Back to the Future

For those who have never gotten over the intellectual rough and tumble of the 1960s, the idealism, the high drama, the tie-dyed shirts, I have good news: They’re baaack. Sort of.

Their partial reemergence is encompassed in the return of the L.A. Free Press, Art Kunkin’s paragon of alternative newspapers that once trod where those of us in the Pig Press feared to go.

The Freep, as it was once lovingly and hatefully known, was scheduled to appear on the street Thursday for $1 a copy, asking from its tabloid-sized front page, “U.N.: Cool or Tool?” and “Why Do Republicans Hate Bill and Hillary?”

If that seems tepid compared to its war on the establishment three decades ago, it’s because Kunkin himself, founder of the old Freep, has mellowed. Age and meditation have cooled his angers, if not his enthusiasm.

Now a trim 70, he still bounces with anticipation as he proclaims the reincarnation of a weekly newspaper that in its first life was born in 1964 and died broke in 1972 as the Age of Aquarius sizzled to a close.

The new Free Press, he says, will be a more thoughtful if less passionate voice of the dispossessed.

“It will be a mirror, not just a propaganda tool, for emerging movements,” Kunkin proclaimed the other day from his Pacific Palisades home. “I will be a lens focusing energy on that portion of the community that wants a better world.”

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I met with the Lens as he was putting the finishing touches on the new Freep. He has turned his living room, dining room and kitchen into an office for the newspaper. The main windows of the hilltop house he shares with a girlfriend of 15 years look toward a gleaming view of the ocean.

“I see myself as a historian and educator,” he said amid the clutter of his improvised newsroom. “We’re not just some little radical group. I’m meeting people with ‘60s values all over the place who are feeling isolated. I see the Free Press pulling them all together.”

His readers, Kunkin says, will include those who are fed up with politics and politicians in the Era of Monica Lewinsky. While there is no antiwar movement to unite them, he adds, “they’ll support a rebellion focused on issues of values.”

Peering out from silver-rimmed glasses with the intensity of a chicken hawk, his curly hair suspiciously dark, Kunkin leaves little doubt that he’s serious about this whole thing.

“I feel like a 20-year-old,” he says with a grand gesture. “This has filled me with energy!” Then he adds in a wry aside, “Let the L.A. Times cover the Music Center. . . . I’m interested in a meeting of the new Labor Party where 20 people get together and talk about what they’d like to see done.”

Since watching his original Free Press go under, Kunkin has engaged in a variety of activities, from producing a nudist magazine in Topanga to teaching meditation. His last effort was publishing a newspaper for the homeless.

It was only three weeks ago that he decided to resurrect the Freep.

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Life for the counterculturists was a little easier in the 1960s. We hated war, racism and the John Birch Society, and loved everyone except those on any level of authority.

Kunkin admits that things are no longer that simple. While he is not all that happy with Bill

Clinton, for instance, he is less happy with Republican efforts to impeach the president.

He sees similarities between the physical assassination of John F. Kennedy and the political assassination of Clinton. In that first era, the old Free Press was founded. In the second, a new Free Press is emerging.

The ‘60s were more than a decade. They were a march, a parade, a protest, a shout, a party and a song. They were also serious, silly and sometimes dangerous. Almost everyone was somehow involved.

But that was then and this is now.

Kunkin is right when he says things have changed. Protests go unattended and unnoticed in the context of larger moral imperatives. Individual survival is a necessity as well as an obsession. The struggle is intensely personal.

The question of whether or not a new Free Press fits into today’s world is open. “I’m listening instead of talking,” Kunkin says by way of explaining the thrust of his reconstituted Freep.

If he listens closely, he may be able to revive some of the spirit that existed in the ‘60s, but I’m not ready to buy a tie-dyed T-shirt just yet.

Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.