by Sanders, Ed
Back in ’62 something called the New York Coffeehouse Law had been enacted. It stipulated that if a restaurant wanted to have live entertainment, it had to acquire a “coffeehouse license,” which required submissions of blueprints, installation of sprinklers, more fire exits, kitchen flues. These installations were to be overseen by the corrupt New York City Building and Fire Code departments. The law allowed three stringed instruments and a piano, but not readers of verse.
I hung out at the coffeehouses that featured poetry readings as much as I could during those years. Many of us, including Allen G., myself, d. a. levy, Diane Wakoski, David Henderson, Ishmael Reed, and Marguerite Harris, read poetry in East Village coffeehouses, especially at the Café Le Metro on Second Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Streets.
The Department of Licenses, in particular, led the clampdown against poetry readings in coffeehouses, against the showing of certain avant-garde films (especially those that featured homosexual and erotic imagery), and against theaters such as Ellen Stewart’s Cafe La Mama. Department officials would scan the Village Voice for listings of poetry readings and send out spores to issue summonses.
I attended meetings with Ellen Stewart of La Mama, Joe Cino of Cafe Cino, Jackson MacLow, and Allen Ginsberg to organize public opposition to the Department of Licenses. Particularly disturbing, reminding me of a faceless bureaucrat gone mad in a William Burroughs novel, was a Department of License official named Walter Kirschenbaum, who we heard was a Liberal Party appointee and was very obnoxious in the meetings. (Young firebrands Henry Stern, later to be head of the New York City Parks Department, and Ed Koch, later to be mayor, helped us.) We started a campaign that ultimately led to the city government pulling back and letting verse be heard without hindrance.
It has been speculated that the clampdown was inspired, at least in part, by the New York City establishment’s desire to “clean up” the city in advance of the millions of visitors and their cash bonanza scheduled to arrive for the upcoming 1965 World’s Fair. I doubt that. The clampdown may have been more an expression of right-wing meanness after the death of JFK and a slow buildup of war. It may take another fifty years or so to learn if the clampdown from the Department of Licenses really did have an element of right-wing repression and secret agencies.
Clamping Down on Jonas Mekas
Early in 1964 Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures had been shown three successive Mondays without any trouble at the Gramercy Art Theater. On February 15 the police issued a summons against the showing, and the Gramercy halted showings of underground films.
Jonas Mekas then began showing underground films at the New Bowery Theater, at 4 St. Mark’s Place (later named the Bridge Theater, where The Fugs often played at midnight the following year). In February 1964 Mekas filmed the Living Theater production of Kenneth Brown’s The Brig. (It won the docu award at the 1965 Venice Film Festival.) On March 3 Flaming Creatures was screened at the New Bowery Theater. After thirty of the film’s forty-five minutes, police officers suddenly stood up and arrested all the people they could and seized the film and all the projectors they could get their hands on. Mekas was held in jail overnight.
A week later Mekas was again cuffed, this time at the Writers’ Stage on East Fourth, for showing Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour, with its homosexual theme. Many intellectuals wrote in to complain, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The case was tossed.
Jonas received a six-month suspended sentence for screening Flaming Creatures. He appealed the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which voted narrowly not to hear it. Abe Fortas was one of the justices who voted to hear the Flaming Creatures appeal. Later when he was up for the job of chief justice, right-wing nuts claimed that he was an aficionado of dirty flicks.
For the next few months the Park Avenue South home of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative became the meeting place of underground filmmakers, sometimes to talk and argue with one another and sometimes to screen their films.
Barbara Rubin
In 1964 I met a young filmmaker named Barbara Rubin at Allen Ginsberg’s new apartment at 704 East Fifth. She was brilliant and enigmatic. At the same time she was very carnal, yet she had a spiritual side that ultimately led her to Hasidism. She and Allen Ginsberg were lovers at one time. She was spunky and thought Big. In 1963 she completed a movie called Christmas on Earth, which had explicitly erotic sections, tracing in its twenty-nine minutes a group sex encounter in a New York City apartment.
By late 1963 Jonas Mekas had hired Barbara Rubin to work at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. In December of that year Barbara, Jonas, and a young man named P. Adams Sitney flew to an “experimental film competition” in Belgium. The three took films with them to screen at the festival, including Ron Rice’s Chumlum, Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man and Window Water Baby, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.
The festival judges decided that Flaming Creatures was unfit to show. Jonas Mekas withdrew from the festival jury in protest. Jonas and friends gave a private screening of the film in their hotel. Meanwhile, on the last day of the festival in Belgium (at Knokke-le-Zoute) Jonas and Barbara shoved into the festival projection booth and began to screen Flaming Creatures to an unprepared audience.
Uh oh.
The festival honchos cut off the power. Reportedly the Belgium minister of justice appeared at the microphone to calm the audience. Meanwhile, the estimable Barbara Rubin found alternative power and began to project Creatures on his very face!
The Travails of Lenny Bruce
Everybody had heard about Lenny Bruce. The buzz on him was enormous. He was an authentic, if very frantic, comedic hero in the American underground. I knew that he and Allen Ginsberg were friends.
By early 1964 there were not many places the brilliant comic could play in the United States. Nevertheless he was able to do four Easter ’64 gigs at the Village Theater on Second Ave. By then he had placed in his routines one of his most controversial pieces, which was inspired by strips from the twenty-second Zapruder film as published in the December 6, 1963, issue of Time. Bruce interpreted the film clips as depicting Mrs. Kennedy “hauling ass to save her ass” (though in fact Jackie had reached out to help pull a Secret Service agent aboard. Then she went back to cradle her husband).
After the concert gigs at the Village Theater (Bruce had lost his cabaret card and so could not perform where liquor was sold), Howie Solomon brought Lenny into his new Cafe Au Go Go on Bleecker Street, with skyscraper-voiced Tiny Tim as opening act.
On the third night of Bruce’s run a guy in a dark suit named Herbert Ruhe from the NYC Department of Licenses (and formerly a CIA agent) plunked down $4.70 for a ticket and during the show took notes. The next day Ruhe visited Assistant District Attorney Richard Kuh, and then on April 1 two cops with a concealed Minofon wire recorder stealth-taped Bruce’s gig.
Assistant DA Kuh brought the tape and transcription to a grand jury, which indicted Bruce, though the tape recording was somewhat garbled and crackly. On April 3 Bruce and Howie Solomon were arrested in Bruce’s Go Go dressing room.
The Great Society
Almost five months to the day after John Kennedy was shot in Dallas, the words “Great Society” were first used by President Johnson at a Democratic fund-raiser in Chicago. “We have been called upon—are you listening?—to build a great society of the highest order, a society not just for today or tomorrow but for three or four generations to come.”
It sounded good to me, except that he was surfacing as a warmonger. Nevertheless his Great Society showed the enlightened side of Johnson’s viciously bifurcated personality.
In the early and mid-1960s there was plenty of evidence that things were going to change for the better. A whole generation came to believe that Good Permanent Change was going to happen right away. The integration and voting rights victories in the South gave the ’60s such hope, and so did laws passed by a Congress and two presidents who still drew public inspiration
from Franklin Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and New Deal legislation such as Social Security and child labor laws.
All in a great rush of months Johnson used his leadership to pass a bunch of Great Society laws. Among them were Medicare, Medicaid, the Freedom of Information Act, the Voting Rights Act, a law setting aside millions of acres of public land as permanent wilderness, and Johnson’s executive order on affirmative action. It was his glory and the glory of a righteous Congress. At the same time, however, as if possessed by a demon of bellicosity, Johnson started up a ground and air war in Vietnam—with napalm, Agent Orange, fragmentation bombs, strategic hamlets, the Phoenix program, and secret bombings of Laos.
Wars eat social progress. Johnson’s Great Society momentum was soon killed by the killing in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and the ruination of Thailand with corruption. The outcry of resistance from millions of Americans, conducted in a creative and defiant mode, doomed his presidency, while guns spoiled the butter and napalm torched the bread and roses. In some ways he represented the worst aspects of American civilization—bellicose, too cozy with the secret, backslapping deal, too eager to send people toward certain harm.
May 1964
I completed the tenth issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts (volume 5, number 6) in May, just around the time I graduated from New York University.
As always, I took great joy in hand-lettering the cover glyph on the stencil. By then I owned an assortment of sharp-tipped, and rounded, styli. In lieu of a lightboard I used a flashlight to illuminate the drawing from behind, and beneath the somewhat flimsy stencil I positioned a fairly thick plastic sheet. It was important for the stylus not to overly gouge the stencil, and over the years I had learned the exact pressures required to cut the stencil’s film without ripping.
I had a bunch of beautiful poems in the issue that spring! Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, LeRoi Jones, Al Fowler, Bill Szabo, Carol Bergé, Diane di Prima, Joel Oppenheimer, Ray Bremser, Nancy Elison, John Keys, Peter Orlovsky, and Nelson Barr—all reflected in my glyphic table of contents page.
By the spring of ’64 I had become active in the movement, just beginning, for the legalization, at least, of personal use of marijuana. To the shock of some of my friends, I mentioned in some of my “Notes on Contributors” that so-and-so was a grass dealer when he ACTUALLY WAS! In this issue I published a full-page editorial calling for legalization of what I called the Ra Herb, “A CALL TO ACTION—Stomp Out the Marijuana Laws Forever!”
My friends were fearful for me, but I didn’t see any reason that I couldn’t make such a call, under the Bill of Rights, and carouse in freedom for the rest of the 1960s! Little did I realize how many leaders of the counterculture—Tim Leary, Ken Kesey, d. a. levy, John Sinclair, and, in a way, John Lennon—would become Pot Martyrs in the backlash against the movement to legalize.
The editorial began:
OK, all you motherfuckers. We know that you’re smoking more grass than a prairie fire. We’re also hip that all you cocksuckers—1000’s of you—are rehabilitating your lungs under conditions of agitation, metaphysical distress, fuzz-fear, & paranoia. Time is NOW for a Total Assault on the Marijuana Laws! It is CLEAR to us that the cockroach theory of grass smoking has to be abandoned. INTO THE OPEN! ALL THOSE WHO SUCK UP THE BENEVOLENT NARCOTIC MARIJUANA, TEEENSHUN! FORWARD, WITH MIND DIALS POINTED: ASSAULT!. We have the facts! Cannabis is a non-addictive gentle peace drug! The Marijuana legislations were pushed through in the 1930’s by the agents and goonsquads of the jansenisto-manichaean fuckhaters’ Conspiracy. Certainly, after 30 years of the blight, it is time to rise up for a bleep blop bleep assault on the social screen. The fact IS that 1000’s of you exist all over the whole fucking U.S. scene, but we can’t wait forever for your grass cadets to pull the takeover: grass-freak senators, labor leaders, presidents, etc.! The Goon Squads are few and we are many. We must spray our message into the million lobed American brain immediately! If there’s public hysteria, we’ll pull the classic Guerrilla Lovefare—enemy attack/we retreat enemy, retreat/we attack—scene! At least we’ll be in the open, operating through our many channels and connections, gobbling away at the foundations of the laws, Gobble Gobble! INTO THE OPEN MOOOTHER-FUUUUUKKKERRRRS!
What is needed, first, then is the classic petitioning; a huge valid petition to be sent to the federal, state, & municipal governments—names to include the weighty and prestigious as well as all the nascent Bhu hawks on the set—signed by all those who smoke or approve. Then, Guerrilla Lovefare zap attack zone offices to plan the public presentation, public witness aspects of Operation grass. Contacts with newspapers, the mass media, letters and phone campaigns. An intelligent, sensitive public campaign to present the facts, the testimonies of legal and medical authorities, and so forth. Fringe attacks: pot-ins at governmental headquarters, public forums and squawking, poster walks, hemp farm disobedience. In New York, with a number too large and prestigious to ignore, a multi-thousand joint lightup on the steps of city hall—FORWARD! THIS IS OPERATION GRASS!
Hemp is the WAY! We demand the “holy weed marijuana”
under our own judgement!
When a law is useless
when a law is degrading
when it prohibits
the right to
a gentle healthful pleasure
DISOBEY!
GOD THROUGH CANNABIS!
Some of my pals in Stanley’s Bar thought for sure I would be rounded up by the fuzz. After all, it was early 1964. A few months later I would help organize the first Legalize Marijuana public demonstration, planned at my Peace Eye Bookstore. The cover glyph for that April issue featured many of my bacchic passions of ’64: Egyptian glyphology; the hookah; D. H. Lawrence’s Boat of Death in the form of outstretched scarab claws on top of which were my Speed-o-Print mimeo on the left and Bell and Howell battle camera on the right, plus two symbols of spurting—the Egyptian phallus to the right and a hypodermic needle with peace button balls on the left—while overhead there was a hovering and protective Egyptian Eye of Horus, with wings and an Ankh sign above.
These were the symbols I was certain would change the world. As for the squirting needle with peace signs adangle, while filming Amphetamine Head, I had witnessed amph-artists squirt arabesques of colored paint from hypos onto various surfaces.
The Glorification of the Needle
One thing I regret emphasizing in my publications was the defiance in shooting up. I had a bit of a cavalier attitude toward the use of the needle. In some apartments in the Lower East Side a hypodermic needle boiling on a gas ring was almost as prevalent as a folk guitar by the bed. Miriam noticed how, just as in later decades a person might ask, “Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?” back in those days it was likely to be “Do you mind if I shoot up?”
Later when my friend Janis Joplin died from a hot shot, I started to regret all the drawings I published featuring images of the needle, such as in a pencil drawing that shows a needle in an Egyptian hieroglyph for “arm,” which I drew in late 1963 for Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, a sketch I decided not to use but trails on in my boxes of stuff.
The Sexual Revolution
I was fairly involved in those years with what was called the “sexual revolution” (for instance, I was on the board of directors of the League for Sexual Freedom). I was impressed with the way Ginsberg and Burroughs, through their court cases, had expanded utilization of the great American Bill of Rights. Ginsberg’s sexuality—always open to the inspection of all—seemed a pathway, at least, to study closely. I’ve always thought that the great expansion of freedom in television, for instance (think The Sopranos), and in other art forms arose out of the work of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. The Beats, through their public presences and their publications, pushed at the barricades of what could be said and done. But did they get the Presidential Medal of Freedom during their lifetimes? NO!
Like it or not, the birth control pill, which by the early 1960s had spread all over the counte
rculture and Beat scenes, gave young women a great freedom to ball anywhere and any time they chose. In this regard the issue of “fucking in the streets” bubbled up in my sequences of hand-drawn stencils, and then, by the middle of 1964, Ted Berrigan had turned me on to a place that, without censorship, would burn stencils electronically from my drawings! Yay.
It was taken up by John Sinclair in his writings from Detroit and Ann Arbor, and he proposed it in the letterhead of his Trans-Love Energies.
The erotic flying saucer that greatly assisted the sexual revolution.
Drawing from a 1964 issue of F.Y.
Later the Yippies (Youth International Party) issued a press release calling for a “festival of life” in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968. They announced that 500,000 people were going to make love in the parks and byways of the Windy City. It eventually dawned on me that balling in the streets was not an issue likely to prove important in the second half of the twentieth century. But it was an issue that burned brightly in my mind during the Bacchus days of 1963 and 1964.
A Long, Hot Summer of Drought
It was a hot summer, with a drought affecting the upstate water supplies for New York City. Miriam was very pregnant, and I was working weekends, as usual, at the cigar store. My intention was to enroll in graduate school at NYU and begin a journey toward a PhD, perhaps in Indo-European languages, or possibly prepare myself to become a professor of Greek. Things would intervene, such as my tardiness in actually applying for grad school and all the moil and mania of the New York underground during those groaning months.
