Festival of Life

(What you're about to read is being run because, we think, it's just about as outrageous as its alternative. We've heard rumblings about going to San Diego [or Miami) for almost a year now and in that year we've been forced to consider just what such an action would mean.

As far as we can tell, demonstrations in San Deigo this summer would be to the 1968 demonstrations in Chicago just wbat Altamont was to Woodstock. You can't recreate an event once it's assumed mythic proportions and any attempt to do so is evidence of either a lack of imagination or even worse, a lack of thought about just what the original event meant.

'60s political strategies are not going to work in the politics of the ‘60s. Mass demonstrations — for all that they accomplished in the last decade — are precisely *60s politics.

The Festival of Life in Chicago was an idea whose time had come. It was the last great demonstration of the era; each and every one after that resulted in some kind of death, because the government bad decided that the best way to treat mass marches was militaristic ally.

On the other band, there will be demonstrations in San Diego and Miami. There should be; there are people in each of those places whose borne territory is being encroached upon by the political parties in question (and are they ever in question!). It would be the height of irresponsibility for Southern Californians and Floridians to ignore what is knocking, as it were, at their very doorsteps.

For the rest of the country a far different question is posed. The youth culture now has a situation where its constituency — or much more of it — is able to vote. This may not mean very much in the long run — voting Richard Nixon out of office, which is a practical necessity if the alternative institutions we have begun to establish are to survive, will still not change the face and structure of America. But the 18 year old vote, as has already been proven in Ann Arbor where two radical 22 year olds (one a woman) not sit on the City Council, can prove effective on a local and state level.

Going to San Diego/Miami is going to cause several things, unquestionably. We are obviously going to gamer some publicity from it — but it is highly unlikely that that publicity will be favorable, and it is also highly unlikely that the most rightwing candidates are not going to be able to capitalize on that negative publicity if only to divert attention from real issues, like the war, and The Depression.

Secondly, no matter how non-violently we approach San Diego or Miami, those cities will be armed to the teeth. We are going to provoke a war-like response and we are not going to be going to these demonstrations as an army most of us aren't even going to be armed. If massive demonstrations did occur in either place, chances are good that a bloodbath that would make Kent State look like a picnic might occur.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, energy taken to San Diego in August is energy diverted from regional and local elections and issues. And regionally and locally is where we can make our power as a new voting bloc most effectively felt.

No matter what we do, Richard Nixon is going to be renominated at the Republican convention. But it isn’t his renomination that we want to stop, really. It’s bis re-election. And stopping that is going to take grass-roots work.

The Democratic convention looks somewhat more hopeful. But George McGovern, who is unquestionably the most (even, the only) sympathetic candidate we have, is going to be harmed-not helped-by massive demonstrations in Miami.

Clearly, our best bet is to stay home, orgainzing in our own communities and states, making our power felt there as a political bloc, working for the most radical candidates available.

There is no way to do both. August will be a prime time for grass roots work towards electing candidates in the fall. This doesn’t mean glamorous work, and it doesn’t mean the kind of mass-media publicity a demonstration might.

But if we are going to opt for change through electoral politics this year — and as we said, we think that getting rid of Nixon is an essential if the youth culture is to survive — then demonstrations at either national convention will be counterproductive at best, suicidally self-destructive at worst.

As for Craig’s fantasy — well, let us know what you think.

— The Editors)

If you could materialize one “festival of life” anywhere you wanted to in this country, where would you place it?

If you answered Miami or San Diego, I’ll say one thing: you may have impeccable 1960’s style politics, but you sure got weird taste in places.

The reason that movements (for the time being that’s what I’m calling what used to be known as “the Movement”) “went” to Chicago (I say “went” because if, say, Three Dog Night ever arrived in a park and saw as few humans as actually were in Lincoln Park back in 196x, they’d think maybe they’d arrived in the wrong park was because Chicago was wired for video that week, and it was thought that some of that video energy could be ripped off and used to project the contrast between “our” Festival of Life and their Festival of Death. After it bacame obvious that permits were going to be denied, it was just a question of whom the TV audience was going to blame for putting on an uglier festival. Oh yes, the contradictions were exposed, the cost of the war was raised, the war was brought home — that must be why the new president’s first act was to withdraw all American forces from Southeast Asia, huh?

The fact is that “Chicago” razed as much consciousness as it raised (cf. instant karma) and that, if you think it’ll be important for you to be in San Diego or Miami this year, you’re either:

(a) a delegate;

(b) a candidate; or

(c) don’t understand how America is wired this year

Yoti a’s and b’s who are reading CREEM to try to psyche out what the movements are, uh, conspiring to do this year, shame on you! What are you paying your agents for, anyway? You c’s, let’s have a show of hands of how many of you can remember — fast!:

How many black people died (dead) in the “riots” that accompanied the Miami convention? Hmmmmmm?

Weird as the Miami convention was, the image of blacklash against the Republican incursion, which in fact made all “our” heroic ante-upping in Chicago look rather penny-ante, never came across did it?

My point is that, regardless of how well a city is wired, the networks got their paws on all the switches, and nothing anybody gets on gets on, unless there’s a percentage in it for the networks. The Chicago “riots” were sent out as part of the network feed because the convention itself was stone bore, but long-haried white kids running around bleeding picturesquely was still someting of a novelty. The Miami atrocities weren’t fed because the TV audience was bored with blacks in general and black riots in particular.

I submit that the bloom is off the rose of the movements as darlings of the media, and any scenarist for San Diego or Miami who presumes that we’d have the cameras on whatever we’d be doing there had better be prepared to explain why we can expect better coverage in 1972 than Miami’s black got in 196X. We’re all media niggers now, C’s.

Anybody who’s talking about San Diego or Miami is stuck in the time-warp of creating Sixties-esque media events. San Diego and Miami have significance this year only to the media and the a’s b’j and c’s. Everybody else would be happier watching a football game or boogying, and it is to this huge constituency, i.e. everybody else, that I’d prefer to address our powers of event-creation. And instead of attempting to create another Sixties-esque media event, I propose that we create a Seventies-ish reality-event.

Any remaining c’s who wonder how people will find out that such a reality-event took place are asked to ponder the fact that they will find out what took place by being there. Moreover, for the benefit of shut-ins (including quadraplegic Nam vets and Vietnamese kids in U.S. hospitals having their eyelids grafted back on) there will be media coverage of this reality event. The media-event conventions, the conclusions of which are already foregone to anybody who can add, at our reality-event something will actually occur!

The occurence will be as follows: We will have a good time.

Now, with all the bummers that the media suppose we’ve been pummelled by during our last media-aeon (i.e., three years) our having a good time (for a change) would be big news. Man bites dog, as every j-school grad knows.

Karmically speaking, we can’t have a good time unless we’re prepared to pay for it. But whom exactly do we pay? The only recipient Lean think of that makes any sense is — the people of Indochina.

I propose that, simultaneous with the San Diego convention, us peace creeps convene a national Festival of Life that specifically snubs San Diego both as a notorious naval death staging area, and as host to all those ponks on ITT-sponsored junkets. I further propose that us peace creeps invite the entire population of America to join us in our revels of atonement for the hatefulness we have visited on the American and Indochinese earth and its denizens. And I further further propose that we suggest that they will have a better time at our Festival of Life for Indochina than sitting like zomboids in front of their television sets flipping the dial hoping for an epiphanous penetration of a half-hour of All in the Family through the fascinating spectacle of some acromegalic hag calling the roll of the states for the n-teenth time.

The proposal I am furthering will make The Concert for Bangla Desh (two live music shows and a three-record set) which will raise $15 million for Bengali relief ($5 an album, estimated 3,000,000 albums) look like passing the hat at the Cafe Bizarre in 1957. If the youth of America is prepared to pony up $15 million for a people our air force has never dropped a spitball on, how much is it prepared to cough up for a people our boys have been systematically mashing to a bloody pulp for (how many years is it now? seven? 11? 18? 26?)????

Certainly $150 million for openers, right? Which is not a bad down-payment on the reparations we owe that land, now that, despite our persistence in fighting it, it is recognized at even the highest honky levels that we’ve lost this war. I mean, we were the first to say the war was a ssfurgg of bat mung against the honor of this nation and the humanity of the Indochinese people; we were the first to say hell no we won’t go; we were the first to say yoo hoo snooky don’t look now but you lost; arid now we must be the first to organize the payment of reparations to the righteous victors.

Getting back to the $15 million for Bangla Desh: that was $15 million in medical supplies and food, with only George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Leon Russell and Eric Clapton as draw, Bob Dylan as deus ex Fourth Street and Billy Preston as proof that that’s the way God planned it; and in only one city. And that was $15 million with only rock and roll. I propose that for the Festival of Life for Indochina, we can get everyone. I mean, you know, everyone: James Taylor, Grand Funk Railroad, the Rolling Stones, I could go on but the point I’m making is that we’re not talking about rock and revolution here in Disney World, we’re talking about MONEY — a lot more money than you and I are capable of imagining, for Indo-fucking-china — and that s rock and revolution for sure. There isn’t a talent operating in the marketplace of the young that would dare not to contribute to this Festival of Life for Indochina — if indeed there was one that wouldn’t be anxious to. And I’m not just talking about rock artists. Fine artists, painters and sculptors will spring for this in a trice, as they have for lesser stakes when the chips were down (i.e., art auctions for Sundance magazine, Earth People’s Park, etc.).

Oh, yes, rock shows. Not concerts — dances, only dances, because we’ve got a lot of stiffness to work out of our joints and I distrust any music that doesn’t get our asses in gear.

Not one monster show in New York, but, say, five monster shows in strategically located places, each “Indochina Medicine Show” rotating through all five places, five chartered plane loads of performers and crew, so that each place would be host to the five heaviest consecutive bills in entertainment history: everyone from David Cassidy to the Rolling Stones, Bobby Sherman and the Jackson Five to Bob Dylan and Black Sabbath. Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin — Grand Funk, The Osmonds — Paul McCartney & Wings, John Lennon with Yoko and Elephant’s Memory.

The other strategic Indochina Medicine Show locations could include: Austin, Texas; Monterey, Ca.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; New Orleans, La.; Boulder, Colorado.

Shows at each location would be produced by the heaviest professional concert promoters in the country — the Bill Grahams, Sid Bernsteins, Concerts Wests, etc. The producers remit the entire proceeds minus their own and the performers’ out of pocket expenses, to an Indo-china Reparations Fund. Liasion with promoters would be made by regional committees of peace-lovers who would get people to donate their labor as ushers, ticket sellers, arrange for security, medical presence, etc.

A national committee of peace-lovers would arrange for the sale of closed-circuit television, motion picture, and record rights to the highest bidders, for a waiver by ASCAP and BMI of all songwriters’ royalties, and for a one-time waiver of the sort of contractual commitments that made it necessary for Capitol to pay 25c per Bangla Desh album to Columbia Records.

(Each of the networks owns a huge record company. If each of these three companies got a piece of the “Indochina Medicine Show” action, what conceivable inducement would those networks need in order to tear themselves away, every . . . so .. . often .. . from the endlessly suspenseful Republican National Convention and do a few sidebars on the Festival of Life for Indochina? You don’t suppose that the networks would be prescient enough to see that if they diverted just a teenie-weenie bit of the public’s attention away from the spine-tingling deliberations of the Elephantine party and did a little color on those hippies, yippies and anti-war demonstrators, they might stand to pull down upon themselves a tidy windfall of unadulterated moolah? . . . No, I guess no network executive could ever be that crass.)

What I’m suggesting, in fact, is that we need — and I mean we, us, you and me have need of, biological and spiritual necessity — a Festival of Life for Indochina not only in five strategic locations but in yet other, shall we say, tactical locations:

Continued on page 74.

Continued from page 45.

In San Francisco, a Festival of Life, in commemoration of the Human Be-in and the Haight-Ashbury; in Chicago, a Festival of Life, in commemoration of the police riots of 196X; in Memphis, a Festival of Life, in commemoration of the death of Martin Luther King; in Los Angeles a Festival of Life in commemoration of the death of Robert Kennedy; at Max Yasgur’s farm and at Altamont, a Festival of Life; at Columbia University, at Harvard _&nd at Cal Berkeley, San Jose State, San Francisco State, Isla Vista, and at Kent State, Festivals of Life; in Toronto and Vancouver, Festivals of Life, in commemoration of the amnesty our exiles may yet grant us; at Wounded Knee, S.D., a Festival of Life in memory of the Dance-Looking-At-the-Sun.

You get the picture; I do, anyway. Whew!

For each place, a different and peculiar Festival of Life must be invented, must be allowed to invent itself, but I believe most would include music, singing, dancing, shouting, theatre, films,, eating, sleeping, playing, fucking, praying, crying. There would be people selling candles and people giving away candles and vou could take your choice. Perhaps a lOc-a-kiss boot*, vith the proceeds to reparations for Indochina. Weird!

There would be people taking up collections and making macrame and delivering babies and shouldering vans out of the mud and bum-tripping and being asked stupid questions by pitiable reporters and building booths and handing out leaflets and twirling cotton candy and Scruggs-picking banjos and looking for their mommies and taking pictures of each other with Nikon F’S and dealing dope and crushing beer cans and picking up garbage and chanting the names of the living and the dead and raising altars and digging graves and writing poetry and counting money and waiting in line to take a shit and arguing with cops and breaking up fights and .. . well, I guess in a Festival of Life just about everything that happens in life happens, only in ... a festive way.

We owe those slants something, don’t we? I mean, we tried real hard but it didn’t work, did it? Sending them money is a pretty paltry excuse for the genuine article of surcease, isn’t it? Radical guilt is to liberal guilt as radical is to liberal.

Remember how much trouble rock festival promoters had keeping gate-crashers away? From where could their minions have summoned the moral authority to exclude someone just because he had no money? I pity anyone who tries to crash the gate of a Festival of Life — you don’t have $5 to pay for reparations to Indochina? Ninety-one months of bombing and you haven’t been able to set aside 5c and 4.9 mills a month? You’re down to your last $5 in the whole world and if you don’t crash this festival now you will be absolutely destitute?

Remarkable, in that there isn’t a refugee in Vietnam who is absolutely destitute . .. Let’s say your sister was being raped, would you donate $5 to reparations for Indochina, if that would stop the rapist? Your mother? Your wife? No? Okay — you can go in free, but Ah sure hope your karma’s got good shocks!

Every penny that could be squeezed out of the entire constituency of the peace movements, including those who relate to them only through the music they have helped to inspire, paid into an Indochina Reparation Fund, administered by a board of directors whom we can imagine if we just close our eyes for a moment together . .. there. The money to be paid out in due course to international and national relief organizations and governments in Indochina, not a cent to any government that has not sprung out of the will of the majority, to any government that claims to rule half a country. Reparations, ‘cause we, the United States of America, and the peace movements, lost. We didn’t raise the cost of the war high enough, so now we have to begin the hard play of raising the cost of peace. We didn’t up the ante high enough, so now we have to ante up $150 million.

I can anticipate a panoply of objections to the scam I’ve outlined — the same rancid cannibalistic panoply of objections that has mired our movements worse than the mastodons in the La Brea tar pits. They, too, thought they had won out over the dinosaurs.

Some people will say the level of political commitment demanded won’t be high enough. It won’t. Only the price demanded to assuage our actual radical guilt will be high enough.

Some people will say the music business people will find some way to take their cut, just as they did on The Concert for Bangla Desk. They will. We’ll simply have to create something so big that however much they rip off, there’ll be so much left for our purposes that we won’t care.

Some people will say, it’s too apolitical, it doesn’t relate sufficiently to the conventions. You’re right. It doesn’t. It will show the convention-al people precisely how many people don’t relate to them, and precisely what it is that they don’t relate to them over: the seemingly indefinite perpetuation of the war in Indochina. This will put an end to the aerosal of rat-vomit the media are schmutzing the airwaves-with, that for some reason the war in Southeast Asia won’t be an issue in November.

If that’s too apolitical, then I confess I don’t understand why there should be free elections in Vietnam, because they’re bound to be apolitical too because they’d be just another set of elections in which the fate of the people of Vietnam hangs in the balance.

Some people will say, the whole thing sounds too complex, it’s an outasite idea and all, but we’d just never be able to get it all together.

Well, as Lord Buckley used to say, if you get to it, and you can’t do it, then there you jolly well are, aren’t you?

If we can’t get our shit together for five days in August, 1972 to, as John Sinclair once said, get out and dance without stepping on too many heads, and create a scene that’s more sexy and meaningful and communicative than the Republican National Convention, how in God’s Name do we presume to somday run this entire nation of interlopers on the continent of North America.

I’ll say this much — during quote San Diego unquote, I’m going to be a celebrant at a Festival of Life somewhere on this depraved globe. If it ain’t here, and if I don’t see a hell of a lot of my friends and neighbors humping the heat-rippled air in their full-tilt-boogie tee-shirts and exchanging custard-sucking grins, I’m cashing in my dinosaur chips and going for the price on the dinosaurs.