the Seed and Lumpen 1968

Our dear bud and Lumpen Guardian Jerry B. gave us a dozen or so underground magazines from the 6o's and 70s. Here are copies of the Chicago Seed that are really fantastic. It was one of our inspirations when we started Lumpen magazine a long time ago. It is virtually impossible to find anything about the Seed online.

















We reprinted this Outlaws of AmeriKa illustration card set in the Lumpen 1968 issue that we did back in 1996. It was published a few months before the 1996 Democratic National Convention came to back to Chicago. The media kept making comparisons to what happened back at the '68 convention and their side of the story was bumming us out. So we responded with our own series of pre-convention issues of Lumpen magazine to mobilize the community and were involved with some action. We printed the counter convention guide and were involved with posting images of the convention site off of the lumpen.com site. Pre gooogle maps i guess..

We hated Clinton back then. Some people forget that most lefties and radical hated the Clinton for pushing the neoliberal agenda down the world's throat. Now he's looked at as a saint of sorts in comparison with the Bush era. I still think he sucks.

Anyway we were part of organizing and booking the (poorly named) Festival of Life in Grant Park with a group of yippies from New York. What a coincidence. We had two days and 26 bands lay in the Grant Park bandshell. No one really came by. Maybe afew hundred a day. But man it was awesome seeing the Flying Luttenbachers perform there.

During convention week the cops busted the anarchist convention that happened to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. The cops actually raided lofts and scared the shit out of everyone. But it didn't stop the 1,000 or so anarchists from marching through Wicker Park all the way to convention in an illegal unpermitted march..

That year the CPD created the first ever Protest Pit. It was a designated fenced in area that was "given" to protesters to allow them to exercise their right of "free speech." Diamond Jack and I pied Abbie Hoffman's kid Andrew Hoffman because he was such a punk and totally flaked in helping us organize the Festival of Life. In that time the prototype of indymedia was created. It was called Countermedia. They had a panel truck and everything to roam around in equipped with video cameras. We would go to hot spots take stories and post everything on the Internet using the Netscape browser.... ah those were the days..



After getting these Seeds I searched for the Lumpen 1968 issue in the archives. It was great to see.. For some reason we are working on another 1968 issue. I guess it to coincide with the 40 year anniversary. We will reprint some of the great stuff lumpens wrote back in the '96 1968 issue and include some reference points for readers to investigate this amazing period of activity for themselves.

i hope to get all this stuffed scanned and mad into pdfs..