1. Michael Bowen - Avant garde Innovator
A) Michael Bowen was born in Beverly Hills, California on December 8, 1937. His work as a Beat artist spans several
decades and has been progressively...
"Pentagon Rising" an article by Richard Honigman is an announcement of the Exorcism of the
Pentagon. The art by Mark DeVries envisions the post-exorcism Pentagon floating in the air.
Jerry Rubin had taken the magical idea to exorcise the Pentagon that Michael Bowen and I had
suggested during our meetings before the Human Be-In and incorporated it into the official
program for the March on the Pentagon on October 21, 1967.
The flowers came to the Pentagon as a result of the FBI thwarting the attempt of Michael
Bowen and Bill Fortner, a large, loud, Texan adventurer and marijuana smuggler, to
circumnavigate the Pentagon by plane, and bomb it with bushels of flowers dropping into the
hole in the Pentagon's center. When the hired pilot didn't come to the airport, (probably
because he was an FBI agent or was stopped by the FBI), they had no alternative but to truck
the flowers to the steps of the Pentagon, causing rifles and helmets to blossom. In the evening
Mayan Indians in native dress, gathering around dusk campfires on the Pentagon lawn, watched
eloquently and said "lagente es uno" (the people are one).
--Additional Notes on the S.F. Oracle - part 3 - by Allen Cohen, "We had started the paper printing 3000 copies and grew gradually to about 15,000
by Oracle #4. We jumped to 50,000 for #5, the Be-In issue, and grew to almost 125,000 by
about Oracle #7"
--part 1,
The purple saddhu cover of Oracle #5 was also used as one of the posters for the Human
Be-In. The Oracle sponsored, announced and was given away free at the Be-In. We printed
about 50,000 copies of this issue and from then on we would print over 100,000 of each
issue. The cover was a composite work by Michael Bowen, Casey Sonnabend and Stanley
Mouse. -part 2 ...
The San Francisco Oracle,
2548 Myra Dell,
Walnut Creek, Ca. 94596 -
tel. 510-935-6492
Before the production of the sixth Oracle, we moved our offices to larger quarters in
Michael Bowen's former flat on Haight Street just off Masonic. Bowen moved to Stinson
Beach in West Marin. The Be-In media blitz had brought the Haight-Ashbury to the center of
America's consciousness. The disaffected, the disenchanted, the mafia, the mad, the CIA, the
FBI, the sociologists, poets, artists, American Indian shamans, East Indian Gurus, TV and
movie crews, magazine and newspaper reporters from all over the world, and tourists riding
through and staring at it all descended on the tiny street called Haight. It was a monumental
traffic jam on all levels.
The first UPS conference was held at Michael Bowen's house on Stinson Beach, and the
Oracle's offices during Easter, 1967. Some of the participants included Art Kunkin of the
L.A. Free Press, Allan Katzman and Walter Bowart of the East Village Other (EVO), Max
Scheer of the Berkeley Barb, and representatives of Detroit's Fifth Estate, Chicago's Seed,
Mendocino's Illustrated Paper, Austin's Rag and a few other papers.
- Michael Bowen -
Beat Artist,
Human Be-In Organizer
words by Sarah Coleman ... It was different in 1967 when Beat artist Bowen
organized the Human Be-In along with friends Allen
Cohen and Tim Leary. "Personally I never felt anti
cyber culture, but there was a feeling that it had to be
controlled... that we could all become robots. Also,
there were computer-driven experiments on animals
that we were concerned about. The Be-In was the
culmination of ten years of psychedelic revolutionary
preparation, with the emphasis on personal
freedom." ... "Drugs are not a good
weapon any more in the fight," says Bowen - other
than marijuana. He gets passionate about the
craziness of suppressing cannabis when tobacco is
freely available and obviously poisonous. His most
recent artwork is "Marlboro Nazi",
Marsha Garland's And The Beach Goes On...November 1996 ... I hung out with artists and writers like Arthur Monroe, Hayward King, Bob and Eileen Kaufman, Raymond Howell, "Bad
Talkin'" Charlie Dawkins, Henri Lenoir, Michael Bowen, Mort Sahl, Janice Blue and Jack Micheline. Vesuvio's, Specs, Caffe
Trieste, El Matador, The Saloon, The Coffee Gallery, Enrico's and the hungry i were the places where we connected. Michael
Bowen's paintings, by the way, can be seen at North Beach's new Van Den Berge Gallery on Francisco near Powell.
--And The Beach Goes On...November 1996
As editor of the San Francisco Oracle from 1966 to 1968, Cohen and Michael Bowen, art director, experimented with
innovative layout and printing techniques intended to extend the message of the publication into the metaphor of its design.
The text, for example, was printed in circular shapes in a conscious effort to break free of the militaristic columns of
traditional newspaper layout. Sometimes, the paper was printed using a "split-fountain" technique that lets two colors of ink
flow and spread in unpredictable patterns over the page. "We would separate the fountains on the press with wood blocks,"
Cohen recalls. "The colors would leak under the blocks and mix while printing to give the paper its psychedelic look."
--Peace Love...Revolution 1.0
North Beach Magazine
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Michael K BOWEN - BIRTH: 19 Sep 1941, Jay CO. - wrong one!!
- close encounters by michael bowen ???
- www.beatscene.com
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