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Counterculture (also written counter-culture) is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day,^[1] the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior deviates from the societal norm. It is a neologism attributed to Theodore Roszak,^[2][3][4] author of The Making of a Counter Culture. Although distinct countercultural undercurrents have existed in many societies, here the term refers to a more significant, visible phenomenon that reaches critical mass and persists for a period of time. A countercultural movement expresses the ethos, aspirations, and dreams of a specific population during an era—a social manifestation of zeitgeist. It is important to distinguish between "counterculture," "subculture," and "fringe culture".

Countercultural milieux in 19th-century Europe included Romanticism, Bohemianism, and the Dandy. Another movement existed in a more fragmentary form in the 1950s, both in Europe and the United States, in the form of the Beat generation,^[2] followed in the 1960s by the hippies and anti-Vietnam War protesters.

The term came to prominence in the news media, as it was used to refer to the social revolution that swept North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand during the 1960s and early 1970s.^[1][2][4]

Western (1960s and 1970s) counterculture[link]

In the United States, the counterculture of the 1960s became identified with the rejection of conventional social norms of the 1950s. Counterculture youth rejected the cultural standards of their parents, especially with respect to racial segregation and initial widespread support for the Vietnam War,^[5][6] and, less directly, the Cold War — with many young people fearing that America's nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, coupled with its involvement in Vietnam, would lead to a nuclear holocaust.

In the United Kingdom, the counterculture of the 1960s was mainly a reaction against the social norms of the 1940s and 1950s, although "Ban the Bomb" protests centered around opposition to nuclear weaponry.

As the 1960s progressed, widespread tensions developed in American society that tended to flow along generational lines regarding the war in Vietnam, race relations, sexual mores, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, and a materialist interpretation of the American Dream. White, middle class youth — who made up the bulk of the counterculture — had sufficient leisure time, thanks to widespread economic prosperity, to turn their attention to social issues.^[7] These social issues included support for civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights movements, and a rejection of the Vietnam War. Hippies became the largest countercultural group in the United States. The counterculture also had access to a media which was eager to present their concerns to a wider public. Demonstrations for social justice created far-reaching changes affecting many aspects of society.

Rejection of mainstream culture was best embodied in the new genres of psychedelic rock music, pop-art and new explorations in spirituality. Musicians who exemplified this era include The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Cream, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, and, in their early years, Chicago. New forms of musical presentation also played a key role in spreading the counterculture, with large outdoor rock festivals being the most noteworthy. The climactic live statement on this occurred from August 15–18, 1969, with the Woodstock Music Festival held in Bethel, New York — with 32 of rock's and psychedelic rock's most popular acts performing live outdoors during the sometimes rainy weekend to an audience of half a million people. (Michael Lang stated 400,000 attended, half of which did not have a ticket.)^[9] It is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in popular music history — with Rolling Stone calling it one of the 50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.^[10] According to Bill Mankin, “It seems fitting… that one of the most enduring labels for the entire generation of that era was derived from a rock festival: the ‘Woodstock Generation’.”^[11]

Sentiments were expressed in song lyrics and popular sayings of the period, such as "do your own thing", "turn on, tune in, drop out", "whatever turns you on", "Eight miles high", "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll", and "light my fire". Spiritually, the counterculture included interest in astrology, the term "Age of Aquarius" and knowing people's signs. This led Theodore Roszak to state "A [sic] eclectic taste for mystic, occult, and magical phenomena has been a marked characteristic of our postwar youth culture since the days of the beatniks."^[4] Even actor Charlton Heston contributed to the movement, with the statement, "Don't trust anyone over thirty," in the 1968 film Planet of the Apes; the same year, actress and social activist Jane Fonda starred in the sexually-themed Barbarella. Both actors opposed the Vietnam War during its duration, and Fonda would eventually become controversially active in the peace movement.

The counterculture in the United States lasted roughly from 1964 to 1972^[12] — coincident with America's involvement in Vietnam — and reached its peak in 1967, the "summer of love".^[13] Unconventional appearance, music, drugs, communitarian experiments, and sexual liberation were hallmarks of the sixties counterculture — most of whose members were white, middle-class young Americans.

In 1967 thousands of young people flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The counterculture lifestyle integrated many of the ideals and indulgences of the time: peace, love, harmony, music, and mysticism. Meditation, yoga, and psychedelic drugs were embraced as routes to expanding one's consciousness. In Toronto, Canada, the Yorkville district served as a kind of Haight-Ashbury North, serving as another major hippie and musical crossroads.^[14] In Quebec, the Front de libération du Québec was in a quest for an independent socialist Quebec during the 1960s to early 1970s. The group, an example of some of the countercultures seeking to disrupt society, resorted to bombings, kidnappings and murder in order to try achieve their quest.^[15]

The movement divided the country: to some Americans, these attributes reflected American ideals of free speech, equality, world peace, and the pursuit of happiness; to others, they reflected a self-indulgent, pointlessly rebellious, unpatriotic, and destructive assault on America's traditional moral order. Authorities banned the psychedelic drug LSD, restricted political gatherings, and tried to enforce bans on what they considered obscenity in books, music, theater, and other media. Parents argued with their children and worried about their children's personal safety, while the children worried about the world's future. Some adults accepted elements of the counterculture, while others became estranged from sons and daughters.

The counterculture collapsed circa 1973, and many have attributed two major reasons: First, the most popular of its political goals — civil rights, civil liberties, gender equality, environmentalism, and the end of the Vietnam War — were accomplished (to at least a significant degree), and its most popular social attributes — particularly a "live and let live" mentality in personal lifestyles (the "sexual revolution") — were co-opted by mainstream society.^[7][13] Second, a decline of idealism and hedonism occured as many notable counterculture figures died, the rest settled into mainstream society and started their own families, and the "magic economy" of the 1960s gave way to the stagflation of the 1970s^[7] — the latter costing many middle-class Americans the luxury of being able to live outside conventional social institutions. The counterculture, however, continues to influence social movements, art, music, and society in general, and the post-1973 mainstream society has been in many ways a hybrid of the 1960s establishment and counterculture^[13] — seen as the best (or the worst) of both worlds.

Counterculture literature[link]

The counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s generated its own unique brand of notable literature, including comics and cartoons, and sometimes referred to as the underground press. This includes the work of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, and includes Mr. Natural; Keep on Truckin'; Fritz the Cat; Fat Freddy's Cat; Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers; the album cover art for Cheap Thrills; and contributions to International Times, The Village Voice, and Oz magazine. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, these comics and magazines were available for purchase in head shops along with items like beads, incense, cigarette papers, tie-dye clothing, DayGlo posters, books, etc.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, some of these shops selling hippie items also became cafés where hippies could hang out, chat, smoke marijuana, read books, etc., e.g. Gandalf's Garden in the Kings Road, Chelsea, London, which also published a magazine of the same name.^[16] Another such hippie/anarchist bookshop was Mushroom Books, tucked away in the Lace Market area of Nottingham.^[17][18]

Lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender counterculture[link]

The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender community (commonly abbreviated as the "LGBT" community), mostly evident in North America, Southern Cone, Western Europe, Australasia and South Africa, fits the definition of a countercultural movement as "a cultural group whose values and norms of behavior run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day."

At the outset of the 20th century, homosexual acts were punishable offenses in these countries. The prevailing public attitude was that homosexuality was a moral failing that should be punished, as exemplified by Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial and imprisonment for "gross indecency". But even then, there were dissenting views. Sigmund Freud publicly expressed his opinion that homosexuality was a perfectly normal condition for some people.[Freud, 1905] According to Charles Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis, there were already semi-public gay-themed gatherings by the mid-1930s in the United States (such as the annual drag balls held during the Harlem Renaissance). There were also bars and bathhouses that catered to gay clientele and adopted warning procedures (similar to those used by Prohibition-era speakeasies) to warn customers of police raids. But homosexuality was typically subsumed into bohemian culture, and was not a significant movement in itself.^[19]

Eventually, a genuine gay culture began to take root, albeit very discreetly, with its own styles, attitudes and behaviors and industries began catering to this growing demographic group. For example, publishing houses cranked out pulp novels like The Velvet Underground that were targeted directly at gay people. By the early 1960s, openly gay political organizations such as the Mattachine Society were formally protesting abusive treatment toward gay people, challenging the entrenched idea that homosexuality was an aberrant condition, and calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality. Despite very limited sympathy, American society began at least to acknowledge the existence of a sizable population of gays. The film The Boys in the Band, for example, featured negative portrayals of gay men, but at least recognized that they did in fact fraternize with each other (as opposed to being isolated, solitary predators who "victimized" straight men).

The watershed event in the American gay rights movement was the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. Following this event, gays and lesbians began adopting the militant protest tactics used by anti-war and black power radicals to confront anti-gay ideology. Another major turning point was the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the official list of mental disorders.^[20] Although gay radicals used pressure to force the decision, Kaiser notes that this had been an issue of some debate for many years in the psychiatric community, and that one of the chief obstacles to normalizing homosexuality was that therapists were profiting from offering dubious, unproven "cures".^[19]

The AIDS epidemic was initially an unexpected blow to the movement, especially in North America. There was speculation that the disease would permanently drive gay life underground. Ironically, the tables were turned. Many of the early victims of the disease had been openly gay only within the confines of insular "gay ghettos" such as New York City’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Castro); they remained closeted in their professional lives and to their families. Many heterosexuals who thought they didn't know any gay people were confronted by friends and loved ones dying of "the gay plague" (which soon began to infect "straight" people also). The LGBT community were increasingly seen not only as victims of a disease, but as victims of ostracism and hatred. Most importantly, the disease became a rallying point for a previously complacent gay community. AIDS invigorated the community politically to fight not only for a medical response to the disease, but also for wider acceptance of homosexuality in mainstream America. Ultimately, coming out became an important step for many LGBT people.

In 2003, the United States Supreme Court officially declared all sodomy laws unconstitutional.^[21]

Russian/Soviet counterculture[link]

Although not exactly equivalent to the English definition, the term "Контркультура" (Kontrkul'tura, "Counterculture") became common in Russian to define a 1990s cultural movement that promoted acting outside of cultural conventions: the use of explicit language; graphical descriptions of sex, violence and illicit activities; and uncopyrighted use of "safe" characters involved in such activities.

During the early 1970s, the Soviet government rigidly promoted optimism in Russian culture. Even mild topics, such as divorce and alcohol abuse, were viewed as taboo by the media. However, Russian society grew weary of the gap between real life and the creative world^{[citation needed]}, and underground culture became "forbidden fruit." General satisfaction with the quality of existing works led to parody, such as how the Russian anecdotal joke tradition turned the setting of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy into a grotesque world of sexual excess. Another well-known example is black humor (mostly in the form of short poems) that dealt exclusively with funny deaths and/or other mishaps of small, innocent children.

In the mid-1980s, the Glasnost policy permitted the production of less optimistic works. As a consequence, Russian cinema during the late 1980s and the early 1990s was dominated by crime-packed action movies with explicit (but not necessarily graphic) scenes of ruthless violence and social dramas about drug abuse, prostitution and failing relationships. Although Russian movies of the time would be rated "R" in the United States due to violence, the use of explicit language was much milder than in American cinema.

In the late 1990s, Russian counterculture became increasingly popular on the Internet. Several websites appeared that posted user-created short stories dealing with sex, drugs and violence. The following features are considered the most popular topics in such works:

• Wide use of explicit language;
• Deliberate misspelling;
• Descriptions of drug use and consequences of abuse;
• Negative portrayals of alcohol use;
• Sex and violence: Nothing is a taboo — in general, violence is rarely advocated, while all types of sex are considered good;
• Parody: Media advertising, classic movies, pop culture and children's books are considered fair game;
• Non-conformance; and,
• Politically incorrect topics: Mostly racism, xenophobia and homophobia.

A notable aspect of counterculture at the time was the influence of contra-cultural developments on Russian pop culture. In addition to traditional Russian styles of music, such as songs with jail-related lyrics, new music styles with explicit language were developed.

Asian counterculture[link]

In the recent past Dr. Sebastian Kappen, an Indian theologian, has tried to redefine counterculture in the Asian context. In March 1990, at a seminar in Bangalore, he presented his countercultural perspectives (Chapter 4 in S. Kappen, Tradition, modernity, counterculture: an Asian perspective, Visthar, Bangalore, 1994). Dr. Kappen envisages counterculture as a new culture that has to negate the two opposing cultural phenomena in Asian countries:

1. invasion by Western capitalist culture, and
2. the emergence of revivalist movements.

Kappen writes, "Were we to succumb to the first, we should be losing our identity; if to the second, ours would be a false, obsolete identity in a mental universe of dead symbols and delayed myths".

The most important countercultural movement in India had taken place in the state of West Bengal during the 1960s by a group of poets and artists who called themselves Hungryalists.

See also[link]

• Dialectic of Enlightenment
• Exi (subculture)
• La Movida Madrileña
• Punk subculture
• Lo-fi music
• Radicalization
• Counter-economics
• Guerrilla theatre
• Underground (British subculture)
• Nambassa

Bibliography[link]

• Curl, John (2007), Memories of Drop City, The First Hippie Commune of the 1960s and the Summer of Love, a memoir, iUniverse. ISBN 0-595-42343-4. http://www.red-coral.net/DropCityIndex.html
• Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. (Vol. 7, pp. 123–245). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905)
• Goffman, Ken (2004), Counterculture through the ages Villard Books ISBN 0-375-50758-2
• Heath, Joseph and Andrew Potter (2004) Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture Collins Books ISBN 0-06-074586-X
• Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo (2009), Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture. University Press of Kansas. ISBN 0-7006-1633-0 ISBN 978-0700616336
• Macfarlane, Scott (2007),The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co Inc, ISBN 0-7864-2915-1 & ISBN 978-0-7864-2915-8.
• McKay, George (1996), Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. London Verso. ISBN 1-85984-028-0.
• Nelson, Elizabeth (1989), The British Counterculture 1966-73: A Study of the Underground Press. London: Macmillan.
• Roszak, Theodore (1968) The Making of a Counter Culture.
• Isadora Tast (2009), Mother India. Searching For a Place. Berlin: Peperoni Books, ISBN 978-3-941825-00-0

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Dugald Baird, How International Times sparked a publishing revolution, The Guardian, 17 July 2009

John Reed
Reed in 2007
Born	(1969-02-07)February 7, 1969 TriBeCa, New York City
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Columbia University
Occupation	novelist
Website
http://www.johnreed.org

John Reed (born February 7, 1969) is an American novelist. He is the author of four novels: A Still Small Voice (2000), Snowball's Chance (2002) with a preface by Alexander Cockburn, The Whole (2005), and All the World's a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare (2008). His fifth book, Tales of Woe (2010), is a collection of twenty-five stories, chronicling true stories of abject misery.

Biography[link]

Born in 1969 in New York City, Reed is the son of artist David Reed and Judy Rifka.^[1] He attended Hampshire College, and received a Masters in Fine Art in Creative Writing from Columbia University.^[2] He teaches at The New School.

Reed was an early contributor to, and subsequently an editor with, Open City, a New York literary journal published by Robert Bingham, who later founded the book series.

Works[link]

He is affiliated with the New York Press and The Brooklyn Rail. "Americans are extremely sophisticated in terms of narrative forms," said Reed in an interview. "We see it in commercials, we see it on TV, we see it in movies. But the narrative forms we're talking about are three acts, five acts, depending on how you want to look at it. They're all based on a Christian model of sin, suffering, redemption; which is not a large model."^[3]

A Still Small Voice[link]

A Still Small Voice (Delacorte 2000, Delta 2001), Reed’s first novel, is a historical novel based on the life of a girl growing up in Kentucky from 1850-1870.

Snowball's Chance[link]

Snowball's Chance (Roof Books 2002/2003), Reed’s second novel was a controversial send-up of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and ended in a cataclysmic attack on the “Twin Mills” (reminiscent of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center). It became a bestseller in the field of books by independent literary publishers.^[4]

The Whole, or, Duh Whole[link]

Wikinews has related news: John Reed on Orwell, God, self-destruction and the future of writing

John Reed discusses politics after 9/11 and Reed's take on Orwell's neoconservativism.

Reed between BOMB magazine's senior editor Monica de la Torre and editor-in-chief Betsy Sussler.

The Whole, Reed’s third novel, parodied MTV and was released in 2005 by MTV Books (Simon & Schuster). The novel described a gigantic hole that appears in the middle of the country, which engulfs four states.

All the World's a Grave[link]

Reed, in a new work, returns to the overhaul of canonical English writers in All the World's a Grave, fall 2008, Penguin Books. The work, subtitled "A New Play by William Shakespeare", is a tragedy in five acts, a "mash-up" constructed of lines drawn from five Shakespeare tragedies and one Shakespeare history; Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo & Juliet and Henry V. In the "literary trick" (as described by Page Six of The New York Post) Shakespeare's lines are rearranged into a wholly new story, in which Prince Hamlet of Denmark goes to war to claim his bride and the daughter of King Lear, Juliet. Upon a triumphant return home, Hamlet discovers that his mother has murdered his father, and married Macbeth. Visited by his father's ghost, and goaded by the opportunistic Lieutenant Iago, Hamlet is driven mad by the erroneous belief that Juliet is having an affair with General Romeo.^[5]

References[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Reed (novelist)

External links[link]

• John Reed's website
• All the World's a Grave, book website.
• Kill the beavers!, The Daily Telegraph, November 22, 2002.
• John Reed: Saint George and the Damn Truth, Moby Lives, Nove,ber 10, 2003.
• John Reed: The Whole, an excerpt, Brooklyn Rail, January 2005.
• Dinitia Smith: A Pig Returns to the Farm, Thumbing His Snout at Orwell, The New York Times, November 25, 2002.
• Cathy Young: Blaming the Victim, Reason.com, December 3, 2002.
• Andrea Scrima: Review of Tales of Woe, Rumpus, November 16, 2010.
• Interview with Arthur Phillips on rewriting Shakespeare

Paul Krassner (born April 9, 1932) is an author, journalist, stand-up comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies.

Early life[link]

Krassner was a child violin prodigy (and was the youngest person ever to play Carnegie Hall, in 1939 at age six^[1]). His parents were Jewish,^[2][3] but Krassner is firmly secular, considering religion "organised superstition".^[4] In college he majored in journalism, and began performing as a standup comedian under the name Paul Maul. He recalled:

While in college, I started working for an anti-censorship paper, The Independent. After I left college I started working there full time. So, I never had a normal job where I had to be interviewed and wear a suit and tie. I became their managing editor and also did freelance stuff for Mad magazine. But Mad was aimed at a teenage audience, and there was no satirical magazine for adults. So it was a kind of organic evolution toward The Realist, which was essentially a combination of satire and alternative journalism.^[5]

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was active in politically edged humor and satire. Krassner was a founder of the Youth International Party (Yippies) in 1967 and a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, famous for prankster activism. He was a close protégé of the controversial comedian Lenny Bruce, and the editor of Bruce's autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.^[6] With the encouragement of Bruce, Krassner started to perform standup comedy in 1961 at the Village Gate in New York.^[6]

In 1963, he created what Kurt Vonnegut described as "a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein's e=mc2." Vonnegut explained: "With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM. At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. [...] By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn't merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm."^[7][8]

In 1971, five years after Lenny Bruce's death, Groucho Marx said, "I predict that in time Paul Krassner will wind up as the only live Lenny Bruce."^[6]

[edit] The Realist

The Realist was published on a fairly regular schedule during the 1960s, then on an irregular schedule after the early 1970s. In 1966, Krassner published The Realist's controversial "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" poster, illustrated by Wally Wood, and he recently made this famed black-and-white poster available in a digital color version. The Realist also distributed a red, white and blue Cold War bumper sticker that read "Fuck Communism."

Krassner's most notorious satire was the article "The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book", which followed the censorship of William Manchester's book on the Kennedy assassination, The Death of a President. At the climax of the grotesque-genre short-story, Lyndon B. Johnson is described as having sexually penetrated the bullet-hole wound in the throat of John F. Kennedy's corpse.^[9] According to Elliot Feldman, "Some members of the mainstream press and other Washington political wonks, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, actually believed this incident to be true."^[10] In a 1995 interview for the magazine Adbusters, Krassner commented: "People across the country believed - if only for a moment - that an act of presidential necrophilia had taken place. It worked because Jackie Kennedy had created so much curiosity by censoring the book she authorized - William Manchester's 'The Death Of A President' - because what I wrote was a metaphorical truth about LBJ's personality presented in a literary context, and because the imagery was so shocking, it broke through the notion that the war in Vietnam was being conducted by sane men."^[11]

In 1966, he reprinted in The Realist an excerpt from the academic journal the Journal of the American Medical Association, but presenting it as original material. The article dealt with drinking glasses, tennis balls and other foreign bodies found in patients’ rectums.^[12] Some accused him of having a perverted mind, and a subscriber wrote "I found the article thoroughly repellent. I trust you know what you can do with your magazine."^[12]

Krassner revived The Realist as a much smaller newsletter during the mid-1980s when material from the magazine was collected in The Best of the Realist: The 60's Most Outrageously Irreverent Magazine (Running Press, 1985). The final issue of The Realist was #146 (Spring, 2001).

Books[link]

Krassner remains a prolific writer. In 1971 he published a collection of his favourite works for The Realist, as How A Satirical Editor Became A Yippie Conspirator In Ten Easy Years.^[13] In 1981 he published the satirical story Tales of Tongue Fu, in which the hilarious misadventures of the Japanese-American man Tongue Fu are mixed with a wicked social commentary. In 1994 he published his autobiography Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in Counter-Culture. In July 2009, City Lights Publishers will release Who's to Say What's Obscene?, a collection of satirical essays that explore contemporary comedy and obscenity in politics and culture.

He published three collections of drug stories. The first collection, Pot Stories for the Soul (1999), is from other authors and is about marijuana. Psychedelic Trips for the Mind (2001), is written by Krassner himself and collects stories on LSD. The third, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs (2004), is by Krassner too, and deals with magic mushrooms, ecstasy, peyote, mescaline, THC, opium, cocaine, ayahuasca, belladonna, ketamine, PCP, STP, "toad slime," and more.

Other activities[link]

In 1968, Krassner signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.^[14]

In 1971, Krassner worked as a weekend radio personality and disk jockey at San Francisco's ABC-FM radio affiliate, KSFX, (subsequently KGO-FM). Under the pseudonym "Rumpelforeskin", he satirized culture and politics while espousing his atheism. He was also a contributor to early issues of Mad magazine. He often appears as a stand-up comedian, and he was among those featured in the 2005 documentary The Aristocrats. Krassner also remains a prolific lecturer. He has been a frequent speaker at both the Starwood Festival^[15][16] and the WinterStar Symposium.^[17][18] In 1998 he was featured at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with Wavy Gravy during their exhibit entitled I Want to Take You Higher: The Psychedelic Era 1965-1969.^[19] Currently, he is a columnist for The Nation, AVN Online and High Times Magazine. He also is a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post.

Krassner has also written about the Patty Hearst trial and possible connections between the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).^[20]

Awards[link]

Krassner is the only person to win awards from both Playboy magazine (for satire) and the Feminist Party Media Workshop (for journalism). He was the first living man to be inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame,^[21] which took place at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. He received an American Civil Liberties Union Uppie (Upton Sinclair) Award for dedication to freedom of expression, and, according to the FBI files, he was described by the FBI as "a raving, unconfined nut."^[6][22] George Carlin commented: "The FBI was right, this man is dangerous – and funny; and necessary."^[6] In 2005 he received a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes for his essay on the 6-CD package Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware.

Criticism[link]

Krassner was harshly criticized, along with many males on the Left, in Robin Morgan's classic feminist manifesto, "Goodbye to All That"^{[23][24][25][26]}:

"Goodbye to lovely "pro-Women’s Liberationist" Paul Krassner, with all his astonished anger that women have lost their sense of humor "on this issue" and don’t laugh any more at little funnies that degrade and hurt them: farewell to the memory of his "Instant Pussy" aerosol-can poster, to his column for the woman-hating men’s magazine Cavalier, to his dream of a Rape-In against legislators’ wives, to his Scapegoats and Realist Nuns and cute anecdotes about the little daughter he sees as often as any properly divorced Scarsdale middle-aged father; goodbye forever to the notion that a man is my brother who, like Paul, buys a prostitute for the night as a birthday gift for a male friend, or who, like Paul, reels off the names in alphabetical order of people in the women’s movement he has fucked, reels off names in the best locker-room tradition—as proof that he’s no sexist oppressor."

Bibliography[link]

Books[link]

• 1981 - Tales of Tongue Fu (And/Or Press)
• 1994 - Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture (Touchstone) ISBN 0-671-89843-4
• 2000 - Sex, Drugs, and the Twinkie Murders (Loompanics Unlimited) ISBN 1-55950-206-1
• 2005 - One Hand Jerking: Reports From an Investigative Satirist, Foreword by Harry Shearer, Introduction by Lewis Black (Seven Stories Press) ISBN 1-58322-696-6

Collections of drug stories[link]

• 1999 - High Times Presents Paul Krassner's Pot Stories for the Soul. Various authors. Compiled by Krassner with a foreword by Ellison, Harlan (High Times) ISBN 1-893010-02-3
• 2001 - Paul Krassner's Psychedelic Trips for the Mind (High Times Press) ISBN 1-893010-07-4
• 2004 - Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy (Ten Speed Press) ISBN 1-58008-581-4

Articles collections books[link]

• 1971 - How a Satirical Editor Became a Yippie Conspirator in Ten Easy Years (Putnam)
• 1985 - The Best of the Realist: The 60's Most Outrageously Irreverent Magazine (Running Press) ISBN 0-89471-289-6
• 1996 - The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race: The Satirical Writings of Paul Krassner Introduction by Kurt Vonnegut (Seven Stories Press) ISBN 1-888363-44-4
• 2002 - Murder at the Conspiracy Convention: And Other American Absurdities introduced by George Carlin (Barricade Books, Inc.) ISBN 1-56980-231-9
• 2009 - Who's to Say What's Obscene? Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today (City Lights Publishers) ISBN 978-0-87286-501-3

Articles[link]

• Woody Allen Meets Tongue Fu January 11, 2008 (preface of the book Tales of Tongue Fu)
• Life Among the Neo-Pagans in The Nation, Aug. 29, 2005.
• The Blame Game in The Huffington Post, August 26, 2005.
• My Acid Trip with Groucho in High Times Magazine, February 1981
• Forty Years Later: Remembering the Summer of Love High Times June 21st, 2007
• The Nature of Protest: Then and Now High Times July 2nd, 2004
• Lenny & the Law, Together Again High Times June 10th, 2004
• Steve Earl: Sticking to His Principles High Times May 19, 2004
• The Trial of Vivian McPeak High Times February 13th, 2004
• The Witch Hunt Ain’t Over Yet High Times December 24th, 2003

Interviews[link]

• 1999 - Paul Krassner's Impolite Interviews (Seven Stories Press) ISBN 1-888363-92-4
• 2004 - Sept. 23, WBAI 99.5 FM New York City, Radio Unnameable: host Bob Fast interviews Paul Krassner
• 2006 - RU Sirius Show #53 (7/17/2006), guest Paul Krassner (podcast, .mp3)
• 2006 - Pranks! 2 Interview with Paul Krassner
• 2006 - The Legacy of Timothy Leary High Times October 20th, 2006
• 2007 - Beatdom's Interview with Paul Krassner
• 2009 - In the Jester's Court: Paul Krassner On The Virtues Of Irreverence, Indecency, And Illegal Drugs by David Kupfer (Sun Magazine Jan. 2009)
• 2009 - In Praise of Indecency: Paul Krassner Interviewed by Carol Queen (CarnalNation, July 27 2009)
• 2010 - Interview With Paul Krassner from SexIs Magazine
• 2011 - Interviewed by Marc Maron

Discography[link]

Stand-up comedy recordings:

• 1996 - We Have Ways of Making You Laugh (Mercury Records)
• 1997 - Brain Damage Control (Mercury Records)
• 1999 - Sex, Drugs and the Antichrist: Paul Krassner at MIT (Sheridan Square Entertainment)
• 2000 - Campaign In the Ass (Artemis Records)
• 2002 - Irony Lives (Artemis Records)
• 2004 - The Zen Bastard Rides Again (Artemis Records)

Filmography[link]

• 1972 - Dynamite Chicken
• 1983 - Cocaine Blues
• 1987 - The Wilton North Report (TV series)
• 1990 - Flashing on the Sixties: A Tribal Document
• 1998 - Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth
• 1999 - The Source
• 2003 - Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson
• 2005 - The Aristocrats
• 2006 - Gonzo Utopia
• 2006 - The U.S. vs. John Lennon
• 2006 - Darryl Henriques Is in Show Business
• 2008 - Sex: The Revolution (TV mini-series)
• 2008 - Looking for Lenny
• 2009 - Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America (PBS)

References[link]

1. ^ Recital by Violin Pupils‎, New York Times, Jan 15, 1939 
2. ^ Rosenbaum, Fred, Cosmopolitans: a Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area, University of California Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-520-25913-3.
3. ^ "An IMC Interview with Paul Krassner" by Brian A. Pace, 06.May.2004 14:05
4. ^ Krassner, P: Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in Counter-Culture, ISBN 0-671-89843-4
5. ^ Loompanics: Paul Krassner
6. ^ ^{a b c d e} Krassner bio at paulkrassner.com
7. ^ The original FUCK COMMUNISM banner
8. ^ Kurt Vonnegut's Foreword to Krassner's The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race
9. ^ The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book - The Realist, Issue No. 74 - May 1967, cover page and page 18
10. ^ Paul Krassner and The Realist by Elliot Feldman
11. ^ Cat Simril Interviews Paul Krassner by CAT SIMRILin from "Adbusters Quarterly" Journal of the Mental Environment (Winter 1995 Vol. 3 No. 3)
12. ^ ^{a b} Here Lies Paul Krassner Reprinted from AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, vol.18, no. 2, 2000.
13. ^ BeatBooks: How A Satirical Editor Became A Yippie Conspirator In Ten Easy Years. (YIPPIE). KRASSNER, Paul
14. ^ “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” January 30, 1968 New York Post
15. ^ Freetimes.com
16. ^ Kates, Bill (1997). Best of the Fests: Starwood Festival in High Times, 1997
17. ^ Association for Consciousness Exploration. Paul Krassner
18. ^ Association for Consciousness Exploration. WinterStar Symposium 1998
19. ^ The Psychedelic Era
20. ^ Double Agent by Paul Krassner
21. ^ Guardian Website
22. ^ Reflections on the Art of the Put-on by Michael DooleyJuly 03, 2007
23. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=PD1CZfa5wicC&pg=PA106&dq=Krassner+%22robin+morgan%22&hl=en&ei=xCSHTrzZGJOdgQfwpYz6Cg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CFMQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=Krassner%20%22robin%20morgan%22&f=false
24. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=EDd2aNCoGlYC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
25. ^ http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/octo.2010.132.1.135?journalCode=octo
26. ^ http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=OAjEQXg1gHAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=Krassner+%22robin+morgan%22&ots=oeB9FOvltQ&sig=tIhOYS78sgQLAkT1cphm0YCK0Pk#v=onepage&q=%20%22robin%20morgan%22&f=false

External links[link]

• Paul Krassner Official Website
• Art Buchwald, Barry Crimmins, Paul Krassner, Kurt Vonnegut - Beating Around the Bush: An Evening of Satire recorded on 10/06/05 at The New York Society for Ethical Culture, 63 min., mp3 format
• The Realist Website
• Paul Krassner profile at imdb.com (The Internet Movie Database)
• Hippie Museum Bio
• Excerpt from Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture
• The Realist Archive Project at www.ep.tc
• 'Paul Krassner at 'Stop the Merchants of Death' Rally, St. Paul, MN, Oct. 2006, YouTube Video
• Articles by Paul Krassner at The Rag Blog
• Thorne Dreyer's three Rag Radio interviews with Paul Krassner.