80px|The Mantra-Rock Dance poster by Harvey W. Cohen
Mantra-Rock Dance was a musical countercultural event held on January
29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It was organized by
followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness as an
opportunity for its founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, to
address a wider public, and as a promotional and fundraising effort for
their first center on the West Coast of the United States. The
Mantra-Rock Dance featured American rock groups the Grateful Dead, Big
Brother and the Holding Company (for whom Janis Joplin was the lead
singer) and Moby Grape; these bands agreed to appear with Prabhupada
and to perform for free. The participation of countercultural leaders
considerably boosted the event's popularity; among them were the poet
Allen Ginsberg, who led the singing of the Hare Krishna mantra on stage
along with Prabhupada, and LSD promoters Timothy Leary and Stanley
Augustus Owsley III. The Mantra-Rock Dance concert was later called
"the ultimate high" and "the major spiritual event of the San Francisco
hippy era". It led to favorable media exposures for Prabhupada and his
followers, and brought the Hare Krishna movement to the wider attention
of the American public. (more...)
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Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantra-Rock_Dance>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
622:
The epoch of the Islamic calendar occurred, marking the year that
Muhammad began his Hijra from Mecca to Medina.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar>
1782:
Mozart's opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail made its premiere, after
which Emperor Joseph II made the apocryphal complaint that it had "too
many notes".
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Entf%C3%BChrung_aus_dem_Serail>
1931:
Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie signed the nation's first
constitution, the first time in history that an absolute ruler
voluntarily shared sovereignty with his subjects.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1931_Constitution_of_Ethiopia>
1950:
Korean War: A Korean People's Army unit massacred twenty-one U.S. Army
prisoners of war.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaplain-Medic_massacre>
1965:
South Vietnamese Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao—an undetected communist spy—was
hunted down and killed after being sentenced to death in absentia for a
February 1965 coup attempt against Nguyen Khanh.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pham_Ngoc_Thao>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
saccade (n):
A sudden movement of the eyes from one point to another, either
voluntary or involuntary
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/saccade>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters
ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions
more than refusing to look at reality.
--Sheri S. Tepper
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sheri_S._Tepper>