Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side
Page 16
The Jayne Mansfield sequence was just about the only footage I shot during the 1960s that would survive.
Filming at the Dakota
Panna Grady continued to invite me and other Fugs to parties at her apartment at the Dakota, and we became friends. At one of her soirees she said that Tim Leary, at a dinner party, had suggested to her that he was the Second Coming.
I asked Panna if I could do some filming at her apartment, and she agreed. A day or so later I showed up at the Dakota. I had made a big cloth banner with the words “Mongolian Cluster Fuck” on it, which I unfurled in her sumptuous living room. I invited Piero Heliczer and several damosels willing to take off their clothes to the filming. Soon everybody was naked in front of the “Mongolian Cluster Fuck” banner.
Panna saw what was going to happen and quickly sent her maid home for the day.
It was actually pretty innocent footage. I brought along a large ball of papier-mâché, which I had painted gold, and filmed a sequence, “The Dance of the Bugger Ball,” with Heliczer holding the golden ball and parading around the room with the naked duo.
Harry Smith’s Freakout at Peace Eye
Ken Weaver and I were hanging out in Peace Eye the night of June 8 when Harry Smith popped by for a visit. He wanted to borrow some money, just a couple of dollars, which I did not have. He freaked out and tore up three highly scholarly publications he was carrying—Cheyenne and Arapaho Music by Frances Densmore, North American Indian Musical Styles by Bruno Nettl, and Place Names of the Kruger National Park, from the Department of Bantu Administration, Republic of South Africa. And he tossed them onto the floor. He also tore from the wall, and ripped into two pieces, an original Tree of Life print he had given me, published in a limited edition of five hundred in 1954 when Harry was working for Inkweed Arts, a company owned by his friend Lionel Ziprin. I reattached the torn Tree of Life and placed it back on the Peace Eye wall. It was an archetypal instance of the artist’s famous antsiness. Here, for the history of it, are the three torn-up publications and the reattached Tree of Life, saved all these years in my archive.
Meanwhile, I was preparing another issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts (volume 5, number 9), which I whirred off my electric mimeo in July.
The torn-up Tree of Life.
The three torn-up periodicals.
Cover of volume 9, number 5.
Table of Contents.
The magazine was swinging more from the personal to the political. As I was drawing the cover, I wanted to use an image of a racing motorcycle, so I went over to William Burroughs’s apartment to borrow one. The weather was quite warm, but William was working in a suit and tie, designing some collages. I asked if he had some pictures of motorcycle racers, and right away he walked over to a filing cabinet, pulled open a drawer, and quickly found an image of a racing ’cycle, which I was able to utilize on the cover! Many thanks, Bill.
I also drew a page titled “A Declaration of Conscience Against War-Creeps,” which called for a fuck-in against the war.
A call from the summer of 1965.
F.Y. Award to Panna Grady “FOR DISTINGUISHED SERVICE TO THE ARTS.”
Filming at the Secret Location
John Wilcock published an interview with me in the Village Voice in the June 17, 1965, issue. Around that time I invited Wilcock to the Secret Location to view a film session for Mongolian Cluster Fuck with Gerard Malanga and a young woman named Diane H. Ken Weaver and a young woman named Terry T. were balling on the shiny mattress of the Secret Location when the Mongolian Cluster Fuck crew arrived.
Ken Weaver was temporarily staying at the Secret Location. He and I had freshly painted the bedroom, and then I had rehung the bright cloth drapes from Orchard Street on the surrounding walls. Then I had attached clip-on lights with photofloods around the upper edges of the walls.
Diane was hesitant to make out with Gerard in front of the camera, although she was willing to blow him, so I took Wilcock out for a snack down the street. When I came back, Gerry and Diane were fucking away, although he had a tendency to V-frick, that is, to pull himself up into a fuller view of the lens for the sake of the camera. Anyway Diane screamed for him not to spurt in her. So at the last few seconds he pulled and crouched over her smooth breast-tips and came on them with viscid white strands.
I brought the camera close to the breast-tips. Malanga noted how the camera was purring onward. He then lowered his head to the wet semen and started slarfing it up, long spurt-strands dangling from his lips to the breasts.
The Background of the Bridge Theater
Meanwhile, The Fugs began to play sold-out shows at midnight on Saturdays during June and July at the Bridge Theater. The theater was located at 4 St. Mark’s Place, very near Bowery/Third Avenue, and it was a key location in the battle those years against censorship by the New York City Department of Licenses.
The Fugs sweatshirt.
It was a time of ferment, anguish, and revolution in Lower East Side arts. It may be a hundred years before our descendants learn what level of involvement there was, by the police and intelligence agencies say, in the crackdown against the arts in the city.
A Yale student named John Anderson started performing with us. He was an excellent bass player and could sing excellent harmonies. He was also an artist and designed the red, white, and blue Fugs logo, which we spray-painted on sweatshirts, using a stencil John created.
We also sold black Fugs panties, with a gold “Fugs” on each and an arrow leading downward to the mons veneris.
I designed and printed The Fugs Songbook on the Peace Eye mimeograph, which we sold at performances and in the Peace Eye book catalogs.
Revolutionary Egyptology
I somehow found time that summer to teach a course in Revolutionary Egyptology at the Free University, located in a storefront at 20 East Fourteenth near University Place. The course’s title piqued the attention of the secret police. (Them commies, you know, will even use hieroglyphics to spread the rev.)
The Criminal and Subversives Section of the New York State Police kept files mainly on leftists and “subversive elements.” A study of the state police a few years later revealed that among the thousands of cards listing data on potential slime-commies, “One card noted that XXXXXXX was teaching a course in ‘Revolutionary Egyptology.’”
The Fugs Songbook, summer of ’65, hot off the mimeo, 50ḉ.
The Berkeley Poetry Conference
It was one of those events whose power seemed to move beyond itself through invisible Platonic currents—such was the Berkeley Poetry Conference that summer, where important poets gave readings and talks, with parties afterward and the chance to hang out by the hundred-hours bard with bard.
Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Joanne Kyger, LeRoi Jones, Lew Welch, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, John Sinclair, Lenore Kandel, Ted Berrigan, Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, and others (including the author of America: A History in Verse) were there. To me it was a life-changing event. Grove Press paid for half of my airplane ticket.
It was Charles Olson’s bacchic/bardic reading on July 23, 1965, at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall that stirred the greatest legend. For over three hours he spontaneously read his verse and talked on poetics. It had an impact on the level of his famous 1950 manifesto, “Projective Verse,” which works its subtle enforcement in matters of American poetics up to this day.
I had no inkling of it, but Olson had become infatuated with a young woman attending the conference named Suzanne. I walked with him and Suzanne across the Berkeley campus toward Wheeler Hall to his lecture. Olson pointed out the on-campus house of one of his heroes, Carl O. Sauer, the author of Northern Mists, an epochal research into early sea migrations from Europe to North America. Then Olson entered the hall and began his talk.
I sat in the auditorium and was enjoying my hero’s enlightening talk when, to my shock, Suzanne handed me a disturbing note:How can those people dig FEAR like his? And I mean that is where it’s at. Like he said
“All my boys have gotten ahead of me” last night. etc etc & he has no new poems to offer, and no huge group here as compared with say, Ginsberg or even Creeley who really brought them in. And he was so scared, and feeling good, as though he would (maybe) do good, that I couldn’t tell him this morning that I couldn’t marry him. And he’s renting a house and car, and phoned the marriage bureau etc etc. And I’m going crazy. I mean I love him, but I love you too, and Dave, and Creeley, and oh, the young boys with their casual bodies.
I wondered what to do. Then I replied, jotting next to her message, “Don’t leave. We’ll make sure we all stick together as a group. I’ll get Creeley to stick with the O. The O will understand without any direct NO. Just that we’ll all stick together.”
Suzanne replied, in handwriting, “Ed I feel like a ghoul staying here watching this. I mean it. I can’t stand it. He said he has never asked anyone to marry him before and he really wants to.”
I replied, “Really, you’ll freak him out if you leave. Look, you’ll not be alone. Sit tight, face it. Creeley, Ginsberg, Dorn, Wieners, dig it. I repeat. a. It’s obvious you can’t leave. b. The O can take anything (any news). c. You’ll just have to give him the news, at the proper time. d. After the reading, I’ll alert the poets that we have to scoop him up and engulf him, until such time that you can have opportunity to tell him.”
Ed Sanders at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, July ’65. Ed Sanders collection.
To which she replied, “Dear Ed: I really do love you. Love, Suzanne.”
(All this was written on the front and back of a pink flier announcing a lecture on “A Political Solution in Asia” by Professor Alex Garber, July 22, sponsored by the Young People’s Socialist League, in Berkeley, which the researcher can find among the author’s archive files at the Dodd Center at the University of Connecticut.)
During the conference Robert Duncan wrote his fine antiwar poem called “Uprising,” which ended:and the very glint of Satan’s eyes from the pit of the hell of
America’s unacknowledged, unrepented crimes that I saw in
Goldwater’s eyes
now shines from the eyes of the President
in the swollen head of the nation.
July 25
Bob Dylan was “booed off the stage” at the Newport Folk Festival for utilizing electric instruments. It did seem to measure his switch to the good-time-yet-anguished rock-and-roll center-right—less protest, more electricity. (And he never would come out against the Vietnam War, though this was the year he gave Allen Ginsberg some money to buy an Uher tape recorder on which the poet composed his excellent poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra.”) Maybe it was too quick a transition from Woody to Fender for the fans of folk clinging to the image of artisans in cabins building banjos out of turtle shells. I could never figure out what the booing was about.
July 28
Johnson sent 50,000 more troops to Vietnam, increasing the total to 125,000. Monthly Drafts to the army would climb from 17,000 to 35,000. It was just about now that the mantram “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” which he could sometimes hear in the White House from demonstrations on the street, began to wreck his presidency.
Night of Napalm
The Fugs performed a benefit entitled the “Night of Napalm” at midnight, August 7, at the Bridge Theater. We had learned about the use of napalm and defoliants in Vietnam, and it seemed almost too horrible to chant about.
Tuli prepared a tape of patriotic songs, which we played. We performed our regular set, with songs such as “Kill for Peace,” “Nothing,” and my “Strafe Them Creeps in the Rice Paddy, Daddy.” (I later used it as part of the “War Song” suite on our album Tenderness Junction.) The band also worked up my “No Redemption” chant, which I had intended to utilize in Amphetamine Head—A Study of Power in America:No Redemption No Redemption
No Redemption from Evil and Sin
No Redemption from the Hate and the Horror
No Redemption No Redemption
The River is full of Corpses
The River is full of the Boats of Death
No Redemption No Redemption . . .
and on and on
Then we enacted what we called “The Fugs Spaghetti Death.” We had boiled pot after pot of spaghetti at Betsy Klein’s apartment that afternoon until we had almost an entire wastebasket full of spaghetti. We threw globs of the spaghetti at one another and at the audience. It was all over the stage, and we began to slip, slide, and fall.
I spotted Andy Warhol in the front row. It appeared that he was wearing a leather tie—then blap! I got him full face with a glop of spaghetti.
Another surreal night at the Bridge Theater. And a huge job the next afternoon, scraping strings of dried spaghetti off a barren stage.
The Attempted Setup of Allen Ginsberg for Pot Arrest
I returned from the Berkeley Poetry Conference freshened and full of projects. Among other things, I needed to do the final work—the text for the booklet and the sequencing of the tunes—for The Fugs first album. The Fugs were performing at standing-room-only midnight concerts at the Bridge Theater.
But all of a sudden I learned that the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD, a forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Agency) was trying to set up Allen Ginsberg for a drug bust. Everybody who learned about it, at least in the Lower East Side, was angry and disgusted. At the time Allen was camping with Gary Snyder for a month in the Cascades, Crater Lake National Park, and Mount Rainier, reading Milarepa’s poems aloud in the morning.
Allen responded to the attempted setup with his own decades-long investigation into the involvement of U.S. government agencies in dealing and drug smuggling. What happened was this: A couple of young men, Jack Martin and Dale Wilbourne, had been arrested for alleged possession of marijuana. Four BNDD agents met with Martin and threatened additional charges, plus a bail bump-up from $5,000 to $100,000, unless he set up Ginsberg for a pot arrest. (Ginsberg had been very outspoken for legalization. The photo of him at a LeMar march with the “Pot Is Fun” sign had been published around the world.)
LeMar press release on the attempted setup of Allen Ginsberg, August 10, 1965.
“We want Ginsberg,” one of the agents had said.
Once I learned about the incident, I wrote and printed a press release under the aegis of LeMar. I sent the release out on August 10. It raised quite a stir.
A Raid on the Secret Location
Three days later, around midnight on August 13, plainclothes police—I never knew whether they were New York police or maybe the feds—raided my Secret Location on the Lower East Side, where I had my film equipment set up and ready to go. I also had stored there stacks of issues of my various publications. I learned about the raid from a downstairs neighbor.
It was never clear whether they knew of the Secret Location on the second floor or not. At the time, because the officers initially were looking for pot, I heard from another resident of the building that when the raid occurred, the guy on the ground floor suggested that they raid my studio if they wanted pot.
In any case they knocked on my door. I wasn’t there, of course; I was home at 224 East Twenty-seventh (Miriam and I had recently moved there with our daughter, Deirdre, from the Bronx). They went down to the courtyard of the back building, pulled down the fire escape ladder, went up the ladder, and got into the Secret Location. They pretty much ransacked the place, and according to the downstairs neighbor who had suggested they check out my pad, the officers took away a quantity of my publications.
Several days later, again at night, plainclothes officers returned, went up the ladder again, broke the window onto the fire escape, went in, and then proceeded to remove EVERY SINGLE REEL OF FILM! There must have been at least 10,000 feet of footage. My entire underground film career, Gone!
I called up the Ninth Precinct and demanded to speak to a detective. He suggested that I “sue for them.”
Was this action connected with the feds attem
pting to set up the bard of “Howl”? Was it part of the general clampdown in New York City, beginning in ’64, on people such as Lenny Bruce and Jonas Mekas? I didn’t know for sure because the annals tracing these things are usually more hidden than the inner workings of the Crypteia (the secret police of ancient Sparta), the Okrana (the czarist secret police), and the KGB/CIA complex.
What was clear was that my underground film career was, for now, over. Gone were the footage of the Great March on Washington, all the thousands of feet of Amphetamine Head, the footage of Szabo and Ellen balling in glory, the footage at the Dakota, the footage from The Fugs Cross-Country Caravan (such as kneeling on the porch of Burroughs’s boyhood home in St. Louis at dawn), the footage of Malanga and the wet breasts, and even the footage of my brother’s wedding in Missouri. I used to fantasize that the wedding would show up spliced to the Dance of the Bugger Ball in some Times Square porn house.