FREEP FRIDAY

For a while, in the 60's and early 70's, I would frequently drop my two bits into a curbside newspaper box on Santa Monica Blvd. a few blocks from Ocean Ave., pull open the cover and extract the latest issue of the Los Angeles Free Press. This was my preference for a "subversive tabloid" in those days (I was always curious about another publication similarly available, a socialist paper called "The Weekly People" -- but even then was repulsed by the prevailing threat of communism).

The "Freep" as it was affectionately called by its many readers, was another underground, counterculture screed that managed to maintain the appearance of a truly alternative newspaper. Founded and edited by Art Kunkin in May 1964, little did I know that he had been an organizer for the Socialist Worker's Party! In retrospect, the inherent nature of underground newspapers were left-leaning.

In the 70's, the Freep focused heavily on the Vietnam War, and some say that it was at least partially responsible for ending it through its hard-line anti-war editorials. Contributors included Harlan Ellison, Charles Bukowski and Laurence Lipton. Ellison's scathing reviews of television programming of the day was collected into two volumes entitled, "The Glass Teat".

The Freep also had comics! In the sample issue shown today, you will notice one of Ron Cobb's political cartoons which have become a part of this blog's "Apocalypse Soon. . ." feature. Besides being noted as the designer of the world-famous ecology symbol, monster fans also know that Cobb painted some covers for Warren's FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND. Gilbert Shelton's hilarious "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" was also included as one of the regular comic strips.

Art Kunkin shed his mortal coil this year at the age of 91 after living at the Institution of Mentalphysics, a spiritual retreat in Joshua Tree for a number of years after his departure from his newspaper.

The Los Angeles Free Press is still being published today. Their website is HERE.

The article below was written when Art Kunkin was still earthbound.

Art Kunkin (photo L.A. Times).

Art Kunkin: Mystic in Paradise
By LIONEL ROLFE

My old coffeehouse buddy from the coffeehouses of the '60s who started the Underground Press Movement when he began publishing the Los Angeles Free Press is a metaphysical guru who lives in the high desert these days.

If you lived in Los Angeles during those heady years, you might remember the Free Press, which was also affectionately known as the "Freep." The seed money for the paper was put up by Steve Allen. The underground newspaper movement spearheaded the nation's counterculture, and by the end of the decade there were underground newspapers in most major cities. In Atlanta, for example, the underground newspaper was known as The Great Speckled Bird.

Today Art Kunkin is in his mid-70s and has certainly aged well, but whether you could say he will likely get his wish of living to 200 years is another question. Kunkin needs to live that long so that he can accomplish all the work he says he has left to do.

He resides in a trailer surrounded by his books and records and 400 acres of high desert at The Institute of Mentalphysics in Joshua Tree. Some nearby sheds and an abandoned farm house are his satellite facilities for storing his books and papers.

The institute has a number of beautiful auditoriums, meditation centers and lodging, some of which were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Art regularly lectures there on "Turning Lead Into Gold With Alchemy," "Stopping the Aging Process," and otherwise finding liberation, enlightenment and success in one's daily life.

But the work for which he has a particular passion is bringing together a multimillion dollar grant to house his material in a real library. Art's library is not limited to the underground press; it includes rare copies of books on alchemy dating back to the 1600s. History, politics, philosophy, medicine, science and metaphysics are covered in great depth in his collection. He wants to create a state-of-the-art digital interactive library for the edification of future generations.

Although the Free Press is preserved on microfilm at various repositories, he has many of the actual negatives from which more than 100,000 copies of the paper were printed each week and, unlike today's so-called alternative papers, were sold for a quarter when the Los Angeles Times was a dime.

Today's "alternative press" claim they are descended from the Underground Press Movement, but it is a vague claim -- and besides which, they have to give their papers away, while readers contributed a good share of the cost of publishing papers like the Free Press.

Those were heady times -- the civil rights struggle and then the anti-war movement which characterized the '60s and early '70s. The Free Press was not only the nation's first underground newspaper, it made Kunkin virtually the voice of the counter culture.

The counter culture was an unlikely amalgam of progressive politics, from Marxist to left-wing Democrats, and metaphysicians and mysticism. Art started out in politics, and moved toward metaphysics in the early '70s.

He began as a tool and dye maker in the '40s, then was business manager of the Trotskyist The Militant. When others of us at the Xanadu and later Fifth Estate coffeehouses, several of whom were refugees from the Los Angeles Times copydesk, gathered to complain about how badly a new newspaper was needed, Art, who also had been a printer, starting putting out the Free Press while everyone else gabbed.

The paper struggled along until the riots on Sunset Strip, and suddenly the hippy paper was sometimes more influential than the Times. It did so by the simple expedience of telling the truth. The Freep actually affected the Times' style, if not its essence, when its Sunday West magazine ultimately hired many of Kunkin's writers, including yours truly.

People liked the new kind of journalism. They were tired of the "Big Lie" told by the status quo. Kunkin said that the reason his paper prospered so was because he sensed the coming changes on a molecular level -- in his own head.

You may laugh, but I worked at the old Free Press and got a weekly paycheck more or less on time, and a fairly good one at that. The paper had incredible readership and got its good stories because readers called them in. The city's establishment came to tremble at the paper's power. And everyone in town read and talked about it each week.

Those days are forever gone. Now Art reads the Times, mainly to find out which of his old Marxist comrades has died. He attributes the fact that he's still going when many of them are not to their inability to develop their consciousness.

After the Freep, he first turned up as a journalism professor at Cal State University, Northridge. Then he was president of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles (on Los Feliz Boulevard) after the passing of Manly Palmer Hall. Then he served a seven-year alchemy apprenticeship at the Paracelsus Research Society in Salt Lake City.

Kunkin insists he has not lost his political concerns. But there are also other things, and says most of his former fellow politicos just couldn't understand that.

He's equally harsh on his fellow metaphysicians, "Most are charlatans, but a few of them really have it, are the real thing." Kunkin, who was a close friend of Timothy Leary, thinks Uri Geller "has it," for example.

Kunkin does not feel the political situation is really as hopeless as it now looks.

"Dynasties like the Bushes are loosing their grip -- and partly it's because the American people are much more conscious than they used to be," he insists.

And he includes fundamentalists Christians in that. He believes when someone proclaims Christ as their savior, that is a legitimate expansion of their consciousness. He says people just have to be educated to understand that they don't need Jesus to obtain consciousness, and eventually more enlightenment.

Kunkin dates his becoming metaphysical from the early '70s, when he was under incredible strain, trying to keep the "Freep" alive. After he published the home addresses of various state narcotics agents (who were busy framing and busting often-times innocent people for political reasons), he was jailed, no one would print the paper, and just to blow off some steam, he disappeared to the Mexican border with a young woman, and did drugs and other tantric things in a motel room for several days.

It was when Kunkin was offered an all-expenses paid junket to San Francisco to attend a mind control event that he became a convert to the metaphysical. After some powerful mind-blowing psychic experiences, he was a convert. He studied everything from Kabalah to Sufism before realizing his heart lay with the Tibetans and The Book of the Dead.

Do the Tibetans believe in reincarnation? He was asked this question by my friend Mary Elizabeth Raines, a hypnotist by trade, who accompanied me to the desert.

This gave Kunkin a chance to explain that the Tibetans don't believe in reincarnation in the sense that the term is usually understood. After death, most of the energies, from the emotional to the intellectual, return to take other life forms, but the specific individual is not returned -- except in very rare cases.

A few anointed souls are able to transform their soul into another body, he says. He explains that is not something to be taken lightly. He prefers not even to mention the name of the process for fear it will be published in any article I write. But there is an ancient way of doing such things, he assures us. "And it has a name, I just prefer not to tell you."

On the other hand, if you take one of his courses, you might convince him to tell you the name of the process by which to obtain immortality.

Lionel Rolfe is the author of the just released third edition of "Literary L.A." He also wrote "Fat Man on the Left." Lionel Rolfe is the author of the ebook, "Death and Redemption in London & L.A." (deadendstreet.com).  He also has authored "Literary L.A." and "Fat Man on the Left" Four Decades in the Underground," both from California Classics Books and available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble online.

[SOURCE: dabelly.com.]

Art Kunkin (photo L.A. Times).

Art Kunkin, Free Press publisher who was the pied piper of counterculture in L.A., dies at 91
By STEVE MARBLE MAY 9, 2019 LOS ANGELES TIMES 10:28 AM

Art Kunkin, the rumpled, curly-haired publisher who arose as the pied piper of L.A.’s counterculture movement in the 1960s with the irreverent but vital Los Angeles Free Press, has died in hospice care in Joshua Tree.

Kunkin, who offered readers a brew of politics, drug talk and rock ’n’ roll, died April 30 at the Institute of Mentalphysics, where he’d lived for years studying philosophy, alchemy and meditation. He was 91. No cause of death was given.

The Free Press — known as the Freep to those who loved or loathed it — rolled onto the streets as L.A. was barreling toward the Watts riots, a tabloid that covered the antiwar movement, the emerging hippie scene and the free speech rallies at UCLA and Berkeley. It was derisive, profane yet sweetly life-affirming.

Inspired by the Village Voice in Greenwich Village and the listener-sponsored radio station KPFK-FM in Hollywood, the Free Press was all things the Los Angeles Times was not.

Kunkin said the mainstream media tended to cover all the events plaguing L.A. as isolated, unconnected events. The Free Press viewed the growing unease in the city as something larger and far more sinister.

“The sense of the 1960s alternative press was that these issues were all connected, that indicated a certain sickness in society,” Kunkin told The Times in 1996.

Launched in 1965, the Free Press was run out the Fifth Estate coffeehouse on Sunset Boulevard. The working environment was familial — reporters, aging beatniks, children, street musicians and the lost and confused milled about in what passed for a newsroom.

The late author Harlan Ellison, then a reporter for the Free Press, said in a 1996 interview that the tabloid seemed to function like “a rambunctious baby with a shotgun in its mouth; it didn’t know when to shoot.”

And that, perhaps, is what upended the paper’s run as the city’s edgy counterweight to the button-down stiffness of L.A.’s traditional media.

For reasons that were never abundantly clear, in the summer of 1969 — as Charles Manson’s followers were terrorizing the city and Neil Armstrong was stepping onto the moon — Kunkin published the names, phone numbers and addresses of 80 narcotics officers in California. “There Should Be No Secret Police,” the headline blared.

The reaction was explosive.

Kunkin was sued by the state and Los Angeles. After two years of legal skirmishes, he was ordered to pay $53,000 in damages, enough to bankrupt the paper. The Free Press limped along for several years before shutting its doors in the late ’70s.

Born in the Bronx in 1928, Kunkin became a tool and die maker. Politically active, he became an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party and later worked for the party’s paper, the Militant. He came west in the 1950s, continuing to work on an assembly line.

In 1964, he was asked to publish an eight-page newsletter for the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in L.A. Kunkin filled it with strange and fantastical stories — Joan Baez’s supposed tax strike, an obscenity bust during a showing of the film “Scorpio Rising.”

The first issue of the Los Angeles Free Press was printed in July 1964. Along with his wife, Abby Rubinstein, Kunkin put up $200 to bankroll the paper, money spent mostly on postage to solicit advertisers. The couple edited the paper at their dining room table, writing headlines, cropping photos, keeping their fingers crossed it would all somehow work.

The paper sold for a quarter, nearly double what The Times cost at a newsstand. The lifeblood of the Free Press were sex ads, which were unwelcome in traditional family newspapers. By 1969, circulation had swelled to 100,000 and the paper had growing political clout.

The Free Press turned Kunkin into a high priest of resistance in L.A. He swapped story ideas with Yippies founder and satirist Paul Krassner, discussed music with Frank Zappa and hung out with Timothy Leary. In 1973, with his legal bills due, Kunkin closed the Free Press.

It was revived briefly after it was purchased by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and then shut for good when Flynt was shot in 1978.

For a while, Kunkin taught journalism at Cal State Northridge and then became involved with several efforts to revive the Free Press. None lasted.

Finally he faded away, heading off to Salt Lake City where he studied alchemy at the Paracelsus Research Society for seven years. He moved to the Joshua Tree compound after returning to California.

Lionel Rolfe, the late Herald Examiner columnist and author, said he first met Kunkin in the 1960s at the Sunset Boulevard coffeehouse. Rolfe wrote in a blog that his old friend remained as spirited and bohemian as ever at the desert institute, living in a trailer surrounded by a mountain of books and records.

“Those days are forever gone,” Rolfe wrote of the Free Press days. “Now Art reads The Times, mainly the obituaries to see which of his old Marxist comrades has died.”

Kunkin’s first two marriages ended in divorce. A third wife, Elaine Wallace, died in 2017. He is survived by two daughters, Anna and April Fountain.