and flat files of prints from Just Seeds, an art cooperative for graphic designers started by Interference Archive founder MacPhee. Much of the Archive is sourced from the personal collections of MacPhee and fellow founder the late Dara Greenwald, which was amassed from their own participation in social movements and the punk rock culture of the 1980s and 90s.
 |
|---|
| The Berkeley Tribe. Photo by Allison Meier / Hyperallergic. |
Every drawer and box and shelf of the Interference Archive is overflowing with valuable research on social movements, from the Paris Rebellion of 1968 to the Latin American solidarity organizations to materials on apartheid, with the importance of art as an avenue for a message’s resonance appearing throughout the decades and the physical connection with the relics of movements really bringing them to life.
While access to all of this is their main goal, their regular exhibitions are a way to examine the role of visual messages in these materials. Looking at the walls covered in the underground newspapers can be a bit overwhelming, but is worth spending time with for the innovative takes on design and use of visuals to convey their fervent messages that were unrepresented in the mainstream press.
"Rebel Newsprint: The Underground Press" is at Interference Archive (131 8th Street, Unit 4, Gowanus, Brooklyn) through March 24. Hours are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays 12 – 5 pm.
[**Allison C. Meier** is a freelance and fiction writer based in Brooklyn. Originally from Oklahoma, she has been covering contemporary visual art for print and online media since 2006. You can read about her New York and world travel adventures on her website. Meier wrote this article for Hyperallergic, "a forum for serious, playful and radical thinking about art in the world today."]
Paul Buhle : Comix Artist Spain Rodriguez (1940-2012)
Spain Rodriguez: Transforming comics. Image from CBLDF.
The passing of a comix pioneer:
Spain Rodriguez (1940-2012)
By Paul Buhle / Dissent / December 12, 2012
In Trashman: Agent of the Sixth International, the signature saga of his early years, Rodriguez's revolutionaries took revenge on a truly evil American ruling class.
We are now so far from the 1960s and ’70s that the crucial locations, personalities, and moments of one very popular art form’s transformation have been largely forgotten. Spain Rodriguez, with a handful of others (the best remembered are happily still with us: Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, Bill Griffith, Kim Deitch, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, and Sharon Rudahl, to name a few), pushed the comics agenda so far forward that no return to the limitations of superheroes and banal daily newspaper strips would ever be possible.
Comic art, belatedly recognized in The New York Times (and assorted museums) as a real art and not a corrupting children’s literature, owes much to them.
Spain (his birth name was Manuel, his father a Spanish immigrant, his mother an Italian-American artist) grew up in Buffalo, New York, a rebellious working-class kid who wore long sideburns and was impressed by the civil rights movement. He dropped out of art school in Connecticut and, after returning to Buffalo and working a factory job with a motorcycle gang engagement, landed in New York in time for the efflorescence of Underground Comix (styled with an “x” to distinguish itself) in a comic tabloid offshoot of the East Village Other.
His colleagues were a strangely mixed crew, all of them old enough to have been influenced by EC Comics, the most politically liberal and artistically accomplished of the old comics industry, and the one hardest hit by the congressional hearings of the McCarthy era. (As with attacks on the Left, every charge of subversion and perversion hid Middle-American outrage: these were Jews corrupting innocent American youth.)
In a sense, every “underground” artist of these early days sought revenge in the name of comic art, and realized it through the depiction of sex, violence, and anti-war and anti-racist sentiment unthinkable in what remained of the mainstream. Sex and violence, lamentably, became chief attractions to many readers, recalling the “headlights” (aka “sweater girl”) crime and horror comics of the late 1940s, albeit with a left-wing or libertarian ambience.
The whole comix artistic crowd moved to San Francisco around 1970, joining Robert Crumb and a few others already there, part of the acid-rock, post–Summer of Love setting. Underground comix, replicating the old kids-comics format but now in black and white, grew up alongside the underground press, whose reprinting of comix created the market for the books.
Crumb was the artist whose work sold the best, in the hundreds of thousands, but Spain was widely regarded as the most political. He was heavily influenced by the most bohemian of the EC comics world, wild man Wallace Wood, whose sci-fi adventures depicted civilizations recovering from atomic war and whose Mad Comics stories assaulted the 1950s commercialization of popular culture. Wood’s dames were also extremely sexy, too overtly sexy for the diluted satire of the later Mad Magazine.
Spain Rodriguez. Photo by Sean Stewart / Babylon Falling.
Trashman: Agent of the Sixth International was Rodriguez’s signature saga in these early years, serialized in underground papers, comix anthologies, and eventually collected in comic book form as Subvert Comics. These revolutionaries took revenge on a truly evil American ruling class in assorted ways, many of them violent, but they also had fun and sex, and were subject to many self-satirizing gags, in the process.
By the middle 1970s, his work had broadened into more social and historical themes, often with class, sex, and violence highlighting his points. Histories of revolutions and anti-fascist actions (and all their complexities) inspired some of his closest reading of real events, but he had no fixed point on the left-wing scale.
He admired and drew about anti-Bolshevist anarchist leader Nestor Makhno and also anti-Stalinist Spanish anarchist Durruti, but he also drew about Red Army members facing death fighting the Germans, and so on. (Several of these pieces are now reprinted in Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection, an anthology from that 1980s series, just published by PM Press.)
In recollections of the internal conflicts among comix artists, sometimes pitting feminists against male-dominated circles, Rodriguez is remembered as having been unusually helpful and egalitarian, a memory that contrasts curiously with his sometimes sado-masochistic plot lines but not so curiously with the gender-equality of the sybarites (“Big Bitch” was Trashman’s female counterpart, the tough working-class broad with sex cravings for weaker men).
He poked and prodded San Francisco’s self-image as a haven of liberated sex, sometimes making his younger self a player on the scene. He also helped set in motion the vital murals movement in San Francisco’s Mission District, but was likely best known on the West Coast for his many posters of San Francisco Mime Troupe openings.
Spain Rodriquez lasted long enough to see his work in square covers (if not often hard covers), his unique and quasi-realistic modernism preserved for generations ahead.
The validation of comic art from near the end of the century onward -- Spiegelman’s Maus and left-wing lesbian Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home high among the evidence of artistic achievement -- found Rodriguez with a Salon series, “The Dark Hotel,” and several books of his own. Devil Dog, a biography of disillusioned Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, and Nightmare Alley, an adaptation of the classic noir novel, are easily among the best. Che, his graphic biography of Che Guevara, reached the furthest, with editions published everywhere from Latin America to Europe, Japan, and Malaysia.
At the time of his death, Rodriguez was amid “Yiddish Bohemians,” a strip about Jewish-American puppeteers during the 1920s and ’30s, in what would be the last in a stunning series of collaborations with playwright-professor Joel Schechter. Rodriguez had started a Woody Guthrie poster for an upcoming Bay Area concert and, had he lived, would have drawn a history of the 2003 San Francisco hotel strike.
After more than 40 years (and the disappearance of well over 90 percent of many little-remembered artists’ work in yellowing pulp), the impact of the Underground Comix world remains more a matter of style than substance, daring more than narrative and artistic content. This is unfortunate, because so many artists had particular contributions worthy of note, worthy of reprinting for the sake of comic art alone.
Spain Rodriquez lasted long enough to see his work in square covers (if not often hard covers), his unique and quasi-realistic modernism preserved for generations ahead. That he never lost his political vision or his sense of humor should go without saying, but those of us lucky enough to see him teach or to be taught by him felt the deep impact of his humanism as well.
Rodriguez died at home in San Francisco, with his wife, Susan Stern, a documentary filmmaker, and his daughter, Nora Rodriguez, by his side. A retrospect of his work, including a short documentary film made by his wife, is now in place at the Burchfield Penny Art Center in Buffalo, the second exhibit in Buffalo to honor this improbable local hero.
[Cultural historian **Paul Buhl** is professor emeritus at Brown University. He publishes radical comic books and graphic novels. Buhle was the editor of_ Che _and is co-editor of the anthology_ Bohemians_, to appear in 2013, with two strips by Rodriguez. Read more articles by Paul Buhle on The Rag Blog_.]_
BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Sean Stewart's Spirited History of the Underground Press
Sean Stewart's On the Ground is a lively
anecdotal history of the underground press
Amply illustrated with art, cartoons, drawings, and covers from the colorful, eye-catching papers of the Sixties, it comes closer to the spirit of the in-your-face underground papers.
By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / December 14, 2011
[On The Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S., edited by Sean Stewart, preface by Paul Buhle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011); Paperback; 204 pages; $20.00.]
Sean Stewart’s On the Ground is the last of three feisty books published in the past year about the Sixties underground press. The strengths of Stewart’s book are spelled out in the subtitle: it’s illustrated and it’s anecdotal.
Unlike John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters, which came out last winter, and Ken Wachsberger’s Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, which came out last spring, Stewart’s On the Ground -- which has just been published -- does not try to be all-inclusive, comprehensive, and analytical.
Amply illustrated with art, cartoons, drawings, and covers from the colorful, eye-catching papers of the Sixties, it comes closer than the previous two books to the spirit of the in-your-face underground papers.
Many of the anecdotes that appear in On the Ground are told by Sixties writers, photographers, and editors who were omitted, neglected, or shunted to the sidelines by McMillan and Wachsberger, though probably not intentionally. There were just too many contributors to the underground papers to include all of them in one book.
Marvin Garson -- the editor of the San Francisco Express Times -- is mentioned briefly and only in passing. That’s too bad because he had a deep understanding of media, news, and communications. Todd Gitlin mostly dismisses him in The Sixties because he pushed surrealism into “bad taste.” Of course, the underground press was often a mix of surrealism and bad taste.
Paul Krassner -- one of the fathers of the underground papers -- defended the mix time and time again and refused so say what was fact and what was fiction in his published pieces, what was made up and what was an accurate historical depiction.
The historian, Paul Buhle, provides a preface to Stewart’s On the Ground that has the feel of a hastily written piece that seems designed to attack the competition. In fact, Buhle goes out of his way to target what he sees as the flaws of McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters; his comments probably would have been more useful in a review of that book than in the preface to Stewart’s work.
Moreover, Buhle is so partial to the Sixties that he often doesn’t seem to see the creativity and spunk of the subversive newspapers, newsletters, and magazines that were published long before the underground newspapers of the 1960s came along. But Paul Krassner, the founder and long time editor of The Realist, goes back to the 1950s and even further back to Tom Paine and the “whole tradition” of dissenting pamphleteers and makes it clear that America has a long rich history of defiant writers, editors, and publishers.
On the Ground does not aim to be critical of the Sixties papers or to skewer the protest movements of the era, but by reproducing the art, the cartoons, and the provocative covers from Rat, The East Village Other, The Seed, Old Mole, Space City!, and more, it aptly illustrates the youthful sexism of the artists and cartoonists and makes all too apparent a generation’s obsession with violence.
Guns, knives, and various assorted weapons appear again and again in more than two dozen illustrations in this book, and from the beginning to the end there are images of naked women, women with conspicuously large breasts, women performing oral sex, and women as the sex toys of men.
Fortunately, the book does not become defensive or try to make excuses for the images that glorify guns and that turn women into objects of male gratification. Enough time has passed, it would seem, for the pictures to speak for themselves, and to reflect the zeitgeist of the era without the need to condemn or defend. There’s something to be said for the passage of time.
Some of the Sixties chauvinism that Buhle exhibits is apparent in anecdotes from activists and organizers such as John Sinclair of the White Panthers who describes Detroit before the 1960s as “a cultural backwater” in which “nothing was happening,” though even in pre-1960s Detroit -- and in Cleveland, Buffalo, and elsewhere in the Midwest -- there were rumblings, grumblings, beat poets, jazz artists, and Marxists.
Really, folks. The thaw in the cold war and the cracks in the imperial society didn’t show up for the first time in 1960.
The voices of many of the women are less strident now than they were in, say, 1970 in the midst of women’s liberation, when nearly every man was regarded as a male chauvinist pig. Alice Embree gives credit to the civil rights movement that preceded the protests of the 1960s and that provided an “example of moral courage to direct action.”
Judy Gumbo Albert, one of the original Yippies, describes her job at the Berkeley Barb in the department of classified sex ads that were usually placed by heterosexual men. “I was a naïve young woman from Canada,” she writes. “This job really opened me to, and made me appreciate the diversity of human sexuality.”
Trina Robbins describes how she "fought her way into the male-dominated world of underground comix" to create her own original work.
Working for the underground press was usually a learning experience, though not always in accord with the ideas about education that were embraced by the college professors of the day. Rat editor Jeff Shero Nightbyrd explains that in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “the Mafia controlled magazine distribution.” The East Village Other tried to bypass the Mafia only to learn that working with the Mafia and not against it was the only way to put papers in the hands of readers. “We had Mafia distributors,” Nightbyrd writes.
Many of the contributors to On The Ground -- Thorne Dreyer, Harvey Wasserman, Paul Krassner, Alice Embree, Judy Gumbo Albert, and Jeff Shero Nightbyrd -- will be familiar to readers of The Rag Blog, and there are colorful stories about the original Austin Rag, too.
“One of the important things about the underground press was that it was a collective, communal experience,” Thorne Dreyer says. “Everybody came in and got involved and became a part of it, and got politicized through the process.” And that same process, or something very similar to it, is taking place wherever the Occupy Wall Street movement has surfaced all across America.
[Jonah Raskin is the author of_ For The Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman_, and_ The Radical Jack London_. A professor at Sonoma State University, Jonah is a regular contributor to_ The Rag Blog_. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]
- Listen to Thorne Dreyer's August 31, 2010, Rag Radio interview with Sean Stewart, author of On the Ground.
- Read Jonah Raskin's reviews of Ken Wachsberger's Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press and John McMillian's Smoking Typewriters on The Rag Blog_._ The Rag Blog
Tom Miller : Stoney Burns Was Dallas' Underground Iconoclast
Remembering Stoney Burns:
Dallas' underground iconoclast
He lived up to his image: longish brillo hair, loads of dope, young cuties by his side, and a great appetite for outrage and graphic explosion.
By Tom Miller / The Rag Blog / May 11, 2011
[Texas underground press pioneer and counterculture icon Stoney Burns died of a heart attack, April 28, 2011, in Dallas.]
In the late 1960s and into the ‘70s I lived in Tucson, but spent a great deal of time traveling the Southwest writing for different underground newspapers. This included Austin’s Rag, Space City! (Houston), Seers Catalog (Albuquerque), and a paper in Denver whose name I don’t recall.
Occasionally this slipped over into the South, where I spent a week or so with both the Kudzu (Jackson, Miss.) and Great Speckled Bird (Atlanta), and north to D.C. where I put in time at the Washington Free Press and Quicksilver Times.
The anti-war movement and the culture it flowered were my main topics, but learning from one paper and passing on information to the next was as important as helping write and edit.
I helped start a paper in Tucson, Mad Funk, which lasted three issues (if you count a one-page broadside call-to-action as an issue). In Phoenix an alternative paper was starting, New Times, and there too I helped out. Yet no paper was as colorful and wildly anarchic as Dallas Notes, later The Iconoclast, run by Stoney Burns.
I called him one day out of the blue, introduced myself, and was invited to the Notes house on -- was it McKinney? Live Oak? Lots of Dallas hippies, young runaways, excellent marijuana, the obligatory mattresses on the floor, and a kitchen where, when the cockroaches weren’t having dinner, we did.
It was summer 1969, and I had just visited Melissa, a small Texas town about 40 miles away whose café jukebox carried virulently racist songs. They were so proud of the tunes that they allowed me to tape record one. Stoney loved to run original pieces about stupid Texans, and my piece, “Ruralism, Racism, and Rhythm,” ran in the July 2, 1969 issue of Dallas Notes.
(I was so struck by how uptight and viciously right-wing Dallas was, I wrote a piece about the city for Hard Times, a terrific muckraking broadside published in Washington, D.C. by the late Andrew Kopkind and James Ridgeway.)
Stoney was a piece of work. He lived up to his image: longish brillo hair, loads of dope, young cuties by his side, and a great appetite for outrage and graphic explosion. He took his role as editor/founder seriously, and you could always count on him to do precise pica counts late into the night making sure his provocative headlines fit above cartoons mocking the local police and City Councilmen, promoting SNCC and La Raza.
At a certain hour of the night he’d grab some cash from a shoebox and we’d head out for late-night grub.
Writer and editor: Tom Miller, left, at underground press conference in Boulder, Colorado, summer of 1973. Photo from Underground Press Archive 1. Right, Stoney Burns in the Iconoclast office, 1972. Photo from University of Texas Press.
Once I flew in to Love Field and, as usual, the first thing I did was to genuflect before the metal statue of the Texas Ranger with the legend: “ONE RIOT, ONE RANGER.” By the time I got to the Notes house Dallas police had already visited and left. Two typewriters were broken on the front yard, having been tossed out of second-floor windows by police.
Middle class Dallas was losing its kids, giving themselves up by the dozen every Sunday at Lee Park. That police in plain clothes and uniform trailed Stoney everywhere amused him. Given the entertainment side of Notes, then Iconoclast, Stoney had warm relations with nightclub and movie theater owners, and often took me along as he dropped in one, then another, then another.
Stoney was gracious enough to reprint pieces I published elsewhere, including a parody I wrote for The Realist about a waterbed that leaked and shocked its owner to death, and another about J. Edgar Hoover’s secret hang-ups.
In all I’d estimate Stoney printed some dozen pieces of mine, and as often as I could, I’d try to pass through Dallas to help with layout and distribution for those and a subsequent issue or two. He was always hospitable, and agog at what was going on elsewhere in the country.
Among the creative contributors to Stoney’s papers was the late illustrator Charles Oldham, known better as Charlie O, who worked on layout and design. One issue I was in had two major front-page headlines: “Youth Community Hit by Massive Dope Raids,” and “Test Your Orgasm.”
The paper also had a running full-page cartoon series about God, called “The Man -- The Continuing Story of God.” What sticks out in my mind even today is that in each strip some hippie would offer God a toke, and the good Lord invariably accepted.
By 1972 Stoney had enough credibility that his newspaper challenged FM rock station KRLD to a game of “revolutionary beísbol.”
At some point Stoney tired of being jailed, harassed, calling the ACLU, and getting out again, and soon started a music mag, named for Buddy Holly. Buddy seemed to do well for him -- I contributed one piece -- but I was more and more tied to writing books and less and less floating through the Southwest.
In 1984, however, I was working on a book that included a factory in Garland, a Dallas suburb. Stoney met me at DFW, we went out for a meal, and at a bar, some weather-beaten once attractive blonde became part of our party.
Just as Stoney was dropping me off at my hotel, and the woman sidled up to me, Dallas police showed up from out of nowhere and cuffed his hands behind his back. As Stoney was being hauled off, he shouted out the name and phone number of his lawyer.
It was the last I ever saw him. The crime he was busted for? Inoperative turn signal. And the blonde? She was a hooker Stoney had hired as a welcoming present for me. What a guy.
[Tom Miller’s most recent book is_ Revenge of the Saguaro: Offbeat Travels Through America’s Southwest_. His web site is www.tommillerbooks.com. Read more articles by Tom Miller on The Rag Blog_.]_
BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Wachsberger's 'Insider Histories' of the 60's Underground Press
Keeping the Sixties alive:
Ken Wachsberger's 'Insider Histories' are
passionate essays about the underground press
By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 3, 2011
[Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part I, edited by Ken Wachsberger; (Michigan State University Press); Paperback; 398 pp.; $39.95.]
Let me say from the start that this is the most thorough and comprehensive book in print about the underground newspapers of the 1960s. Ken Wachsberger, the editor of the volume, sees the papers of the Vietnam Era as the forerunners of today’s radical blogs and so he means his book to be relevant for the current generation and it is indeed greatly relevant to today.
The authors of the essays -- there are 14 of them -- are almost all survivors of the Vietnam Era, and all of them are veterans of the underground papers. So, the book lives up to its promise to offer “insider histories.” No one could have written essays so passionate about the 1960s as those who lived the 1960s, and no one could have had memories as rich as these.
Victoria Smith (Holden), the author of the last essay in the book, died in 2008. Her essay is especially rigorous and offers a complex analysis of why the underground newspapers rose quickly and then fell quickly. Rather than summarize her in-depth criticism and self-criticism, I urge readers of The Rag Blog to dive into it for themselves.
Smith writes about Space City!, Houston’s countercultural paper, but many of her ideas apply to papers in other parts of the country that found themselves the victims of their own success. It wasn’t repression from the established order that ended Space City!, according to Smith, but rather the internal politics and philosophy of the paper itself.
Many of the underground papers ascribed to the notion of “permanent revolution,” and no newspaper can long function with that outlook on life. Some -- perhaps even a great deal -- of stability and order is essential to meet deadlines and publish on schedule.
All of the essays in Wachsberger’s volume are immersed in history and are intellectually vigorous. Reading them feels like being thrown back into the 1960s itself. Suddenly an essay will take one back to June 1967, or August 1969, and so the book as a whole feels vivid, immediate, and intense. It’s a real case of déjà vu.
The wealth of details is truly remarkable: not only dates, names, and places, but also the kinds of arguments that took place at meetings are vividly recalled. Moreover, the essays trace the month-by-month changes that took place in the political and cultural arena in the 1960s. With so much turmoil and upheaval, it is amazing that the underground papers were published as regularly as they were.
I think that Wachsberger's book will be most valuable to those who want to keep the Sixties alive today as well as to those who weren’t alive in the 1960s but wish they had been there. Wachsberger’s fine anthology will transport them back to the offices of The San Francisco Oracle, The Great Speckled Bird from Atlanta, and to feminist papers like Off Our Backs.
There are superlative essays about Muhammad Speaks, the newspaper of the Black Muslims, and Akwesasne Notes, the newspaper of the Mohawk Nation that, according to author Doug George-Kanentiio, not only reflected the era but also “shaped contemporary Native America.”
There are also essays about The Guardian, which often seemed to be a part of the Old and not the New Left, and about Liberation News Service (LNS) that served as an alternative to the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI).
Harvey Wasserman, the author of the piece on LNS and a contributor to The Rag Blog, writes with much of the verve of the 1960s. “LNS was a joyous, thrilling, uniquely powerful rocket ship we got to ride, as a blessing of youth and of the rare brilliance of the time” he exclaims. “May we never lose the essential magic and humanity.”
Almost all of the essays in this book capture the innocence of youth in the 1960s, and the unusual historical brilliance of the era. There are trenchant criticisms here, but they are rarely petty or spiteful.
Wachsberger’s wonderfully alive and lively book is scheduled to be followed by three more volumes about the underground press, and so the series as a whole promises to be the definitive work on the subject of the underground press, at least for our time.
[Jonah Raskin is a professor at Sonoma State University and the author of_ For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman_. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]
Also see:
- BOOKS/Jonah Raskin: John McMillian's 'Smoking Typewriters' / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2011
- The Movement and the New Media by Thorne Dreyer and Victoria Smith / Liberation News Service / March 1, 1969 (reposted at The Rag website).
Thorne Dreyer / James McEnteer : Dallas Underground Icon Stoney Burns Dead at 68
Stoney Burns is arrested by Dallas Police officers at Lee Park on April 12, 1970, after what The Dallas Morning News called "a clash between law officers and young people" that "occurred when police tried to arrest several hippie-types" at the park. Image from The Dallas Morning News.
Stoney Burns dies at 68:
Crusading underground journalist
was incessantly harassed by Dallas officials
By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2011
See "Stoney Burns used a gentle wit to fight injustice in Dallas," by James McEnteer, Below.
Sixties icon Stoney Burns passed away Thursday morning, April 28, 2011, in Dallas. Our mutual friend, Angus Wynne, informed us that Stoney died at Baylor Medical Center “of a sudden, massive heart attack.” Burns, 68, was buried on Sunday at the Shearith Israel Cemetery on Dolphin Road in Dallas.
Stoney, who was born Brent LaSalle Stein, was a Sixties activist/journalist and pioneer of the underground press in Texas. When we were publishing The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, he edited a series of publications in Dallas, including Dallas Notes and the Iconoclast -- and later the music magazine, Buddy. In its notice about Burns' death, Pegasus News referred to Stoney as the "King of the Hippies."
In an April 29 article, The Dallas Morning News said that Burns' Dallas Notes "decried war, intolerance and hypocrisy with a playful aggression and a cutting edge."
In his 1992 book Fighting Words, in which he profiled five independent Texas journalists, James McEnteer wrote, "Powered by an anarchic energy and a highly developed sense of the absurd, Stoney personified everything official Dallas loathed." [See McEnteer's reflections on Stoney Burns, written for The Rag Blog, below.]
Stoney was incessantly harassed by the Dallas authorities, who charged him with obscenity, beat him mercilessly, tore up his offices, and confiscated his equipment.
Burns' obscenity case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where Justice William O. Douglas commented on the cops' ransacking of the Dallas Notes offices: “It would be difficult to find in our books a more lawless search-and-destroy raid.”
Stoney had trouble finding anyone in Dallas to print his newspapers, and, according to Austin's Steve Speir, a potential printer in Fort Worth backed out after someone threatened to burn down his shop. So Steve set Stoney up with a printer in Waco, “and on the way back to Dallas we’d be stopped by the cops and harassed. They’d throw all the papers on the ground and search the truck.”
According to The Rag Blog’s David P. Hamilton, four Dallas police cars followed him for several miles after one visit to Stoney’s home.
In 1974, Time Magazine wrote, "The law in Dallas, from all appearances, had been bent on getting Stoney Burns for years" when they "found in the glove compartment a tiny stash of marijuana. It was barely enough for one or two joints." But it was enough to get Stoney a sentence of 10 years and one day -- time he never served thanks to Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe who commuted the sentence.
Angus Wynne told the Dallas Observer that Stoney Burns had "gone through so much, between his public battles and private ones, and turned into a sweetheart. He'd had [an earlier] heart attack and cancer and whipped all those... He was just a great guy, one of the generalissimos of the so-called revolution back then. There was something real special about Stoney..."
[_Rag Blog _editor Thorne Dreyer was a colleague of Stoney Burns in the Sixties underground press.]
Stoney Burns. Photo courtesy of Angus Wynne.
Fighting words:
Stoney Burns used a gentle wit
to fight injustice in Dallas
By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2011
“Maybe that’s why we’re hated. We tell the truth; we’ve got nothing to lose. We do have something to gain, however. It’s our self-respect. Yeah, we tell the truth. It’s about time some newspaper did.”
-- Stoney Burns, Dallas Notes [From James McEnteer: Fighting Words, Independent Journalists in Texas, UT Press, 1992.]
Stoney was not just a brave man -- facing down the rigid Dallas Establishment in large part all by his lonesome -- but a funny one. He used his gentle wit and sense of the ridiculous as effective weapons for social justice in 1960s Dallas, just about the unfriendliest territory imaginable for stoned longhairs looking to have a good time.
Stoney loved a good time -- good music, friends, and laughter. But his easy-going sense of the absurd enraged the humorless conservatives in the Dallas Police Department who considered his satire of local laws and his criticism of usually unmentioned overbearing police tactics as unacceptable threats to their sense of law and order.
Stoney became a cause and a crusader almost by accident, as the sole occupant of the void left by jackboot censorship of all but the most orthodox right-wing cant in the Dallas media.
Stoney Burns in the Iconoclas_t office, 1972. Photo courtesy of Stoney Burns from_ Fighting Words: Independent Journalists in Texas_, by James McEnteer, University of Texas Press, 1992._
His Notes from Underground started on the SMU campus and was quickly banned. He was the only journalist to describe and photograph police harassment of peaceful long-haired young people in Dallas parks. His various newspapers took different names over the years, but were always an eclectic mix of music reviews, social commentary, and jokes at the expense of local officials, reflecting Stoney's own sensibilities.
His papers featured outrageous cartoons, guaranteed to offend the white bread, church-bred Folks who Mattered in Dallas. Stoney always professed bewilderment at the passionate hatred his dopey humor aroused among otherwise rather staid, affectless citizens. The brief, final incarnation of Stoney's journalistic ambitions was a paper he called The Iconoclast, in homage to the Waco rabblerouser, William Brann.
The police harassed Stoney Burns for years, wrecked his newspaper offices, stole his equipment, planted dope on him, and tried every which way to shut him up, finally hounding him into prison for 10 years and a day on a trumped-up charge of marijuana possession, which the governor later quietly dismissed.
But Stoney's abbreviated prison term ended up accomplishing its goal of silencing a genuine independent voice of Dallas journalism. Stoney went on to publish Buddy, about the local music scene, but made only occasional, rather vague political comments in subsequent years.
Stoney Burns brought light and fresh air into Dallas public discourse of the 1960s. Despite the strange (to him) resistance his journalism conjured in the authorities, Stoney had the courage to continue telling the truth as he saw it for seven years.
He served as an inspiration to many in his own community and beyond, revealing the cowardice of a system ruled by intimidation, not by public assent. He opened up the acceptable limits of free speech in 1960s Dallas. And he paid a price for it.
Dallas and Texas and the country are in Stoney's debt, now as then. Stoney's courage and humor are needed today as much as ever. His spirit will always be worth remembering.
[Rag Blog contributor James McEnteer is the author of Fighting Words: Independent journalists in Texas, published by the University of Texas Press. He lives near Durban, South Africa.]
Also see:
- Stoney Burns, Co-Founder of Underground Paper Dallas Notes and Buddy, Has Died by Robert Wilonsky / Dallas Observer / April 29, 2011
- Ernest McMillan and Stoney Burns : Dallas 60s Activists Revisited by Roy Appleton / The Rag Blog / November 3, 2008
Brent Stein (aka Stoney Burns) in the 1962 Hillcrest High yearbook, Dallas. Image from Dallas Observer Blogs.
John McMillian : Gimme Shelter: Altamont and the Underground Press
Hell's Angel takes the cue. The contrasting coverage of the disastrous Altamont rock festival by the Berkeley Tribe and the San Francisco Examiner tells us much about why the underground press became such a force. Image from morethings.com.
When America was up for grabs:
What media coverage of Altamont teaches
us about the Sixties underground press
By John McMillian / The Rag Blog / February 24, 2010
[The following is an excerpt from John McMillian's_ excellent new book,_ Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, published in January 2011 by Oxford University Press. Much has been written about the underground press and its seminal role in the Sixties cultural revolution, but this may be the definitive work on the subject. To say nothing of the fact that it's a very exciting read!]
“STONES CONCERT ENDS IT,” blared the front-page headline of the underground Berkeley Tribe, dated December 12-19, 1969. “America Now Up For Grabs.”
The Rolling Stones concert that the Tribe described was supposed to have been a triumphant affair. Coming just four months after half a million hippie youths drew international attention by gathering peaceably at Max Yasgur’s farm, some had even hyped the free, day-long event -- which was held at Altamont Speedway, some 60 miles east of San Francisco, and which also featured Santana, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Flying Burrito Brothers -- as “Woodstock West.”
But this was no festival of peace and love. As almost everyone knew, the idea for the free show only came about after the Stones were nettled by criticisms that they had alienated fans with exorbitant ticket prices and arrogant behavior on their 1969 American tour. What’s more, Altamont proved to be a dirty, bleak space for a rock festival, almost completely lacking in amenities for the 300,000 concertgoers. Asked to guard the performers -- allegedly in exchange for a truckload of beer -- the Hell’s Angels went on a drug-and-booze soaked rampage, assaulting countless hippies with weighted pool cues and kicks to the head.
When the Stones finally started their set after sundown, they found it impossible to gain momentum; they could only play in fits and starts, as the Angels roughed up spectators and commotion swirled around them. Albert and David Maysles’ classic documentary, Gimme Shelter, captured Mick Jagger nervously trying to soothe the crowd: “Brothers and sisters, come on now. That means everybody -- just cool out.” “All I can do is ask you -- beg you -- to keep it together. It’s within your power.” “If we are all one, let’s fucking well show we’re all one!”
But Jagger’s entreaties were in vain. Just as the Stones were starting “Under My Thumb,” the Angles set their sights on an African-American teenager in a flashy lime suit: Meredith Hunter. By one eyewitness account, the whole thing began when a heavyset Angel was toying with Hunter, laughing as he yanked him by the ear and by the hair. Then, when Hunter pulled himself away, he ran into a pack of perhaps four more Angels, who started punching him.
Trying to escape, Hunger whipped out a long-barreled revolver and held it high over his head; in an instant, an Angel plunged a knife between his neck and shoulder. Autopsy reports confirmed that Hunger was tweaking on methamphetamines when he was killed. His last words, supposedly, were: “I wasn’t going to shoot you.”
Ever since, writers and historians have found it tempting to describe Altamont as a generation-shattering event, the proverbial “end of an era.” If the early Sixties was a time of gauzy idealism, characterized by JFK’s youthful vigor, righteous lunch-counter sit ins, and the first flush of Beatlemania, then the Altamont disaster ranks alongside the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots, the Manson Family murders, and the Weather Underground’s townhouse explosion as evidence of the era’s swift decline.
Less well known, however, is that the trope arose in the underground press. “Altamont … exploded the myth of innocence for a section of America,” wrote 21 year old George Paul Csicsery (now a respected filmmaker) in the Tribe’s lead article. Just a little while earlier, he said, it had been “cool” for large groups of youths to assemble at parks and rock festivals. “People would play together, performing, participating, sharing and going home with a feeling that somehow the communal idea would replace the grim isolation wrought on us by a jealous competitive mother culture.”
But on the bleak, dry hills around Altamont, the feeling was entirely different: “Our one-day micro society was bound to the death-throes of capitalist greed.” The Angels’ violence had “united the crowd in fear” while Jagger strutted the stage like a “diabolical prince.” To Csiscery, the concert was a metaphor for a society on the brink: “Clearly, nobody is in control. Not the Angels, not the people. Not Richard Nixon, or his pigs. Nobody.”
Elsewhere in the Tribe, readers could find several more pieces on the Altamont debacle, all of them written by participant-observers, all of them done in a familiar, even informal style. Several writers made liberal use of the editorial “we” (as in, “We’re turning into a generation whose thing is to be an Audience, whose life-style is the mass get-together for ‘good vibes.’”) Others sprinkled their reports with song lyrics, hallucinatory images, or whimsical asides.
The Tribe also featured an elliptical poem about the Altamont debacle, as well as a comic strip by the artist Greg Irons that skewered a local radio station for irresponsibly hyping the event and then fulminating against it after things went bad. Almost all of this material struck a portentous tone; the Tribe’s radical politicos and youth-culture aficionados who caravanned to Altamont came away feeling grubby, mortified, and concerned. “I realize some people just had a good time,” said one writer. “Me, I saw a guy get killed.”
Altamont received front-page attention in the San Francisco Examiner, too, but nothing like the blanket coverage that was found in the Tribe, and besides, the Bay Area’s leading evening paper completely missed the concert’s significance; its reports and analysis could not have been more wrong-headed.
On December 6, the Examiner stressed that the biggest problem associated with the concert was the traffic headache it caused on Interstate 5/580; it specifically added that the police reported “no violence.” The next day, the paper mentioned that one person had been killed, but in fact four people died: two were run over by a car while sitting at a campfire, and another drowned in a swift-moving irrigation canal while zonked out on drugs.
“But for the stabbing,” the Examiner reported, “all appeared peaceful at the concert... The record-breaking crowd was for the most part orderly, but enthusiastic. The listeners heeded the advice of the Jefferson Airplane: ‘We should be together.’”
Then on December 9, the paper’s editorial writers fumbled to explain why 300,000 youths would even want to attend a free rock festival headlined by the Rolling Stones in the first place. They literally could not come up with an explanation that they deemed fully satisfactory.
Finally, on December 14, Dick Nolan, an op-ed columnist, stressed that the event had been a disaster for the counterculture, but his tone was so priggish and excoriating that it’s hard to imagine very many younger readers taking him seriously. “Maybe it’s wishful thinking,” he wrote. “But to me that Altamont rock fiasco looked like the last gasp of the whole hippie-drug thing.”
There were the Stones, he said, “peddling their idiot doggerel and primitive beat” before that most mindless of animals, the human mob. Altamont was just another manifestation “of the rock-drug-slobbery cult,” to which Nolan could only say good riddance.
This is not a book [Smoking Typewriters] about Altamont, of course. But by quickly glancing at how two local newssheets covered the Stones concert, we can begin apprehending the powerful appeal of the underground press in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Issue of the underground paper, The Berkeley Tribe_. Image from zomblog_.
Amateurishly produced by a collective of unabashed radicals, the Berkeley Tribe had a fleet of reporters who actively participated in the events they covered. Lacking any pretense of objectivity, they put across forcefully opinionated accounts of events that mattered deeply to them -- that grew out of their culture -- and they used a language and a sensibility of their own fashioning; their hip vernacular was something they shared with most of their readership.
By contrast, the professionals who staffed the Examiner -- the flagship of the Hearst newspaper chain -- approached Altamont with a prefabricated template. Their first instinct was to cloak the free concert in gooey, Woodstock-style sentimentalism. Then after that proved untenable, their editorialists proved totally uncomprehending of the rock and youth cultures they sought to explain.
It is little wonder, then, that many New Leftists never bothered to read daily newspapers, at least not when they wanted to know what was going on in their own milieu. Instead, beginning in the mid-1960s, in cities and campuses across the country, they began creating and distributing their own radical community newssheets, with which they aimed to promote avant-garde sensibilities and inspire political tumult.
Amplitude and conviction were hallmarks of the underground press: this is where they set forth their guiding principles concerning the unfairness of racism, the moral and political tragedy of the Vietnam War, the need to make leaders and institutions democratically accountable, and the existential rewards of a committed life.
And their success was astonishing. According to cultural critic Louis Menand, underground newspapers “were one of the most spontaneous and aggressive growths in publishing history.” In 1965, the New Left could claim only five such newspapers, mostly in large cities; within a few years, several hundred papers were in circulation, with a combined readership that stretched into the millions.
In addition to trying to build an intellectual framework for the Movement’s expansion, New Leftists imbued their newspapers with an ethos that socialized people into the Movement, fostered a spirit of mutuality among them, and raised their democratic expectations.
The community-building work that New Leftists brought about in this way was neither incidental nor marginal. Instead, it played a crucial role in helping youths to break away from the complacency and resignation that prevailed in postwar America, in order to build an indigenous, highly stylized protest culture.
Given the obstacles confronting those who have attempted to build mass democratic movements in the United States, this was a considerable achievement. Simply put, much of what we associate with the late 1960s youth rebellion -- its size, intensity, and contrapuntal expressions of furious anger and joyful bliss -- might not have been possible without the advent of new printing technologies that put the cost of newspaper production within reach of most activists, or without the institutions they built that allowed their press to flourish.”
[John McMillian is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Sate University. His latest book is Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America_, published by Oxford University Press.]_
John McMillian, author of Smoking Typewriters, will be our special guest at a Rag Blog Happy Hour, Friday, Feb. 25, 2011, 5-7 p.m., at Maria's Taco Xpress, 2529 S. Lamar Blvd., Austin. The public is welcome. John will also appear at BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd, Austin, at 7 p.m. Friday for a reading and book-signing. And John McMillian will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 4, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP-91.7 FM in Austin, and streamed live on the internet.
Also see:
- BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : John McMillian's 'Smoking Typewriters' by Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2011
- Pressing for change: John McMillian's 'Smoking Typewriters' charts history of underground newspapers by Anis Shivani / The Austin American-Statesman / February 20, 2011 The Rag Blog
Only a few posts now show on a page, due to Blogger pagination changes beyond our control.
Please click on 'Older Posts' to continue reading The Rag Blog.