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Poet in Residence
Entry 7 of 20 | show all | print this entry |
(Cannabis College > 420 Café > The Dolphins > Daniel Stalpertstraat 74, Amsterdam, October 22-23, 2006)-This has been a trying week for the itinerant bard, but everything looks a lot better at the end than it did at the beginning-everything except the resumption of my little cash flow, which is still a week or so off. There was going to be some work today, interviewing the New York Dolls in London for a German film project, but the session was nixed and I'm still stone broke.
For those who are fairly new to my Travelogue list, I should explain quickly that I am presently following a course in life and work with no visible means of support, living by my wits and getting by with the help of my friends to supplement what pitiful income I derive from my work as a poet, underground journalist and program producer.
There are never really any fat days, but some are much thinner than others, and it's pretty fucking thin right now. There's some money coming in after the first of the month, and then some work in Italy and Amsterdam in November, but until then I'm walking on very thin ice financially and I need help bad.
I've been very fortunate since I left Holland for America last June 22nd. I started working immediately, had enough money to live on every day, came back with about $1500 and, even though it was reduced by 30% in the exchange for the almighty Euro to just over $1000, I managed to stretch it out until the beginning of last week. Now I'm back to where I was in the first 3 weeks of June, pinching every Euro and praying for a 20 note or two.
My living expenses have been reduced about as far as they can go-especially since I finally kicked cigarettes on my birthday 3 weeks ago-but it doesn't really matter how small one's budget is when there's nothing coming in. And that's when I have to turn to my friends for help.
Golden Bard Travel Fund
This is the tricky part, because I know a lot of my friends are scuffling just as hard as I am to keep things together and need some help of their own just about as badly. They couldn't send me $20 if they had to, and from their correspondence I can tell that no one feels worse about it than they do.
But I am also blessed with friends who are able to help out from time to time and seem to be glad to know when there are times they can be of especial service. And this, dear friends, is one of them, for sure. So if you're willing and able to make a contribution to what I call (after Ed Sanders) the Golden Bard Travel Fund, it can be done via the PayPal donation setup at this site. I need to raise $400-500 (280-250 Euros) to get through the next two weeks and your donations in any part of that will help.
It might seem in poor taste to stick up one's friends for funds to live on, but I'm a non-profit arts institution in my own right and you can think of this as like contributing to the Fall Fund Drive of your favorite radio station. WWOZ in post-Katrina New Orleans just raised $250,000 in its Fall Fund Drive, for which they deserve the heartiest congratulations, but if I could raise $500 right now I'd be overjoyed.
Patronage by our friends, readers and listeners is increasingly important in today's grim world where public art has about the value of a fart, to coin a phrase, and the smellier and more offensive it is, the more it's hated by the populace. Contributors to the Golden Bard Travel Fund will join my friends and patrons here in Amsterdam in supporting this particular artist's activities:
· The fine poet Andrew Jones & and his brilliant wife Rita, who took me in at their sumptuous pad above the Royal Gallery on the Koenigstraat and treated me like a visiting king for my first month back in the Dam
· James Millard, the Englishman from Detroit affectionately known as Mr. Pure, who responded to my need for lodgings for another two months by renting us an apartment in the Pijp section of town. Using very creative thinking in such a crisis, James determined that he would spend as much on hotel rooms during his two planned visits to Amsterdam during that period as it would cost to rent an apartment where he could stay while in town and I could remain until time to go back to the States in mid-December. What a brilliant idea! Thanks, James, and I'll see you on the 6th November. Adam Brook will be in around the 13th and he can stay there too.
· Allan Leiberman of the Get Lucky Hotel on the Kaisersgracht, who hooked me up with the people with the apartment in the Pijp. Allen put me up for three months last fall in a tiny but much appreciated room at the Get Lucky and now he's come through again in a big way. Thanks, Allan!
· My man Sidney from the Hempshopper on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgherwal, who came over and picked up all my accumulated stuff at Andrew & Rita's and drove us down to the Pijp in his tiny vehicle and even carried the heavy shit up the stairs for me. Sidney will be producing his annual Grass-Ma-Tazz Ball during the Cannabis Cup on the evening of Tuesday, November 21st.
· Mary Jo & Eric of Eat at Jo's, the very popular dining establishment in the Milkweg building (enter from the Marnixstraat), who have given me my second Poet in Residence posting here in Amsterdam. The benefit to the starving poet is that time-tested remedy for what ails one, the FREE MEAL, two or three times a week in this case. The great Mary Jo even made and packed me up some sandwiches and quiches to eat at home in this time of need.
· The friendly coffeeshops of Amsterdam where I drink my coffee, smoke my joints, read my newspapers, do my crossword puzzles and get my daily work done: My home base, the 420 Café, that has the exceptional good taste to treat me to my (non-alcoholic) drinks on the house; my sponsor, The Dolphins, with its consistently strong wireless internet connection; the Rock-It, our hang on the Nieuwmarkt; the Sensi Museum Coffeeshop, at the very junction of the Red Light District and the Green Light District; Amnesia, birthplace of Radio Free Amsterdam; and the Cannabis College, not a coffeeshop but an information center, legitimized grow spot (the only one in Holland) and wireless point, where I serve voluntarily as an adjunct professor and director of the poetry program.
Speaking of friends and patrons, my beloved comrade Michael Simmons has just written his introduction to the new edition of Guitar Army that's coming out next spring from Feral House Press. For the past 10 years Munz has been my host, guitarist, press agent, social maven and fearless comrade when I'm in Los Angeles, and he knows so much about me from me sleeping on his couch that I asked him to introduce my book and help me edit it down a little bit. I was so proud of what he said about me that I asked him if I could share it with you here, and he said yeah. So here it is:
JOHN SINCLAIR IS FREE
By Michael Simmons
"John Sinclair is a huge lover with masses of curly black hair flowing all over his head and shoulders. John is a mountain of a man. He can fuck twenty times a day and fight like a bear. He and his White Panther brothers and sisters from Ann Arbor, Michigan, are the most alive force in the whole Midwest. They turn on thousands of kids each week to their own beauty and build them into warriors and artists of the new Nation. For this John Sinclair was entrapped into giving two joints of grass to two undercover Pigs. For this some bald-headed judge named Columbo sentenced John Sinclair to nine-and-a-half to ten years in the penitentiary at Jackson, Michigan."
-Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation, 1969
"It ain't fair/John Sinclair/In the stir for breathin' air."
-John Lennon, "John Sinclair", 1971
In 1969, John Sinclair began serving a sentence of a decade in prison for giving a nark two joints. TEN FOR TWO. Sinclair had become a threat to the ruling class because he was exhorting young people to reject the system that had murdered, enslaved and colonized tens of millions of non-caucasians. He openly called for Revolution to fight greed and bosses and squares. He publicly dreamed of a Utopia where, after the act of profiting from the blood and sweat of others was relegated to the status of antiquated servitude, the human race would evolve beyond the hamster wheel of WORK, KILL, DIE.
Sinclair championed ROCK & ROLL, DOPE AND FUCKING IN THE STREETS. He insisted it was within our power to create a life that celebrated freedom by means of TOTAL ASSAULT ON THE CULTURE. For this, The Man took his freedom away.
"FREE JOHN SINCLAIR!" we screamed in the streets. Abbie screamed it onstage at Woodstock and Pete Townshend of the Who, unaware of who he was or why he was there, booted Abs off the stage. Years later, Pete said he thought Abbie was correct in reminding the hordes that one of ours was rotting in prison.
I was a teenager in 1969 and was already a feral Yippie wombat kicking over NYPD sawhorses at demos to end the war in Vietnam. Surrounded by a society that bred young people for the human being lawnmower of war to support the economy of profit, millions of us were inspired by visionary hipsters like Sinclair and chose to revolt.
Nobody ever walked on the moon until we sent a human there to do it in 1969. Just because we don't all live in space, doesn't mean that the Space Program was foolhardy "idealism." To dig that era is to dig that it was a time WHEN HUMANS FIRST WALKED THE MOON. Everything was possible! Fuck the rules! DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE!
But if you desire to walk on the moon, first you gotta get a spaceship.
John Sinclair was a poet who had courage, vision and verve. Among his accomplishments was the co-founding of an Artists Collective (Detroit Artists Workshop); then a Commune (Trans-Love Energies) in Detroit and later Ann Arbor, Michigan; a Revolutionary Political Party (The White Panthers); and ultimately a working Political Party (Rainbow People's Party); the latter in a far-reaching attempt to empower lowly hippies and people of color to work within the system and affect democratic electoral change. He managed Rock & Roll Bands (MC5, The Up, The Rockets, Mitch Ryder & Detroit) and wrote for Underground Newspapers (Fifth Estate, The Sun, The Argus, East Village Other, San Francisco Oracle). He didn't merely mouth slogans - he did the work.
The Beatles had exposed us to the idea of the rock band as a model for family. If you've seen their second film Help! you'll recall the Fab Four's mythical co-living quarters. Myth is important because it allows us to dream beyond the confines of enforced reality and see the possibilities. Sinclair dug. The MC5 - a band that's finally achieved the respect they deserve after 35 years - really did live communally (unlike the Beatles) with their sisters and brothers in Trans-Love Energies. The MC5 was Trans-Love was White Panther was Guitar Army.
Not only did John accomplish all of the above, he wrote the manual: Guitar Army.
Sinclair was (and remains) a prodigious scribe. Astonishing ideas and poesy flow from the man on a daily basis. Sinclair had a Unified Field Theory of Freakdom. Guitar Army is the result of approximately eight years of John's unique synthesis of Black Culture, the improvisation and spontaneity of Jazz, Marxism (Karl and Mao, as well as Groucho, Chico, and Harpo), the Beat Generation, the Total Energy of Rock & Roll, sundry influences such as scribes Charles Olson ("A Foot Is To Kick With"), William S. Burroughs, Ed Sanders and Amiri Baraka, and John's perspective of Prison as Political Prisoner, mad-to-talk fellow freaks (particularly Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies), and the pervasive psychic & spiritual obliteration of psychedelics. OBLITO IN TOTO.
The very phrase Guitar Army describes the same phenomenon Abbie dubbed Woodstock Nation. We not only had our own culture - music, books, art (including comics and posters), film and video, press, radio - but we had our own look, our own language, and we organized communally. It's difficult to fully relate to contemporary youth how young hippies would trust each other purely on sight. I recall sitting at the Port Authority Bus Terminal/NYC in 1971 and befriending a fellow freak. I asked him to watch my guitar while I took a leak. I knew both he and my Fender Telecaster would still be there when I returned. They were.
In its day, Guitar Army fit into our cloth school backpacks with our stash (10 to 20 bucks a lid!), vinyl copies of Exile On Main Street, Kick Out The Jams, and A Love Supreme, and paperback editions of Revolution For The Hell Of It, Soul On Ice and The Communist Manifesto. Sometimes we'd remember to pack our schoolbooks as well. Those were different times than young people have experienced since the mid-1970s or so. Shitloads of us kids thought we were in the midst of The Revolution. Not some "brought to you by Hot Topic" fantasy, but the real deal: an irreversible planetary transformation that would bring Peace, Justice, Art, Love and Fun for the rest of eternity.
We were wrong, but one has to recall the circumstances. In our lifetimes, we'd witnessed the end of legal racial segregation in our own country. We stood up to the government and demanded that they stop slaughtering Southeast Asians. While they didn't acquiesce quickly or easily, we forced their hand and even Richard Nixon proclaimed himself a "Peace Candidate." We proclaimed our consciousness Our Fucking Business - off-limits to our parents, teachers, cops and politicians. In this spirit and on certain plants & chemicals, we collectively traveled through space and time and were awed by the limitlessness of everything.
We, too, could walk on the moon.
Again, we were wrong, so shoot us (which the authorities did at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970, killing six). The biggest limitation turned out to be ourselves. It was too easy for those of us from white, privileged backgrounds - that is to say, most of us - to hang a right on easy street and become our parents. John's thesis of YOUTH AS A CLASS was brilliant but illusory. However, his theory that CYBERNETICS WILL LIBERATE was prescient and is still being played out. The true believers amongst us kept The Dream lit in the underground through the remaining 1970s, up through today. "It ain't over till it's over," said Yogi Berra, a smarter man than neo-conservative Frances Fukuyama, who proclaimed THE END OF HISTORY before September 11, 2001.
One of the self-defeating factors amongst post-hippie bohemian movements was the rise of the too-hip. The jaded and ironic and sarcastic and smug and selfish attitude that all that '60s stuff was yesterday's papers and there was no point in challenging anything, much less creating a Revolution. The fait acompli of this defeatist snobbery is that Evil Incarnate is currently in power.
It's more urgent than ever that we fight back, as Malcolm X speechified over 40 years ago, by any means necessary. Hopefully, we'll be more savvy this time. Our analysis needs to be more realistic. Just as importantly, we must never, ever surrender. But Guitar Army is not about realism per se. It's about THE SINGULAR VALUE OF IDEALISM. We dream of a man walking on the moon, and then we walk.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono joined many rockers, jazz daddies, poets and radicals and played the historic John Sinclair Freedom Rally on Friday, December 10, 1971. Lennon sang a song he'd written for the event called "John Sinclair." The following Monday the Michigan Supreme Court ordered Sinclair released from prison on appeal bond and ruled in favor of John's appeal in March of 1972.
Certainly the Beatle's help was immeasurable, but it was Sinclair's staunch legal challenges and public support that encouraged the Michigan State Legislature to change the marijuana laws one day BEFORE the concert. Sinclair presented the facts that: "1) marijuana is not a narcotic, 2) marijuana was improperly and without foundation classified as a narcotic absent due process of law and 3) 10 years for possession of marijuana is cruel and unusual punishment no matter the amount possessed but particularly with respect to two joints." The legislature bought the arguments, reclassified cannabis from a narcotic to a controlled substance, and reduced the penalty for possession from a 10-year maximum to one year (with a possible 90-day misdemeanor charge for "simple possession") and the penalty for sales or dispensing from a 20-year mandatory minimum and maximum of life to four years maximum. It was a stunning victory thanks to Sinclair's perseverance.
Ultimately John Sinclair is a classic American hero who stood up for what he believed in. He insisted on practicing democracy and that's why so much trouble befell him. Thanks to him, marijuana decriminalization subsequently swept the nation like a prairie fire until a senile actor was elected President in 1980, the same year John Lennon was killed. Time thereafter proceeded to move backwards.
After serving two-and-a-half years of the 10-year sentence, Sinclair thereafter proceeded to live freely. He organized arts and music festivals. He wrote poetry and performed it live with musicians. He became a revered disc jockey and musicologist. He traveled from Michigan to New Orleans to Amsterdam, where he spends much of his time today. Most importantly, John Sinclair is free and he wants you to know that you are too.
-Los Angeles
October 23, 2006
[Introduction to the 2nd edition of Guitar Army to be published by Feral House on April 20, 2007]
John Sinclair Radio Show #108
The Dolphins, Amsterdam
Saturday, October 14, 2006 @ 11:30 pm - 12:40 am [20-0636]
The original cast of the John Sinclair Radio Show-producer/engineer Henk Botwinik, Executive Producer Larery Hayden and your host-was reunited at last on a Saturday night in mid-October at The Dolphins coffeeshop, and we celebrated with a program of terrific music, most of it from New Orleans, by Rockin' Jake, Cyril Neville, Ivan Neville, Walter "Wolfman" Washington, Rockie Charles, Guitar Slim Jr., Ironing Board Sam, Little Freddie King, Coco Robicheaux, Shannon McNally, Bobby Charles, and honorary Crescent City citizen Bo Diddley.
Listen to the John Sinclair Show #108 (.mp3)
Playlist 108
[01] Rockin' Jake: It's All Good
[02] Intro, Opening Tokes & Comments by John Sinclair with Henk Botwinik & Larry Hayden
[03] Cyril Neville: This Is My Country
[04] Ivan Neville: Fortunate Son
[05] Walter "Wolfman" Washington: Sure Enough It's You
[06] Sinclair Comments #2
[07] Rockie Charles: I Need Your Love So Bad I'm About to Lose My Mind
[08] Guitar Slim Jr.: Well I Done Got Over
[09] Ironing Board Sam: Chillin' Like an Ice Cube
[10] Little Freddie King: Bus Station Blues
[11] Sinclair Comments #3
[12] Coco Robicheaux: Hoodoo Party
[13] Shannon McNally: Indian Giver Bible
[14] Bobby Charles: Put Your Arms Around Me Honey
[15] Comments #4 & Outro
[16] Bobby Charles: Later Alligator
[17] Bo Diddley: Diddley Daddy
Hosted by John Sinclair for Radio Free Amsterdam
Produced, Engineered , Mastered & Posted by Henk Botwinik
Executive Producer: Larry Hayden
Special thanks to Radouane & the staff of The Dolphins
Podcast October 16, 2006
© 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
When I was in my home town of Davison, Michigan last August I was interviewed at length by a young man who explained that he was working on a biography of my homeboy, the great filmmaker and gadfly-and fellow native of Davison-Michael Moore.
When we finished I asked his name again and it turned out I'd been talking to the veteran progressive journalist Roger Rapoport, now a resident of Muskegon, Michigan. The other day Adam Brook sent me Roger's story of our conversation, published in the Berkeley Daily Planet on Friday, 20 October 2006:
ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE GRASS A CHANCE
By Roger Rapoport
One film that did not make it on the fall film festival circuit this year is 20 TO LIFE: The Life and Times of John Sinclair. A documentary with plenty of smoke that mirrors the protest movement, it's the story of the man who jump started John Lennon's political career, John Sinclair.
One of the problems with promoting his new movie is "a scene near the end where people in Amsterdam are laughing and smoking one ounce joints. This isn't what they are looking for. They like films about people who are f.....up. They don't want people who are unrepentant. I don't think the movie will be a success. The grandfather of recreational drugs is not what they are looking for today."
A father figure in the '60s underground press movement, founder of the Detroit Artists Workshop, the Rainbow People's Party and the White Panther Party, he also managed rock groups like the MC-5 and led the movement to legalize marijuana. Sinclair received a 9 1/2 to 10 sentence in 1969 for giving two joints to an undercover agent.
John Lennon, who had also been set up on a marijuana bust in England, agreed to headline the Free John Now Rally that packed Ann Arbor's Crisler arena with a crowd of 15,000 in December 1971. His song (It Ain't Fair) "John Sinclair" was the highlight of a knockout show that included Stevie Wonder, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Jerry Rubin and Bob Seger.
Among the rock critics on hand were a matched pair of FBI agents who wrote in a confidential memo to J. Edgar Hoover that Yoko Ono "can't even remain on key." They suggested that the song "probably will become a million seller... but it is lacking Lennon's usual standards."
Apparently this view was not shared on the Michigan Supreme Court bench in Lansing. Three days after Sinclair's super rally, the justices ordered his release on appeal appeal and, three months later, reversed his conviction and struck down the state's marijuana laws as "unconstitutional."
The Ann Arbor rally opens The U.S. vs. John Lennon and forms the centerpiece of the film's political story. It was here that leaders of the anti Vietnam war movement formatted their plan for a series of protest concerts that would culminate in a free three day rock festival event at the 1972 Republican political convention. The FBI's presence documents the White House's anxiety over Lennon's star power and the ability of musicians to become political Pied Pipers for the left.
Now in post production, 20 TO LIFE: The Life and Times of John Sinclair is directed by Steve Gebhardt (known for his documentaries on the Rolling Stones and John Lennon). It is a cultural overview of the '60s and
the decade's most famous marijuana bust. After raising $50,000 in completion funding, the producers are busy with the distributor, MVD, making marketing plans for 20 TO LIFE for a 2007 release.
An earlier Gebhardt project, TEN FOR TWO: The John Sinclair Freedom Rally, focused on the December 1971 concert in Ann Arbor that starred John Lennon & Yoko Ono. Although that film was briefly released in Britain, it was never shown in America because of legal worries over the INS effort to deport Lennon.
Sinclair is arguably the hardest working poet in show business. He is on the road six months of year at clubs, concert halls, bars and college venues reading poetry backed up by his band, the Blues Scholars: "I've spent ten years trying to figure out how to do it."
The result is a considerable distance from rap music, which he dismisses as "third grade Mother Goose rhymes done with a machine gun. Walt Whitman got rid of rhymes a hundred and 50 years ago."
Although he left America for Amsterdam following the 2000 election, Sinclair returns home frequently to perform and visit family. During a recent American tour that included Berkeley, Sinclair, a tall man with a stylish white goatee, was eager to reconnect with old friends.
An important whistle stop was his hometown, Davison,
Michigan, which has given the world two other media superstars, Sheryl Leach, the creator of Barney, and Michael Moore.
In town for the I Chews The Blues Festival, Sinclair spoke enthusiastically about his life as an expatriate blues scholar. In Amsterdam he has broadcast online radio shows from local cannabis coffeeshops and other venues. The poet has also found a welcoming audience for his work across Europe in clubs and art galleries. And in his eyes, permissive Dutch drug laws are "the bomb."
Although he has been ahead of his times in many ways, Sinclair has never been a slave to popular culture. The former president of the University of Michigan Flint's film society 40-some years ago seldom sees movies. "They
aren't making the old kind of Fellini, Goddard films, interesting movies about life." The last feature film he took in at a theater was Clint Eastwood's Bird, the 1988 Oscar-winning story on the life of jazz legend Charlie Parker.
Turning to the crowd, a lively mix of kids, teens, college students, families and friends, Sinclair feels at home in his hometown:
"This is my idea of a great festival. People who you never heard of playing and having fun. This isn't about business, it's about playing music for your friends. No one is making a million. I don't give a ... about someone who has a million because they are different. They worry about their taxes. I am still focused on how I get dinner just like the average person in America."
-Berkeley Daily Planet
Friday, 20 October 2006
Contact: opinion@berkeleydailyplanet.com
Website: http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/
Note: Roger Rapoport's new book Citizen Moore: The Making of An American Iconoclast will be published in December.
Finally, Henk Botwinik and Anthony Murrell have cut the long-awaited 20th episode of ImageMakers for Radio Free Amsterdam, talking with featured artists at the My Streets, My City show at Chiellerie Galerie.
Listen to EPISODES ImageMakers #20 with Anthony Murrell (.mp3)
Art: My Streets, My City
Chiellerie Galerie, Wed-Sun 14:00-18:00, until 2 November.
Most of the work in My Streets, My City is by artists who express themselves on walls rather than on canvas. All the contributors are either Dutch, French or Belgian, and the common theme is that they all use urban life as the backdrop to their creations. So, if you thought the picture-postcard vistas of most cities in this country couldn't inspire urban angst, then take a look at Ewos-who hails from Utrecht-who took the letter O and created a host of furious-faced characters; or Bitches in Control, whose images have been reprinted on T-shirts and bags. Other standout work comes from Brussels-born Clyde Knowland, with his swirling lines looking like motorway intersections or a mess of wires. As well as the main exhibition, there are also two specially decorated rooms at the Winston Hotel which tie in with the exhibition. (Jane Cavanaugh)
-Amsterdam Weekly
October 18, 2006
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