“In the end, the military campaign was called Operation Ranch Hand, but it originally went by a more appropriately hellish appellation: Operation Hades. As part of this Vietnam War effort, from 1961 to 1971, the United States sprayed over 73 million liters of chemical agents on the country to strip away the vegetation that provided cover for Vietcong troops in ‘enemy territory.’ Using a variety of defoliants, the U.S. military also intentionally targeted cultivated land, destroying crops and disrupting rice production and distribution by the largely communist National Liberation Front, a party devoted to reunification of North and South Vietnam. Some 45 million liters of the poisoned spray was Agent Orange, which contains the toxic compound dioxin. It has unleashed in Vietnam a slow-onset disaster whose devastating economic, health and ecological impacts that are still being felt today. This is one of the greatest legacies of the…

“Accattone is a 1961 Italian drama film written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Despite being filmed from an original screenplay, Accattone is often perceived as a cinematic rendition of Pasolini’s earlier novels, particularly The Ragazzi and A Violent Life. It was Pasolini’s first film as director, employing what would later be seen as trademark Pasolini characteristics; a cast of non-professional actors hailing from where the movie is set, and thematic emphasis on impoverished individuals. While many people were surprised by Pasolini’s shift from literature to film, he had considered attending the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome before World War II. Pasolini had collaborated with Federico Fellini on Le notti di Cabiria and considered cinema to be writing with reality. The word accattone[akkatˈtɔne] is a slang term meaning ‘vagabond‘ or ‘scrounger‘. Accattone is a story of pimps, prostitutes and thieves, types…

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

John F. Kennedy

“Legendary filmmaker Peter Whitehead was at the heart of Swinging London, chronicling the youth explosion, the burgeoning popular music scene and the counterculture of the 1960s. In March the NFT hosted a comprehensive retrospective of his work. Now the BFI releases two of his films for the first time; Wholly Communion (1965) and Benefit of the Doubt (1967), coupled with a new interview with Peter and additional rare footage. With over three hours of material, Peter Whitehead and the Sixties is a fascinating document of the radical, experimental, literary and theatrical scenes of 60s London. On 11 June 1965, the Royal Albert Hall played host to a slew of American and European beat poets for an extraordinary impromptu event – the International Poetry Incarnation – that arguably marked the birth of London’s gestating counterculture. Cast in the role of historian, as a man-on-the-scene, and massively elevating his limited resources, Whitehead…

Wikipedia – “‘All Along the Watchtower’ is a song written and recorded by American singer-songwriterBob Dylan. The song initially appeared on his 1967 album John Wesley Harding, and it has been included on most of Dylan’s subsequent greatest hits compilations. … Covered by numerous artists in various genres, ‘All Along the Watchtower’ is strongly identified with the interpretation Jimi Hendrix recorded for Electric Ladyland with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. … According to Clinton Heylin, all the songs for John Wesley Harding were written and recorded during a six-week period at the end of 1967. With one child born in early 1966 and another in mid-1967, Dylan had settled into family life. … Accompanying Dylan, who played acoustic guitar and harmonica, were two Nashville veterans from the Blonde on Blonde sessions, Charlie McCoy on bass guitar and Kenneth Buttrey on drums. … Several…

“City of Night is a novel written by John Rechy. It was originally published in 1963 in New York by Grove Press. Earlier excerpts had appeared in Evergreen Review, Big Table, Nugget, and The London Magazine. City of Night is notable for its exposé approach to and stark depiction of hustling, as well as its stream of consciousness narrative style. Set in the 1960s, the book follows the travels of a young man (Rechy uses the term ‘youngman’ when referring to hustlers) across the country while working as a hustler. The book focuses chapters on locations that the boy visits and certain personages he meets there, from New York City, to Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Orleans. Throughout the novel, the unnamed narrator has trysts with various peculiar characters, including another hustler, an older man, an S&M enthusiast and a bed-ridden…

When the Moody Blues entered a Decca recording studio in October 1967, they were a modestly successful British Invasion act with one likable Merseybeat hit single to their credit, 1965’s “Go Now.” Their contract with the label was about to expire and they owed several thousand pounds to Decca. In exchange for having the debt canceled, they agreed to make a rock version of Dvorak’s New World Symphony that the label wanted to use to showcase a new stereo audio format.

If record buyers were a bit slow to catch on, critics were even slower.

But the weeklong Decca session didn’t work out as planned. Instead of a Dvorak recording, it produced Days of Future Passed, an album that successfully fuses rock and classical in a performance that profits substantially from the contributions of composer/conductor Peter Knight and his London Festival Orchestra (a nonentity that was named for the…

“The Yage Letters, first published in 1963, is a collection of correspondence and other writings by Beat Generation authors William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. It was issued by City Lights Books. Most of the letters date back to 1953 and chronicle Burroughs’ visit to the Amazon rainforest in search of yagé (ayahuasca), a plant with near-mythical hallucinogenic and some say telepathic qualities. Along the way, Burroughs and Ginsberg share other stories and anecdotes, including some concepts Burroughs would later use in novels such as Naked Lunch. The book ends with further correspondence written in 1960 detailing Ginsberg’s experiments with yagé. Beyond the letters themselves, the book is noteworthy for two short pieces by Burroughs. The anarchic ‘Roosevelt After Inauguration’, a savage parody of American politics in which ‘a purple-assed baboon’ is appointed to the United States Supreme Court, was omitted from…