Underground Press Syndicate
Related: underground press - Tom Forcade
East Village Other. Vol.2, no.10, 1967
image sourced here.
R. Crumb cover of French magazine Actuel (1990)
image sourced here.
Profile
Kindman was the founder, in December 1965, of The Paper, East Lansing, Michigan's first underground paper and one of the first five members of Underground Press Syndicate. In early 1968 he joined the staff of Avatar, in Boston, unaware that the large, experimental commune that controlled the paper was a charismatic cult centered on a former-musician-turned-guru named Mel Lyman, whose psychic hold over his followers was then being strengthened and intensified by means of various confrontations and loyalty tests. Five years later, Kindman fled the commune's rural outpost in Kansas after another of many violent confrontations with irrational policy decisions over which he felt helpless, and made his way to Palo Alto, California, to recover from the earlier traumas. There, he became active in the budding men's movement and on another community-based newspaper, the Grapevine. Later, in San Francisco, he was a home-remodeling contractor, a key activist in a gay men's pagan spiritual network, and a student. Using writing as a means of self-discovery, Kindman wrote the following story in part to try to make sense of what happened to him and why. He died, from AIDS, on November 22, 1991, two months after it was completed. --http://www.trussel.com/lyman/melpress.htm [Aug 2004]Fifth Estate
By 1972 the optimism of the sixties had worn off and the tone of the paper became more concerned with struggle than fun. Ovshinsky left, leaving a group of young people (teenagers or in their early twenties) to run the paper. Some of their naivete wore off as they sent delegations to Vietnam, Cambodia and Cuba. With the massive defeat of George McGovern and the election of Richard Nixon for a second term with an increased vote damaged the movement - many underground papers stopped coming out and the alternative news services such as the Liberation News Service, and the Underground Press Syndicate had collapsed. By 1975, FE was lingering on - many staff had burnt out through too much activism and they had their share of internal disputes. The debts were mounting up. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Estate [Aug 2004]
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