Greff Fabrics Blues, 1971 (vi)

Also in September 1971, in a rack in the Queens College library, I picked up a copy of an alternative Manhattan Upper West Side-based newspaper/magazine, "The University Review," that both former Columbia SDS activist Lew and former "Columbia Daily Spectator" editor Robert seemed to be involved in putting out. And since the editors of "The University Review" invited their readers to mail in their writing, I sent them a copy of my short story, "The Classless Society," and a "basement cassette tape" of some of my protest folk songs from the 1966 to 1971 period, including "Bloody Minds" and "Livin' On Stolen Goods."

Yet for some reason, Lew and Robert were not willing to open the pages of their alternative left-wing "University Review" publication to my writing, although during the 1990s my written work ended up getting heavily published for 7 years in the Lower East Side-based alternative weekly "Downtown." But without my writing, "The University Review" didn't last more than four years before it folded.

Apparently former "Columbia Daily Spectator" editor Robert had been in contact with Mark around the same time as the March 1970 Townhouse explosion in which Ted, Diana and Terry were killed (and had apparently even gone to see the "Zabriskie Point" movie with Mark around that time, according to Mark's 21st-century autobiography). But after "The University Review" folded, Robert ended up getting a job for awhile as the "Village Voice" editor and then working as an editor for mainstream corporate media firms like Times-Mirror-"New York Newsday," Time Warner-CNN-"Fortune" magazine and Billionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Bloomberg Inc. mass media firm, for many years.

Meanwhile, after "The University Review" folded, former Columbia SDS activist Lew apparently pocketed some money from a Movement class-action lawsuit which responded to the FBI/COINTELPRO surveillance and break-ins that targeted Upper West Side New Left activists like Lew in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then Lew got more into writing books about professional basketball teams and mostly unproduced Hollywood screenplays apparently than being into much late 1970s or 1980s anti-imperialist or prisoner solidarity activism; and, eventually, he was apparently hired by the Columbia University Administration in the late 1980s to be its "house radical" as some kind of a School of the Arts prof/screenplay writing instructor (who also helped an ex-BPP activist write his 1960s memoirs) until his tragic death from Lou Gehrig's disease less than a year after the 40th anniversary reunion of 1968 Columbia Revolt student participants in 2008--where Lew gave one of the greatest speeches of his life while sitting in a wheelchair, that brought tears to the eyes of most people in the audience.