1970 Omen magazine WALTER BOWART Counterculture Metaphysical Tucson AZ Occultism

Description

Description:
The Omen magazine.  Rare Introductory issue, Volume One Number One.  Copyright 1970 by The Omen Press in Tucson, Arizona.  Editor in Chief is Walter H. Bowart (American leader in the counterculture movement of the 1960s, founder and editor of the first underground newspaper in New York City, The East Village Other, and author of the book, Operation Mind Control).   Bowart also founded the Omen Press when he moved to Tuscson in the late 1960s.
Editor in Chief:  Walter H. Bowart
Assistant Editor:  Betsy Klein
Secretary: Darlene Creel
Contributing Editors: Stephen Levine and Dr. Sanford Unger
This magazine is beautifully illustrated throughout.
Contains 46 pages.
Articles in this introductory volume include:
-Sex Violence Conservation by Richard Felger
-Ecolomentary by Henry Still
-Golden Age of the American Civilization by A. Reza Arasteh
-Poem
by Dan Propper
-Gift of Fire, Gift of Light by Dane Rudhyar
-Before the Stuff Comes Down by Gary Snyder
-Graduate Work by Paul Reps
-Our Mother Who Art on Earth by Don Benson
-Ecolo-Sutra by Jose Arguelles
-Mockingbird Reality by Stephen Levine
-A Short, Short Love Story of a Man and a Planet by Lew Welch
Only two volumes of The Omen were ever published.  We also have the other (Volume 1, No. 2) available for purchase in a separate listing and will gladly combine postage if you'd like to purchase both magazines.
Condition:
Very good condition with only some light wear at the spine (in the form of creases and color loss to the cover at the spine).  Nice and clean throughout!  The stapled spine of the magazine is still holding the covers, but there are tiny tears (in the cover) at both staples, so you'll want to handle with care so the cover doesn't break loose.
Size:
Large format!  Height:  14-3/4 inches.  Width:  10 inches.
Buyer pays postage.
Many thanks for looking!
Christianne & Mike - Funkijunk
LA TIMES Obituary for Walter Bowart
Walter Bowart, 68; co-founder of the East Village Other
by Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 13, 2008
Walter Bowart, who channeled the cultural chaos of the 1960s into
print as the co-founder of one of the era's first underground
newspapers, died Dec. 18 in Inchelium, Wash. He was 68.
The cause was colon cancer, his family said.
Bowart helped launch the biweekly East Village Other in Greenwich
Village in 1965, a convulsive year when the Beatles, the civil rights
movement and the Vietnam War were rocking American society.
Bowart and a small band of colleagues used the paper to push the
boundaries of convention with articles about sex, drugs, music and
pressing social issues, presented in an experimental format that
changed from issue to issue.
The paper reported on the exploits of many of the figures who became
icons of the psychedelic era, including Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman
and Allen Ginsberg.
"It was a radical alternative to the Village Voice. It was very
irreverent," said Paul Krassner, the satirist and co-founder of the
Yippies who ran his own counterculture journal, the Realist, from an
office near Bowart's on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Bowart later published books and other materials about metaphysics.
He also became fascinated by the Central Intelligence Agency's
experiments with mind control and offered his view of government
attempts to manipulate human behavior in the book "Operation Mind
Control," published by Dell in 1978 with an introduction by "The
Manchurian Candidate" author Richard Condon.
Born in Omaha in 1939, Bowart attended the University of Oklahoma on
a journalism scholarship but was also interested in painting. He
brought an artist's sensibility to the East Village Other, which was
launched by a small group of artists and writers that included Allan
Katzman, Sherry Needham and John Wilcock.
"Walter should be remembered because he was such a pioneer in this
early revolution in publishing," Wilcock said, noting that Bowart was
among the first underground newspaper publishers to use offset
printing as "a way to break the limitations of a linear paper."
Unlike other underground papers that stuck to traditional newspaper
design, the Other had stories swirling around pictures and graphics
printed in dizzying colors.
"It was gritty but imaginative," said Northwestern University
professor Abe Peck, who lived in the East Village during the paper's
heyday and later wrote a history of the alternative press. He
remembered in particular a cover that consisted of a picture of a man
in a Sgt. Pepper uniform with a collage of images floating above his
head that depicted his thoughts. He was burning his draft card under a
headline that declared, "Girls Say Yes to Men Who Say No."
The Other, which had a circulation of about 65,000 at its peak, also
fostered a new breed of cartoonists, including Vaughn Bode and Spain
Rodriguez, influential figures in the underground comics movement of
the 1960s that provided popular culture with characters who resisted
authority, practiced free love and smoked pot. The paper advocated
better living through chemistry in features that included a column by
LSD guru Leary called "Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out," the slogan that
the one-time Harvard professor coined for the psychedelic generation.
The Other was "pro-drug, probably more than most of the papers," said
Art Kunkin, founder of the Los Angeles Free Press, the granddaddy of
underground papers. "There was a definite hippie image to the paper.
It was very psychedelic looking. . . . You couldn't read it sometimes
because there would be color pictures overlaid on the type. But it was
very innovative."
Bowart practiced what the paper preached. At a 1966 hearing in
Washington, D.C., on whether LSD should be made illegal, he testified
that he had used LSD more than 30 times and urged one of the senators
to go on an LSD trip and "report back" on the experience. According to
a New York Times article, none of the senators appeared eager to
follow Bowart's advice. LSD was declared a controlled substance a few
months later.
Bowart subsequently helped launch a rumor that the mood-altering
properties of LSD could be found in nonchemical substances,
specifically bananas.
According to Krassner, the story grew out of a discussion he heard
Bowart having with Katzman and another editor, Dean Latimer. They were
intrigued by the idea that a substance common to LSD and bananas could
trigger pleasurable sensations in the brain. The story found its way
into underground and mainstream papers, instigating what Krassner has
called the great banana skin hoax.
"In San Francisco, there was a banana smoke-in, and one entrepreneur
started a successful banana-powder mail-order business, charging an
ounce," Krassner wrote in his 1993 autobiography, "Confessions of a
Raving, Unconfined Nut." It was widely believed that the 1967 hit
"Mellow Yellow" was songwriter Donovan's homage to bananas as a
natural hallucinogen.
Stories like the banana high spread through the culture via the
Underground Press Syndicate, a network formed by Bowart, Kunkin and
others with a serious purpose, to "warn the civilized world of its
impending collapse," according to a manifesto written by its founders.
The syndicate, which eventually included 600 papers in the United
States and abroad, "was the way the news about the opposition to the
Vietnam War was circulated and also about '60s culture, music and so
forth," Kunkin said
According to one widely told story, Bowart came up with the name of
the syndicate when an interviewer asked him what it was called. At
that moment he saw a United Parcel Service truck go by, which prompted
him to tell the interviewer that the organization was called UPS.
Bowart left the East Village Other in 1968 but remained involved in
publishing. In Arizona, he started Omen Press, which published
materials about Eastern mysticism and metaphysics. He later lived in
Aspen, Colo., where he wrote for the Aspen Daily News, and in
Washington state, where he published the Port Townsend Daily News.
During the 1980s, he was editor of Palm Springs Life magazine, which
he once characterized as "a Sears catalog for the congenitally rich."
Bowart was not born to wealth but married well. His second wife was
Peggy Hitchcock, an heiress to the Mellon banking fortune. When they
divorced in 1981, he successfully sued her for alimony, winning ,000
a month for 15 months. He married four times in all. He is survived by
four children, Wythe Bowart, Sophia Bowart and Nuria Detarre, all of
San Francisco, and Wolfe Bowart of Perth, Australia; two
grandchildren; and three sisters.
In later years, he was a frequent guest speaker at forums on mind
control and founded the Freedom of Thought Foundation to educate the
public about it.
"In the '60s he was saying you can be who you want to be, think what
you want to think," Wolfe Bowart said last week. "He was really
about . . . freedom of the mind, the last frontier."]