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.]

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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.]

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David P. Hamilton : Change You Can, You Know, Believe In...

Graphic from Pyrrhic Defeat.
Consumer choice division:
Change you can believe in

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / April 4, 2012

I could no longer tolerate the bell chamber of American cable news. Its obsessive fixation on the still months-away American presidential election pitting two candidates approved by the 1% was driving me up the wall. I would regurgitate involuntarily if forced to watch one more of that repulsive manifestation of all the worst features of America, the Republican primary debates.

So, I dumped Time Warner for the Dish to get access to better news sources. The Dish gets us Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, and RT (Russia Today -- media home of numerous American leftists), Link TV, Free Speech TV, and several other international sources of information. What a relief. Now I had a much wider selection of biases. But there remain issues.

This enhanced news selection prominently includes the various shows of Thom Hartmann, most notably, the “Big Picture” that appears on both RT and Free Speech. He also does a couple of hours of live call-in, just him talking and answering calls on camera.

Thom is very busy and generally very sharp. We are fortunate that he is there. Sometimes he does a feature where he debates two rightists at the same time. They are perpetually on the defensive. We first caught his show on San Francisco’s cable television. Then we found a way to get him in Austin.

After watching a few days and getting a bit excited, I called Thom's show and asked the following question:

Thom, you support a constitutional amendment to take corporate money out of politics and revoke corporate personhood. So do I. But to enact a constitutional amendment, it must be passed by two-thirds of the members of the Congress and then in three-fourths of the state legislatures.

If our democracy is already seriously corrupted by corporate money, how can we expect legislators who are already largely sycophants of corporate America, to act against the interests of those who pay so handsomely for their services by voting for this amendment?

Thom’s answer, confirmed by his Washington reporter guest, was that they have heard many legislators say that they really hate having to raise money all the time. If only enough of the electorate pressured them, they would vote for the amendment. They essentially argued that these are good people who just need a little support in order to do the right thing.

Basically, I asked Thom whether or not democracy was already dead in America and Thom answered by saying no, just on life support.

As much as I admire Thom, there is some fuzzy thinking here. He is campaigning hard for an amendment that is premised on the idea that democracy in America is quite seriously compromised already. Yet he appeals to the corrupted institution to rise up and cleanse itself. You can’t have it both ways.

You can hardly expect the utmost beneficiaries of the burgeoning economic inequality that so heavily compromises our democracy to instruct their functionaries in the so-called “public” sector to rectify the situation in our favor.

Most legislators are already virtual employees of the less than 1%, the capitalist class who own the controlling interests in the major corporations. They are in that role because they are highly adapted to the corrupted system. They like money and power, the respectful recognition and bounteous benefits they acquire by being political operatives of the rich and powerful.

Thom’s answer posits that they are actually there to do what's best for the country and the general population and are only inhibited from doing so by the need to raise millions to run their necessarily expensive campaigns, money readily supplied by the dastardly corporations. That's nonsense. If that were true, they would have passed public financing of political campaigns years ago.

The amendment to overturn “Citizens United” may be a wonderful device to focus the public on the issue of how economic inequality corrupts our democracy, but it will pass when pigs fly.

Which brings us to a fundamental question. Is economic reform that measurably effects income distribution in the U.S., and consequently the class structure, still possible given the current level of political corruption by corporate money?

The answer is not very possible, if at all, and the potential is diminishing. The ruling economic elite can only be expected to instruct their political servants to minimize their social responsibilities as much as possible and to increase their access to government money. They have unswerving faith in a religion called the "Free Market” -- and Social Darwinism that allows them to take this course without the least guilt.

What is the difference in corporate deference between Democrats and Republicans? The former have progressive voting constituencies that must be placated to some small degree, but just enough to distinguish them from Republicans.

The most crucial arena is the tax structure. Specifically, will the Democrats end the Bush tax cuts for the rich when they again have the chance? Despite the fact they controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency for two years, they did not do so when it was last up for a vote. Will they risk bing labeled as those who raised taxes or will they again “bargain it away”? I advise you to limit your expectations.

Before the “Citizens United” decision, the barriers limiting corporate control of the political process were already full of holes. With that decision, they fell by the wayside entirely.

As a direct result, we today have the spectacle of a Las Vegas gambling tycoon openly giving $15 million to Newt Gingrich to run his campaign. Given the donor’s reputed wealth of many billions, that’s pocket change. That example is just the egregious tip of the iceberg. It would be hard to argue that most legislators are not already at this point, beneficiaries of significant corporate largesse.

This system, like others, produces politicians that are adaptive to it. Insofar as there are still shining examples of probity in regards to corporate cash, given this burst of judicial activism by the Supremes, they are a dying breed.

Witness the strenuous effort that has been exerted for years to get rid of Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Austin. Eventually, his right-wing detractors will find the right district, the right flunky, and enough big bucks to take him down.

Their personhood is immoral, devious, relentless, and infinitely well financed. Corporations will continue to own the controlling interest in an enterprise known as the U.S. government and they will expand their holdings, because there is nothing to stop them and very little chance that things will change.

Consider also the important role the federal government now plays in relation to the private sector. Forbes magazine recently reported that of the 10 richest counties in the U.S., half of them bordered on Washington, D.C. Average household income in these counties hovers around $100,000 per year.

In recent decades northern Virginia has become an economic dynamo, driven by a private sector that feasts on government contracting. These counties are also home to corporate lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who work in or around the nation's capital, soaking up federal government spending.

There is no other prize more valuable to corporate elites than maintaining their control over the power and wealth of the federal government for their private gain. They are firmly in the driver’s seat now and have the power to change the rules to their further advantage. No election occurring in other than catastrophic conditions will change that and in such conditions, they probably won’t allow elections.

As American anarchist Emma Goodman once said, "If you could change things by voting, it would be illegal."

Whatever may have been the case in the past, serious reform that alters the class structure or the political institutions of American society in favor of the 99% is no longer possible by electoral means.

[Rag Blog contributor David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog.]

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Jeffrey Nightbyrd : Rehearsals for the Apocalypse

Underground journalist and Sixties activist Jeffrey Nightbyrd will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin, Tuesday, September 14, 2-3 p.m. (CST). To stream Rag Radio live, go here. To listen to this show after the broadcast, or to listen to earlier shows on Rag Radio, go here.

'Don't be a slave to the rules':
Our time in the sun

By Jeffrey Nightbyrd / The Rag Blog / September 13, 2010

See 'The mysterious murder of Michael Eakin,' by Jeffrey Nightbyrd, Below.

[The Austin Sun was a counterculture paper published in Austin from 1974-78. It was born of the underground press, and served as a precursor to the many "alternative" publications that would follow. The Sun's influence went far beyond its short life span. It served as an incubator for major talent and helped stimulate the development of Austin's music scene, helping artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Ely, Marcia Ball, and Butch Hancock reach a wider audience.

The Sun was founded by Jeffrey Nightbyrd and Michael Eakin. Nightbyrd -- formerly Jeff Shero -- was a major figure in the Sixties New Left, in Austin and nationally. He served as national vice president of SDS and was active with the Yippies. Jeff was involved with Austin's original underground newspaper, The Rag, and also edited RAT in New York. Jeff now directs Acclaim Talent, one of the largest talent agencies in the Louisiana/Texas region.

(Co-founder Michael Eakin, a former editor of the Daily Texan, was shot to death in 1974. The crime was never solved and is believed by many to have been related to a story he was researching on the South Texas Nuclear Plant. See the sidebar article below.)

A retrospective exhibit of art from The Sun ("Rehearsals for the Apocalypse: The Austin Sun Years 1974-1978)" is currently showing at the South Austin Popular Culture Center. The following was adapted from notes Jeff wrote for the exhibit.]

Looking through the old Suns, the issues we championed haven’t changed today: war, a smart energy policy, no nukes, long range environmental thinking, ethnic and religious tolerance, sensible drug policies, planning instead of runaway growth, and sexual freedom.

In Austin tolerance has become widespread but our economy dangles on a precipice, we are fighting overseas wars, and our natural world is imperiled. Hence the title of this museum exhibit: "Rehearsals for the Apocalypse. The Austin Sun Years."

The hard facts are that former Daily Texan editor Michael Eakin and I thought it was essential to create an Austin newspaper that presented alternatives to the local information sources. So we went about raising money.

People like Bud Shrake who had just sold a movie script to Hollywood pitched in.

“Bud," we told him. “We don’t know if we will ever be able to pay this much back.”

“I know that," he said. “One day pass it on.”

Over a brief few years many great writers and artists got their start. My first partner, Michael Eakin, was murdered under suspicious circumstances. And like an improbable reality show, we sunspots kept surprising each other with bursts of originality.

Finally hard economic reality set in forcing me to take in a “liberal” real estate investor. Soon he bought up more stock than anyone and ousted me as a “terrible manager.” His condemnation -- “You don’t even have a time clock!” -- still rings in my ears.

Afterward, most of the Sun staff followed their muse and found more success.

For most of us the Sun years were a time of plenty... or should we say our time in the Sun.

Following are some thoughts and memories:


Good drugs and bad drugs

The Sun crew laughed at the over-culture’s hypocrisy about drugs. After all, we live in America -- the society that invented the “Drug Store.” Some drugs like alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine (the most addictive of all) had legal sanction. But others, like pot, could send a smoker to prison. (Pot prisoners are almost half the population of many jails and we never saw pot smokers getting into fist fights in bars.)


Psychedelics

In the Sun era, creative Texans reached for transcendence through peyote and mescaline just as the indigenous Indians had for thousands of years before. Into the mid-Sixties peyote could still be bought at cactus nurseries. Then the hysteria fed by the establishment media set in, demonizing psychedelics as madness-inducing. We tried to bring enlightenment to the frenzy.


William Burroughs

Burroughs, the apocalyptic futurist and author of Naked Lunch, inventor of cut-up writing, and beatnik legend, inspired the Doom issue of the Sun, which in turn inspired the theme of this exhibition, “Rehearsals for the Apocalypse. The Austin Sun Years.”

Burroughs contributed his articles to the underground press for free.


Michael Ventura

Michael Ventura, a Sicilian street kid from Brooklyn, stopped by the Sun on his way out of town and got his first paid writing assignment. A curious combination of street-toughened, world-class dirty dancer and Talmudic-like scholar, he became a creative mainstay of the Sun. His apartment walls were astonishing, covered with voluminous hand-lettered note cards, quotes from the world’s greatest and most obscure thinkers, thousands of posted notes that worked as brain stimulants for his essays.

Jeffrey Nightbyrd, in the day.

Rocky Horror midnight madness

The national Rocky Horror Picture Show Saturday night phenomenon took off in Austin. The producers called the Sun and asked if we would sponsor a test event to see if Rocky Horror had legs, as they say in the movie biz. Tim Curry flew in, and a raucous crowd at the Paramount Theater cheered their way through the look-a-like contest. By the end of the night the sell-out crowd had sung their way through the entire movie and a phenomenon was born.


The music scene and Stevie Ray Vaughan

The clubs kept giving birth to stunning and original bands and musicians that would make jaded veterans pause in awe. I remember Michael Ventura touting a new guitarist, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and watching him for the first time in an obscure club on Red River called the One Knight. Eight people were in the audience. But Stevie didn’t care.

Driven like a Hendrix or a Picasso he ripped through songs so fast and beautiful that you knew you had entered a moment of magic shared only by a few. Soon the venues grew much bigger. But somewhere in Austin right now another young genius is playing.


Sexual freedom

The Sun wanted to keep the government out of all our bedrooms. But in this era gays could still be prosecuted as sodomists, and women were not secure in the Roe v Wade ruling that protected the privacy of their bodies. We felt the rainbow of sexuality that is the human experience was none of any government’s business. Relationships of any kind are hard to sustain. So, root for everybody. The Sun rooted for all consenting adults and championed the right of the abnormal to find their happiness


On writing

Writers fresh from the academic reformatory that is the university would bring us lifeless prose. What would now be slam poets would arrive, ignorant of the rules of English grammar, and put down words that were captivating.

I told writers: “Don’t be a slave to the rules -- make the language your slave. Do anything that works.” I would suggest reading advertising copy. Or translations of the Chinese master Li Po and Tu Fu. In extreme cases I would hand writers a copy of the poems of e. e. cummings. There are no rules of good writing save putting down words in any fashion that communicates with passion.


Piedras Negras jailbreak

Taking a page from the Wild West, gun-toting hired guns stuck up the guards at the Piedras Negras jail and freed a gringo rancher’s son. In the mayhem, a bevy of hippie pot prisoners made their escape running down to the Rio Grande and swimming the river. First thing, they called the Sun to tell their story. We were just going to press, so at 2 a.m. the art department redesigned the cover and we beat the dailies by two days.

Michael Eakin. Photo scanned from Daily Texan.
The mysterious murder of Michael Eakin

By Jeffery Nightbyrd / The Rag Blog / September 13, 2010

Austin Sun co-founder and former Daily Texan editor Michael Eakin was a dogged opponent of the South Texas Nuclear Plant. On April 14, 1979 he was shot to death while sitting in a parked car in Houston. The crime was never fully investigated. There are few hard facts in the case.

The South Texas Nuclear plant was built after politicians overcame huge opposition within out city. There is no proof that Michael’s murder had anything to do with his journalistic investigations. But former Sun investigative reporter Todd Samusson recently sent me some very disturbing information which follows:

I had extensive experience of harassment for doing anti-nuke organizing in Austin. I was physically assaulted several times. Always by two large thuggish-looking guys but never the same two. I had my house ransacked and nothing stolen but an address book. I received threatening calls. I had my porch light smashed out three times. I even came out of a meeting once and found a bullet hole in the rear window of my truck (that same piece of crap I used to schlep Austin Suns from the printer in Taylor back to the Sun offices). My car window had a bullet shot through it.

Michael Eakin obviously had it much worse. In the weeks preceding his death he told me he was working on a freelance article about cost overruns at the South Texas Nuclear Project. He said he had been interviewing construction workers at the site about intentional slowing down of work to drag out the project. Also about major flaws in the concrete pours of the containment buildings. (These stories were later confirmed in articles in the Austin American Statesman -- I think written by Bruce Hite.)

Michael was shot point blank and killed in his car in Houston with a small caliber pistol (weapon of choice for mob contracts, according to police). Also shot was his passenger Dilah Davis. She was hit in the face but survived. She was very active in Austin Citizens for Economic Energy the electoral group working against the nuke.

That project was done on a cost-plus basis. There was absolutely no incentive for Brown & Root to come in at the contract price. In fact they had every incentive to seek cost overruns. The south Texas nuke was originally bid at $700 million-plus. When I left Austin in 1988 the cost was heading toward $4 billion. The nuclear industry isn't about how to best generate electricity; it's about construction gigs. And, on a bigger scale, it's about bonded indebtedness on electric utility bonds used to pay for that construction. That $4 billion turns out to be way, way more than that over the life of the debt.

So the money trail is way bigger than Brown & Root. It goes to huge bond houses. Anybody along that trail had motive to stop Michael from prying.

Brown & Root was eventually fired for its cost overruns and replaced by Bechtel. But they went on to do well, becoming KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root) and making zillions from the current war in Iraq.

Michael Eakin should not be forgotten. As a journalist he pursued his passion to expose corporate corruption to the end.

Now showing!
Rehearsals for the Apocalypse

The South Austin Popular Culture Center is presenting a landmark exhibit featuring the underground/alternative newspaper the Austin Sun. The exhibit will run from Sept. 11 through Oct. 23.

"Rehearsals For The Apocalypse" encompasses the entire run of the Austin Sun, which was from October 1974 through June of 1978. The Sun was founded by Jeff Nightbyrd and Michael Eakin. They were joined later by printer and bon vivant J. David Moriaty as managing editor, The Sun transcended the usual mode of underground newspapers with professional layouts, cutting edge news articles and, wonder of wonders, paid staff positions.

The exhibit features a selection of newspaper covers along with accompanying articles, photographs, and comments by Jeff Nightbyrd, Dave Moriaty, and some of the key staffers. The show also includes a striking selection of vintage photographs.

"Rehearsals For The Apocalypse: The Austin Sun Years 1974- 1978" will run from September 11th through October 23rd. The South Austin Popular Culture Center is located at 1516-B South Lamar Boulevard in Austin. Hours are Thursday through Sunday from 1- 6 p.m. or by appointment and chance.

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Houston Alternative Media : Telling It Like It Was

Underground in H-Town. Art by Shelby Hohl / Museum of Printing History.
Underground [history] in H-Town:
Veteran journalists compare notes
On counterculture and alt media

By Raj Mankad / May 24, 2010

[Raj Mankad is the editor of Cite magazine, the "architecture and design review of Houston" that has been published quarterly by the Rice Design Alliance since 1982. OffCite, where this article first appeared, is Cite's online incarnation.]

“The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is watching you.”

An arrow bearing that note was shot into the Space City! office. The incident was one among many threats and acts of violence against progressive and radical institutions in Houston. The KPFT station transmitter was bombed off the air twice. Bullets were shot at and yellow paint thrown on the walls of Margaret Webb Dreyer’s gallery, which she ran out of her home from 1961 to 1975. The gallery had served as a counterculture hub according to Thorne Dreyer, her son and an editor of Space City!.

Thorne Dreyer shared these stories at an event on alternative media also featuring veteran writers Tom Curtis, Gabrielle Cosgriff, and Michael Berryhill. The Museum of Printing History hosted the panel discussion in conjunction with “Underground in H-Town,” an exhibition that highlights the importance of minority and alternative publications in local history.

Space City! was published from 1969 to 1972, a part of an international explosion of underground papers set off by the introduction of low-cost offset printing.

Houston in the 60s and 70s is never represented as a hotbed of dissent on par with San Francisco or New York. “The main thing about Houston was that it was all spread out,” Dreyer said in a similar talk at the Houston Zine Fest. “There was no Houston there, [only] community in bits and pieces everywhere. Houston is much more of a city now than it was then. What Space City! did was to help to identify all these pockets of progressive politics and kindred spirits, and pull them together into a cohesive spirit...a network of countercultural stuff.”

Gabrielle Cosgriff picked up the discussion where Dreyer left off. She partnered with Janice Blue to publish Breakthrough from 1976 to 1981. They named it after La Brecha, a book written by Mercedes Valdivieso, a Chilean feminist who taught literature at the University of Houston and Rice University. Cosgriff talked about Breakthrough’s support of Kathy Whitmire in her election to Houston city controller and mayor. The recent election of a lesbian mayor and a city council with an equal gender balance, she argued, can be traced back to efforts three decades earlier.

In its last year of publication, Breakthrough became a general-interest publication --“women’s issues are everybody’s issues” said Cosgriff -- and named David Crossley as a co-editor. Crossley has gone on to lead Houston Tomorrow. Cosgriff serves on the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle.

The audience in the small auditorium included activist Gloria Rubac, writer David Theis, and many other notable people. Alternative media scholar and Rice Media Center staffer Tish Stringer recorded the discussion on video. There were some young people absorbing the history including Culturemap writer Steven Thomson and Emily Hall of PH Design.

Organized in partnership with the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, “Underground in H-Town” presents original documents and images from community papers and the alternative press from the second half of the twentieth century, with a special focus on the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Papers presented in the exhibition include historic issues of Forward Times, Voice of Hope, Space City!, The Jewish Herald Voice, El Papel Chicano, El Sol De Houston, Houston Breakthrough, among others. It is worth a visit.

For more information, visit The Rag Blog post on the exhibit by Shane Patrick Boyle. The Rag Blog is edited by Thorne Dreyer.

From left: Michael Berryhill, Gabrielle Cosgriff, Tom Curtis, Thorne Dreyer. Photo by F. Carter Smith / The Rag Blog.

Special issue of Cite
Will focus on counterculture

In 1970, Charles Tapley’s architecture firm won a national award for convincing their client, Camille Waters, not to build anything on her site in the Texas Hill Country. The architects’ renderings portray a life camping out of a volkswagon. The upcoming issue of Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston recovers this and other 1960s and 70s sites of counterculture.

This issue of Cite, like many in its 28-year archive at citemag.org , mixes high design with down and dirty civic engagement.

Scheduled for a June release, the special issue covers experimental geodesic domes, the Moody Park riot, underground papers, the Love Street Light Circus, the 1977 march on an Anita Bryant performance that gave birth to Houston's vibrant GLBT organizations, and other topics. The photography draws from the Space City! archives. Gary Panter, East Texas-born illustrator and set designer of the Pee Wee’s Playhouse, is contributing the cover art.

-- Raj Mankad / The Rag Blog

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Underground in H-Town : A Rich History of Alternative Media

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On display at the Museum of Printing History: Cover of Space City! from January, 1970. Cover art by Kerry Fitzgerald (Kerry Awn).
Museum of Printing History:
Saluting Houston's alternative media

By shane patrick boyle / The Rag Blog / May 19, 2010

HOUSTON -- Houston has a problem, a memory problem. This is particularly true when it comes to the history of the city's underground and alternative culture. Underground in H-Town, an exhibit at Houston's Museum of Printing History, attempts to address this problem.

The exhibit, curated by the Museum of Printing History's Amanda Stevenson and Jo Collier of the Houston Public Library's Houston Metropolitan Research Center, explores the history of minority and alternative publications in Houston.

The Museum of Printing History, founded in 1979, is a lively Houston museum whose mission, in part, is “to promote, preserve, and share the knowledge of printed communication and art…” with, in the words of Texas Highways, a “collection of objects and artifacts devoted to the history, science, and art of printing.”

The show includes sections on Jewish, Asian, Latino, African American, LGBTQ, and feminist media as well as a display which showcases Space City!, a radical newspaper of the late 60s and early 70s (and it's spin-offs) and another which focuses on Public News, a popular alternative paper of the 80s and 90s, and a centerpiece comparing alternative and mainstream coverage rounds out the exhibit.

Anyone who thinks there is no alternative media in Houston may be surprised to learn that over 40 titles are represented and these are only scratching the surface of what is actually a rich and diverse history.

The longest running title included in the exhibit is the Jewish Herald Voice which was founded in 1908 and is still published today. The oldest issue displayed in the exhibit is a February 18, 1939, copy of the Houston Defender which is also believed to be the oldest physical copy in existence of the African American newspaper founded nine years earlier.

OutSmart (founded in 1994) is the youngest title represented while the most recent item in the exhibit is a 1997 issue of Public News.

One newspaper that is not from Houston is also included. The May 14, 1978, issue of Corpus Christi-based Tejas News finds a place in the exhibit for its extensive coverage of the Moody Park Riots of May 5 that year and is paired with other papers, including La Prensa which covered this story.

The 60s and 70s are the emphasis of the exhibit and a large part of this focus is Space City! (originally called Space City News). The collective-run paper was edited by a group including Thorne Dreyer, who previously was a founder of The Rag in Austin, which also had a substantial Houston presence. (Dreyer continues to publish The Rag Blog, an online reincarnation of The Rag.) Several issues are included as well as some internal pages including an editorial that recounts the paper's first year, including the name change and the bombing of their offices by the Ku Klux Klan.

Mockingbird, which split off from Space City!, is also included. An editorial from the first issue (April 1972) discusses what they perceived as failures in the collective process and their reasons for forming a separate paper. Ironically, there was also a split from Mockingbird, leading to the creation of a publication called Abraxas, which is also included in the exhibit.

An audio presentation of an oral history interview with Thorne Dreyer, which can be heard in the adjacent theater, compliments this section. The interview was originally recorded in 1976 by Dr. Louis Marchiafava of the Houston Metropolitan Research Center.

The opening reception was attended by a large contingent from Space City! and other veterans of the 60s-70’s Houston counterculture.

Out of the past: Former staffers of Houston underground paper Space City! and other luminaries from the period's counterculture reunite at opening reception for Underground in H-Town, April 8, 2010, at Museum of Printing History. From left: Cindy Soo, Bobby Ray Eakin, Ray Hill, Deborah Osborne, Thorne Dreyer (dark cap), Bruce Litvin (kneeling), Gary Chason (white cap), Sophia, George Banks, Jeffery Shero Nightbyrd, Michael Condray, Jim Ohmart (kneeling), John Wilson, and Eileen Hatcher. Not pictured: Russell Noland, Tom Curtis. Photo by Amanda Stevenson / The Rag Blog.

The section on gay and LGBTQ media presents pictures of the protests over a Houston visit by singer Anita Bryant who led the campaign against the gay rights ordinance in Florida and became a national symbol of anti-gay hysteria. Publications in this section date back to the mid 60s.

Albatross, the oldest known gay publication in Houston, began as a newsletter in 1965. But if some of the LGBTQ publications of yesterday look unfamiliar, some of the faces might look very familar including activist and radio personality Ray Hill on the cover of Montrose Voice, and Annise Parker (now mayor of Houston) on the cover of The Wand from 1990.

Several issues of Houston Breakthrough, a free feminist publication edited by Janice Blue and Gabrielle Cosgriff (now on the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle) which ran from 1976 to 1981, are also included in the exhibit. Unfortunately they are in what seems to be a catch-all section with the Houston Peace News and some labor publications. This may be a question of space or it may be that few examples of local feminist and labor publications have been archived.

Public News, the alternative news weekly of the 80s and 90s which began as a two sided photocopy (not displayed), closes out the exhibit. Not only are several issues presented, but the sign from the paper's last offices on West Alabama is also included. A 1997 issue looks back at Houston in the 60s.

The centerpiece of the exhibition features coverage of the shooting of black activist Carl Hampton, as it was handled by mainstream and alternative media outlets.
The highlight of the exhibition is the centerpiece which illustrates the need for alternative media to provide a counterpoint to the mainstream press. It shows how the same story was covered by alternative and mainstream media outlets. The display shows how the murder of Carl Hampton 40 years ago this July, was covered by the Houston Chronicle, The Houston Post, Space City!, the Voice of Hope, and the Forward Times. Hampton was a charismatic black activist who was shot by Houston police.

The most disappointing part of the exhibit, and this may be just a question of space, is that it stops with the 90s rather than presenting the history of alternative press as a phenomenon that continues today, and is also very thin on any examples after 1980.

Fortunately, there is some sense of a continuum established with the show's poster which is illustrated by Shelby Hohl of Free Press Houston, one of Houston’s most popular alternative papers established in the past decade.

Also, several newsracks at the end of the exhibit offer a look at current publications. To be sure, some of the publications in these racks are not actually alternative. One of those is the Houston Press, the corporate owned weekly that bought Public News, a purchase believed by many as designed to suppress it, is represented here.

Public News, Houston's major alternative publication from the 80s.
However, dig through and you will find that some of the publications in the exhibition, still being published today, are represented in these racks. And even though not all the publications in the racks are alternative, the racks themselves certainly are. None of them would be considered street legal under the terms of the Houston's newsrack ordinance.

Underground in H-Town runs through July 24 at the Museum of Printing History, 1324 W. Clay.

In conjunction with the exhibit, the Museum is presenting a Roundtable Discussion on Alternative Media in Houston on Thursday, May 20, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. The panel will be moderated by Michael Berryhill, a professor of journalism at the University of Houston and award-winning investigative journalist. Panelists include Gabrielle Cosgriff, Tom Curtis, and Space City!'s Dreyer, veterans of the alternative and mainstream media. (See details below.)

[shane Patrick boyle is the founder of Zine Fest Houston. Last year he had the privilege of working with Jo Collier to bring Thorne Dreyer and Sherwood Bishop to the Zine Fest for a Space City! 40 year reunion. The title "Underground in H-Town" came from a zine he was working on during that time which has not been released.]

Photo by Rob Block / Houston Indymedia.
All images not credited are courtesy of the Museum of Printing History.

Roundtable Discussion on Alternative Press in Houston

Museum of Printing History
1324 W. Clay
Houston, Texas
Thursday, May 20, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

The Museum of Printing History is pleased to host a Roundtable Discussion on Alternative Media in Houston. The panel will be moderated by Michael Berryhill, a professor of journalism at the University of Houston and award-winning investigative journalist. Panelists include Gabrielle Cosgriff, Tom Curtis, and Thorne Dreyer, three freelance journalists with an intimate knowledge of print media in Houston from the 1970s to the present, including the alternative and mainstream press. Topics that will be explored include the history of alternative media in Houston, as well as current and future trends.

This event is held in conjunction with Underground in H-Town, an exhibition that highlights the importance of minority and alternative publications in the construct of local history. Organized in partnership with the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Underground in H-Town presents original documents and images from community papers and the alternative press from the second half of the twentieth century, with a special focus on the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Publications represent the many diverse communities of Houston. Papers presented in the exhibition include historic issues of Forward Times, Voice of Hope, Space City!, The Jewish Herald Voice, El Papel Chicano, El Sol De Houston, Houston Breakthrough, among others.

Gabrielle Cosgriff was the editor for Houston Breakthrough, a free monthly feminist publication that was recognized locally and nationally in its 5-year existence, 1976 through 1981. Cosgriff moved on to editorial work with local Houston magazines and People Magazine. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle.

Tom Curtis is an award-winning investigative reporter, who has written since the 1970s for, among many others, the Houston Chronicle, Space City!, Fort Worth Press, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Dallas Times Herald, Texas Monthly, and Rolling Stone. Curtis co-founded Houston City Magazine in April 1978, and was a senior editor at Texas Monthly 1987-1990. A freelancer throughout most of the 1990s, Curtis now freelances from Galveston.

Thorne Dreyer was a pioneering underground journalist in the 1960s and 1970s, as founding editor of two of the nation's most important underground papers, The Rag in Austin and Space City! (originally Space City News) in Houston, and was a member of the editorial collective at Liberation News Service in New York. Dreyer now lives in Austin where he is a director of the New Journalism Project, edits The Rag Blog, an internet news magazine, and hosts a weekly radio show on KOOP-FM.

Volume 1, Number 1 of Space City News (later, Space City!). Cover art by Kerry Fitzgerald (Kerry Awn).
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UT's InCite : Documenting a Diverse Community

Patience and attention to detail go into producing a fine quilt. See story about Austin's Blackland Quilting Group, below. Photo by Priscilla Villarreal / InCite.
InCite into Austin:
Online publication kicks UT journalism up a notch

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / December 23, 2009

See 'Binding the community: Austin's Blackland Quilting Group,' by Patricia Villarreal, Below.

If you have had the misfortune to be exposed to University of Texas student journalism on a daily basis -- as I was during my 17 years at UT -- you probably learned to downsize your level of expectation. Day in, day out, Daily Texan editorials and Letters to the Editor -- the editors and the readers -- locked horns in spirited competition to achieve new depths of banality, and the university spends mega-bucks on a slick 48-page four-color magazine called burntORANGE in which to showcase student writers offering advice on "the best place to catch a nap on campus" or "how not to look like a freshman."

Is this what Walter Cronkite means when he says about UT: "What starts here changes the world?"

Therefore it is an unexpected surprise to find that UT students are indeed capable of producing thoughtful, mature, and probing reporting and then packaging it in a compelling and highly readable format. Students of Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte's Alternative Journalism (J349) class currently are putting the finishing touches on the second issue of InCite, an exceptional web publication researched, written, and produced by students.

Below the website's masthead is a short mission statement stating: "InCite seeks to provide another dimension to news by exploring the complexities of events. To do so, InCite draws across perspective and upon intellectual diversity for contextualization while anchored within independent thought."

The course syllabus further describes J349 as an "interdisciplinary survey course for graduate and undergraduate students" exploring "the journalistic, sociological and historical role of the alternative press." Students are challenged to bring to the publication of InCite the same kind of intellectual diversity which drives the truth-seeking traditions of The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, Mother Jones and other similar independent publications.

Obviously the concept of "intellectual diversity" is important here, and the work featured in the two issues of InCite so far produced indicates a maturity and depth of understanding that transcends various "diversities du jour" occupying so much discussion in academic and governmental circles these days.

In addition to The Rag Blog's featuring of Priscilla Villareal's extraordinary photo essay about a group of elderly East Austin quiltmakers, the current issue of InCite has Mary Tuma's well-researched and sensitively written report of the social effect of a digital inequality separating gender, race, and class demographics in Austin; a timely piece by Jazmine Ulloa on how credit card companies prey on students; Gregory Brandt's in-depth report on the May 2 Global Marijuana March in Austin; and DC Tedrow's gripping narrative of Iraq and Afghan veterans reliving the horrors of war.

Both issues of InCite can be found here.

Friendship and caring were part and parcel of the quilting process for this circle of friends. Photo by Priscilla Villarreal / InCite.

Binding the community:
Austin's Blackland Quilting Group

By Priscilla Villarreal

The eight women who spend their Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Blackland Neighborhood Center enter full of purpose. One flips on the CD player that produces the familiar tunes of gospel artists Kirk Franklin and Chester D.T. Baldwin. Up goes the large quilting frame to hold the coverlet they work on together. Another relaxing session begins.

The Center at 2005 Salina Street in East Austin serves a number of community purposes. Neighborhood residents turn there for food, transportation services, employment information and even entertainment such as bingo.

But the quilters -- Martha Coleman, Bessie Futrell, Willie Mercer, Carrie Henderson, Royce Pryor, Annie Watrous, Patsy Dearborn and Hazel Weathersby -- are steady Center participants, ranging in age from 62 to 104, who have outgrown the back room space where they meet. They crowd into the room already jammed with boxes of fans, stacks of chairs, and filing cabinets. A full bookcase clings to one wall. Located next to the food pantry, the room also stores surplus food. The women can barely gather around the frame which is supported by two carpenter horses.

To ease the crush, volunteers are renovating the Stewart House, a nearby dwelling that will serve as a center annex. The quilters expect to move into it later this year. Carrie Henderson, one of the younger women says they don't really want to go, but will if they must. She worried about handicap access to the "rescued" home. But Bo McCarver, organizer of the non-profit Blackland Neighborhood Group, said that the house will definitely be outfitted for use by the disabled. Neighborhood activites, he added, now need more space.

The women work steadily while workers stop by to chat or to tease.

"Oh is that the drunkards' path?" asks Sandra Taylor Harris, an administrative assistant at the Center, while she sneaks a peek at Henderson's sheet of patterns. "Yeah I know that pattern," she jokes. Harris likes to tease them saying that the reason their quilts are completed so quickly is because she comes in after they've left and sews for them -- like the shoemaker's elves in the classic Grimm Brothers' fairy tale.

She admires the quilters efforts. "You really have to have patience to do that, and these women have patience," she says.

Binding the community: Austin's Blackland Quilting Group at work (and play). Photo by Priscilla Villarreal.
At lunchtime, they share food from home. These women enjoy each other's company, never running out of conversation or jokes. They know each other well -- five are related either by blood or marriage.

Sometimes, concentration on the quilt brings periods of silence before they return to discussing current news, church events, family happenings, and even pop culture, like who was eliminated the night before from American Idol. When they begin to "roll" (folding the completed outer portions of the coverlet and working closer to the quilt’s middle ) laughter erupts if someone lets the frame fall.

These gatherings provide gratifying pastime and the comfort of community. Watrous, one of the newest members, says it's the best thing that has happened to her, because everyone is so congenial. "It's nice to have somewhere to go and to be around such pleasant people," she says. Watrous is one of two in the group who is not related to any of the other members, but that does not mean she is an outsider. She says she has made pretty good friends and they "treat her like a relative." Like Watrous, Weathersby says the other quilters have also "adopted" her into their family.

The ladies don’t sell their quilts, but give them to family members and old friends. Watrous gave one of the most recently completed works to a church friend.

The quilts also go to a select few organizations, like the George Washington Carver Museum, which once exhibited the ladies’ collection. The museum's biannual exhibit, "By Bits and Pieces," showcases African-American quilters. It displayed these women's quilts from October to December 2006. Bernadette Phifer, Carver Museum curator, contacted them and collected their patchworks. Faith Weaver, former exhibit coordinator for the museum, says they chose them because "they demonstrated the functionality, creativity, and the ability to serve to record family history that quilts were in the black community."

Weathersby, another newcomer to the group, says that quilts were used during the times of the Underground Railroad in coded ways that gave directions to those who fled. Henderson even made one on display at the museum that told the story of Railroad’s escape system.

Not only did the community enjoy seeing these coverlets, but Weaver believes the women got something else out of it. "It was an intimate celebration and self-appreciation of their work," she says.

The exhibit also brought some unwanted commercial attention. "After the exhibit ended, people came by the Center and had lists of requests to make quilts and would ask how much," says Pryor.

Bob Jones, the current exhibit coordinator for the Carver Museum, said they are thinking of displaying the ladies’ handiwork again next fall.

The women have set guidelines for quilt requests. The person who wants a quilt made must bring the top (pattern), batting (cotton filling), lining (bottom sheet of quilt), needles and thread. When that's done, the effort becomes one of community building. They invite the petitioner to stay to help make the quilt -- and then to agree to stay long enough to help others with theirs.

Five years ago, Center workers asked if they could display the quilts for Juneteenth. Since, they cheerfully drape their quilts around their workspaces.

Susie McDonald, Georgia Medlock, Rena Martin Leonard, and Henrietta Jackson were among the group’s organizers during the Civil Rights era. Martha Coleman, who turned 104 in July, is McDonald’s sister, and joined the group in 1971 after their mother passed away.

Once the Blackland Neighborhood Center opened in 1984, Pryor, Coleman, and two of her sisters joined the group. Henderson estimates that since 1971 they have steadily made two quilts per week, or almost 4,000 quilts total.

"Anyone is invited to come and sew with us," said Royce, "it just happened that it's the same ones that stick with us.”

Source / InCite / Volume I, Issue 2

Go here for photo gallery.

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Rogues and Centrists : How Media Frame the World

The symbolic uses of politics:
The Gipper and the Rogue

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / November 20, 2009

Moderate Republicans -- yes, they are not extinct, though most are in hiding -- scoff at Sarah Palin and wish she would go away.

...Reagan piously gave lip service to the right-wing social agenda while doing nothing to further it by legislation.

...The ‘Gipper’ talked tough about the Russians -- while doing more that any other president to foster détente.

...But it’s no coincidence the Eisenhower ‘50s and Reagan ‘80s were periods of unusual peace and prosperity.

Evan Thomas, 'Gone Rogue,' Newsweek, November 23, 2009.

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc.

Karl Marx, ‘Preface,’ The German Ideology

Insights from social science

A long time ago the eminent political scientist Murray Edelman wrote a book entitled The Symbolic Uses of Politics. In it he postulated that most people experience the political world not through concrete reality but through emotional symbols. For example, the classic way in which people relate to their political institutions is through the flag of their nation.

Americans viewing the flag see images of men in combat fighting for freedom or men and women standing in line waiting to vote for their preferred political candidates. A colorful cloth with stars and stripes gets transformed in our consciousness into a rich, glamorized history even when the emotive images are in direct contradiction with people’s lives.

In addition, Edelman suggests the ways in which the emotional symbols get embedded and reinforced in the consciousness of peoples by borrowing from anthropological writings on myth and ritual. Myths are networks of emotional symbols that collectively tell a story that explains “reality.” Rituals reinforce in behavior the mythology of public life. We need only reflect on the pledge to the flag that opens elementary and secondary school class sessions in rich and poor communities alike or regular meetings of AFL-CIO labor councils.

Edelman pointed out that emotional symbols (he called them “condensational”) provide the primary way people connect with the world beyond immediate experience. The extraordinary complexity of the modern world is reduced to a series of powerful symbols such as the threats of “international communism” or “terrorism.”

Media analyst Todd Gitlin, wrote about “media frames;” that is the ways in which media construct the symbols and myths that shape information about the world. Print media shapes what we read, who are regarded as authoritative spokespersons, and what visual images shape our thinking about countries, issues such as war and peace, trade, investment, and the global climate. Television emphasizes visual images rather than words. Whatever the media form, points of view are embedded in the words and images communicated.

Writers such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Robert McChesney accept implicitly Edelman’s counsel that people experience the world indirectly and usually in emotional form. They also assume, as does Gitlin, that what we read, see, and hear about the world is framed for us. They go further to suggest that what Marx called the “false conceptions about ourselves” in symbols, myths, rituals, and frames are usually the product of ruling class interests.

Enter Rogues and Centrists

The Newsweek article cited above was selected not because it was unique but rather because it was representative of ongoing and dominant media discourse. Sarah Palin, while popular with an undetermined but substantial segment of the U.S. population, is presented as an extremist. The article hastens to add that a similar collection of “Democrats can be just as rigidly partisan on the left.” The article suggests that these extremes represent big problems for the political parties in which they operate and most importantly this “polarization” is a threat to the well being of the United States itself.

The article then refers to the “two greatest postwar presidents,” Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. They were great in part because they presided over two periods, the '50s and the '80s, “of unusual peace and prosperity.” Reagan was the president who did the most to stimulate détente with the former Soviet Union.

In addition to this curious revisionism about “peace and prosperity,” the author claimed that while these two presidents were products of conservatism in their respective Republican parties, they ruled from the center.

To generalize from this extraordinary historical rendition, therefore, contemporary politicians must learn that “populism” from the left or right must be avoided if American society is to survive and thrive.

Further, the article says that the Eisenhower and Reagan years symbolize peace. The collapse of the former Soviet Union occurred because of the policies of the latter. And, despite an enormous array of data and human experiences to the contrary, the 50s and 80s were years of prosperity as well as peace. One can conclude from the description that history is myth, symbol, and ritual, and it is packaged and provided to us in media form as frames.

Perhaps the most potent assumption embedded in this mystification is the proposition that only centrist politics can work.

What role for the Rogues?

It is clear that the centrist agenda could not be defended on its own terms. It is an agenda that supports militarism, financial speculation, deindustrialization, and globalization. The byproducts of these processes are experienced directly by working people throughout the country as joblessness, declining real wages, inadequate access to health care, education, and transportation, and forms of pollution that can be seen from many people’s bedroom windows.

But if Americans can see “extremism” from the “left and right,” often shown on the screen as screaming protesters, then the centrist logic becomes more compelling even though people know that centrism means a weak public option in health care and Wall Streeters regulating themselves.

And which political extremist today can better promote the symbols, myths and centrist media frame than Sarah Palin. So while journalists and their bosses have nothing but scorn for her, she is trumpeted on every news and talk show on television.

The analysis above is not too surprising but what remains more difficult is figuring out a progressive agenda for recapturing the production of symbols and myths and establishing a space to provide more effectively alternative media frames. While alternative media and advocacy groups exist, the need to develop a national and global progressive media agenda still is required.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical, where this article also appears.]

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