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172.
NEW TIMES #1-4 (NY: E-M Publishing, April 20-May 25, 1970) - all published (?).
Small folio. Stapled wrps., each 30pp. Illustrated. Ed. Jim Fouratt (#1 only) and Jonathan Kundra. Design by Michael Gross.
The first four issues (possibly the only four published) of this rare magazine, which billed itself as “National bi-weekly alternate culture news”. Published on the cusp of the new decade, New Times’s mix of politics (radical/sexual) and revolutionary music (Velvets, MC5) attempted to represent “the hip/radical/youth/alternative” counterculture, a constituency which by then was already beginning to fragment.
i) the first issue (April 20) contains a 4pp. article on the Velvet Underground by Lenny Kaye, with photographs by Ronn Campisi, one of the most detailed and considered contemporary articles about the group (four years later Kaye began playing guitar with another VU fan, Patti Smith). Its cover feature, “The New Sexuality”, comprises an extended survey of contemporary sexual mores by Josef Bush and Wendy Roberts, which includes full pages devoted to, among others, Eric Emerson, Jackie Curtis and Brigit Polk, the latter profiled by Lillian Roxon, each one accompanied by a photo-portrait by Peter Hujar. Another section, “Boozing & Cruising”, examines the gay subculture and its social and sexual oppression. Other articles include John Reilly and Rudi Stern on videotape; ecology; various news stories on the Panther 21, the Chicago Festival of Life at the Roundhouse, and the takeover of Rat by a feminist collective.
ii) the cover of the second issue (May 4) bears a photo of a hippie couple and baby striking a rebel pose with guns and bullet belt (pre-dating the similar image on the cover of Oz #31), below the JFK quote: “If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.” Centrepiece article is a 4pp. feature on the MC5, with four large photos, two by Magdalene Sinclair, followed by a feminist critique. Other articles include Gene Youngblood on Buckminster Fuller’s World Game; student drop-outs; whole foods; the underground press; Yippies and Weather men and women; numerous news reports on Leary’s bust; post-Stonewall gay repression in the West Village; William Burroughs, Nico and Iggy: “Three faces that helped shape the sixties”; more.
iii) the third issue (May 18) includes three pages of news from the trial of the New York Panther 21 (3 photos) + a 2pp. interview with BPP member and one of the 21, Afeni Shakur (4 photos); the story behind Abbie Hoffman’s stars-and-stripes flag shirt; the Woodstock movie; GTO Miss Cinderella on hitch-hiking (w. photo); 4pp. interview with Jerry Rubin; “Northwest Passage” by Allen Ginsberg (later included in “The Fall of America”); more.
iv) the fourth issue (May 25) includes a 9pp. front cover feature on Charles Manson (including his astrological chart, “A Last Interview From Jail”, his birth certificate, plus an advertisement from the Chatsworth-based Charles Manson Defense Fund: “Help An Innocent Man Find Justice In America”). Also stories on anti-war demos and police reaction in Berkeley, California and Cambridge, Mass.; a lengthy review by Bob Colaciello of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Sympathy For The Devil” (see also item #193); and more.
Closed tears to lower corners of front cover of issue #3, and slight staining to back cover; tiny fore-edge tears to front covers of issues #1 and #4; otherwise Very Good plus.
