Because I have been writing about the history of the East Side starting with retrospectives in the Bugle (covering earlier literary efforts at UWM & elsewhere thru the time of Kaleidoscope), it seemed to fall upon me to update readers with news of some of the figures of the era -- mostly sad, unfortunately, covering the deaths of Bob Watt, Jim Glynn, the Gibsons, Dennis Gall & others who made a mark.  Now, from Harvey Taylor comes news of the condition of music reviewer, critic & writer Rich Mangelsdorff:

     Kevin [Lynch] & Mike,
          I'm guessing you both knew Rich quite well,
     'back in the day' -- probably much better than
     I -- and perhaps know that he's fallen on very
     hard times, is in a care facility on the East side,
     with the clock apparently ticking faster & 
     faster -- but in case you haven't heard, thought
     you'd want to know. ('Bria On The Lake,' 2115
     E Woodstock, #135)
          Pls pass this along to friends of Rich.

     The news changes quickly, especially in his serious condition (advanced bladder cancer), & the latest I have is that he went to Columbia St. Mary's Hospital for surgery.  At any rate, tributes can be expected, so I thought I would contribute here some of my remembrances, following Kevin Lynch at the Shepherd Express online edition:
 https://shepherdexpress.com/…/paying-tribute-to-milwaukee…/…,

          when mangelsdorff meets watt

     "turf" the big m will bawl 
     "goodies" from the smiling mischief 
     treetrunks will shatter lollipops 
     popcorn will smother the bear 
     "hassle" said one 
     the other answered "caboose" 
     "rumble" one belched 
     "buttons" the other whispered 
     "mess" 
     "toys" 
     "cunt" 
     "girlies" 
     and they blasted and wafted 
     grunted and kissed stomped and 
     soft-toed 
     until they sagged and blobbed into a 
     puddle of tar and lemon meringue

     My next major recognition of Rich was in the companion Bugle article on the History of Kaleidoscope, where I reprinted his early piece on trends in music & some iconic figures from Cisco Houston to Al Kooper: www.zonyx.net/TEXTS/KscopeStory.html#audience

[Below: Police Riot in Chicago.  Issue #22, Sept. 13 - 26,
1968.  A sample of the years of turmoil recorded in
Kaleidoscope for this continuing look back.]

      

     Those just tuning in may notice an extensive gap in this
column, explained in a previous entry by emotional suffering
& a withdrawal to contemplative inaction caused by damage
inflicted on the author by the Blonde Beguiler.  [Besides, I had
to clean my apartment.]  Work did continue on fiction entries
-- with more to come -- & some observations below on
Milwaukee's connections to the Holocaust & a Blogging of the
Bible.   
     Well, time thumps on, as Milwaukee artist, poet &
exterminating angel Bob Watt wrote some 40 years ago in
Kaleidoscope's first issue, & as you no doubt have been
noticing for a while, the events of 40 years ago in general --
from San Francisco's Summer of Love & Milwaukee's
so-called race riots of 1967 in which the National Guard was
called out, presumably to at least the early 70s -- have either
ripened in the imagination or receded to a past of dimness &
distortion to a point where popular media sees a need to take
another look at the highlights of what happened.  Whether on
TV or in the papers, it seems 40 years is a convenient point to
look back from.
     So Z-Blog  will do its part by re-examining every issue of
Kaleidoscope, one issue at a time, thru its demise in 1971, with
appropriate illustrations scanned & reproduced where possible
& text reprinted.  I'll add original commentary -- since I was
there as its news editor & in other capacities -- & what I hope
will be appropriate insights on the era in general, as they
accrued over the intervening decades.
     For aging hippies of the day, it should be one last,
nostalgic resurrection of a fading past, & for the younger
readers an instructive, maybe enjoyable -- if not indispensable
-- history.
     In the beginning K'scope aspired to publish every two
weeks, so check in about that often to keep abreast -- or see
some (breasts, that is), since in the early hippie days women's
sensitivities to sexism were not what they became with later
issues, & Dirty Old Men sought out the paper Downtown,
helping sales, for its illustrations of naked chicks -- as
accepted without question in advertising as they were in
casual hippie gatherings of the day.  [Comments are welcome,
of course, & will be considered for publication, if you wish.]
     Eventually, peace & love faded as the Vietnam War
escalated & violence & repression took over in the
country -- a journey to be re-lived thru the pages of K'scope --
& factions vied for control of the paper.  But even in the
beginning it wasn't only psychedelia, peace & poetry -- after
all, we were destined to land before the US Supreme Court
after conviction by Wisconsin for obscenity, tho our real
offenses were no doubt political.  Time thump, time thump,
time thump. . . .
     
Issue #1 - Oct. 6, 1967
Cover by George Lottermoser
Montage of Joyce Lottermoser & Dan Ball (Velvet Whip)
    
      The first issue is already quite well excerpted, since I wrote a history of the paper for the
Bugle-American, reprinted on this
website.  The cast of characters includes
some who will be around for years -- in the paper & on the scene -- & many who
are forgotten.  Some will be brought back in this blog.  The familiar names, at least
in some circles, are Editor John Kois
[not-so-manifest], Assistant Editor John
Sahli, Art Editor Gene Caldwell, News
Editor George Johnson, Poetry Editor
Bob Reitman, Chicago Editor Jim
Bowers, columnist Bob Watt [Zen bug chaser], reviewer Rich
Mangelsdorff [serious Pop Rocks]; & contributors Barbara &
Morgan Gibson, Dan Peterson, Richard Bussian, Rikki Huston
& Dan Ball.  Just follow the links above or in the history for more
detail.
       The important local news of the day as reflected in K'scope (&
there was sometimes no apparent connection) was the open
housing marches into the hostile white South Side led by Fr.
Groppi & the NAACP Youth Council as recounted by Barbara
Gibson.
       They had been going on for a while & would continue, but her
detailed, emotive story is the heart of the first issue, which
otherwise relies heavily on reviews, columns & hippie
impressionism in general:  

                              October 6-19, 1967

                                                                                   /
                          A DAY IN THE MARCH . . .
    by Barbara Gibson
     The paper says that today (September 9) the march will go
"deep into the South Side."  That scares me because I've heard
what's happened there the past week.  So of course I have to go.
 I have marched with them one other time this week -- from
[Judge Christ] Seraphim's house on the East Side back to St.
Boniface, holding my little daughter's hand the whole time. . . .
                                                                 [follow link to full text] 

     [Editor's note:  These entries are way behind
     schedule, but I'll try to do better]

                                       
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--The Daily Bleed

                  

• Great destruction resulting in the extensive loss of
   life, especially by fire.
  

     But it is the more specialized meaning, usually
capitalized,  that is generally reserved for the fate of
Jews in WW II:

     Holocaust The genocide of European Jews and
     others by the Nazis during World War II  [same source]

that has led to the broader use of A massive slaughter
[same source] to apply to the fate of many blacks at the
hands of American lynch mobs during our worst period of
racism, as in the Black Holocaust.  In any case, tho fire
was generally only involved sporadically (as a form of
torture or mutilation for blacks) or peripherally (that is,
cremation ovens for Jews), the widespread annihilation
based on race or ethnic characteristics -- and
homosexuality -- has become today's accepted use for the
term.  [See the exhaustive history at Answers.com for
Nazi victims besides Jews, for example.]  This led to the
use of the holocaust label in the life's work of
Milwaukee's James Cameron, founder of America's
Black Holocaust Museum, who died at 92 on Sunday,
June 11.
      His achievements were deservedly recognized in his
obituary in the Journal Sentinel, where it is noted "the
only known survivor of a lynching" took up his mission
after "getting inspiration while visiting Yad Vashem,
Israel's Holocaust museum." An overlooked -- if minor
controversy -- is the conflation or usurpation of the term
Maafa for the fate of Africans and African-Americans, as
recounted at its site at Answers.com:

         The Maafa translated into English means The
     Enslavement of (Mama) Africa. It is derived from a
     Kiswahili word meaning "disaster", or "terrible occurrence."
     When capitalised it refers to the oppression of African
     people murdered, raped and inhumanly enslaved by Arabs
     and Europeans.
    
     At any rate, The Maafa, not Black Holocaust, is the
term preferred by some.  The situation is complicated by
those who insist that
 
     Whilst the word 'holocaust' can be used to refer to
     large scale deaths of humans by humans, if capitalised
     it only refers to the Jewish/German persecutions. This
     asserts that the Holocaust is the 'real' holocaust and
     that the African holocaust is nothing but a poor
     facsimile.

      And the same goes for the Black Holocaust.  At any rate,
though Cameron popularized his use of the term, discussions of
the Jewish Holocaust tend to be vague about its derivation, saying
only that it came into use in the '50s; some credit author Elie
Wiesel (Night).  But Z-Blog has turned up the theory that former
Milwaukeean Fred Blair, owner of Mary's Book Shop
Downtown (named for his wife) & an old-time labor organizer,
Communist gadfly & nemesis of J. Edgar Hoover himself, was the
first to use the term.  His death at 93 in March 2005 was noted in
part of a long Z-Blog entry  [Tue. June 7, 2005] on 3 local guys
named Fred (really).  In it, I quote an obscure observation [Fri. June
10, 2005] to the point that

     In The Ashes of Six Million Jews, a book-length poem of
     1946, for example, Fred Blair gives a close and graphic
     description of a mass execution of Jews -- one of the first
     literary representations in the language. [emphasis added]

     It's all part of that controversy, again, involving author William
Styron & others, over how exclusive the modern use of holocaust
should be.
     The 1946 verse, for those who don't want to follow the links
above, reads:

                  The executioners pour pitch
                   And oil into the groaning ditch,
                   And drive away the settling frost
                   With a fierce human holocaust.

     For other readers, I suggest following this column's links to the
Three Freds & other topics for some more forgotten Milwaukee
radical history -- including that of Blair -- & the Journal
Sentinel's diffidence in what it later espoused as part of its path to
promoting justice.
     Of course, since Cameron built on the earlier use of holocaust
in 1946, it can be claimed that Blair was responsible for the term
Black Holocaust as well as that for the Jewish experience.  Quite
an achievement for someone labeled Wisconsin's top Communist
by J. Edgar Hoover and eventually awarded $48,000 for the FBI's
persecution.
                                                   

New Feature: Surprise URL of the Week:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/

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Sunday Sermon XII:  Eukey's Search for Melrose Baggy
    

CD (as Shawn O. Eukey) nicely
ridiculing the Bush administration & taking on Condoleezza
Rice with a parody, Condo-Leasa, of Mona Lisa that morphs
lovely work of art into ugly jerk-off wart .
     Previously, he had put out his satiric take on cell phones in a
 parody of Jailhouse Rock.
     Others have written of his caustic sense of humor & quirky
enthusiasms, such as the correct name for our solar system.  One
of his latest projects was researching his past; in finding out about
his birth-mother he said he had only recently turned up the fact
that his biological father had gone down with the torpedoed US
Army troopship Dorchester in 1943, with 900 men aboard --
known as the ship of the Immortal Four Chaplains, who were 

Vol. I,  but there are no DLs  on the Web
that I could find.  He promised to keep an eye open, but now I'm
stuck without Jim on the job, & unless someone sends me a
sound file, I'll never know the true quality of Baggy's
achievement.  [With the advent of YouTube, the 1959 doo-wop Beauty may be played here.]
     His downstairs neighbor, Ralph

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