A commune calling itself the Kingdom of Endor tried to plan The Great Aspen Freak Festival in the little Colorado town for this July but carelessly announced that 100,000 hippies-could be expected—and that blew the whole thing.
Suddenly the available land wasn’t available any more and threats of “vigilante” action scared off what few record company commitments that had been made. What finally brought matters to a head was a claim—untrue—that the Beatles would be coming.
Meanwhile, the Colorado legislature passed a special law to allow 90-day jail sentences for kids convicted of squatting on unoccupied property in the mountains west of Boulder. Apparently there was quite a bit of it last year and no law to cope with it.
Telephone company is refunding thousands of bucks each week to disgruntled customers who lose dimes in broken phones. All you have to do is call the operator and ask for your share………
You’ll soon be seeing “thatched” roofs made out of fiberglass following successful tests of this new plastic product in England…
Martin Luther King’s old organization, the SCLC, has joined forces with the Hospital Workers Union and will fight for a share of those millions of dollars paid in room fees by wealthy patients to even wealthier hospitals…
Why Cities Go Broke: In Newark, almost one-half of the local real estate is tax-exempt because it belongs to the church.
To promote its latest movie, “How To Commit Marriage,” Cinerama took 50 about-to-be-married couples to Miami Beach for a mass wedding on May 27. Florida’s marriage laws insist on four days residence before the ceremony so the “lucky” couples were put up—segregated by sex—from May 23.
Here’s the irony: star of the movie Jackie Gleason, that fat champion of morality who’s promoting “decency” these days, has been living out of wedlock with a dancer for about ten years. Won’t divorce his wife because she’s Catholic.
The Movement: Chicago indictments against the yippies and others charging “conspiracy” (“the first time that the majesty of the U.S. government has been used to make criminal charges against a put-on” says Michael Harrington) is successfully shaping us all into a conspiracy—an open one that freely admits its aim to be the overthrow of the U.S. “government.”
Heterogenous guest list of the Abbie Hoffman fundraising party shows how widespread The Conspiracy is becoming. Veteran publisher and Peace Eye freak Ed Sanders, meanwhile is completing his novel about Abbie tracing the growth of the Yippie conspiracy right up to its current position as “an international cartel of chromosome-damaged diplomats, Swedish generals, Yippie agents within the pentagon, war correspondents, bank presidents, nuns, poets, streetfuckers and peace apes.”
Black Panthers’ brilliant (and humane) national campaign to provide breakfast for undernourished children so they can learn better (“we must survive this evil government so we can build a new one”) is outlined in the April 27 issue of their paper, The Black Panther (25¢ from Box 2967, Custom House, SF, Calif. 94126)………
Touring across country bringing street theatre, guerrilla happenings, radical newsreels and political disruptions along with them SF’s 6th Street theatre needs help (local organizers, places to stay, money, etc) from friends in the movement. Their schedule begins in Philadelphia (June 6-7) Pittsburg (9-11), and Ann Arbor (12-19) then on to Chicago and Indiana; in July the 10-member (and a puppy) company visits Madison, Milwaukee, Iowa City, Boulder, Denver and the southwest, finishing in San Diego and LA. Read this item again and then, if you can help, write to: Al Tobias, P.O. Box 245, NYC 10009.
MEDIAMIX: If Craig Karpel’s profile in’ the first issue of US is any criterion, David Eisenhower’s at least as dumb as his father. And he apparently told the Times that he was marrying Julie Nixon before graduation because he didn’t have the “will power” to wait two years before fucking her…
As he busted Screw and Kiss for “obscenity” (his definition) NYC assistant D.A. Richard Beckler became judge, jury and executioner by threatening to arrest any newsstand that carried the papers.
Apparently he’s trying to save money by dispensing with the need for trials although it’s doubtful that the U.S. Constitution would agree with him…
Are hustlers the only chicks answering those studs-want-to-fuck ads in the sex classifieds?………
The Nation doesn’t agree with James Forman’s campaign to pressure the rich WASP churches for financial reparations. Why? Well, maybe the Nation’s financial backers include some of those rich, white churchmen…
SF’s Society for Individual Rights (SIR) is battling with Pacific Telephone for the right to be listed in the Yellow Pages under “homosexual”………
More financially insolvent underground papers can be expected to follow the lead set by Seattle’s Helix and SF’s Good Times by reincorporating as a nonprofit religious foundation under the umbrella of the Universal Life Church, staffs thus becoming worker-priests…
Toby Mamis explains that he asked the copyright people in Washington about the name “New York Herald Tribune” and was told nobody was using it. And that’s why NYC’s high school kids can buy this new, livelier tabloid Trib (110 Riverside Dr., NYC 10024) and with the original logo yet!
EATITUP! Cat and dog food advertising “are subtly directed towards the appetites of people, not animals” says Connie Sohodski in “The Dove,” and as evidence she asks why the ads stress that the food is all meat? That dog food shouldn’t taste like dog food. That one commercial depicts dog shopping in a supermarket “and engaging in all that chitchat that people might engage in.” The fact is, she adds, that pet food manufacturers have discovered that their products sell well in areas inhabited by people who can’t afford pets—that they’re obviously buying it for themselves.
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Dangerous nerve gases and poisons that are made from chemicals can also be deactivated and rendered nontoxic by chemicals, so why are they being transported across country causing a furor in every town through which they pass?
Why are they being destroyed anyway? Are we still spending billions manufacturing new ones? New stocks of the same ones?
As these questions aren’t being answered (and most of them haven’t even been asked) let’s assume that the reason for the trip is something else: maybe to show the public—dissenters and hawks alike—that the government still has a few scary things handy to keep dissidents where they belong.
Would our beloved government use poison gases on its own citizens? Why not? They’re already using guns, flame-throwers, tanks, bombs and mace. Why you can even get shot for planting trees. What kind of trees have YOU been planting pig Daley?
