Friday Nite Hankster Chat: Blogging Friday Night from New York City

6:46pm: Bob Dylan's 1965 Newport Folk Festival appearance drew fire from the (established) folk music crowd -- Dylan was booed for using an electric guitar.  Wikipedia tells us that At the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan had been received enthusiastically when he performed "Blowin' In The Wind" with Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, and other Festival performers.^[2] At the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan performed "With God On Our Side" and "Mr Tambourine Man".^[3] 

Something I love about this song and this history is that the sixties was an anti-authoritarian period in US history. An anti-establishment and unknowing, questioning, growing-up, being on your own like a rolling stone kind of a place, no place to hide moment that captured American hearts and minds. No direction home.

Here's Jimi Hendrix with his cover of a signature song from the sixties: h/t to Badassvidsinc





6:15pm: Yes, it's Friday, it's goin' on nitetime, and it's time for Friday Nite Hankster Chat...

Here's for starters: Some of my friends know I am a fan of Rolling Stone magazine. It's the only print publication that I currently subscribe to. I read it cover to cover on the subway to and from work and other business around town. And I just got word that RS has a "Rolling Stone Readers Pick the Top 10 Songs of the Sixties" - Tracks by The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys And The Doors all make the cut.

So over the next 3 weeks, The Hankster will be bringing you those Top 10 Songs of the Sixties As Determined By RS Readers in threes, starting at the top and working our way down.

Feel free to cheat like I did and go on to the Rolling Stone site and get all the good stuff up front.

Here's the Number One RS reader choice Enjoy!!

Marian Rich: How I became an Independent

by Marian Rich

NYC Independence Party activist Bryan Puertes asked me to write about how I became an independent so here goes…

I grew up in the Sixties on the Upper West Side of Manhattan – a bastion of political liberalism – in a household of staunch Democrats.  In our home, politics was always a topic of discussion. I remember going into the voting booth with my mother and pulling down the lever for JFK (I was 4).  My father was blacklisted in the 50s for his support of the Civil Rights movement within the Actors Equity union – I was taught from an early age that racism and poverty were not be be tolerated.  My mother was a working woman and she made no attempt to cover over the oppressive nature of her roles as wife and mother.  It was a no-brainer – our family was supportive of all of the liberation movements of the Sixties, and we were - quite naturally - Democrats.

By the time I was 12 (1968) I found myself in the highly politicized Jr. High School 44.  Our teachers were dodging the draft, the school was racially polarized, and in social studies we were debating the war in Vietnam and who we were going to support in the Democratic Party primary (the Republican Party didn’t seem to exist).  Many of us kids were for McCarthy but I stood with my family tradition of supporting the Kennedys and campaigned for RFK.  I used to do street work for him outside of the Democratic Party office on Broadway and 72^nd Street. The campaign got a kick out of me since I was their youngest volunteer.

Then in 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and shortly thereafter Robert Kennedy.  It was a horrible time – we were deeply sad, angry and fearful.  I campaigned for Hubert Humphrey because he was not Richard Nixon. I suppose it was that year that I began to question my allegiance to the Democratic Party or any political party – I started to see that something was terribly wrong with “the system.”  Richard Nixon won the 1968 election and I remained politically engaged but no longer identified as a Democrat.  I was disgusted with business as usual politics.

In high school I started to identify as a leftist.  I didn’t know to call myself an independent but I was.  I was an independent leftist.  I remember that as a freshman at Syracuse University there was a rally against Nixon during the Watergate hearings and hardly anyone else was there.  That worried me.  I wondered why, on a campus with thousands of students, we couldn’t pull out a crowd to protest.  I questioned if protest alone was ever going to change anything.  I took some time off from college and traveled and finished as a transfer student at Sarah Lawrence College.  I studied Marxism and Women’s History and theatre.  I started to think about the role of culture in changing the world.  I attended No-Nukes rallies in the early 80s.  I got married and my husband Steve and I would spend weekends “shopping around the left” – trying to find a place to hang our political hats.

We lived on the Upper West Side and we kept running into organizers in the neighborhood who were engaged in a variety of appealing efforts – the Coalition of Grassroots Women stands out - I always stopped at their table.  We were intrigued by posters in the neighborhood about an African American woman named Barbara Taylor who was exposing the political corruption in the Democratic Party.  Then one day in 1982, I saw this green bus in the neighborhood; on the back of this bus were two women who were campaigning as independent candidates for Governor and Lt Governor – one was Jewish (Nancy Ross) and the other was Black (Lenora Fulani).  I thought I had died and gone to (political) heaven. Who were they and what was going on?  Shortly thereafter I met two organizers on the corner of 110^th St. and Broadway and they asked me to sign a pledge card to pledge my vote to Ross/Fulani in order for an independent party, the New Alliance Party, to get ballot status in New York State.  I signed.  And I guess that was the “official” day that I became an independent.  That was 28 years ago and today I am a proud member and builder of the NY Independence Party.

Marian Rich is a long-time independent political organizer, an Artistic Associate of the Castillo Theatre, and one of the members of the Castillo Theatre's Brand New Improve Show.

Conversations on Barack Obama and The Sixties: Are you dissin' us, man?

The sixties bite back, from a November 2007 post by Ben Smith on Politico: I'd missed this last week round, but Tom Hayden, the sixties-era leader, wrote an open letter to Obama on HuffPo, a rare Boomer self-defense against his rhetoric of generational change. Hayden attacks Obama's moderate stance on Iraq, but the most interesting bit is his defense of the 60s......

See Tom Hayden's earlier endorsement of Obama in The Nation. In part -- More disturbing is what happens to the mind by setting up these polarities. To take a "centrist" position, one calculates the equal distance between two "extremes." It doesn't matter if one "extreme" is closer to the truth. All that matters is achieving the equidistance. This means the presumably "extreme" view is prevented from having a fair hearing, which would require abandoning the imaginary center. And it invites the "extreme" to become more "extreme" in order to pull the candidate's thinking in a more progressive direction. The process of substantive thinking is corroded by the priority of political positioning......

NOTE TO BARACK: Hi, I am your crazy uncle. My parents, MY proud products of the 1950s, split up in 1963 (thank the Lord for that decision...!) in Blytheville Arkansas, the most recent northeast Arkansas town we lived in, soon after JFK was assassinated, when I was about 11. My stepfather, a poor man from Hendersonville North Carolina, joined the USAF when he was 17 so he could go to college, did his stint in Vietnam, and died from bad choices including alcoholism at age 56. My ex-husband and father of my 2 kids -- adults now -- Lucy and Rena, was visited by the FBI in 1972 because he was a subscriber to The Catholic Worker, and a member of the War Resisters League. My brother was a CO (that's a "conscientious objector" on the basis of a philosophical opposition to killing people). Many young men in our country felt they had to go to Canada to seek political asylum rather than participate in an immoral and unjust war.

Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright might not be Rev. Al Sharpton, or Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But they are us. This is our history. We sixties crazies, the Civil Rights Freedom Fighters, the ordinary people of our country, kids, mothers, teachers, everyone, fought against all the odds. Barack, please give us our due. We are with you, but could you please acknowledge the soldiers in the trenches that created your candidacy?

If you just want votes, heave ho -- but if who we are as a people matters to you (and it seems to matter to Michelle), let's be honest. What about our history??