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20 TO LIFE
The World Premiere of TWENTY TO LIFE at the Festival Internazionale della Letteratura Resistente in Pitigliano, Italy on September 7th was followed by screenings in Genoa, Livorno, Florence, Pietrosante, Forte Prenestino in Rome, and at the Rex Theatre in London at the Raindance Film Festival. Then director Steve Gebhardt and myself. fully supported by Adam Brook, conducted the Michigan Premiere
Tour for the movie, with screenings at the Flint Institute of Arts (October 2); the Grand Rapids MicroCinema (3); the Inside Out Gallery in Traverse City (4), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (6), Howmet Theatre in Whitehall (7) and the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor (10). Then I went to New Orleans for a week to screen the film at the Green Room in Covington (12) and at Tipitina's (16).
More screenings are being arranged now, including the Hollyweed Film Festival in Santiago, Chile on November 10, and you'll be the first to know when the movie comes to your town. TWENTY TO LIFE will be released October 30 on DVD in the USA by Music Video Distributors (MVD).
Details of our Amsterdam premiere extravaganza in association with Grass-A-Matazz in the Melkweg during the Cannabis Cup will take place on the 19th of November. High Times has announced that TWENTY TO LIFE won the prize for Best Documentary at the World Marijuana Film Festival in Ibiza last June, and they're carrying Chris Simuniak's interview with me in the October issue, out now.
GUITAR ARMY
Rock and Revolution with The MC5 and the White Panther Party
By John Sinclair
With introduction by Michael Simmons
35th ANNIVERSARY EDITION
* First time in print since 1972
* 40 additional photographs
* Includes 18-track CD with rare recordings
“Guitar Army was our manual for revolt. It’s a rainbow-colored Howl, still resonating today with the singular value of idealism.â€
—Michael Simmons
Guitar Army is the incendiary book that proclaimed “Rock and Roll is a Weapon of Cultural Revolution†for young, revved-up readers in 1972. Author John Sinclair spearheaded the leftist revolutionary vanguard White Panther Party and managed the Detroit rock band MC5, leading them from the ferment of the Detroit riots to the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, where the band played minutes before police clubbed antiwar demonstrators.
In October of 1970, the FBI referred to the White Panthers as “potentially the largest and most dangerous of revolutionary organizations in the United States.†However, just three years earlier, the group’s leaders hosted a “Love-In†on Detroit’s Belle Isle, presided over by Sinclair, whom the Detroit News proclaimed “High Priest of the Detroit hippies.â€
In 1970 he was arrested and sentenced to 9 ½ to 10 years for giving an undercover officer two marijuana joints. Sinclair then became the most celebrated political prisoner of the original war on drugs. After 18 months in prison, John Lennon, Allen Ginsberg, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs, and others demanded his freedom with a televised benefit concert attended by 15,000 people. Three days later, Sinclair was released.
Guitar Army chronicles these years of revolution through Sinclair’s “street writings†and prison writings, with over 80 photographs, illustrations, concert flyers and comics from the period.
This 35th anniversary edition of Guitar Army includes two dozen previously unpublished period photographs, recent writings from John Sinclair, and an introduction from Michael Simmons that leads the reader through the revolutionary times to Sinclair’s life today. Author John Sinclair is the still-charging embodiment of a dazzlingly optimistic time in which change felt necessary and possible.
A bonus CD contains rare recordings of MC5 and other Detroit-area revolutionary bands, Allen Ginsberg, Black Panther Bobby Seale on the White Panthers, and original White Panther Party meetings.
Other Books:
VA TUTTO BENE!/IT'S ALL GOOD!(2006)
GUITAR ARMY (1972)
Alan Ginsberg, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, John Lennon, Sun Ra ...