Underground downtown culture and national historical trauma unfolded simultaneously on the same day

Evidence

The same day that Stoller’s column appeared, along with an ad noting the Gate’s attractions as Kidnapping and Abduction, When Queens Collide, Bill Vehr’s play Whores of Babylon—a mishmash of Old Testament and comic book sci-fi, caustically reviewed by A. D. Coleman in the Voice as a sub-Burroughsian cut-up—and a local band, the Seventh Sons, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1384

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to reader’s agenda: the juxtaposition of tiny avant-garde scene listings against the assassination is a case study in how the counterculture and mainstream political history occupied parallel tracks in 1968.