The corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place in 1968.

“St. Marks Place—the three blocks of East Eighth Street that run from Astor Place to Tompkins Square Park—has become a symbol of the East Village. Head shops serve as a reminder of the street’s hippie heyday, while stalwart Federal mansions remain a link to the area’s more distant—and upscale—past. If something has happened in the East Village in the last two centuries, there’s a good chance St. Marks Place has played a role. Yet the street has never been a perfect microcosm of the East Village; those mansions were an anomaly, and the hippies were, too. St. Marks is the most famous street in the East Village, but is it a part of the ‘real’ neighborhood at all? The farmland that today comprises St. Marks Place was originally owned by Dutch Director General Peter Stuyvesant, who bought the bouwerij

amazon: Silence

“On August 29, 1952, David Tudor walked onto the stage of the Maverick Concert Hall, near Woodstock, New York, sat down at the piano, and, for four and a half minutes, made no sound. He was performing ‘4’33”,’ a conceptual work by John Cage. It has been called the ‘silent piece,’ but its purpose is to make people listen. ‘There’s no such thing as silence,’ Cage said, recalling the première. ‘You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.’ Indeed, some listeners didn’t care for the experiment, although they saved their loudest protests for the question-and-answer session afterward. Someone reportedly hollered, ‘Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town!’ Even Cage’s mother had her doubts. At a…

Members of the Black Panthers lined up at a Free Huey (Newton) rally in DeFremery Park in Oakland.

“The status quo — hallowed by hate, sanctioned by Jim Crow — was beginning to crack. Behind the scenes, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation was keeping watch. In 1967, the FBI quietly unleashed a covert surveillance operation targeting “subversive” civil rights groups and Black leaders, including the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King Jr., Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and many others. The objective, according to an FBI memo: to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize’ the radical fight for Black rights — and Black power. Details of that sabotage plaster internal FBI records, with thousands of pages scattered across a medley of databases. Now, the UC Berkeley Library is working to put those pieces together. In May, just before the movement for Black lives cascaded over the planet, the…

  . .   Good Morning!

______________________________

Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

______________________________

Throw your dreams into space like a kite,
and you do not know what it will bring back,
a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

– Anaïs Nin

“Mémoires (Memories) is an artist’s book made by the Danish artist Asger Jorn in collaboration with the French artist and theorist Guy Debord. Printed in 1959, it is the second of two collaborative books by the two men whilst they were both members of the Situationist International. The book is a work of psychogeography, detailing a period in Debord’s life when he was in the process of leaving the Lettrists, setting up Lettrism International, and showing his ‘first masterpiece’, Hurlements en Faveur de Sade (Howling in Favour of Sade), a film devoid of imagery that played white when people were talking on the soundtrack and black during the lengthy silences between. Credited to Guy-Ernest Debord, with structures portantes (‘load-bearing structures’) by Asger Jorn, the book contains 64 pages divided into three sections. The first section is called ‘June 1952’, and starts…

It is easy to be confused about whether it’s safe to resume in-person instruction. Schools in Europe, which were quick to reopen a few months ago, are closed now due to a resurgence of COVID-19. Experts, including the new head of the CDC, say it’s safe to reopen, even if teachers have not been vaccinated.

Steven Singer does not agree. From the onset of the pandemic, he has worried about reopening too soon. Now he wants to know why Dr. Rochelle Walensky says it is not safe to go to a Super Bowl party, but safe to reopen schools without vaccinating teachers. He says Dr. Walensky is engaged in magical thinking. He asks: Why are schools safer than Super Bowl parties?

Mercedes Schneider deconstructs a report by the Journal of the American Medical Association that has been widely misunderstood as a blanket endorsement of full-time in-person instruction. She pulls…

The Seattle Seven and two of their attorneys in summer 1970, photographer unknown

“The Seattle Liberation Front, or SLF, was a radical anti-Vietnam War movement, based in Seattle, Washington, in the United States. The group, founded by the University of Washington visiting philosophy professor and political activist Michael Lerner, carried out its protest activities from 1970 to 1971. The most famous members of the SLF were the ‘Seattle Seven,’ who were charged with ‘conspiracy to incite a riot‘ in the wake of a violent protest at a courthouse. The members of the Seattle Seven were Lerner, Michael Abeles, Jeff Dowd, Joe Kelly, Susan Stern, Roger Lippman and Charles Marshall III. After the nationwide organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) disintegrated in 1969, Michael Lerner, an instructor newly arrived in Seattle from Berkeley, California…

Daniel Nyikos was born in Germany into a U.S. military family. His mother is Hungarian and his father is an American of Hungarian descent. The family moved a lot during his early school years, mostly in America and the Netherlands. His poetry has been featured in Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry.”

_______________________________________

To read Daniel Nyikos’ poem, “Potato Soup,” click here:

Kaleidoscope, April 26-May 9, 1969

“In the 1960s, investigative journalists, poets, novelists, political activists, community organizers, and artists formed an unprecedented alliance for change in the vigorous underground press movement that flourished in the United States. This network of counterculture, campus, and other alternative media brought larger political issues into communities, awakening citizens to their own power to influence national policy. Surprisingly, the rapid growth in the number of underground newspapers and readership was mirrored by a sudden, equally rapid, decline in the early 1970s. The fate of the underground press followed that of the Movement, in general. The end of that great incubator of dissent, the Vietnam War, and the dismantling of the draft reduced the sense of immediacy felt by many people. Disagreements over strategy and goals fragmented the nascent New Left. While alternative journals belonging to the older traditions of muckraking, Left political commentary and party papers…

“In the summer of 1968, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — known at the time as Lew Alcindor, and just barely twenty-one years old — was already a basketball legend. Impossibly tall and incredibly talented, he had led New York City’s Power Academy to 71 straight wins before joining John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins. After a year on the ‘freshman team,’ he had led the varsity to back-to-back NCAA titles, winning tournament MVP both times (he would add another title and MVP in 1969). And that summer, if you were a kid growing up in one of the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) developments, you could meet the legend in person. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar could probably have been anywhere he wanted in the summer of 1968. Many people had expected — indeed, had demanded — that he would lead the United States to Olympic glory on the basketball court, but he declined the tryout