Henry Flynt:
The Intense Years (1954-67)
A chronology with
correlative events
bold:
Henry Flynt involved
bold italic:
Henry Flynt works
regular:
works of others
italics:
history
The inclusion of a
correlative event does not imply approval or disapproval, only that the public
was aware of it.
Reference works sometimes
give different years for the same event.
1953
February. Ana Pauker,
Communist boss of Romania, is arrested.
March 5. Stalin
dies. Allegation that he was
poisoned by his third wife, who was his physician.
March. Ana Pauker is released to house arrest
because Stalin died. If Stalin had
continued to live, she would have met the fate of Slnsky.
July 27. Korean War
armistice.
no month
DNA discovered.
Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations
Simone
de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, tr. 1953
Dave
Brubeck, Jazz at Oberlin
1954
February. Second
Freshman semester of senior high school. [At junior high school. Greensboro had
a 6-3-3 system.]
February 1954 – August
1956. Client, Guilford County Mental Health Clinic; principal therapist,
Douglas McNair.
March 1. Puerto Rican
nationalist assault in the U.S House of Representatives.
April 22.
Army-McCarthy hearings.
May 7. Communist
victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu.
May 17. The Supreme
Court rules school segregation unconstitutional.
May 19. Charles Ives
dies.
May 29. The Bilderberg Group opens officially.
June 27. Arbenz is
overthrown in Guatemala by a C.I.A.-sponsored coup.
August 10. Flynts trick
photo of Alexander Flynt is published with story, Double Negative, The
Greensboro Record, Section B, Page 1.
September.
Matriculates Greensboro Senior High School (now Grimsley High School) at age
14, first Sophomore semester. Joins the school orchestra as a matter of
course.
October 31. Algerian
war of independence begins.
November 3. Matisse
dies.
November 8. Dave Brubeck on the cover of Time Magazine.
November 29. Fermi
dies.
no month
c. 1954-56. Violin
lessons with J. Kimball Harriman, Kim Harriman, who becomes a nationally
prominent string teacher.
1954-57. Flynts
parents insist that he occasionally attend church services with them even
though he has announced that he is an unbeliever. It attracts enough
notoriety that Flynt amounts to Greensboros village atheist.
c. 1954-7. Attendee,
Greensboro Astronomy Club. Presumably the club has an organizers roster,
but there is no formal membership for attendees. The venue for lectures
is the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Field trips to telescope
viewings.
Junius Scales, chairman of
the Communist Party of North and South Carolina, is arrested under the Smith
Act.
Randall
Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution
George
Abbott, Pajama Game
Dissent magazine begins
publication.
Ad
Reinhardt, black paintings
Jasper
Johns, Flag (American flag)
Shake, Rattle and Roll (Joe Turner; covered by
Bill Haley)
1955
February. Second
Sophomore semester of high school.
March 12. Charlie
Parker dies.
April 18. Einstein
dies.
April 18-24. Bandung Conference, Indonesia.
April 12. Jonas Salk
announces that his polio vaccine is successful.
May 14. Inception of
the Warsaw Pact.
August 28. The Emmett
Till murder in Mississippi.
September. First
Junior semester of high school.
September 30. James
Dean dies.
October 3. The movie Rebel Without a Cause opens.
December 1. Rosa
Parks, NAACP staff, and alumna of Highlander School, takes the bus ride that
leads immediately to the Montgomery Improvement Association (Abernathy, King)
and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
December 5. AFL-CIO
merger.
no month
c. 1955-56. Member of
the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra.
At that time the Symphony is a volunteer orchestra based at the
University of North Carolina Greensboro.
The antiproton is produced.
N.
V. Peale, The Power of Postitive Thinking
Noam
Chomsky, Logical Structure of Linguistic
Theory
Foundations of the Unity of
Science,
key volume in the logical positivist canon
Leslie
Fiedler, An End to Innocence
Will
Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew
The
National Review begins publication
Tennessee
Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Norman
Mailer, The Deer Park
Vladimir
Nabokov, Lolita
James
Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Bill
Haley, Rock Around the Clock
Crew-Cuts,
Earth Angel
Bo
Diddley, Bo Diddley
Chuck
Berry, Maybelline
Little
Richard, Tutti Frutti
1956
February 25.
Khrushchevs secret speech on Stalins crimes.
February. Second
Junior semester of high school.
March 9. In China, the Masanjia Labor Camp
(Liaoning Province) is established.
April 13-18. Member of
the Greensboro High School orchestra: when it travels to St. Louis to
play at the opening session of the Music Educators National Conference.
There are general assemblies.
April 18: Father OConner
the jazz priest; Dave Brubeck speaks at the piano. Some hint of jazz as
an alternative system. But
wait! Brubeck also muses that he
may proceed to 12-tone jazz.
[Cf. George Avakian, Down Beat, June 13, 1956, page 14. Cf. Harriman Developed Grimsley
Orchestras, Greensboro News & Record,
March 28, 2005.]
The educators organization
was originally the Music Supervisors National Conference, see Summer.
June 5 – July 23. The Wilhelm Reich materials in
Rangeley, Maine are destroyed by the U.S. government.
Summer. Flynt has
thought of attending Julliard for summer school, but his teachers tell him to
go to Interlochen, the National Music Camp in Michigan. The camp was
founded by Joseph Maddy after he directed a national high school orchestra at
the Music Supervisors National Conference. Originally the National High
School Orchestra Camp; renamed the National Music Camp in 1932. Today,
Interlochen Center for the Arts. A year or two before Flynt attended, the
camp gained two major new buildings, the Kresge shell and the Maddy
administration building. The only fellow-attendee Flynt will see after
that summer is Richard Mendelsohn (at Harvard).
August 11. Jackson
Pollock dies.
August 23. Several tons of publications assembled
by Wilhelm Reich in Manhattan are burned by the U.S. government.
September. First
Senior semester of high school.
Fall. Concertmaster of
high school orchestra.
October 23 – November
4. Hungarian uprising.
October 29, 1956.
Israel invades Egypt with Britain and France. [The U.S. threatens the
Soviet Union with a nuclear attack to deter a Soviet intervention on behalf of
Egypt.]
November 6. Eisenhower
runs for President a second time against Egghead Adlai Stevenson, again
defeating him. Southern Democrats
are not pleased with Egghead Adlai as their standard bearer.
early November. Flynt
is elected most intellectual by his high school class. [Known from a
Nov. 5 letter from a local dairy awarding a milkshake, obviously a
school/business promotion.] Just
as Egghead Adlai is sent packing.
no month
COINTELPRO: commencement of centralized FBI
operations to sabotage U.S. progressives, notably the Civil Rights movement.
Black Mountain College,
North Carolina, becomes inactive in this year.
Wittgenstein,
Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics
Sartre,
Being and Nothingness (original,
1943)
Einstein,
The Meaning of Relativity, 5th edition
C.
Wright Mills, The Power Elite
William
Whyte, The Organization Man
Paul
Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
J.J.
Arvalo, The Shark and the Sardines
(original; tr. 1961)
James
Baldwin, Giovannis Room
Allen
Ginsberg, Howl
Genet,
The Balcony
George
Mathieu, Paintings in Performance,
Paris
Stockhausen,
Klavierstck XI
the Ali Akbar Khan release
on Angel Records with the Menuhin introduction
Love Me Tender, Presleys first movie
Presley,
Heartbreak Hotel
Presley,
Hound Dog
Carl
Perkins, Blue Suede Shoes
Fats
Domino, Im In Love Again
Chuck
Berry, Roll Over Beethoven
Gene
Vincent, Be-Bop-A-Lula
Nervous
Norvus, Transfusion
1957
January 10-11.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference founded.
January 15.
Non-conservation of parity announced; the Chinese discoverers will be awarded
the Nobel Prize in Physics later the same year (unprecedented rapidity of
recognition).
February. Second
Senior semester of high school.
February 13, Wednesday. Inducted into the National Honor
Society (NHS). tapped for Torchlight. Flynts induction was
opposed by at least one significant teacher, Ms. Garrett, presumably on the
ground that he did not meet the social involvement and leadership criteria of
membership.
The NHS was formed in 1921
by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP).
March 6. Independence
of Ghana.
April 1957.
Notification by letter of award of Certificate of Merit from National Merit
Scholarship Corp.
Spring. Flynt quits
high school orchestra—unheard of—and is replaced as Concertmaster
by Julia Adams 58.
May 1957. Recipient of
honorary scholarship to Harvard. (No money. Means that Flynt meets
the merit criteria for financial assistance if they had found financial need.)
[Cf. Harvard College
Scholarship Goes to Henry A. Flynt, Jr. The
Greensboro Record, May 17, 1957.]
July. In China, the Anti-Rightists campaign seamlessly
succeeds the Hundred Flowers movement. The Hundred Flowers movement was a
calculated trap.
July. Norman Mailer,
"The White Negro," Dissent,
Summer 1957. It condemns the
hipster—but public consciousness transforms it into the premier herald of
the hipster (as white Negro).
September 1957.
Matriculates Harvard at age 17 as a mathematics major, first Freshman semester.
September 11. Plutonium fire at the hydrogen bomb
production facility, Rocky Flats, CO.
September 24.
Eisenhower sends troops to Little Rock to enforce public school integration.
October 4. Sputnik
launched. Harvard science personnel are abuzz.
October 22. Papa Doc Duvalier comes to power in
Haiti.
Fall. SANE is formed.
November 18. Mao declares in Moscow that the East
Wind prevails over the West Wind.
no month
European Economic Community
is established.
Hugh Everett III proposes
the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Noam
Chomsky, Syntactic Structures
Simone
de Beauvoir, The Long March
(original: tr. 1958)
Vance
Packard, The Hidden Persuaders
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Jack
Kerouac, On the Road
Marcel
Duchamp, From the Green Box [English
digest of Green Box authorized by
Duchamp]
Stockhausen,
Gruppen
Cages
course, Experimental Composition, N.S.S.R. begins
John
Coltrane, Blue Train
Jerry
Lee Lewis, Whole Lot of Shakin Going On
Everly
Brothers, Wake Up Little Susie
Buddy
Holly, Peggy Sue
Jerry
Lee Lewis, Great Balls of Fire
1958
January. The Great
Leap Forward commences in China, ending in 1961. Now known as the Great Chinese Famine. Tens of millions starve as a result of
government policy. The highest
estimate which is not dismissed as crackpot is Diktters: 45 million deaths. Starvation in China was alleged in the
West at the time by the Right wing, but did not become history until decades
later. The Great Leap will be a
political litmus test. Progressive
Labor Party (see below) will endorse the democidal policy in November 1971 in Road to Revolution III.
February. Second
Freshman semester, Harvard
February. Milton Babbitt, Who Cares If You
Listen?, High Fidelity
c. April 1. Van Cliburn wins
the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow.
May
15. John Cage, Town Hall Retrospective, New York.
May. End of the
semester, Flynt undergoes psychiatric hospitalization at Harvards Mt. Auburn
Clinic.
June. Flynt returns to
Greensboro for the summer.
July. The U.S. and
Britain intervene comprehensively in the Arab Middle East to suppress Arab
nationalism.
September. first Sophomore
semester, Harvard. Routinely assigned to a residential house, Flynt
switches to Dudley, for off-campus students, and moves into a dingy rooming
house.
September. Cages and Tudors notorious appearance
at Darmstadt.
October
3. Boulez appears on WNYC-FM, New
York, announcing his discovery of chance.
(Anything to do with the Feldman satire on Boulez of this year?)
October 9. Pope Pius
XII dies. In the ensuing conclave, Giuseppe Cardinal Siri is elected
Pope, then forced aside before he can appear publicly as Pope, allowing the
election of Roncalli. [The evidence is peripheral; conclaves are secret.]
October 28. Pope John
XXIII begins his reign.
November.
Lecture by Karlheinz Stockhausen at MIT on electronic music (Gesang). Tony Conrad attends.
November
5. New Instrumental and Electronic Music, lecture by Stockhausen, Paine
Hall, Harvard University. Conrad and Flynt attend. Life-changing
for Flynt as an object-lesson.
November
22. Gerard Hoffnungs parody,
Punkt Contrapunkt by Bruno Heinz Jaja.
December. Caffe Cino opens in Greenwich Village
and becomes the venue for off-off-Broadway.
December 15. The
Rightist Liu Shaoqi takes the Presidency of China from Mao because of the
Great Leap Forward disaster.
no
month
China:
the Dabao (Sichuan Province) punishment camp is established.
A group splits from the
CPUSA to form P.O.C. Leaders: Roman, Pelagrin, Haywood. Periodical Marxist-Leninist Vanguard.
First CND march in Britain.
Wittgenstein,
The Blue and Brown Books
J.K.
Galbraith, The Affluent Society
Chelsea, a literary magazine, is
launched in New York.
Truman
Capote, Breakfast at Tiffanys
Genet,
The Blacks
Yugen is launched in New York by
LeRoi and Hettie Jones
It Is, Philip Pavias culture
magazine, commences
Morton
Feldman, Sound, Noise, Varse, Boulez, It
Is 2
Yves
Klein, Le vide
Cage,
Variations I
Interviews of Our Times, a comedy record with Lenny
Bruce, notable for Shorty Petterstein
Cecil
Taylor (with John Coltrane), Double
Clutching
Chuck
Berry, Johnny B. Goode
Johnny
Otis Show, Willie and the Hand Jive
Duane
Eddy, Rebel Rouser
Everly
Brothers, Bird Dog
Nick
Todd, At the Hop
1959
January 1-7. Victory
of the Cuban Revolution.
February. Second Sophomore
semester, Harvard
March.
Saul Kripke, A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic, Journal of Symbolic Logic. [The gossip was that Kripke had
had a paper published while in high school; if this was the premise of the
gossip, surely Kripke was at Harvard in 1959.]
March 21. Tibetan uprising
is crushed by China.
June. Flynt returns to
Greeensboro for the summer.
June 19. Letter from
Harvard warning about low grades. Flynt ignores the warning (he will
register for Quines mathematical logic class in September). (He is
sampling the intellectual heights, not steering toward a degree.)
July. Khrushchevs denunciation of U.S.
modern art at the American exhibition in Moscow.
July. Nixons kitchen
debate with Khrushchev at the American exhibition in Moscow.
July.
Jack Gelbers The Connection, The Living Theater.
July 17. Billie Holliday dies.
August-September. The
first Sino-Indian border clashes.
September. First
Junior semester, Harvard.
September 15-27.
Khrushchev visits the U.S., meets with Eisenhower. The AFL-CIO opposes
the invitation to Khrushchev.
September 22. Josef Hauer,
rival claimant in dodecaphony, dies.
Fall. Ugly Drawing [done in Quines class]. Now in MOMA.
October. The African Communist, journal
of the South African Communist Party, commences publication.
October.
Allan Kaprow, 18 Happenings in Six Parts, Reuben Gallery.
October
16. George Brecht, Toward Events: An Arrangement, Reuben Gallery.
November.
La Monte Young, Vision.
December 9. A New
Music Concert at Harvard, supposed to end with a serialist piano work performed
by a pianist in the Harvard Music Department, includes Flynts Trio.
The Trio actually comprised independent solos for violin, piano, cello
(distinctly different new music forms) performed simultaneously. Flynt,
violin, Wilder, piano, Miller, cellist. Because Flynt strolls around the
auditorium to vary sound location, and because Wilder uses Tudors technique of
punching the pianos underside, it is a scandal. The Music Department
pianist storms out.
Because
this happened, the Harvard Music Department will block the inclusion of a
Conrad piece in a later concert in spring 1960. [Known from Conrad letter
to Young, 5/5/60, cf. Conrad letter to Young, 4/18/60.]
no month
Congress passes the Landrum-Griffin
Act.
Workers World Party is
formed as a split from the SWP, makes an approach to Romans P.O.C. but is rebuffed.
Studies
on the Left begins publication.
Norman
Mailer, Advertisements for Myself
Heidegger,
The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics (original 1949)
Heidegger,
Introduction to Metaphysics (original
1935)
John
Cage, Lecture on Something, It Is 4
movie,
On the Beach
movie,
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Robert
Rauschenberg, Monogram
Frank
Stella shows black paintings (begun in 1958) in a group exhibition at MOMA
Cage,
Indeterminacy (Folkways recording)
Stockhausen,
Zyklus
Stockhausen,
Refrain
Miles
Davis, Kind of Blue
Ornette
Coleman, Change of the Century
Ornette
Coleman, Tomorrow is the Question
Dave
Baby Cortez, The Happy Organ
1960
January 4. Death of
Albert Camus.
January. The Student
League for Industrial Democracy is renamed SDS.
January.
La Monte Young, Poem.
January.
Yves Klein, The Painter of Space Hurls
Himself into the Void.
February 1. First
sit-in, Greensboro, NC.
February. Cage, who is teaching at the New
School, performs Water Walk on Ive
Got a Secret.
February 13. France
tests its first atomic bomb.
February 18. Telegram
notifying parents that Flynt is withdrawing from Harvard on probation for low
grades.
February 23. Two
letters from Flynt to his parents re his withdrawal from Harvard.
March
9. Yves Klein, Anthropometries.
March
14. A Concert of New Music, Living Theater, New York.
March 21. Massacre in
Sharpeville, South Africa.
March.
John Cage, Theater Piece performed. Review follows in Time magazine, March 21; just the review
is a major influence on Flynt.
April. Chinese
Communist Party publishes Long Live Leninism! commencing the public
Sino-Soviet dispute.
April. Fair Play for Cuba Committee started in New
York.
April.
La Monte Young, Two Sounds.
April.
La Monte Young gives this as date of composition of 566 to Henry Flynt [response to Flynts Concerto for Kitchen Sink and Monkey Orchestra, 2 January
1961. So Young must have applied the title to an existing piece.]
April 17. SNCC founded
in Raleigh, NC (after the first sit-in).
May 1. Soviet Union
shoots down a U2 spy plane.
May 2. Execution of
Caryl Chessman, with attendant protests.
May
5. La Monte Young, Composition 1960 #2.
May 9. The FDA approves
the first birth control pill.
c. June 1. Philosophy Proper, Version 1 (14 pages).
Privately mimeographed and circulated. Flynt letter to parents 6/1960.
c. June 1. Flynt
garners Chomskys verdict on Philosophy Proper, Version 1. Israel
Scheffler suggested and arranged the encounter at MIT. [This conflicts
with my episodic memory, in which I showed Version 3, a typescript, to Chomsky
in 1961—but there is objective evidence, Flynt letter to parents 6/60,
Flynt letter to parents 7/30/60. Before I showed Version 1 to Chomsky, I
partly revised it, my letter says. But surely there is only the one
mimeographed version.]
June. Eisenhowers
planned trip to Japan is cancelled due to demonstrations which include the
Zengakurens snake-dancing and the slogan Eisenhower go to the Hell!
June 30. Belgian Congo
becomes independent.
July.
La Monte Young, Lecture 1960.
July 25. The date the
Soviet Union announces the withdrawal of thousands of technicians from
China. It is now said that the
Chinese were responsible for their exit. [cf. Politics in China since 1949.]
August 9. Flynt, untitled
piano piece performed in a radio concert by La Monte Young , KPFA.
August 16. Cyprus gains independence from Britain.
September 14. OPEC is
founded.
September. The UN
General Assembly at which Khrushchev and Castro create sensations.
September 24. Castro and Malcolm X meet at the Teresa
Hotel in Harlem.
October 1. Nigeria
becomes independent.
October
6. The concert at mary
bauermeister atelier where Paik cuts off Cages tie.
October
8. Cage, Tudor, Cunningham at the International Festival of Contemporary
Music, Venice. An absurdist sensation recounted by Time magazine.
November. Electronic music score, November 1960 No. 2 (2
pages). Young archive.
November 8. Kennedy
elected President. He will later be deemed to have stolen the election.
December.
Nam June Paik, tude for pianoforte, Kln.
December. Musical score, Circus, consisting of four pieces to
be performed simultaneously. (1) and (2) are lost; (3) is dated Nov.
– Dec. Young archive.
December 17. composition 12/17/1960 No. 1. [Dated the
moment I set off to see Young in New York? Not a short word
piece—?]
c. December 17. Flynt
arrives in New York to visit Young at the time of the Jennings loft concerts.
A life-changing visit for Flynt.
Dec.
18, 19. The performance series, curated by La Monte Young, at Yoko Onos
loft—the loft concerts—begins with two Terry Jennings
appearances.
December 20. The
National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam is officially launched.
December. Approximate date given for so-called Tape 5, Flynt
music, whistling, violin, voice, said to have been given to Maxfield.
late December. Essay, My Work in Music, 6 pages.
Acknowledges Youngs word pieces. My two letters to Leonard Stein (Young
archive) refer to this essay.
no month
End of the British colonial
war in Kenya which defeats the Mau Mau.
Mssbauer effect—used
to confirm general relativity.
Harvard Psilocybin Project
(Leary, Alpert).
William F. Buckley founds
Young Americans for Freedom.
Liberator
magazine is started in New York by Daniel
Watts.
Trobar, a poetry magazine in New
York, is launched by Robert Kelly
The
journal Kulchur started with Marc
Schleifer as editor.
Peter
Schumann founds the Bread and Puppet Theater in New York.
Sartre,
Critique of Dialectical Reason
Daniel
Bell, The End of Ideology
Herman
Kahn, On Thermonuclear War
C.
Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee
(Nelle)
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Alfred
Hitchcock, Psycho
Stockhausen,
Carr
Stockhausen,
Kontakte
John
Coltrane, My Favorite Things
Ornette
Coleman, This Is Our Music
Viscounts,
Night Train
Chubby
Checker, The Twist
1961
January. Mathematical System 1, shown to Kripke
in Flynts room. Destroyed; that
it existed is documented by a manuscript in MOMA.
[various word
pieces stimulated by Youngs in-person presentation of his word pieces in
December 1960, such as:]
January
2. Concerto for Kitchen Sink and
Monkey Orchestra. Young archive.
January
3. Mbius strip score, called
Piece No. 2, 2/3/61. Documented by
second letter to Leonard Stein.
January 17. Assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
January. Robert Morris, Box with the sound of
its own making crafted.
January 23. A plane carrying
H-bombs disintegrates over Goldsboro, NC.
One of the bombs in particular is prevented from detonating by one small
switch only.
Before Feb.
26. Poem 4 completed—the
score will be displayed at the Feb. 26 loft concert. It seems that the English translation
is the only surviving vintage holograph.
MOMA.
February 11. Eichmann trial begins in Jerusalem.
February 25, Saturday. Flynts
first performance in the loft series (see December 1960): a free-form
performance. Recorded by Maxfield.
February 26, Sunday. Performances of notated pieces; display
of scores on a table, including Poem 4 and the Jan. word pieces. notated pieces. piano tablature piece; high E string
violin piece.
February. Young begins to solicit submissions to Beatitude East, intended as issue #18 of
Beatitude magazine. [E.g. Young to Brecht c. March 1961.] After many turns, this document will
appear in Spring 1963 as An Anthology.
March. Flynt gives Young an essay on
philosophy of mathematics, for Beatitude
East, before March 29, i.e. before concept art exists. [Flynt to parents 3/29/61.]
March 10. Concact of Colored Sheets and
Acoustical Scans [Optical Audiorecorder].
March 10 is earliest date given — March dates proved because a
published concept art piece was recycled from a colored sheet music piece.
March 24, Friday. Flynt on WHRB in Cambridge for one-half
hour, tapes of his musical performances, including prepared violin,
announcing the concert of March 31.
Flynt letter to parents 3/29/61.
March 31, Friday. The Harvard Concert.
—Richard Maxfield
—La Monte Young
[premiere of Compositions 1961]
—possibly Henry Flynt
—Morris Box with the
sound of its own making was not noted on the announcement but was displayed in
the auditorium.
Spring 1961. The first issue of Freedomways, the must-read journal of black affairs
created by the Communist Party and edited by wives of two Communist leaders.
April 1, Saturday. trial run for the Young-Flynt duets
that will be recorded January 9, 1962.
April. Yves Klein at Castelli.
April 12. Yuri Gagarins space flight.
April 17. Bay of Pigs invasion. The U.S. government denies any
involvement.
May 4. The CORE Freedom Ride leaves
Washington, D.C. for the South.
The rides will continue until the FCC makes rule changes in November.
May 5. Alan Shepard, the first American in
space.
May 14. Youngs 566 to
Henry Flynt performed by Toshi Ichiyanagi, Carnegie Recital Hall.
May
19-20. Second performance of
Youngs Compositions 1961, Yoko Onos loft.
June. Robert Morris, Passageway, Yoko Onos
loft.
June 2, Friday. Lecture on Newness at Youngs Bank St.
apartment, NY. Private event, no
announcement. Date given in Flynt
letter to parents 6/1/61.
June 5. Junius Scales, Greensboro native, is
sentenced to six years in prison for Communist Party membership even though he
has left the CP.
Summer. Young, Blues in B flat, with Terry
Jennings.
June. concept
art as such crystallized: therefore,
in the aftermath of the June New York visit. First communicated to Tony Conrad. All surviving vintage compositions:
Illusion-Ratios
6/19/61
Transformations
10/11/1961
Innperseqs
(May-July 1961)
Work Such That
No One Knows Whats Going On (July 1961)
Teseqs
(concept art version of Mathematical System 4 3/14/61)
Concact for
the Optical Audioplayer early 1962
July. Exercise Awareness-States [later Mock
Risk Games] [In 1981, the lost manuscript retrieved from Tom Constanten. Both versions achieved publication.]
July. Philosophy Proper, Version 3 completed
and duplicated to be circulated.
Mentioned in Flynt letter to Young 5/2/61, then in Flynt letter to
parents 7/3/61.
July 15, Saturday. AG Gallery presentations: Exercise Awareness-States, Innperseqs
July 16, Sunday. AG Gallery presentations: reading of Philosophy Proper, Version
3.
July 21. Gus Grissom is the second American to
orbit earth.
summer. John Alten completes manuscript, The
Lost Philosophy of Oswald Spengler.
August. Linact: Incongruities (1 page)
August 13. Communists erect the Berlin Wall.
August
23. Jazz violin, two takes. Recorded in Cambridge, MA.
August 28. Robert F.
Williams , North Carolina NAACP leader and militant, officially becomes a
fugitive. FBI Wanted Poster dated
August 31.
September 1-6. First Non-Aligned Summit held in
Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
September. Anthology of Non-Philosophical
Cultural Works hectographed by Tony Conrad and privately circulated.
Poem 1
(1960-61)
Audart
Composition (May 1961)
Audart (July
1961)
Strange
Culture Description (April-May 1961)
Concept
Art: WSTNOKWGO (July 1961)
Concept
Art: Innperseqs (May-July 1961)
September 18. Dag Hammarskjld dies in a plane crash.
October. 22nd Congress of the CPSU,
exacerbating the Sino-Soviet split.
Stalins body removed from Lenins tomb.
October. The Exploitation of Cultural
Revolutionaries in Present Societies.
[Destroyed. Was sent to
Maciunas, proved by Flynt to Young 10/25/61. The theme comes back in a less frantic way in On Social
Recognition, for example.]
November 1. First Women Strike for Peace national
action.
November. Energy Cube Organism completed. Flynt to Young 11/61. Flynt to Young 11/29/61 proposes to
mail a sketch to Young.
November
29. Flynt to Young 11/29/61
mentions inception of a new work, likely the Perception-Dissociator.
December
8, 1961. Young, Response to
WSTNOKWGO. [typescript, Young
archive]
December 9. Tanganyika becomes independent with
Julius Nyerere as President.
December 11. Official beginning of the Vietnam War.
December 15. Eichmann receives the death sentence.
December 19. Goa ceded to India.
December
20. Audact Nos. 1-3, this
date. Recorded in Cambridge,
MA. #3 is unfinished. (It will be completed from the source
tape, according to the 1961 instructions, in 2008.)
no month
Murray Gell-Mann introduces
SU(3) symmetry, the eightfold way.
Raul
Hilberg, The Destruction of the European
Jews
Frantz
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
(original; tr. 1965)
Daniel
Aaron, Writers on the Left
Joseph
Heller, Catch-22
LeRoi
Jones, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide
Note
Bread&, New York poetry magazine,
launched by Frank Kuenstler (Maciunas gives him a series in AG Gallery)
Genet,
The Screens
Rauschenberg,
telegram This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.
Manzoni,
Magic Base
Manzoni,
Line 1000 Meters Long
Yves
Klein, Monotone Symphony
Stockhausen,
Originale
Cage,
Variations II
Ornette
Coleman, Free Jazz
John
Coltrane, Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard
Dave
Brubeck Quartet, Take Five
B
Bumble & the Stingers, Bumble Boogie
Drifters,
Sweets for my Sweet
1962
January. The magazine Root and Branch appears this year. Lasts for two issues.
Written by U.S. political science students flirting with Cuba while
condemning Nkrumah for corruption.
They publish Donald Warden, later to become Dr. Khalid Al Mansour,
political operative for the Saudis, who will play a key role in elevating
Barack Obama.
January. First issue of PL (Progressive Labor)
magazine. [Rosen and Scheer were
expelled from the Communist Party in 1961, but that should not be cited as PLs
founding date. Progressive Labor
will declare itself a movement in July.]
Jan. 8, Monday. First benefit for An Anthology, the Living Theater. The poorly attended event abandoned the printed program,
taking on the character of a drawing-room gathering. Notables in the small audience: Mac Low, Earle Brown.
When Youngs jazz ensemble (drums, Billy Higgins) began to play, Flynt
went up on the stage with his song flute and joined them. [Mac Low to Maciunas, c. January 9,
where he calls the song flute a tonette]
Jan. 9,
Tuesday. Flynt-Young fiddle-piano
duet recording. Flynt-Young alto
sax-piano duet recording.
Flynt-Young song flute-piano duet recording
Feb.
5. second benefit for An
Anthology, the Living Theater
Feb. 8 or 9. Flynts draft physical. Flynt classified 4F.
Feb. 9, Friday. ONCE Festival, Ann Arbor. WSTNOKWGO receives two
performances. As comments on the
program per Youngs typescript of 8 December 1961; as Youngs dismissive
announcement in real time. [program, tape of concert, Young archive]
Feb. 20. John Glenn flight
Feb. 22. creep discourse recording (reel E1)
March. Noscol Version 5 (text)
March. The Tenth St. Coffee House is succeeded
by Les Deux Mgots on East 7th Street. Poets hangouts; Diane Wakoski, Jackson Mac Low.
March 20. C. Wright Mills dies at age 45.
April 17, Tuesday. Cognitive talk, Harvard
April 18. Benjamin Davis, Harvard Law graduate and Communist leader, speaks at
Harvard. Flynt attends with M.I.T.
engineering student Sylvester Okereke.
April 21. Seattle Worlds Fair opens
May. Note on Autobiography, My Acognitive
Cultural Self-Discovery, Creep.
May 8. premiere of Something Funny Happened on
the Way to the Forum
May 1962. Max Stanford founds the Revolutionary
Action Movement (RAM Party) at Central State College in Ohio. This organization has been considerably
underrated.
May 15, Tuesday. Acognitive and Creep lecture, Adams
House, Harvard
[Cf. Harvard Crimson, May 16,1962, Flynt Cites Value of Social
Creep.]
May or
later. The Important Significance
of the Creep Personality (text, destroyed)
June 7. Mongolia becomes a
full member of the Soviet-organized CMEA, drawing much closer to the USSR.
June
9. George Maciunas, Neo-Dada in
the United States, Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal
June 16. Port Huron Statement of SDS.
June 18. Date given for so-called Tape 8, Flynt,
violin and song flute. [Supposedly in Young archive, not located]
June-July. Flynt stays at
Avenue D in Manhattan for two weeks.
Hears North Carolinian Robert F. Williams describe his struggle with the
Klan and the government on WBAI-FM.
(Must have been a rebroadcast.
Williams was recorded in Cuba by Marc Schleifer.)
July 1. Progressive Labor Movement (not Party!)
launched by Rosen and Scheer.
Hereafter PLM.
July 3. Algeria becomes independent. Also given
as July 5.
July 5, Thursday. Acognitive Culture talk, 49 Avenue
D. [I confused the date but it has
been resolved.]
July 6. Death of William Faulkner.
July
15. Young and ensemble, improvised
modal music, 10-4 Group Gallery
July 23. launch of Telstar [cf. Tornadoes, Telstar, 1962]
August. By this month, the Workers World youth
organization has been renamed Youth Against War and Fascism, with Key Martin of
Columbia University as leader.
August 5. Marilyn Monroe dies.
August 7, Tuesday. Pure Recreation talk, Harvard. [Cf. Harvard Summer News, August 6, 1962, notice.]
Summer? My New Concept of General Acognitive
Culture (text)
August 30. A U-2 strays over Sakhalin Island.
September 30. A Taiwanese-operated U-2 is shot down
near Nunchang in western China.
September 30. James Meredith
enrolls in the University of Mississippi, integrating the University.
October 1. West Irian is
ceded by Holland to Indonesia.
October 11. The Second Vatican Council commences.
October 20. China invades India, administering
humiliating defeats to India.
Timed to coincide with Khrushchev gamble in Cuba.
October 22. Cuban missile crisis
October
24. Cage, 0' 0"
November. dcollage No. 3 released with Flynts
essay My New Concept of General Acognitive Culture
November. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life, magazine publication in Moscow.
November. Khrushchevs
vulgar denunciation of the Soviet modern art exhibited at Manezh. It is now known that Khrushchevs
handlers contrived the occasion to set him off. What is really shocking is that the head of a nuclear power
was too crude to suspect that he was being played by his handlers.
November. A group splits from the CPUSA to form
Hammer & Steel in Boston; leader Homer Chase. This utterly insignificant grouplet was nevertheless known
around the far Left, and is the only other anti-revisionist U.S. group
Progressive Labor recognized/recognizes.
November 7. Eleanor Roosevelt dies.
December?
The Simkins hospital integration case in
Greensboro begins in 1962 and ends in 1964. The Supreme Courts decision compels the integration of all
hospitals which receive government money.
December 6. Frantz Fanon dies in Bethesda, Maryland.
December 15. The Chinese Communist Party issues
Workers of All Countries, Unite against modern revisionism.
December 25. Junius Scales
is released from prison.
December 31. China issues The Differences Between
Comrade Togliatti and Us.
no month
Perception-Dissociator
drafted mostly during this year.
Draft discarded? Piece
recreated c. 1966, first published Ikon I/5, April 1968. The work never came to fruition in its
early form, but through it, Flynt motivated himself for such investigations as:
The
Perception-Dissociation of Physics (1969), published 1975.
Intersensory
Discorrelation (1981).
Superseding
Scientific Apprehension of the Inanimate World (1990), web site.
Dabao (Sichuan Province)
punishment camp is closed. (Alternate year 1961.)
Marshall
McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Michael
Harrington, The Other America
Robert
Ruark, Uhuru
Robert
F. Williams, Negroes With Guns (Marzani
and Munsell)
James
Baldwin, Another Country
Heidegger,
Being and Time, English translation
El Corno Emplumado, poetry magazine, launched
by Margaret Randall
premiere
of Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf
first
completion date in reference books for Flaming
Creatures
Morton
Feldman, Dr. Schullers History Lesson, Kulchur
9, 1962
Stockhausen,
Momente
Jackie
Wilson, I Just Cant Help It
Booker
T & the MGs, Green Onions
Tornados,
Telestar
1963
January. Cage, Variations III, date of
composition.
January 16. Khrushchev announces the 100-megaton
bomb in East Berlin.
early 1963. Vince Copeland visits Boston for radio
appearance and Flynt rides back with him to New York.
early 1963. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
appears as a book.
January. PLM conducts a hot-pepper intervention
in the Hazard KY miners strike, led by Wally Linder.
February. Boulez joins the Harvard music
faculty. Unnoticed by Flynt: Boulez has disappeared among the
moderate modernists.
February. Deux Mgots, the poets coffee house on
East 7th St., closes.
February. From
Culture to Veramusement [text, destroyed]
Feb. 27. FCTV Press Release dated 27 Feb. 1963
Feb. 27, Wednesday. demonstrations at cultural institutions
with Conrad and Smith
Feb. 28, Thursday. 49 Bond St., reading of From Culture to
Veramusement
March. FCTV
Press Release dated March-April 1963
March 30. The CPSUs Open Letter, commencing
the most intense Sino-Soviet polemics.
April 16. Dr. King, Letter from a Birmingham
Jail.
April 23. William Moore, Baltimore resident,
member of CORE, solo civil rights marcher, is shot execution-style on a highway
in Alabama.
c. May 1. Flynt moves to New
York, renting a room in a rooming house
May. release of Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
May
11-12. YAM DAY
May. Flynt visits parents in Gboro, sends
letter to WW [father away from Gboro at a photographers convention]
May. While in North Carolina, Flynt visits
Larry Phelps, PLMs representative in Chapel Hill. Phelps could have been 22 in 1963. He was or would be a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill. See below, when he becomes a news
story.
May 25. letter from Gboro publ. in WW, pen
name Charles Henry
May 25. Organization of African Unity (OAU)
formed in Addis Ababa.
c. May. An
Anthology (see above), now a book, ed. Young, copyright and published by
Young and Mac Low, is shipped.
Includes Concept Art.
c. May. dimension
14/fringe released. This Ann Arbor magazine has a selection
of word pieces for which Young was a consultant. Includes pieces by Flynt.
Summer. An excursion to Cuba organized by PLM.
Texas millionaire Harvard student Albert Maher is in the group.
June 3. Pope John XXIII dies.
June 12. Medgar Evers is murdered.
June 14-17. SDS issues America and the New Era.
June 21. Pope Paul VI begins his reign.
summer. Flynt employed as messenger.
July 1. U.S. Postal Service introduces ZIP
codes
July 7, Sunday. Flynts seminar at Ben Pattersons
apartment.
July. FCTB [n.b.] Press Release dated July-August 1963, called #2 when
strictly it was number 3
July. PLM conducts a hot-pepper intervention
in Monroe NC, led by Ed Lemansky.
July 30. Months after Kim Philbys arrival in
Moscow, Soviet officials announce that they have granted him asylum. [Cf. A Spy Among Friends.]
August 5. U.S.-Soviet Test Ban Treaty
August 8. Mao ZeDong issues Statement Supporting
the Afro-Americans, credited to the influence of Robert F. Williams, now in
Peking.
August 27. W.E.B. Du Bois dies in Ghana.
August 28, Wednesday. The March on Washington; Dr. Kings I
have a dream speech.
September. Macuinas returns to New York.
September. House Un-American Activities Committee
hearings on the Cuba trip sponsored by PLM.
September 15. Birmingham bombing kills four black
children attending Sunday School.
October 12. New
Yorker parody, by Donald Barthelme, of the FCTV March-April press
release. Flynt is depicted as the
extremist buffoon Henry Mackie.
November. RAM commences publication of its
quarterly Black
America. RAM has Robert Williams as its honorary Chairman, will have
Malcolm X as a clandestine member, and will have Amiri Baraka as a member.
November 1. U.S. proxies overthrow Diem in South
Vietnam.
November 22. President Kennedy is assassinated in
Dallas. Vice President Johnson
replaces him by Constitutional provision.
November 24. Oswald, the accused, is assassinated in
the Dallas police station by Jack Ruby.
December 12. Kenya becomes independent.
December 19. Mark Lanes
Oswald Innocent? appears in National Guardian. Lane will be adopted by Workers World,
which will support his campaign that eventuates in his book Rush to
Judgment.
December
22. Central Park Transverse Vocals
1-4 recorded
December
25. Acoustic Hillbilly Jive
recorded
December
26. release of Beatles I Want to
Hold Your Hand
December
28. Hindemith dies.
no month
Identification
of Brend (text, 4 pages)
Leary and Alpert dismissed
from Harvard three years after the beginning of Harvard Psilocybin Project.
Castalia Institute (Leary,
Alpert, Metzner)—nicknamed Millbrook.
Caf Le Metro, poets
hangout, opens on Second Ave., New York.
Paul Cohen proves the
independence of the Continuum Hypothesis.
Karl
Marx, Early Writings, ed. T. B.
Bottomore
Betty
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
Sartre,
Search for a Method, English
translation
LeRoi
Jones, Blues People
UMBRA, African-American poetry
magazine, is launched
1963,
second completion date in reference books for Flaming Creatures
Cage,
Variations IV
Beach
Boys, Surfin U.S.A.
Crystals,
Da Doo Ron Ron
Jaynetts,
Sally, Go Round the Roses
Trashmen,
Surfin Bird
Kingmen,
Louie Louie
1964
January 12. The Arab government of Zanzibar is
overthrown by African nationalist rebels.
January 16. Hello Dolly! opens.
February-March. The RT, a faction in the SWP led by
James Robertson, is expelled, and names itself the Spartacist League. Its first publication is Spartacist.
It will not start a newspaper until years later.
February 7. The Medgar Evers murder trial ends in a
mistrial.
February 7. The Beatles arrive in New York.
February 28. Thelonius Monk on the cover of Time magazine.
February. Murray Gell-Manns paper, A Schematic
Model (quarks).
March 8. Malcolm X breaks with the Nation of
Islam.
March 14. Jack Ruby is convicted of killing
Oswald.
March 14. The date on which the PLM front, the
May 2nd Movement or M2M, is said to be founded at Yale
University. This is prior to the
demonstration from which its name is taken. M2M will be dissolved in 1966.
March. Julius Hobson, government economist and
sometime CORE officer, creates ACT as the organization for his one-man Civil
Rights campaign.
March. Primary Study, Version 7, published in Fluxus V TRE.
March 18. Norbert Wiener dies.
March 19. Program for Genocide in South West
Africa published in Workers World.
April 1. Brazil, military coup against Goulart
commences the fifteen-year tyranny of the Right. Now known to have been CIA-sponsored.
April 22. The Worlds Fair
Stall-In. Attributed to a faction
of CORE but disavowed by the parent organization. In fact, the participants whose photos appeared in the New
York tabloids, being beaten by police, were all white and all from YAWF. The only participant whose name is on
record today is Key Martin.
April 26. Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form
Tanzania.
April 29, Wednesday. AACI demonstration at Town Hall. Fight Musical Decoration of Fascism!
May 1 - 3. The Afro-American
Student Conference on Black Nationalism at Fisk University in Nashville, with
the participation of RAM.
May 2. Large demonstration against the Vietnam
War in Times Square—PLM credited as organizer.
May 27. Nehru dies.
May 28. The PLO is established in Jerusalem.
May 30. Free Alto recorded at 359 Canal
St. (reel M2)
June 12. Nelson Mandela sentenced to life
imprisonment.
June 14. Freedom Summer, a drive to register
black voters in Mississippi which is primarily a SNCC project, begins. It will last into August.
June 19-21. The CP founds the DuBois Clubs in San
Francisco. Similarity of the name
to the Boys Clubs is denounced as a Communist trick.
June 21. In connection with Freedom Summer, the
civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney disappear in
Mississippi. They are murdered the
next day.
July 3. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed
into law.
July 14. Publication of the CCPs Ninth Comment,
On Khrushchevs Phony Communism, written by Mao.
July 16-22. The Harlem Race Riots of 1964.
July 25. In a sequel to the Harlem Riots, Bill
Epton of PLM, and attorney Conrad Lynn, are arrested for incitement.
August 2. Gulf of Tonkin incident. Now known to have been a U.S.
government deception.
August 4. Bodies of the civil rights workers who
were murdered on June 22 are
discovered in Mississippi.
August 6. London Times literary Supplement, page
688 Henry Flynt concept art.
August 7. Tonkin Gulf
Resolution. Now known to have been
unconstitutional.
August 8. Antiwar rally in
New York. Albert Maher of PLM is
arrested.
mid-August. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party is refused recognition by the Democratic Party Presidential Convention in
Atlantic City.
August 20. President Johnsons War on Poverty bill
signed.
September 3. London Times Literary Supplement, page 775,
Henry Flynts intellectualized art; page 828, mentions My New Concept of
Acognitive Culture, dcollage No. 3.
Important because up to this point, I am grouped with a post-Cage circle
that has not been co-opted by Maciunas.
September 8, Tuesday. AACI demonstration at Judson Hall.
Picket Stockhausen Concert!
September 10. Interview with Henry Flynt in Village Voice, Susan Goodman, Anti-Art
Pickets Pick on Stockhausen.
September. From Time magazine review, Sept. 18,
1964, page 81, it is known that Flynt sent a word piece to Norman Seaman which
involved the audience gathering in a dark room with an airborne cutaneous
anesthetic. (To eliminate all
sensation except hearing.) The
piece itself, presumably typed on canary paper, does not seem to have
survived. Flynt meant it as a
spoof of modern-music one-upmanship—since the latter was what Moormans
Avant-Garde Festival was supposedly about.
September. Probably this month. Flynt receives a call at WW from WBAI,
inviting him to speak on the radio to explain the anti-Stockhausen
demonstration. WW vetoes accepting
the invitation.
September 27. The Warren Commission Report is
published, concluding that Kennedy was murdered by a lone assassin.
October 14. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize.
October 15. Khrushchev is deposed by Brezhnev.
October 15 or 16. China explodes an atomic bomb. It is now known that the U.S.
contemplated a surgical strike to prevent Chinas acquisition of the bomb. The question of a surgical strike to
prevent nuclear proliferation comes up repeatedly—one wonders if there
was a scenario to hit Pakistan.
October 24. Northern Rhodesia becomes Zambia,
ending 73 years of British rule.
October 27. Prominent dancer Fred Herko does dance
of death, leaps out of loft window to his death.
November 3. L. B. Johnson, who gained the
Presidency by replacing Kennedy, is elected President.
December 3. Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
December
3. The Primitives, forerunner of
the Velvet Underground (see below), rehearse and record in Walter De Marias
Bond St. loft.
December. Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana is
ousted by a joint CIA-British covert operation.
no month
Project Camelot is started
Bell proves Bells Theorem,
action at a distance in quantum mechanics.
Sartre is awarded the Nobel
Prize and is the first and only recipient to decline it.
Kim Harriman leaves the
Greensboro school system for the University of Georgia.
Wittgenstein,
Philosophische Bemerkungen
Murray
Gell-Mann and Yuval Neeman, The Eightfold
Way
Marshall
McLuhan, Understanding Media
Sartre,
Les Mots
Herbert Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man
Susan
Sontag, Notes on Camp, Partisan Review
Leary and Metzner, The
Psychedelic Experience
movie, Dr. Strangelove
LeRoi
Jones, Dutchman
LeRoi
Jones, The Toilet
LeRoi
Jones, The Slave
Rolf
Hochhuth, The Deputy first staged on
Broadway
Beatles,
A Hard Days Night
Martha
& the Vandellas, Dancing in the Street
Nashville
Teens, Tobacco Road
Zombies,
Shes Not There
1965
January 21, 1965. Larry
Phelps, age 23, is murdered in the PLM office in Harlem by Arthur McCall. Motive never established. [Cf. The New York Times, 22 January 1965.]
February 21. Assassination of Malcolm X.
March. The Progressive Labor
Movement issues Road to Revolution, later known as RR I.
April. The Progressive Labor Movement declares
itself the Progressive Labor Party.
Hereafter PLP.
April 28. U.S. intervention in the Domenican
Republic.
June. The PLP newspaper, Challenge –
Desafio, begins publication.
July
23. Cage-Cunningham performance of Variations V in a New York Philharmonic
series.
August 6. Voting Rights Act.
August 11-16. Watts riots.
August 20. Jonathan Daniels, Episcopal seminarian
from New England, is shot dead by state employee Tom Coleman in the course of a
civil rights protest in Alabama.
September. The CPUSA (M.-L.), led by the unusually
young Michael Laski, splits from P.O.C.
It publishes Peoples Voice.
September 3. Lin Biao, Long Live the Victory of
Peoples War issued. The Chinese
Communist Party receives this document nervously, sensing its extremism.
September 12 and 19. Yoko Ono, Morning Piece, 87
Christopher St., New York.
October. Indonesian mass murder of
Communists. Absence of official
Communist protests speaks volumes.
October 3. Immigration Act of 1965.
October 4. SDS officially severs ties with the
League for Industrial Democracy.
November
1. The Velvet Underground first
performs as a pit band in this week.
November 11. Ian Smiths UDI in Rhodesia.
December. Publication of Communists Must Give
Revolutionary Leadership in Culture.
Dec. 2. Lecture to art students on Communist
cultural policy, Cooper Union.
December 10. Henry Cowell, modern music pioneer and
U.S. cultural administrator in West Germany, dies.
no month
HF is discussed in Ben Vautiers
Tout No. 9 Esthtique (Nice)
Penzias and Wilson detect
cosmic microwave background radiation.
Project Camelot is
cancelled.
The Socialist Scholars
Conference in the U.S. is established this year. [Chroniclers report this claim warily.]
Chomsky,
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Wolff,
Moore, Marcuse, A Critique of Pure
Tolerance
Ralph
Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed
The Autobiography of Malcolm
X
Tony
Conrad, The Flicker
Bob
Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone
Barry
McGuire, Eve of Destruction
Petula
Clark, Downtown
Dobie
Gray, The In Crowd
Jr.
Walker & the All Stars, Shotgun
Shirley
Ellis, The Name Game
Sam
the Sham & the Pharaohs, Wolly Bully
Beach
Boys, Help Me Rhonda
Righteous
Brothers, Youve Lost That Lovin Feelin
Bob
Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues
Yardbirds,
For Your Love
James
Brown, Papas Got a Brand New Bag
1966
January. The CPUSA (M.-L.) commences publication
of Red Flag.
It allegedly forms the Negro National Liberation Front. (It could only have been a tiny paper
organization.)
January 10. Julian Bond is denied his seat in the
Georgia State Legislature.
January. Transformations included in the Arts
In Fusion exhibition, Temple University.
February 17. The Insurrections record at Walter De
Marias loft.
March 16. The Insurrections record in a
borrowed apartment.
March. Crisis Over Zimbabwe published in The Partisan, the YAWF journal
April 21. The Sip-in at
Julius in Greenwich Village. Dick
Leitsch, John Timmons, Craig Rodwell.
May 14. Henry Flynt tracks, Raga Electric, Sky
Turned Red, Sanders Studio.
May 16. Three adherents of the SWP are
assassinated at their headquarters in Detroit.
May 25. The Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution is launched in China.
It will last until 1976.
Number of people slaughtered, high estimate is one million. PLP, in Road to Revolution III, will lament the defeat of the Cultural
Revolution.
June 2. Public inquisition on the Indonesian
massacre of Communists, arranged by YAWF, held at Columbia University. Speakers, Eugene Genovese, William Worthy.
June 5 and July 3.
Inteviewed with Fwanyanga Mulikita, Zambian Ambassador to the UN, by Florynce
Kennedy, WLIB.
June 6. James Meredith, first known for
integrating the University of Mississippi, is assassinated.
July 23. Insurrections tracks, Broadway
Recording Studio.
August. The Red Guards are started in China
early this month, according to The New York Times.
August 8. Robert Williams speaks at a rally in
Peking commemorating the 8 August 1963 Mao statement.
August 16. House Un-American
Activities Committee hearings on subversive activities in the antiwar
movement. PLP members are
subpoenaed.
Sept. 4. Flynt delivers a statement on cultural
questions at the annual national conference of Workers World Party. It backfires in that it elicits a clash
between Mae Mallory and Sam Marcy over the Chinese demonstrators who are
menacing the Soviet Embassy in Beijing.
Sept. 16, 17, 23, 24. Friday, Saturday, Friday,
Saturday. Flynt performs (electric
violin) as replacement for Cale with the Velvet Underground at the Dom, New
York.
October 15. Black Panther Party founded in Oakland,
CA.
October 29. Betty Friedan founds NOW.
November 3. Che Guevara arrives incognito in
Bolivia.
November 30. Schoenbergs Moses and Aaron is premiered in the U.S. in Boston.
December 1. SNCC votes to expel whites. The Black Panther Party has been
founded; SNCC continues to exist.
This is said to be the first, indecisive expulsion vote. The decisive vote will be in May 1967
in Atlanta. Some attribute the
vote to RAMs infiltration of SNCC.
December 2.
Informal Hillbilly Jive (does not yet have boogie intro) and Echo Rock
recorded.
December 8.
Mastertone Studio, editing of existing tracks.
Dec. 9. Issue of L.A. Free Press, this date, Joseph Byrds interview of Stockhausen. Flynt and AACI demonstrations
mentioned.
Winter
1966. Film Culture, first
publication of Mock Risk Games.
December 17. PLP issues Road to Revolution II, in
which they declare the Soviet Union to be a capitalist country. (I can report as an insider that WW
thought this was sensationalism which would finish the organization off. But not so. The Chinese loved it.
They would endorse PLP in 1967, and Mao would declare the Soviet Union a
capitalist country in 1973.)
December
22. SNCC benefit at the Village
Theater, Stokely Carmichael, A.B. Spellman (MC), Marion Brown, Jackie McLean,
Archie Shepp. Linkage of the Black
Power movement and the new jazz.
Frank Kofsky in attendance.
December 23. Flynt, not listed on flier, performs
Hillbilly Jive [with newly composed boogie intro inspired by reading about
Coleman in Four Lives in the Be-Bop
Business], Palm Gardens celebration, New York. The pre-assembled audience, prepared to hear the Fugs, is
wowed. Bernard Stollman introduces
himself to Flynt backstage. The
Stollman acquaintance does not lead to an album.
no month
Primary
Paradox written [Primary Study
Version 7 recast discursively]
1966
Mathematical Studies written (published 1975)
Music in the
African Ceremony of Possession written
1966. I recreate the Perception-Dissociator
as originally planned in the form of a hand-made guidebook.
Shane Mage introduces his
LSD Marxism at the second Socialist Scholars Conference
Oscar
Lewis, La Vida [culture of poverty]
Baran
and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital
Mark
Lane, Rush to Judgment
Mao
ZeDong, The Little Red Book
The Silent Slaughter, YAWF pamphlet on the
massacre of Communists in Indonesia.
RAM
pamphlet, The World Black Revolution—calls
for the creation of a Black International and a dictatorship of the world by
the Black Underclass through World Revolution
The
magazine Ramparts (founded in 1962 as
heir to Root and Branch) takes the
form for which it becomes widely known.
Truman
Capote, In Cold Blood
Cage,
Variations VI
Cage,
Variations VII
Simon
& Garfunkel, Homeward Bound
Simon
& Garfunkel, I Am a Rock
Tommy
James & the Shondells, Hanky Panky
Troggs,
Wild Thing
Left
Banke, Walk Away Renee
Beach
Boys, Good Vibrations
1967
January 10. Lester ax handle Maddox becomes
Governor of Georgia.
January
20. Black Music at SNCC Benefit Linked to Liberation Struggle
published in Workers World.
Flynts unsigned review of the concert the preceding December 22 at the
Village Theater.
January 26. Concert, electric fiddle, Mass Art, New
York. There is no audience. Flynt can wow a pre-assembled audience
but cannot garner an audience.
January 27. Three astronauts die in the Apollo 1
launch pad fire.
February 10. 25th Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution ratified, deals with an incapacitated President.
February 11. Rev. A. J. Muste, leader of many Left
coalitions, dies.
February 18. J. Robert Oppenheimer dies.
March
8. Herbert Marcuse, lecture at
School of Visual Arts, New York, curated by Dore Ashton: Art in the One-Dimensional Society. Flynt attends, to distribute CMGRLIC on the
sidewalk and to scout out Marcuse.
Benn Morea of BLACK MASK is there, and challenges Marcuses vision of
social salvation through romantic art.
Seeing Marcuse induces Flynt to read Soviet
Marxism and to become increasingly estranged from the barracks model of
communism.
March 9. Defection of Svetlana Alliluyeva to the
West.
April 15. The Spring
Mobilization antiwar demonstrations.
(Nicknamed the Mobe.)
500,000 participants claimed.
Headlined in New York by Dr. M.L. King, Jr.
April 20. Regis Dbray surrenders himself to the
Bolivian army.
April 21. Military dictatorship commences in
Greece.
April 28. Muhammad Ali refuses military service.
May. The second, decisive vote to expel
whites from SNCC at the Central Committee meeting in Atlanta.
May 6. Performance, electric fiddle, Ikon
Magazine benefit, New York.
May 7. The New Left, The New York Times.
Reports that SDS has turned to revolutionary violence.
May 22. Langston Hughes dies.
June 5. The Six-Day War.
June. The Beatles Sergeant Pepper album
released.
June-July. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the
Rolling Stones are in and out of jail on drug convictions.
June. Flynt resumes college, at NYU, with a
summer French course. At some
point between now and August, his visits to the Workers World office cease.
June 12. U.S. Supreme Court rules that state
prohibitions on interracial marriage are unconstitutional. The decision only affects the South.
June 13. Thurgood Marshall nominated to the U.S.
Supreme Court.
June 17. China conducts its first H-bomb test.
June 21. Sixteen RAM members
are arrested, mostly in New York, for a plot to assassinate moderate black
leaders. Herman Ferguson, a school
principal in Brownsville, Brooklyn, is determined to be most culpable. RAMs leader, Max Stanford, is arrested
in Philadelphia. He is
subsequently released. [Cf. 16
Negroes Seized, The New York Times, 22 June 1967.]
June 29. Jayne Mansfield dies.
July 6. The Biafran War begins.
July 13-15. Race riots in Newark and Detroit.
July 17. John Coltrane dies.
August. The Soviet Economy and the Communist
Party written. Amounts to a
follow-on to Marcuses Soviet Marxism
emphasizing institutional economics.
September 8. The Canadian mind-control scientist
Ewen Cameron dies. He has been
paid by the CIA to participate in MKULTRA.
September. First fall semester at NYU. Flynt resumes as a math major with the
Real Analysis course using the Royden textbook.
Fall. Flynt mails The Soviet Economy to Sam
Marcy. It amounts to a resignation
from WW. In fact, Flynts connection to the organized Left ends at this point
because the Soviet Union is the premise of the latter.
October 8-9. Che Guevara captured and executed in
Bolivia.
October 17. Premiere of the love-rock musical Hair.
October-November. House Un-American Activities Committee
hearings on subversive influences in riots.
November. Prospectus for the Journal of
Indeterminate Mathematical Investigations, a flier.
November 18. Joan Didion,
Comrade Laski, Saturday Evening Post, an
interview with Michael Laski of the CPUSA (M-L). Somebody is having their fun with the far Left—since
leader Laski embezzles the Partys treasury and drives nonstop to Las Vegas,
where he loses everything in a casino.
December 3. First human heart transplant performed
by Dr. Christian Bernard.
December 26. Beatles TV film Magical Mystery Tour
premiers.
Dec. 29. Paul Whiteman dies.
no month
Mock Risk
Games [re-creation from memory of Exercise Awareness-States] written.
Mock Risk Games published
in Ikon, New York, 1967.
CMGRLIC issued in Italian
translation as a poster. ED. 912,
Milan.
Cybernetics
of Controlled Brain Inputs written
Art or
Brend? essay written
First pulsar discovered.
Electroweak unification and
the neutral current.
Third Socialist Scholars
Conference
The Chinese Communist
leadership declares Progressive Labor to be the correct Party in the U.S.
[Reported by a U.S. News & World Report publication as inside
information! Communism and the New Left (1970).]
San Remo Caf, Greenwich
Village writers hangout, closes.
Desmond
Morris, The Naked Ape
Eric
Berne, Games People Play
Norman
Podhoretz, Making It
Piri
Thomas, Down These Mean Streets
Norman
Mailer, Why Are We in Vietnam?
Rgis
Debray, Revolution in the Revolution
Harold
Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual
Carmichael
and Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America
Doors,
Light My Fire
Aretha
Franklin, Chain of Fools