Loading...MISSION STATEMENT CONT.
To this end, John Sinclair is transferring to the Foundation all copyrights to his poetry, recordings, record productions, broadcast programs, books, performances and other creative activities in perpetuity, and the John Sinclair Foundation will share royalty payments and other proceeds from these copyrights equally with the designated heirs of John Sinclair.
The Foundation shall conduct its operations with funds secured through royalties, advances, performance and personal appearance fees, record and book sales, commissions on artworks, donations, gifts, memberships, grants, and other public sources.
Expenditures will be made from the Foundation’s accounts for expenses associated with on-going and prospective projects undertaken by the Foundation, includ building operat establishment and maintenance of an Artist In Residenc staffing
grants, fees and honoraria for contributing art and other costs of doing business.
The John Sinclair Foundation will be assisted in its development and activities by an Advisory Board appointed to serve as consultants and advisors with respect to operations, fund-raising and project development.
Our immediate projects include the upgrade of our internet radio station, RadioFreeAmsterdam. the establishment of a meeting space/gallery/performance/office space in Amsterdam called the Bohemian Embassy as a new project of the F the consolidation of several existing websites under the umbrella of the John Sinclair F preparations for making a uniform digital edition of the poetry and prose of John S and registering copyrights and publishing the creations in music and verse of John Sinclair as the property of the Foundation.
The John Sinclair Foundation has been conceived as the repository of all of John Sinclair’s published works and recordings, copyrights and creative files and to serve as a vehicle to pursue special cultural projects in progress or in the planning stages and then in perpetuity.
The major on-going project of the John Sinclair Foundation is the internet radio station, RadioFreeAmsterdam.com, founded in 2005, and the establishment of a public cultural outpost in Amsterdam called the Bohemian Embassy to hou present events, workshops and
provide a meeting, working and relaxation station for residents and t develop an Artist In R and create and display art and cultural history exhibits in a warm, friendly, comfortable environment.
The John Sinclair Foundation was been established in Amsterdam in 2016 as Stichting John Sinclair, a non-profit organization registered with the appropriate government agencies. Stichting John Sinclair maintains a bank account at the ING Bank in Amsterdam. The Foundation’s fund-raising efforts in 2016 have generated substantial funding to underwrite our organizational and initial programming costs for 2017.
Stichting John Sinclair has assembled a working group chaired by Sidney Kuijer and comprising Steven Pratt, Tariq Khan, Hank Botwinik, Christian Greer, Janne Svenson, and Marianna Lebrun, with support from Dylan Harding in Bristol UK, Jerome Poynton in Athens, Celia Sinclair in New Orleans, Marion Sinclair and Imani Ashanti in Detroit and Ben Horner in Flint, Michigan.
The Foundation is under the direction of Sidney Kuijer at Singel 10 in Amsterdam and Steven Pratt serves as Project Director. Website construction at www.johnsinclairfoundation.org has been undertaken by Yellow Light Digital and a uniform digital edition of the complete books of poetry, prose, and recordings of John Sinclair is scheduled to be accomplished in 2017.
WHO IS JOHN SINCLAIR
John Sinclair is a poet from Deroit who has cut a wide swath as a prolific cultural worker, an innovative bard who sets his verse to music from the blues and jazz tradition, a dynamic performer and bandleader who has collaborated with scores of outstanding musicians in performance and recordings, an acclaimed editor, leading music journalist, award-winning radio broadcaster and record producer, an iconoclastic educator and lecturer, and a passionate crusader against the War on Drugs for more than 50 years
Sinclair founded and directed the Detroit Artists Workshop, managed the MC-5, formed the White Panther Party, produced the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, directed the Detroit Jazz Center, taught Blues History in the music department at Wayne State University, edited City Arts Quarterly for the Detroit Council of the Arts, produced Piano Night at Tipitina’s for the Professor Longhair Foundation and the “live” broadcast of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for WWOZ-FM. He spent three years in prison for marijuana offenses, overthrew the Michigan marijuana laws, helped institute Ann Arbor’s historic $5 fine for possession of weed, founded the Ann Arbor Hash Bash and served as High Priest of the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. Sinclair has collaborated with a brilliant array of contemporary musicians, from saxophone giants Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Daniel Carter and Earl Turbinton to hornmen David Amram, Michael Ray, Charles Moore, James Andrews and Kermit Ruffins, guitarists Wayne Kramer, Walter “Wolfman” Washington, Willie King, Jim McCarty and Jeff “Baby” Grand, and West African griots Bala Tounkare and Guelel Kuumba.
Sinclair has released more than 25 CDs, including several with his band of Blues Scholars, and his recent books include It’s All Good—A John Sinclair Reader, Song of Praise: Homage to John Coltrane, Sun Ra Interviews & Essays (editor), a book of blues verse called Fattening Frogs For Snakes, and i mean you: a book for penny. John Sinclair was born in Flint, Michigan on October 2, 1941. He attended Albion College and graduated from the University of Michigan-Flint College in 1964 with an A.B. in English Literature. At college he began writing poetry and music criticism and edited the school paper, The Word. Sinclair pursued graduate studies in American Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, completing his master’s thesis on William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch while beginning his career as a poet, journalist, music presenter, concert and festival producer, music historian, radio broadcaster and educator.
A marijuana activist since 1965, Sinclair has fought on the marijuana side of the War on Drugs through Detroit LEMAR, Amorphia, NORML and a five-year struggle in the courts of Michigan that cost him 2-1/2 years in prison before he overturned Michigan’s marijuana laws on appeal and helped enact the historic $5 fine for marijuana activity in Ann Arbor.
Sinclair was Chairman of the White Panther Party and its successor, the Rainbow Peoples Party, battling Richard M. Nixon and his henchmen from the beginning of his administration to the bitter end. It was Sinclair’s court case challenging Nixon’s warrantless wiretap program that produced the historic Supreme Court decision in U.S. vs. U.S. District Court that “national security” wiretaps could not be allowed—at least not until the Bush-Cheney-Rove era of the 2000s.
Sinclair left Detroit in 1991 and spent 12 years in New Orleans before establishing his present base in Amsterdam in 2003, where he founded his internet radio station, www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com, in 2005 and began the process of establishing the John Sinclair Foundation. He continues to release records and books and tours throughout Europe and around the United States with a stunning variety of musical collaborators.
John Sinclair may be reached through the John Sinclair Foundation, Singel 10-sous, 1013GA Amsterdam, The Netherlands or at johnsinclair..
After taking it for 30 years or so, the City of Amsterdam finally fell in behind the federal government and joined the rollback movement that’s raged for the past several years. The highlight of this demonic development was the government’s effort to ban non-citizens of the Netherlands from the coffeeshops and, concurrently, to transform the coffeeshops—open to the public for more than 40 years now—into private smoking clubs where each Dutch smoker would be forced to register with the authorities as a member of one particular club.
While this solution was adapted by a series of small towns and cities on the eastern border of the country and in some other distant areas, the major cities, led by Amsterdam, rejected the federal government’s attempt to strangle their cash cow and compromised by agreeing to enforce all marijuana regulations presently on the books, like the restriction against the operation of coffeeshops within 250 meters of a school building.
The school building clause has led to the closing of dozens of coffeeshops in the city center. Other city government plans involving the social restructuring of the Red Light District have led to the shuttering of dozens more, including every weed outlet on the popular Warmoestraat corridor.
The number of coffeeshops in Amsterdam itself has shrunk from about 750 some 20 years ago to something like 200 now. The shops closed by government edict are simply shut down without recompense or granting of a license to operate somewhere else—they’re simply out of business. When their current license comes up for renewal, it is not renewed.
The good part is that the coffeeshops that continue to exist are entirely unchanged—except for the additional crowds of people denied access to their former haunts and the waves of tourists who find less and less choices of places to smoke and cop in the Centrum. Ironically, the shutting of so many outlets has turned the ones that remain into virtual goldmines of cannabis profits.
I’ve reported on several of these issues in past columns, but it’s important to reiterate that in Holland—unlike, say, Colorado or Oregon today—marijuana has been accepted only at the end-retail level, that is, it’s okay to sell five grams of weed or hash over the counter to a consumer in a coffeeshop.
But it has remained illegal to grow, cultivate, harvest, transport, wholesale or otherwise provide the marijuana to the coffeeshops. This quaint demonstration of official hypocrisy is what they call maintaining a “gray area” with regard to legalization
DutchNews.nl reported recently that the Dutch police “dismantled 5,856 marijuana plantations last year, or nearly 16 a day {but] estimate this is only one fifth of the total.” Additionally, “the government is making a major effort to stamp out production and last year made it a criminal offence for companies to supply people with lamps, fertilizer and other equipment if they suspect it is being used to grow marijuana.” Sound familiar?
Now comes the membership of the “ruling right-wing party,” VVD, which recently voted to end the “strange situation” where the sale of small quantities of marijuana in licensed coffee shops is accepted but production is not. The party is now committed to “clever regulation” of cultivation and sales and will add this call to the party’s manifesto for the 2017 general election, which DutchNews.nl concludes will “clear the way for a shift in the policy of the next government.”
Further, “Dozens of local councils in the Netherlands have endorsed a manifesto calling for the cultivation of cannabis to be legalized and regulated, and 25 [cities] have applied to the minister of justice for permission to experiment with legal growth and supply.”
Okay. This is the first positive development in the Netherlands for quite some time, and while it may be too late for the Cannabis Cup as we knew it, these developments bode well for the future in this place that has been the future since the early 1970s. Maybe it’s taken the progress made by voters in half the states in the U.S. in terms of gradually removing marijuana from the wrong-headed and heavy-handed approach of the federal authorities, but it’s reassuring to see the Dutch people moving in an intelligent direction once again.
I wish I could say the same for the American voting public as a whole, but their wholesale swallowing of the tissue of horseshit that was the Trump campaign is an extremely bitter pill to have to ingest. Not only is this billionaire reality television star and unscrupulous real estate developer and casino entrepreneur a major liar, blowhard, bigot and bully, but his campaign was built on a call for the imprisonment of his opponent—“Crooked Hillary”—that he has already admitted he has no intention of pursing as president.
Let’s hope that the rest of his bullshit platform will be equally ignored, but it’s hard to see the promise in that point of view when his appointments to administrative posts are so vicious and wrong. Get ready for an attorney general who has said that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was okay until he found out they were smoking marijuana.
In more sad news closer to home, the City of Detroit has managed to close down 102 of the 273 medical dispensaries operating in the city as of last March. “Eighty-seven (of the 273) are out of business,” Detroit Corporate Counsel Melvin “Butch” Hollowell crowed. “Seven of those closed voluntarily, 80 we’ve closed,” and 14 more dispensaries in the city have received closure notices, with 64 additional dispensaries “in the pipeline.”
Outside of the heavily-moneyed initiative to move a new generation of white people into the downtown area and the former Cass Corridor, the opening of 273 compassion centers within the city of Detroit has been the most positive sign of change in the entire ruins of Detroit, and one of the only signs of change and positive growth outside of Grand Boulevard on the north, the Lodge freeway on the west and I-75 on the east.
What kind of morons are running the city of Detroit? Where do they get these people? If I may paraphrase the president-elect, Melvin “Butch” Hollowell should be in prison for conducting this idiotic campaign. Lock him up!
Free The Weed!
—Amsterdam
November 24, 2016
WHO IS JOHN SINCLAIR? CONT.
A marijuana activist since 1965, Sinclair has fought on the marijuana side of the War on Drugs through Detroit LEMAR, Amorphia, NORML and a five-year struggle in the courts of Michigan that cost him 2-1/2 years in prison before he overturned Michigan’s marijuana laws on appeal and helped enact the historic $5 fine for marijuana activity in Ann Arbor.Sinclair was Chairman of the White Panther Party and its successor, the Rainbow Peoples Party, battling Richard M. Nixon and his henchmen from the beginning of his administration to the bitter end. It was Sinclair’s court case challenging Nixon’s warrantless wiretap program that produced the historic Supreme Court decision in U.S. vs. U.S. District Court that “national security” wiretaps could not be allowed—at least not until the Bush-Cheney-Rove era of the 2000s.Sinclair left Detroit in 1991 and spent 12 years in New Orleans before establishing his present base in Amsterdam in 2003, where he founded his internet radio station, www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com, in 2005 and began the process of establishing the John Sinclair Foundation. He continues to release records and books and tours throughout Europe and around the United States with a stunning variety of musical collaborators.John Sinclair may be reached through the John Sinclair Foundation, Singel 10-sous, 1013GA Amsterdam, The Netherlands or at johnsinclair..
FOUNDATION
The purpose of the John Sinclair Foundation is to insure the preservation and proper presentation of the creative works in poetry, music, performance, journalism, editing and publishing, broadcast and record production of John Sinclair, and his historical legacy as a cultural and political activist.
Contact – info@johnsinclairfoundation.org
MUSIC & POETRY
More details and buy albums
LATEST ALBUM:
MOBILE HOMELAND
Featuring an absolutely stellar all-star cast
of Detroit musicians and produced by Tino Gross,
this album features Wayne Kramer (MC5), Mary
Cobra (Detroit Cobras), Jimmie Bones (Kid Rock),
Johnnie Bassett (Legendary Detroit Bluesman),
Harmonica Shah, Jeff Grand, Dave McMurray, Johnny
“Bee” Badanjek (Detroit, Mitch Ryder, Alice Cooper)
and Kenny Olson (Kid Rock), among others.
Bohemian Embassy
The John Sinclair Foundation plans to create a grassroots arts and cultural centre in Amsterdam conceived as a home for international artists and their creative activity and organized as a conscious environment where local and visiting artists and intellectuals, their friends and followers can meet, relax and interact in a warm and sympathetic setting.
The Bohemian Embassy is designed as a place for music lovers, book lovers, and art lovers of diverse tastes and backgrounds to gather, study, and share their cultural insights and experiences. The Bohemian Embassy will also provide a space for chamber concerts, performances, lectures, workshops, classes, discussions, poetry readings, film screenings and other community-based cultural arts activities.
The Bohemian Embassy will also provide broadcasting and recording studio space for our internet radio station, Radio Free Amsterdam, allowing for maximum integration of our two major projects and regular documentation and broadcast of the arts and cultural activities at the Bohemian Embassy.
The Bohemian Embassy will dedicate space in the facility for displaying art works, posters and photographs. There will be another space, curated by Cary Loren of BookBeat in Detroit, offering selected books and recordings for on-site perusal and sale. The venue will also display archival materials from the John Sinclair Archive and other collections.
The Bohemian Embassy project will be directed by Steven Pratt, who will act as on-site manager and curator of programming. His presence will be augmented for half the year by the active participation of John Sinclair, who will serve as Artist In Residence and chief architect of the project.
Back to Top
Guitar Army (Second Edition)
It’s All Good: A John Sinclair Reader (2008)
Song of Praise: Homage to John Coltrane
Va Tutto Bene (It’s All Good)
Peyote Mind
Fattening Frogs For Snakes: Delta Sound Suite
Guitar Army (Original)
Poetry Archives
…and more
Always Know
It’s All Good
No Money Down
If I Could Be With You
I Mean You
Full Moon Night
Full Circle…
BENTLEY HISTORICAL LIBRARY – UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
John and Leni Sinclair were leaders of the counterculture movement in Michigan, organizers of radical social, political, and cultural endeavors primarily in the areas of music, poetry, graphic design, and community welfare projects. Materials in this online collection include digitized versions of analog sound recordings held by the Bentley Historical Library.
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY (The John Sinclair Detroit Jazz Collection)
In 1991 John Sinclair donated his Detroit Jazz Collection of original recordings from the Detroit Artists Workshop, Detroit Jazz Center, Paradise Theater/Orchestra Hall, and many other venues and sources in Detroit and Michigan along with posters, printed information, and other materials to the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit in order that these historical materials would be available to Detroiters in perpetuity. Beginning in 2017 Art Yard Records of London will be releasing in association with the Wright Museum albums of music produced by John Sinclair from the Detroit Jazz Archives featuring artists including Charles Moore, Ron English, Lyman Woodard, the Detroit Contemporary 4, the Artists Workshop Music Ensemble, and a series of Detroit jazz composers recorded with orchestral accompaniment at Orchestra Hall/The Paradise Theater in 1979-81
RADIO FREE AMSTERDAM ARCHIVES
Since the first John Sinclair Radio Show was posted on November 22, 2004 and the establishment of Radio Free Amsterdam on January 1, 2005, each radio program released on Radio Free Amsterdam has been archived and kept available for listening on demand. The Radio Free Amsterdam Archive contains every episode from the station’s inception until the original site was retired as of December 31, 2016 to make way for our new broadcast service, directed by the John Sinclair Foundation.
FREE THE WEED: A John Sinclair Cannabis Column
ABOUT JOHN
John Sinclair is a poet from Deroit who has cut a wide swath as a prolific cultural worker, an innovative bard who sets his verse to music from the blues and jazz tradition, a dynamic performer and bandleader who has collaborated with scores of outstanding musicians in performance and recordings, an acclaimed editor, leading music journalist, award-winning radio broadcaster and record producer, an iconoclastic educator and lecturer, and a passionate crusader against the War on Drugs for more than 50 years
Sinclair founded and directed the Detroit Artists Workshop, managed the MC-5, formed the White Panther Party, produced the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, directed the Detroit Jazz Center, taught Blues History in the music department at Wayne State University, edited City Arts
Quarterly for the Detroit Council of the Arts, produced Piano Night at Tipitina’s for the Professor Longhair Foundation and the “live” broadcast of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for WWOZ-FM. He spent three years in prison for marijuana offenses, overthrew the Michigan marijuana laws, helped institute Ann Arbor’s historic $5 fine for possession of weed, founded the Ann Arbor Hash Bash and served as High Priest of the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam.
Sinclair has collaborated with a brilliant array of contemporary musicians, from saxophone giants Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Daniel Carter and Earl Turbinton to hornmen David Amram, Michael Ray, Charles Moore, James Andrews and Kermit Ruffins, guitarists Wayne Kramer, Walter “Wolfman” Washington, Willie King, Jim McCarty and
Jeff “Baby” Grand, and West African griots Bala Tounkare and Guelel Kuumba.
1978, with John Lennon and Yoko Ono after they helped free me. Photo taken in Detroit tavern.
Sinclair has released more than 25 CDs, including several with his band of Blues Scholars, and his recent books include It’s All Good—A John Sinclair Reader, Song of
Praise: Homage to John Coltrane, Sun Ra Interviews & Essays (editor), a book of blues verse called Fattening Frogs For Snakes, and i mean you: a book for penny.
John Sinclair was born in Flint, Michigan on October 2, 1941. He attended Albion College and graduated from the University of Michigan-Flint College in 1964 with an A.B. in English Literature. At college he began writing poetry and music criticism and edited the school paper, The Word. Sinclair pursued graduate studies in American Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, completing his master’s thesis on William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch while beginning his career as a poet, journalist, music presenter, concert and festival producer, music historian, radio broadcaster and educator.
Ten Year Prison Sentence
ruled unconstitutional
with help from John & Yoko
The John Sinclair freedom rally brought together luminaries including pop musicians John Lennon (who recorded the song, “John Sinclair”
on his Some Time in New York City album), Yoko Ono, David Peel, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger, jazz artists Archie Shepp and Roswell
Rudd, and speakers Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale.}