Other Scenes

by

Fifth Estate # 54, May 16-31, 1968

What RFK’s election would prove is that America is further ahead in its cheerfully cynical acceptance of corruption and back-room deals than had been feared…

First winner of the Other Scenes Yellow Journalism Award (“the underground Pulitzer”) is the New York Free Press for its outrageously creative publication of the names, addresses and telephone numbers of local draft board members. Citation of the OSYJ award reads: “In a time when newspapers prefer to follow rather than lead, when the apparent aim is to mollify the advertisers rather than rock the boat, and when most newspapers put the maintenance of the status quo ahead of the best interests of the readers’, the New York Free Press reminds us that traditionally the best newspapers have always been troublemakers. May their example be widely copied”…

One of the founders of the NYC’s Free University, Joseph Berke, tells the story of its early days in the new London magazine Fire ($1.50 from 4 St. George’s Terrace, N. W. L.) which he now edits…

Spanish-speaking readers might enjoy Argentina’s avant gard mag, Eco Contemporaneo (50 cents from C. Correo Central 1933, Buenos Aires, Argentina…

Seal off an island stocked with men and women of different races; give them a bonus when they intermarry and another bonus for production of dark-skinned children. The result? Beige power. Or so says Paul Jacobs who offers it as his solution to racial conflict…

England’s new five-penny postage stamp is supposed to get a letter there faster than the concurrently existing four-penny stamp but as Peace News suggests—if everybody refused to buy the new stamp all letters would continue to get there in the same time…

And John Delin, science writer London’s Sunday Telegraph, has an idea for restoring consumer power: bring back haggling. The printed price on something, he says, has come to “assure the sanctity of the Holy Writ” and if people started to question questions (e specially at the supermarket checkout counter) the buyer would regain the initiative. He gives several justifications: the fact that the same item costs less in different parts of the town and that some shopkeepers would prefer to sell an item more cheaply than keep it unsold on the shelves.

One of the first priorities of a modern, egalitarian society should be the abolition of all schools of archaeology and the transfer of their funds to the world’s unhoused peoples. What sense does it make to keep pouring millions of dollars into digging up the remains of ancient civilizations when today’s human beings are dying of starvation? Six countries, it was recently announced, will finance an immense archaeological project in Greece to recover “important remains” in an area scheduled for burial under a big dam. So let them bury it. Who needs any more museum basements filled with dirty pieces of broken pottery even if it is thousands of years old?

Draft card burnerHottest underground poster today is a picture of a Detroiter Bill Greenshields burning his draft card with FUCK THE DRAFT printed underneath it. Steve Kuromiya, a former student of Pennsylvania University, got busted by U.S. postal officials for trying to mail 1,000 copies of the poster by third-class mail. (For $2 he’ll send one first-class mail: Dirty Linen Corp. GPO Box 2791, New York 10001)…

GAVIN & GARRISON IN ’68 bumper stickers cost 50 cents from Bill Shea, Box 637, Woodacre, Calif. 94973…

Hugh Hefner sent memos to all Playboy execs with the word that he was dropping out (of his responsibilities) and to do their own thing. The consequent power struggle has everybody in the Chicago headquarters dizzy with excitement…

What will presumably be the final word on the fictitious Victorian detective has just been published in England: a two-volume, $20 Annotated Sherlock Holmes, with commentaries, deductions, comic strips and other spinoff works inspired by Conan Doyle’s original…

GIs in Britain have been stealing antiques and shipping them back to the States via transport planes from U.S. bases over there…

In a lengthy put-down of Eye magazine (“Hearst could see that something is happening and it better know what it is. Or fake it”) a writer in SF’s Express-Times accuses the whole mag of being phony – “phony letters, phony classifieds, pen names for writers like Jack Newfield who wants to keep his association with the thing inside the bank.”

Top