[Marxism] LA

[Louis Proyect]

Walter Lippmann wrote:
> We're still in need of an alternative newspaper here
> in Los Angeles. Today a few others have attempted to
> pick up the slack where the L.A. Weekly once served.
> Art Kunkin is publishing the Free Press again and 
> we have something called CITY BEAT and another whose
> name escapes me. 

Kunkin was a Troskyist in the 1940's.

Art Kunkin: Mystic in Paradise
By LIONEL ROLFE  calclass at earthlink.net

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.

(clip)

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.

full: http://www.dabelly.com/columns/bohemian33.htm