From The Rag Blog -BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : John McMillian's 'Smoking Typewriters'

Markin comment:

In the 1960s there was a phethora of alternative (non-political party established)newspapers that flourished for various lenghts of time. Their undoing was that central split between those who wanted to retreat to some backwater cultural revolution and those who saw the need to fight the front-facing political battles against the imperial state. In short the battle of the dope bong and pick up the gun. With the demise of the political struggle came the demise of the alternative (non-party) newspaper. No question.
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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : John McMillian's 'Smoking Typewriters'

John McMillian, author of Smoking Typewriters, will appear at BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd, Austin, at 7 p.m., Friday, Feb. 25, 2011, for a reading and signing of his book about the Sixties underground press. John will also be our special guest at a Rag Blog Happy Hour, Friday, Feb. 25, 5-7 p.m., at Maria's Taco Xpress, 2529 S. Lamar Blvd., Austin. The public is welcome. And John McMillian will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 4, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7FM in Austin, and streamed live on the internet.
The curious case of the 1960s papers:
John McMillian's Smoking Typewriters

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2011

[Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, by John McMillian (Oxford University Press, Feb. 17, 2011); Hardcover; 276 pp.; $27.95]

Art Kunkin was born into a Jewish family in New York in 1928. A brainy kid, he attended Bronx High School of Science, became a follower of Leon Trotsky, moved to Southern California, and recreated himself in the burgeoning bohemian world of Venice.

He would probably not be remembered today and he would certainly not appear in John McMillian’s Smoking Typewriters were it not for the fact that he founded the L.A. Free Press -- the Freep -- and became one of the curious fathers of the underground newspapers of the 1960s.

McMillian writes about Kunkin and the Freep near the very start of his new book in which he tells his version of the 1960s through the eyes and ears of its loud, colorful, unconventional papers such as the Freep, Rat, The Seed, The Great Speckled Bird, The Barb, The Rag, and many others with equally provocative names.

Smoking Typewriters provides a fast-moving narrative about the birth, the death, and the second life of the newspapers that were spawned by the upheavals of the 1960s and that were also spurred on by those upheavals. Part agitprop in a radical American tradition that went back at least as far as the 1930s, and part agitpop in the unique style of the 1960s, papers such as The Barb, The Seed, and Rat sparked the rebellion of a generation, even as they reported the latest news, gossip, and rumors from the barricades, the communes, the rock concerts, and the on-going spectacle of the streets.


Austin SDS leader George Vizard, later murdered under questionable circumstances, peddles an early issue of The Rag on The Drag near the University of Texas campus in 1966. At left is his wife, Mariann. (Mariann -- who changed her last name to Wizard -- is now a contributing editor at The Rag Blog.) Image courtesy of Thorne Dreyer, from the photo section of Smoking Typewriters / Oxford Press.

One of the early papers McMillian discusses in depth is Austin’s Rag, the first underground paper in the South. The Rag, now reborn as The Rag Blog, was a model for many papers that would come later, he says, because it was the first to emerge directly out of a radical community, the first to be run collectively, and the first to merge the hippie and New Left cultures.

McMillian puts readers in the cockpit of the era. He conjures up the radical style, the exuberant mood, and the bravado -- no mean feat given the fact that he wasn’t there to live it himself. An historian, he looks back at the era with the benefit of hindsight and with a certain detachment, too, that enables him to tell the story without aiming to grind obvious ideological axes.

He focuses attention on Los Angeles, Austin, and East Lansing, Michigan, as well as on Chicago and New York, and makes it clear that the 1960s as a state of mind and as a way of being in the world, took place everywhere in the United States.

To write his book, McMillian interviewed many of the pivotal figures from that time -- both men and women -- who wrote for and edited the underground newspapers, such as Harvey Wasserman, Allen Young, John Holmstrom, Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree, Ray Mungo, Sheila Ryan, and others. In Smoking Typewriters he looks at the sexual politics of the papers, and at the tangled, complex relationships between men and women as they played themselves out in newspaper offices.

Smoking Typewriters takes readers from the early days of SDS, through the rise of the anti-war movement, to the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969 that has often been described as the culminating event of the decade. Ten pages of photos from the 1960s put faces to the names mentioned in the book.

There’s a brief, last chapter that looks at trends in alternative media since 1969, and an afterward that touches on zines, blogs, and bloggers, and in which McMillian predicts that, “we are going to see a collapsing of private space and a diffusion of power around knowledge and information.” For those who would like to dig deeper into the subject, there’s also an extensive bibliography and more than 50-pages of footnotes

LNS) is McMillian’s privileging of SDS and the New Left. SDS was obviously influential; New Leftists changed life on college campuses. I was an SDS member and a New Leftist myself. But I was also a hippie, and a member of the counterculture, and from where I stood the underground newspapers were as much a product of the hippie counterculture as they were of SDS and the New Left.


Thorne Dreyer, now editor of The Rag Blog, and the late Victoria Smith, shown at the offices of Space City! in Houston in 1970. Image from the photo section of John McMillian's Smoking Typewriters, Oxford Press.

McMillian gives more emphasis to the overtly political figures of the era, and to the ideological nature of the papers, and minimizes aspects of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. In some ways, the evidence provided in the book goes counter to McMillian’s own argument. So, for example, he offers a pithy quotation from Abbie Hoffman, one of the founders of the Yippies, who said of the underground press “It is a visible manifestation of an alternative culture. It helps to create a national identity.”

Granted, McMillian discusses nomenclature such as “New Left,” “hippies,” and “politicos” in the introduction to his book. He might have taken the discussion to a deeper level and provided more insight. Still, his book will be appreciated by both ex-New Leftists and ex-hippies because it looks again at the push and pull that took place between those who followed Marx, Mao, and Lenin, and those who followed Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and the Beatles.

Moreover, as McMillian recognizes, there was no clear-cut schism between the hippies and the politicos. So, for example, he offers a useful comment about those two seminal 1960s figures, Marshall Bloom and Ray Mungo, the founders of LNS: “They were a curious duo, dope smoking, hip, full of far-out incredulousness, yet terribly concerned about Vietnam, the urban crisis and politics. ”

In the 1960s, we were all -- if I may speak for a whole generation -- very curious in the sense that we were an odd and unpredictable mix of cultures, values, and identities, especially in the eyes of the Joneses who just couldn’t keep up. As Bob Dylan put it, “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?”

The writers for the underground press, as McMillian shows, not only knew what was happening, but also provided maps and blueprints for others who wanted to join the happenings, the be-ins, the love-ins, the sit-ins, and the whole spectacle of the cultural revolution.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and Out of the Whale: Growing up in the American Left. He teaches at Sonoma State University.
Also see Anis Shivani's excellent review from the Feb. 20, 2011, Austin American Statesman: Pressing for change: John McMillian's 'Smoking Typewriters' charts history of underground newspapers.
The Rag Blog

Posted by thorne dreyer at 9:15 AM

*Hands Off Professor Bill Ayers- Let Him Speak

Click on title to link to "Boston Globe", April 2, 2009, article on Professor Bill Ayers discussed below.

Commentary

Okay, Okay I know that I have invoked the word professor ironically and in a somewhat tongue in cheek manner in discussing controversial Professor Bill Ayers in this space as an object lesson about the career paths of 1960’s ex-radicals once they have reconciled themselves to bourgeois society. Naturally when his name came up prominently in relation to the emergence of then-Illinois Senator Barack Obama I could not resist sticking a few well-deserved barbs Ayers’ way. But they were rather politically pointed barbs from the left about why an ex-Weatherman would be hanging around with a bourgeois candidate on the make like Obama.

But now news (somewhat dated news as I have been out of town and did not pick up the controversy until after it was over) about Boston College’s thinly- veiled slap at academic freedom by refusing to let the good professor speak in person or via satellite has crossed the line, even for the very arbitrary and capricious of so-called “academic freedom”. This is, moreover, is not solely a case of right wing commentators having a field day with the issue, although a local “Rush Limbaugh” wannabe helped fan the flames. I am sure that the right-wingers were more than happy when the Boston College administration decided to keep the academy and the minds of their young charges there “pure” from the taint of any old time radical. However, this is just one more in an ever- growing line of cases (think of Ward Churchill and the Finklestein case) where a college administration was more than capable, as in the past, of putting the clamps on by itself.

Here are the facts. Apparently, Professor Ayers was scheduled to deliver some kind of lecture on urban education (his specialty) at Boston College during the week of March 29, 2009 at the invitation of some student groups, including the College Democrats of Boston College. Such lectures by newsworthy figures are not unknown events on college campuses and moreover are a rather lucrative proposition for professors on the academic lecture circuit. The Boston College administration balked at that invitation citing a groundswell of opposition from local neighbors. Why? It seems that there is some lingering animosity concerning the shooting of a Boston Police officer by people allegedly connected with Professor Ayers’ old organization, the Weathermen. Professor Ayers, however, has never been charged, much less convicted, with any connection to that crime.

Why the furor then? Well, the Boston College administration, bowing to those inevitable amorphous unknown forces (although we can guess what those forces are now, can’t we), expressed its profound concern for the safety of the student community and “respect” for the local community (where it has been busily buying up real estate in order to expand its campus). Well, ho hum we have heard that ‘justification’ before. The kicker here on this bogus ‘safety’ issue is that when a televised Ayers lecture by satellite was proposed that too was deemed too “hot” to handle.

What really gives here though? One of the students in the article I am using for information (“BC won’t air Ayers lecture by satellite”, Boston Globe, Peter Schworm, April 2, 2009) let the cat out of the bag. This Ayers controversy, while an easy one for the administration to raise holy hell over, is not the first time that the BC administration has vetoed speaking engagements for controversial figures on campus. That interviewed student did not state who else had been banned but we can figure that one out also.

Needless to say birthday boy Charles Darwin might find it hard to get invited to this august university what with his oddball quirky theory of evolution (BC is an old-time Jesuit school). Much less the heroic Kansas Doctor George Tiller, one of the few abortion providers in that state (they would probably have a lynch mob out for him). So much for that vaunted “academic freedom”. Fortunately we never took that profession of freedom as anything but a very vulnerable “right”, although we gladly use it to get our socialist message out when we can. We remember the “red scare” of the 1950’s here in America when the academy knuckled under without a whimper. And, left to its own devises, most of the academy would have loved to have clapped down during the anti-Vietnam war movement; it was just too big and got way beyond the ability of campus administrations to effectively curtail it. Let us not kid ourselves on that score.

But what about Professor Bill Ayers? Apparently this Boston College incident is not the first college where some furor that has dogged him. I do not, at this time, have the details of Ayers’ other problems at other campuses. However, I heard him last November, just after the 2008 elections when he was touting his revised memoir, on the “Terry Gross Show” on NPR (as any Boston College student could have done, as well). He seemed none too radical in his presentation of his current politics which were tired garden variety left-Democratic Party ones that we have become all too familiar with from repentant radicals, although to his credit he did not abase himself in denial of his revolutionary past. Nor should he have. We were dealing with serious war criminals then in the Johnson/Nixon wielding the most powerful military machine/police apparatus the world has ever known in case one has forgotten or wasn’t around then. For now though. Hands Off Professor Ayers! - Let him speak on politics, education or whatever the hell he wants to talk about. Anywhere.