by Sanders, Ed
In 1949 they arrived in the United States, where both of them became filmmakers. In 1955 Jonas founded the magazine Film Culture. In the fall of 1958 he began his very influential weekly column, “Movie Journal,” in the Village Voice. In the summer of 1960 the Mekas brothers purchased some out-of-date film stock and began their feature-length film Guns of the Trees. Jonas wrote the script.
Mekas formed the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in early 1962 after another film distribution operation refused to screen a film by Stan Brakhage, Anticipation of the Night. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative practiced no censorship at all, and 75 percent of the rental fees for showing a film went directly to the filmmaker. And so in early 1962 the Charles Theater on Avenue B near Twelfth Street began showing underground films. Some of us from nearby streets eagerly attended.
Across the street was Stanley’s, a packed bar frequented by poets, civil rights activists, filmmakers, painters, and oodles of others from the nearby rent-controlled buildings. After Guns of the Trees my friends and I adjourned to Stanley’s for conversation and fun. Inspired by the film, I announced that evening that I was beginning a magazine and I solicited manuscripts. The name I tossed out among the revelers made them laugh. It had been in my mind a number of years.
Typing a Wild Magazine at the Catholic Worker
In those years I was active in the peace and Ban the Bomb movements. I volunteered at the Committee for Nonviolent Action located on Grand Street, and a number of my friends were on the staff of the Catholic Worker newspaper or did other volunteer work for the Worker at its House of Hospitality on Chrystie Street, which is a southern extension of Second Avenue. They were antiwar Catholic pacifists who lived a life of voluntary poverty. Sometimes I watched them hold prayer circles on the second floor on Chrystie Street.
A few of them wrote for the Catholic Worker, and some of them at night worked the streets of Greenwich Village to get donations in exchange for issues. It was understood that because of their lives of voluntary poverty, they were allowed to use some of the donations for their personal needs, such as a few 25¢ quart bottles of Rheingold beer (my crowd’s drink of choice), which they might take back to their pads, or even use the quarter for a mug of dark beer at Stanley’s.
The Catholic Worker provided the best lunch imaginable—beautiful chunks of homemade bread and a healthy soup that worked wonders, especially for someone who might have had too many vodkas at Stanley’s the night before. I sometimes had lunch there and now and then picked up clothes or shoes from the free clothes bin on the second floor.
I was, of course, aware of Catholic activist Dorothy Day, her presence at the Worker, and her writing, which I could sense was sometimes stunningly good. Her hair was white, and her facial expression was somewhere between fierce and loving. She seemed always on the road, but now and then I would spot her in the House of Hospitality at 175 Chrystie Street, where the offices and soup kitchen resided.
Staff members lived in buildings on nearby streets, and were expected to be celibate unless married. This was 1962, not that many months after the pill became extremely common, along with the diaphragm, among damozels of the left.
There were all kinds of legends about Dorothy Day on people’s lips—that she had had a wild youth, that she had been the model for Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting, “Nude Descending a Staircase,” which turned out not to be true. She had been born in 1897 and would have been around fourteen or fifteen at the time of the painting.
Many of us were undergoing wild-youth times ourselves, and the thought that someone who would soon be touted as material for sainthood had had wildness during her salad days was soothing and inspiring at the same time.
She had founded the Catholic Worker newspaper back in the spring of 1933 and somehow kept it going. I’d heard over 100,000 copies of each issue were printed. Dorothy Day also led the creation of a series of Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality around the nation. I learned that she had written for The Masses, that great and ultracreative magazine that had vigorously opposed America’s participation in World War I and that Woodrow Wilson had crushed out of existence with indictments for sedition and raids.
By 1962, her sixty-fifth year, Day had taken part in demonstrations against mandatory civil defense/nuclear war drills, during which sirens forced New York City residents once a year to go into underground shelters or at least to get off the streets. Her credentials for doing good were almost overwhelming.
The day after watching Ginsberg chant poetry in Guns of the Trees, I typed the first issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts on a Catholic Worker typewriter, on the third floor, on mimeograph stencils that I borrowed. I also borrowed from the Worker a few reams of flecked, colored paper called Granitex. The first issue was a beautiful light green; subsequent issues were in various shades of red. Some pages were flecky gray, and a few were blue or near-chrome yellow.
On February 19, a Monday, I went to a typewriter store on Second Avenue, and for $36 plus change I purchased a small Speed-o-Print mimeograph machine and some printing ink, which I poured into the open top of the printing drum.
In the first issue I published two excellent poems by Jean Morton, then on the Catholic Worker staff. In the “Notes on Contributors,” I wrote, “Jean Morton—a mad stomper for the Catholic Worker. Jean is a word-machine and her many secret notebooks will cleave out about ten feet of leather-bound library space of the future.”
While I was typing the stencils for the first issue, my friend Nelson Barr quickly wrote a “Bouquet of Fuck Yous,” which I drew by hand on the stencil, using a stencil-cutting stylus I found in the desk I was sitting at. I noted in the typed “Notes on contributors,” “(Barr’s) Bouquet of Fuck Yous was written as this went to press. Composition time: 43 seconds. Place: 3rd floor, Catholic Worker.”
Ticket to the Mimeograph Revolution. My small Speed-o-Print mimeo, $36.06, February 19, 1962, able to fit nicely on the porcelain bathtub cover in my kitchen at 509 East Eleventh Street.
The cover of the first issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, drawn by stylus on stencil, February 1962.
An Egyptian Vision
I was writing a series of poems involving several Egyptian hieroglyphs—the Eye of Horus, which I called Peace Eye, and the small, single-person Egyptian boat found as a hieroglyph on thousands of funerary texts, which I identified with D. H. Lawrence’s “Boat of Death.” I was not normally very religious, but one afternoon a few months previous I had seen the side of a skinless cow’s face, with large eye staring, in the window of a meat store on Second Avenue (not far from where I soon purchased my Speed-o-Print), which gave me a kind of Egypto-poetic religious moment. Since the 1940s in Missouri when my mother would name and describe the constellations and stars in the summer sky, I had been looking for a schematic that would describe the universe. Once in New York I went from studies in Hindu/Indian/Upanishad texts to Egyptian hieroglyphs, which by early 1962, after taking a course at the New School in the Egyptian language, I knew pretty well. After my vision in the window of the meat store, I began the works I called “The Soft-Man Poems,” a kind of semireli-gious text inspired by William Burroughs’s novel The Soft Machine, portions of which I had been studying in magazines, commingled with my fascination with the solar myths of ancient Egypt.
Uh oh. It wasn’t long before it came to the attention of Dorothy Day that her typewriter, her stencils, her groovy green Granitex paper, and her third-floor office had been used to publish Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. Day issued an edict that Catholic Worker staff members could not publish in my magazine. Most complied, but several resigned, including Jean Forest and her husband at the time, Jim Forest, soon to be a longtime prominent antiwar activist and writer.
I published issue number two a few weeks later, featuring a poem by Jim. He had been managing editor of the Catholic Worker and later on wrote biographies of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. I wanted no quarrel with Dorothy Day, whose power and worth were right there in her columns, in th
e soup line, in the clothing bin, in the tireless activities against war, and in her passion for social justice, so I published an editorial in the next issue:
Several staff members of the Catholic Worker were stomped off the Worker set as a result of publishing in Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts or as a result of continued association with its editor. Dorothy Day, the head stomper at the Catholic Worker, has succombed to the Jansenist Dialectic and flicked four people off the set there. This outburst of Calvinistic directives seem to us not in the spirit of anarchy, nonviolence, and the view of Christ in every man. However, we understand the need of the grand old lady of Catholic pacifism for a closed metaphysical system where there are no disturbances such as Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. Therefore, in future issues of this magazine we shall refrain from any mention of the Catholic Worker to save Miss Day from any more metaphysical distress. If any of the mad gropers left at the Worker want to publish in Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, all manuscripts should bear the notation, “approved by D. D.”
Yours in Christ, the Sexual Lamb,
Ed Sanders.
I vowed not to mention the Catholic Worker in future issues, and I didn’t. In a way Dorothy Day reminded me of my own mother, Mollie, who had passed away when I was a senior in high school in Missouri. My mother was very religious, taught a Sunday School class for high schoolers, and was very liberal on many issues, except she was a bit puritanical. Mollie would almost certainly have sided with Dorothy Day.
The same month, February 1962, that I typed those first stencils at the Catholic Worker, I joined writers Grace Paley and Bob Nichols, and others, to help found the Greenwich Village Peace Center, located in a storefront on West Third Street between Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue. Meeting Grace Paley and Bob Nichols was a big inspiration. I helped varnish the floors, helped set up shelves to prepare the opening of the Peace Center, and was invited by the Board of Directors to serve as chair of the “Nonviolent Peace Action Committee.”
A Sit-In at the Atomic Energy Commission
On Friday, March 3, President Kennedy announced that if the Soviets did not sign a permanent cheat-proof test-ban treaty before the end of April, he would resume the testing of nuclear weapons in the air. A bunch of peace activists, including some of my pals from the Catholic Worker, had already planned to conduct a sit-in at the New York branch of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) if Kennedy announced U.S. tests. (I had been arrested at the Russian Mission to the United States a few months earlier when the Soviets conducted open-air nuke explosions.)
The sit-in was scheduled for Monday. The weekend was spent preparing and printing the leaflets and notifying demonstrators. Two leaflets were written. One was a fact sheet for those committing civil disobedience that recommended serving jail sentences rather than posting bail or paying fines. The other leaflet, to be handed out at the sit-in, explained its purpose, decried atmospheric tests, urged workers to quit their jobs at the AEC, and urged everyone not to pay taxes for nuke-puke. The peace groups pursued the doctrine of “openness and truth”—that is, of informing the police and AEC officials of exactly what was going to take place. They sent out announcements to the press.
Monday morning was a bitter, windswept day. The New York Atomic Energy Commission was located at 376 Hudson Street on the lower west side of Greenwich Village near the piers. Before the demonstration the police had erected a ring of gray barricades around the entrances.
That morning I awakened nervous, meditating about the impending confrontation. I washed with meticulous care because I recalled all too well the shabby treatment I had received from a police officer who had noted my murky feet during my arrest at the Russian Mission. Ever thereafter I had always Spic-and-Span’d myself prior to any demonstration. I didn’t eat.
As I walked from the Secret Location on East Eleventh, I recalled how that very weekend there had been demonstrations in Times Square where club-wielding police on horses had ridden up on the curb into a large crowd packed on Father Duffy’s traffic island—and the blood had dripped from the whacked skulls.
When I arrived at the AEC, there was that strange electric aura that always seemed to occur just prior to civil disobedience. The bitter cold, the throngs of police, the pickets, the barricades, the weird intelligence agents with movie cameras, the traffic oozing extra slowly by, the reporters, the nervous protest leaders—all combined both to thrill and to terrify. I spotted a few of my friends, most of them from the Catholic Worker, already sitting behind the barricades outside the front door. They waved and soon I, too, had slipped through the blocking legs of the police and under the gray boards, silently nodding to those already sitting.
I sat with my knees bunched up and my arms locked around them. I could see the supporting picket line move slowly in a large oval, signs hoisted against Kennedy’s nukes. We were warned by a police captain to move from the door or we’d be arrested. Then it began.
There was a quick engine roar as an arrest wagon backed up to the sit-in. Two detectives with food-bloated faces, thick dark blue overcoats, and narrow-brimmed felt hats double-nabbed me, one to a shoulder, sucking me out of the close hem-in of the barricades and toward the police van, half drag, half carry. Then it was a heave-ho scene, and I was plopped aboard.
Not all of the thirty or so demonstrators who were arrested “went limp”—as they termed a totally relaxed arrest posture. Some walked to the wagon instead. The argument was that going limp created violence because it tended to anger the gruff, huffing police haulers.
When the van was full, the back door was locked and we were driven away to the New York Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street. Those jammed aboard sang numbers one, two, and three on the arrested-pacifist Hit Parade: “We Shall Overcome” and “Down by the Riverside,” with a little satiric “God Bless America” thrown in.
For the next five hours we were treated to the criminal justice stockyards, herded along with the hordes of sullen unfortunates arrested that day in New York City. Finally we were placed in a “holding tank” packed with the accused, located just outside the courtroom. There was a parade back and forth of legal defense aides with scribbled clipboards trying to assist the poor.
After a seemingly endless chain of mumbling confrontations with the judge, many of which seemed to be drug related, the docket numbers and names of the pacifists were moan-droned by the bailiff as they were herded into the room and the arresting officers lined them up in front of the judge, a dour scowler with curtains of chin blubber dangling.
The first thing to be noted in standing before the judge was that the big brown N in the motto IN GOD WE TRUST, high on the wall behind him, had fallen off. The judge flashed some red onto his face when one of my co-arrestees, lining up with the others in front of the bench, refused to face the judge but rather insisted on facing the spectators. “I refuse to recognize the existence of these proceedings,” he announced.
The gavel-whacking judge admonished the supporters in the front row to shut up. The judge then launched into a cold-war lecture that culminated in the old “You’d never get to do this in Russia—you’d be sent to Siberia.” Then he gave the one not facing him, because of his noncooperation, notice of bail of $500, but the others he released on their own recognizance. All defendants were charged with discon—disorderly conduct. Those who had gone limp were given additional charges of resisting arrest. The august red face set a date for pleading of March 23, 1962, 10:00 AM. “And be on time!” the judge admonished.
Our pro bono attorney was Ernst Rosenberger. Five years later he would serve as my American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney, successfully defending me against my arrest for publishing Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts.
On March 23 most of us pled guilty to disorderly conduct in exchange for the dropping of resisting-arrest charges. I and a few others (including Catholic Worker friend Jim Forest and future Fugs manager Nelson Barr, who was a regular contributor to Fuck You) were sentenced to ten days at the Hart Islan
d Workhouse. Then we were escorted back into the bowels of the Tombs (the nickname for the New York City Criminal Courts building) to be fingerprinted.
I was opposed to the FBI fingerprint storage system, and I knew that the New York City fuzz would flash my prints right down to DC for the big file. I notified the guards that I was not going to cooperate with fingerprinting and was astounded at the commotion this seemed to cause.
My refusal convinced the jail officials that they might have some sort of Pretty Boy Floyd on their hands. Aha, they rubbed their hands, smilingly knowingly, aha, a criminal! They told me they were going to take the prints by force, and still I refused.
Then they sent me to see a prison psychologist, the purpose presumably to determine if I might get violent while resisting the printing. I assured the officer that I would be totally nonviolent but that I’d have to be carried to the print room.
When I was dragged into the room, the officer seemed to assume that I was going to cooperate, even after I fell several times from the chair into a limp heap on the floor. The officer picked up my limp right hand, the fingers dangling in desuetude. The officer rolled a smush of ink across the smooth desktop with a roller. Then he blacked my fingers and placed them on a fingerprint card. “Roll your fingers,” he ordered. “I’m sorry,” I replied. “I can’t cooperate. I don’t believe in fingerprinting.”
