Steve Fly – They Came To Starburg – Digital Release – An album of spoken word

IMB6025 Steve Fly – They Came To Starburg – Digital Release – An album of spoken word (31st October 2014) Steve Fly is a native of Stourbridge UK, now an Amsterdam resident who plays drums, spins vinyl, writes novels and literary and cultural commentary. He maintains a flock of websites and works in various other art forms without visible restraint. His other music projects have included New Flesh, Garaj Mahal, Temple Dragon band, John Sinclair and The Cosmic Trigger Stage Play. Buy it on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/they-came-to-starburg/id935832302 Release Date: 31-Oct-2014 Label: Iron Man Records UPC: 859713588714 Primary Genre: Spoken Word Secondary Genre: Alternative Language: English 1 Nightmare in a Bottle -…

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Free The Weed 44 by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from New Haven, Connecticut, where I’m visiting my sister Kathy in the middle of a 3-week trip to the East Coast before ending up with a week in New York City and a train ride back to Detroit in time for the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Detroit Artists Workshop on November 1, 1964. Just after I filed my last column I flew out to Portland, Oregon to perform at the Hempstalk Festival along with my man John Trudell and his band Bad Dog. They’ve been doing this for 20 years and just this year received the City’s approval to hold the event in a popular…

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Free The Weed 43 by John Sinclair

I’d like to take a turn away from our usual conversation to commemorate the once-in-a-lifetime experience I’ll enjoy next month when we celebrate the founding of the Detroit Artists Workshop 50 years ago. This month I’ll celebrate my 73rd birthday on October 2nd, so I was 23 when we started the Artists Workshop as Detroit’s bohemian outpost and gathering place for a renegade artistic community that was creating a new way to make art and live and work together with other fellow seekers like ourselves. The Detroit Artists Workshop was a beautifully organic thing that grew directly out of the nexus of a wildly disparate group of creative individuals in their…

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John Sinclair + The Founder Effect – Spiegeltent, Canary Wharf, London 17th Sept

John Sinclair and The Founder Effect perform songs from ‘Mohawk’ at Canary Wharf Spiegeltent, London Download the Spiegeltent Leaflet PDF here "John Sinclair - renegade poet, scholar and cultural revolutionary.....an Archetype of the 1960's art, music and literary synthesis, still kicking with both feet on his trajectory for cultural transformation. Mohawk features ten tracks from his book of verse: always know: a book of monk. Beatnik poems, great odes and personal reflections of the Be-Bop jazz persuasion, all flowering together." Doors – 6.00pm John Sinclair on stage 6.30pm – 7.45pm Tickets available through SEE Tickets for £10 + Booking Fee All Press Enquiries Sean Newsham: sean@mutante-inc.demon.co.uk All Guest List requests to:…

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Free The Weed 42 by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from Amsterdam for the last time this summer. I’ll be spending a month in London to serve as a judge for the Dopefiend Cup at an undisclosed location at the end of August and play a concert in the Speigeltent at Canary Wharf in mid-September with a great British jazz ensemble called The Founder Effect. Then I’ll head back to Detroit to begin an action-packed fall schedule, and if you’re at all interested in following my progress around the United States from the Hempstock Festival in Portland, Oregon to the Maine Harvest Festival near Portland, Maine to Lowell Celebrates Kerouac in Massachusetts to New York City and back to…

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Free The Weed 41 by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from Amsterdam, still the world capital of the cannabis culture despite all the efforts of the Dutch government to drive the marijuana industry back to the Stone Age, and notwithstanding the incredible gains being made at last in sections of the United States where citizens may finally buy their weed over the counter without interference by the drug police. Before I say anything else I’d like to thank my publisher, Ben Horner, and all the marijuana people in my home town of Flint, Michigan—where I smoked my first joint over 50 years ago—for their brilliant efforts in attracting the High Times Medical Cannabis Cup to the former Vehicle City…

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Free The Weed 40 by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from the Mediterranean coast of Italy, where I’m visiting my friends Jerry Poynton and Helen Oliver Adelson, the great American painter, at their rustic place in the countryside outside of Tarquiia, Italy, just an hour north and west of Rome. I flew in from Amsterdam through an incredible storm that cleared up just before we landed at Leonardo da Vinci airport, but now I’m relaxing in the bucolic serenity of the Etruscan countryside and enjoying the radio program (#553) I made at the 420 Café before leaving Amsterdam that’s posted on my internet radio station at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com. Radio Free Amsterdam has been my leading passion in life for the…

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The Sun Ra Arkestra and John Sinclair – Barbican, London by Michael Horovitz, 4 June 2014

Detroit jazz poet John Sinclair, counterpointed by inventive British post-bop quartet The Founder Effect, whom he’d only just met, filled the first half hour of this marathon gig with echoes and premonitions of the Arkestra and of its visionary originator-captain Sun Ra, who died in 1993. Sinclair’s finale ‘Another Order of Being’ drew extensively on Ra’s pronouncements, notably that ‘A band can demonstrate unity among men more than anything else in the world’, and that ‘In some far place, many light years in space, where human feet have never trod! where human eyes have never seen! I’ll build a better kind of world’. Then on ambled a dozen amiable all-black Arkestrans,…

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Free The Weed 39 – by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from London, where it’s still a crime to smoke and possess cannabis products and the medical use of marijuana is not yet recognized by the forces of the Crown. Like the guy at Customs told me a couple of years ago when he seized my medically prescribed cannabis in its official Dutch medical container and refused my offer to present my Dutch prescription and my Michigan medical marijuana card: “This is just smuggling drugs to us.” I’m in London to mark the release of my new album MOHAWK from Ironman Records and play a couple of little gigs with my drummer and comrade Steve The Fly, who produced the…

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John Sinclair – Mohawk CD 24th March 2014 on Iron Man Records

John Sinclair - “Mohawk” CD Released Monday 24th March 2014 by Iron Man Records, Birmingham. John Sinclair, the renegade poet, scholar and cultural revolutionary releases his new album on Monday 24th March 2014. John, has been described as an Archetype of the 1960's art, music and literary synthesis, and who today, is still kicking with both feet on his trajectory for cultural transformation. His new record features ten tracks from his book of verse: always know: a book of monk. Twenty poems planted firmly in a single-shot session, and carefully trimmed down to ten exhibits for this album. Beatnik poems, great odes and personal reflections of the Be-Bop jazz persuasion, all…

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Video by CHU on the making of 360 degree artwork for "Mohawk" by John Sinclair

"I sketched the entire world and digitised it inside Google's Sketchup, where this three dimensional, three hundred and sixty degree artwork could spring to life. This sketch can be viewed from almost anywhere and the result is a multi-dimensional drawing - a million sketches worth. When making a normal two dimensional drawing, changing the viewpoint requires a completely new sketch - this way, the sketch allows plenty of freedom for the viewer and there are a sickening amount of permutations. This economy in the production stemmed from the need to pay tribute to, as close as possible, the location and setting for the photoshoot on the cover of Thelonius Monk's Undeground…

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Video by CHU on the making of 360 degree artwork for "Mohawk" by John Sinclair

"I sketched the entire world and digitised it inside Google's Sketchup, where this three dimensional, three hundred and sixty degree artwork could spring to life. This sketch can be viewed from almost anywhere and the result is a multi-dimensional drawing - a million sketches worth. When making a normal two dimensional drawing, changing the viewpoint requires a completely new sketch - this way, the sketch allows plenty of freedom for the viewer and there are a sickening amount of permutations. This economy in the production stemmed from the need to pay tribute to, as close as possible, the location and setting for the photoshoot on the cover of Thelonius Monk's Undeground…

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The Culture Industry: Enlightenment or Mass Deception?

“Pop culture in general is the main thing they use to keep young people from developing any ideas.” - John Sinclair. John Sinclair, the renegade poet, scholar and cultural revolutionary releases his new album called "Mohawk," on Iron Man Records, on Monday 24th March 2014 with distribution by Cargo. The music was written and arranged by Steve Fly who mirrored John’s poems in the music by initially combing the tempo of the original songs recorded by John ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie, Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker and Thelonious Monk. Steve The Fly is a native of Stourbridge UK, now an Amsterdam resident who plays drums, spins vinyl, writes novels and literary and cultural commentary. He…

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Free The Weed 35 – by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from Amsterdam, where people in the cannabis community are looking on in wonder as the United States takes its first tentative steps toward legalizing marijuana for use by all thinking persons over 18 years of age. Like they say in New Orleans, a lotta people don’t know that marijuana is not actually legal in the Netherlands, although over-the-counter sales of cannabis has been allowed under what they call a “grey area” in the law which amounts to a sort of super-decriminalization policy that not only eliminates arrest but lets smokers buy and ingest the sacrament in designated coffee shops without police interference. But growing, distribution, wholesale transfer and delivery…

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