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Image provided by: University at Buffalo
■ a, whose office was prosecuting the student trial of the ROTC demonstrators. There was no damage and no arrests. February 21 - The student judiciary trial of the nine ROTC demonstrators is declared a mistrial when the University Advocate’s prosecutor storms out of the court, protesting the harassing of witnesses. February 20 - The Buffalo chapter' of the National Organization of Women is formed on campus. February 23 - Engineering students announce a boycott of classes over the refusal of tenure status to a popular professor. The students re protesting the undemocratic and poorly-defined process which leads to a tenure decision. sit-in in support of the players. The game had concluded and the group marched over to Hayes Hall to confront Acting President Peter Regan, After a brief confrontation, the students left the building. A group of about 20 riot-equipped campus police appeared and, after a rock was thrown at Regan’s window, chased the __ students back to Norton Hall, where other students threw up barricades to block the entrance to police. The police crashed through the barriers with the intent of clearing the building. From there, what followed is called a “police riot” by some observers and “excessive force\ by nearly all others. Dozens of students are clubbed and kicked to the point of bleeding as the police push the crowd but of Norton Hall. Within an hour, city police enter the building and clear the first floor in a matter of minutes. Upstairs, students are writing out eyewitness accounts of brutality and arranging bail funds for those arrested. After being forced out into the icy night J air, students threw ice and $ shouted “Off the pigs\ to a group « of police standing on the Norton - steps. From there follow a series ? of sweeps toward Kimball tower | into the crowd of several hundred 5 students. More students are 3 beaten and maced and several “ police who fall are attacked by * February 25-26 - The most terrifying night in the University’s history begins about 7 pin. with a rally in Haas Lounge to support the boycotting black basketball players. About 100 students march to Clark Gym to stage a students. With each surge, people scatter toward the dormitories tripping and falling on the icy 3 walks. More city police arrive with K-9 dogs. By 12:30 a.m., enough 5 The Sixties is putty for the Seventies. The amorphousness and malleability of the very concept, the sixties, leads us to use the period to justify all sorts of arguments. We create for ourselves a personal gospel on the decade and damn anyone who disagrees with it. For this “infant” of the Sixties, those years of revolution and revelation began quietly on the couch in my aunt’s apartment. The radio was playing the Supremes’ “Baby Love.” That experience of sitting there, enjoying the song and the pleasures of being independent and all of seven years old, remains my most accessible memory of the Sixties. Emotionally, the Sixties spiral out from “Baby Love” but it is absurd (not to mention difficult) to relate the entirety of the Sixties through one song. Perhaps it is this melange of private legacies that makes the sixties a lost horizon populated with left over symbols. We look at the decade and see surface rather than substance. Symbols are shorthand for the mind; their validity depends on the quality of their restranslation back to the things they’re supposed to stand for. And there’s the rub - we are hardly telepathic. “Baby Love” is not going to explain the Sixties for anyone except me; perhaps the art of the times will reach more people — surely there are more symbols to work with. After all, we probably can’t do any worse than Bob Dylan. “I don’t know what it meant” he said recently, referring to the Sixties, “but I’m sure glad they are over.” In music, the Sixties ends for me with the advent of punk and disco in 1973. The dialectic between these and J Sixties’ music is too involved to go into here but a major g difference between the musics would have to be the shift S from musicians seeing themselves as social instigators to S seeing themselves as plainly, entertainers. 3 Literature’s low profile d One of the stranger things about the Sixties is that ? while singers could inflame the youthful throngs, writers, who you would expect to be more eloquent, took a S backseat as inspirational leaders of the revolt against the < status quo. There is no mistaking however, their seminal to influence on the period. to In popular fiction insanity and the insane individual, became heroes, if there were any at all. This insanity, in a society where the sane thing was the Vietnam war, Art and anarchy The Sixties loaded with symbols aiming to imitate life cropped up in books like Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and R.D. Laing's The Divided Self. “The fiction of the sixties was escapist, absurdist, and surrealist,\ states Howard Wolf, an English professor and author of the Sixties-based novel Forgive Thy Father. “But the poetry was prophetic,” he adds. Specifying one of these themes, Wolf claimed that “What links Tolkien, (author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) and Bartholme was their use of fantasy.” Fantasy, Wolf says, either “represented a denial of the present social experience” as in The Lord of the Rings where Tolkein creates a complete world with a map and an ancient history, or “an assertion of the individual consciousness over social reality” as in the works of David Bartholme and William Gass, by Ralph Allen Sixties music Never had American musicians carried as much weight as they did during the Sixties. Singers, like Dylan and Baez, seemed to lead the charge for change; they were the Pied Pipers of this country’s disenchanted middle-class youth. In these early years, rock, recently birthed from r&b, harped on teenage love and the heartaches you’d forget by the next milkshake. The folkies spent their evenings with sad-eyed social injustices or in communion with nature, while Motown packaged black musicians to Poetry came in diverse flavors, from Braugtigan and Vonnegut, to the “Beats” like Ginsberg, Kerouac and Le Roi Jones, to Nikki Giovanna and Gwendolyn Brooks. The latter are usually corralled in to that nebulous school, “black poetry.” But the diversity of are usually corralled in to that nebulous school, black poetry.” But the diversity of black poets meant that if a school of black poetry did exist, it would have to be a school without walls. Gwendolyn Brooks’ tempered verse in classical form, for instance, rarely reached the forefront of this country’s media consciousness while Giovanna’s line (“nigger you can kill”) did. “pass,” recommending bouffants to their female musicians and short cropped hair for their male musicians. And please, no songs about how black folks got it bad in this country! Though some people today see them as wifnps, we often forget that in those days to be a rock-n-roller was a rebellious act in and of itself. The groundwork for social upheaval when rockers took up popular causes. When this campus experienced its period of unrest (1969-1971), Zappa and his Mothers of Inventions, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix were, if not the rock of ages, at least the rock of the age. Upon Hendrix’s death in 1970, Joe Fernbacher, an editor for The Spectrum, said of him, “Jimi Hendrix in his short career created a physical manifestation of the black sexual myth; he was created by the white world and he shunned his creators and came back a black man playing black music to anyone who would listen.” Writers never seemed to gain the stature of songwriters and singers, in the popular consciousness of the sixties. Considering however that presently only 20% of the American population read books with any frequency, it is almost suprising that they had the influence they did. Many writers fought a battle to assert self over the image that others thought they should project. James Baldwin was roundly criticized by both blacks and whites for not writing violent enough. Some “radical” critics of the time saw the worth of any artist as proportional only to how his work added to the struggle. While some artists were co-opted into spitting out what others thought to be “proper” revolutionary art, by and large, this admiration of ethnic culture, percussion, especially the drum, became important to all music, but especially to jazz. Although the method of “jazzsicans” was to subtly play on the prevailing social unrest, there were notable exceptions. Gil-Scott Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised couldn’t be anymore straight forward about revolution and the roles media was playing in it. “The revolution will not be televised” he sang. “It will be live.” What modest success jazz experiences today was predicted on the experiments conducted in this period by “jazzsucians” like Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Charlie Mingus. With the rising appreciation and —continued on page 20— . . Perhaps It is the melange of private legacies that makes the sixties a lost horizon populated with left over symbols . . .
