by Sanders, Ed
She teamed up with Shirley Clarke, a bright force in the avant-garde movie world. Clarke had won an Oscar in 1963 for her documentary on Robert Frost. In 1962 she’d filmed the Living Theater’s production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection. She was a cofounder, with Jonas Mekas, of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
For a few months in late summer and fall we worked very hard on The Fugs movie project. There was a party at Shirley Clarke’s place at the Chelsea. Her friend Archie Shepp was there. Weaver and I practically begged him not to sign with ESP Records. It worked, and Shepp was saved.
Weaver wrote pages of ideas, and Tuli and I did, too. My idea was to begin filming in war-tense Saigon; my thought was to have a chamber orchestra playing when our plane landed, a “salute to mortar and small arms fire.”
In my archive is a typed page listing “possible titles for Fugs movie” as follows: “The Golden Door, Eagle Shit, Eagle, Aluminum Sphinx, Electric Forest, Arbitrary Madness, Oxen of the Sun, America Bongo; Unh! Unh! Ahh! Vampire Ass, Grail Gobble, Winnow’d in Fate’s Tray, No Reality; Bend Over, Earthling! All Is Skush, Blob Tissue, Mystery at Cabin Island, On-ward, Forward March! Hemorrhaging Frog, Gobble Gobble, Primal Substance, Moon Brain, It’s Eating Me! Useless Passion, and Hemisphere Gimme.” All wonderful movie titles from the fall of 1967, and now I pass them on to all filmmakers to use.
The Fugs Go to Saigon, a movie treatment from 1967.
Meanwhile, I worked with Tuli and Ken on a film script. I was interested in somehow linking it to the Eleusinian Mysteries, those ancient myths about the goddess Demeter and her search for her daughter, Persephone, seized and taken to the underground by the god Ploutos. I intently studied C. Kerényi’s very scholarly Eleusis—Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter and George Mylonas’s equally scholarly Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Both books rekindled my thirst for scholarly pursuits. We also had brainstorm sessions on western themes. Shirley Clarke tried to raise money. We met with potential money source Dan Selznick at Shirley’s pad at the Chelsea. For almost any film project there’s a treatment prepared. I assigned myself to come up with a one-page treatment, starring William Burroughs, LeRoi Jones (prior to becoming Amiri Baraka), Allen Ginsberg, and, of course, The Fugs. I liked the idea of presenting a new religion called “Rodney.” For his part Weaver brought in ideas of adding western themes, so for a while our film had the general title of Badass.
Finally we had around 150 pages of ideas, scene descriptions, songs, vignettes, and the like. What I needed were a few weeks of calm in our groovy marble-fireplaced floor-through on Avenue A to type a final version. But that was not to be. We were wiggling in the space-time continuum, and the continuum was itself wiggling in wild whirls and moiré patterns of Bacchus and the ole Beatnik sense of Gone!
Planning for the Exorcism
All throughout the history of The Fugs in the ’60s, the war in Vietnam throbbed like an ever-seething soul sore. However much we partied, shouted our poetry, and strutted around like images of Bacchus, we could never quite get the war out of our minds. It was like that Dada poetry reading that Tristan Tzara gave in 1922 in Paris, with an alarm clock constantly ringing during the reading. The war was THE alarm clock of the late ’60s.
It seemed as if the war might become permanent, so there were big demonstrations planned for October to surround the nerve center of the war—the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Somebody came up with the idea of holding an exorcism of this mystic pentagonal citadel of napalm and incineration.
I was in charge of coming up with a structure for the Exorcism. For the actual Exorcism/Levitation of the Pentagon, I consulted with my authority on all things magic—Harry Smith. As long as we were ACTUALLY going to exorcise demons, I figured that we might as well prepare a structure that, at least in the theories of actual Mageia, might do the job. Harry advised consecrating a circle around the Pentagon and using the alchemical symbols of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. He also suggested adding Egyptian elements to the Exorcism, such as a cow, to represent the goddess Hathor. (We did have a cow prepared, painted with mythic symbols, but the police prevented it from getting near the Pentagon.) Tuli and I also purchased dozens of daisies to toss upon the Pentagon from a plane.
Leaflet for mock Exorcism, October 13, 1967.
A letter in EVO by Abbie Hoffman, writing under the name George Metesky, making a rather fanciful prediction about what would occur during the Exorcism.
By the second week of October I began to pay attention to the Exorcism of the Pentagon. On October 13 there was a demonstration of the Pentagon Exorcism for the press at the Village Theater. Exorcists constructed a model of the Pentagon, with wires attached, so that it could actually elevate during the mock Levitation. I printed a leaflet announcing the mock exorcism for Friday the Thirteenth.
I purchased some cornmeal and consecrated a circle around the mock Pentagon. After a singsong chant the “Pentagon” was elevated high above the stage.
The Trial for the Killers of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman
It sure seemed like Slow Justice! My generation had been horrified at the evil murders of the three participants in Freedom Summer, whose murderers, now more than three years after the fact, were going on trial. The week of October 15 leading to the Exorcism, Cecil Price and others went on trial for the June 1964 murders of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. Published pictures in Time magazine on October 20 showed Price chawing tobacco and snickering like a small-town bully in the courtroom.
Back in December 1964 nineteen men had been indicted for the Freedom Summer slayings. They were charged not with murder but with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of the three murdered heroes under an 1870 statute. After many twists and injustices that flung dirt on the Feather of Justice, seven were found guilty on October 20, nine were acquitted, and the jury was hung on three. The seven fought jail on appeal but finally entered federal prison in 1970.
The Exorcism and Levitation of the Pentagon
The Fugs flew down to Washington on Friday, October 20, to perform at a psychedelic theater Friday and Saturday evenings. Shirley Clarke and Barbara Rubin filmed the arrival of our plane at the airport. Clarke also filmed the Exorcism. She was on the flatbed truck parked in the Pentagon parking lot, where we chanted, “Out, Demons, Out!” Fellow filmmaker and magician Kenneth Anger set up a magic ritual underneath the flatbed truck.
Leaflet I drew and printed on the Peace Eye mimeograph, following the advice of Harry Smith on the structure for the Exorcism of the Pentagon.
The issue of the Exorcism, as always, was about Good and Evil and the Egyptian Maat, the Feather of Justice. I had been raised in Missouri to believe in the threat of actual Evil. That the Devil was actual evil. Accordingly, I created as serious an Exorcism as I could.
Button: the Pentagon Rising, October 21.
There were at least 200,000 demonstrators who marched across the Memorial Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial, as well as a flatbed truck containing a generator, a sound system, The Fugs, and a group of San Francisco Diggers (including Michael Bowen), plus filmmakers Shirley Clark, Barbara Rubin, and Miriam Sanders (magician/filmmaker Kenneth Anger also was there) to exorcise the Pentagon. Anger claimed he had buried something magical inside the Pentagon days previous.
Tuli Kupferberg and I had paid for, out of our earnings that weekend from The Fugs’ appearance at a psychedelic venue in DC, the rental of the flatbed truck, the generator, and the microphones and speakers through which to intone our Exorcism ritual. We positioned ourselves on the edge of a parking lot a few hundred feet from our target, while tens of thousands of marchers walked past, and I intoned a singsong litany of Exorcism after which we all began to chant, “Out, Demons, Out!” over and over for about fifteen minutes. Rubin and Clarke filmed the chanting, while Anger positioned himself beneath the truck and performed his own ritual of exorcism. It was quite an afternoon. (Thanks to Bob Fass of WBAI-FM in New York City, a tape of our Exorcism survived [we put a go
od part of it on Tenderness Junction].)
Up near the Pentagon itself the 200,000 assembled and 250 were arrested, including Norman Mailer and Dave Dellinger. I stood up at the microphone on the flatbed truck at the Pentagon and began to chant:In the name of the Amulets of Touching, Seeing, Groping, Hearing and Loving we call upon the powers of the Cosmos to protect our ceremonies. In the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis, God of the Dead, in the name of all those killed for causes they do not comprehend—in the names of the lives of the dead soldiers in Vietnam who were killed because of a Bad Karma, in the name of Sea-borne Aphrodite, in the name of the Magna Mater Deum Idea, in the name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Jesus, Iao Sabaoth, Yahweh the Unnameable, the Quintessential Finality, the Zoroastrian Fire, in the name of Hermes, in the name of the Beak of Thoth, in the name of the Scarab, in the name of the Tyrone Power Pound-Cake Society in the Sky, in the name of Ra, Osiris, Horus, Nephthys, Isis, Harpocrates, in the name of the mouth of the Ouroboros, we call upon the Spirits to Raise the Pentagon from its Destiny and Preserve it. In the naaaaame—in all the names!
Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Demon out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out! Out! Out! Out! Out! Out, Demons, out!
For the first time in the history of the Pentagon, there will be a grope-in within a hundred feet of this place. Seminal Culmination in the spirit of Peace and Brotherhood. A real Grope for Peace. All of you who want to protect this rite of love may form a circle of protection around the lovers. Circle of Protection!
These are the Magic Eyes of Victory! Victory for Peace. Money made the Pentagon, melt it! Money made the Pentagon. . . . In the name of the generative powers of Priapus, in the name of Ourouriouth Iao Sabaoth Ereschi-gal, we call upon the malevolent Demons of the Pentagon to rid themselves of the Cancerous Tumorous War-Death. . . . Every Pentagon general lying alone at night with a tortured psyche—Out Demons, out! Out Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out!
Out, Deeeeemoooon! Out, Deeeeeemooon! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out!
In the name of the Most Sacred of Names, Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out!
I spotted Kenneth Anger. He was being hissily dismissive of Shirley Clarke, who was filming the Exorcism. “Our magic is stronger than yours, Kenneth,” I chanted at him through the microphone. A reporter for Newsweek peered under the flatbed truck, where Anger was burning a sacred card surrounded, it looked like, by a pentagon-shaped angularity of pieces of wood. He, too, received a hiss from Anger.
After the conclusion of the Exhortation and Levitation of the Pentagon, we walked over to the big demonstration. Some of us were carrying the daisies we’d purchased for the flyover and daisy tossdown that had been thwarted at the airport. Soldiers with fixed bayonets stood in rows guarding the entrance to the Pentagon, and a few of us stuck the ends of the daisies into the rifle barrels of the nervous young troops. Tuli missed the show at the Ambassador Theater that night in DC because he was among those hundreds who were arrested.
It was at this demonstration, I’ve read, that an upset Lyndon Johnson first heard the kids chant, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
It was a famous thing we did, and people praised us for our audacity, yet the Vietnam War went on for another seven years. So much for “Out,
Demons, Out!”
I sometimes tell interviewers that, yes, we DID elevate the Pentagon from its pediments, but we neglected to rotate it, and so the war continued.
The problem that remaineth.
Meanwhile, Out in Topanga Canyon by the Pacific
Meanwhile, not many days after the Great Exorcism, there arrived out in Topanga Canyon, California, a black school bus with the words “Holywood Productions” on the side. The people in the bus decamped at a ramshackle countercultural location called the Spiral Staircase. They were a roaming band of youth more or less led by a would-be musical star named Charles Manson. They weren’t communards. They were clearly under the spell of this small ex-con with a guitar. There was a lot of pot, LSD, and sex sex sex, and they mingled at the Spiral Staircase with a satanic cult from England. The black bus had brought their leader to Los Angeles to try to get his brains on tape: that is, to record an album for Uni Records. Some of them were starting to believe that Mr. M had religious meaning. Some of their subsequent problems, I would partly blame on Acid Lingus, or even on Theolycergicolingus—cunnilingus on acid with a Deity.
Publishing Some “Cantos” of Ezra Pound
Back from the Exorcism I became involved in the strange literary history of Ezra Pound, a poet I had once held in awe but whose anti-Semitic broadcasts, some of which I read at the Library of Congress the day of the Great March back in ’63, had caused me to rethink my fascination with his poetry. At the end of October I began work to publish an edition of unpublished “Cantos.”
Here’s how it happened. I ran into fellow bard Tom Clark on St. Mark’s Place one afternoon in late October. I had purchased a new Gestetner electric mimeograph machine, plus a Gestefex electronic stencil-cutting machine, the only one in the Lower East Side, and I was looking for stuff to publish. They were valuable, and because Peace Eye had been broken into several times, I kept both in our apartment on Avenue A.
Clark mentioned that he had a clean copy of a book of unpublished “Cantos,” numbered 110–116, by Ezra Pound that he had acquired from poet Donald Hall. There was a rumor, I was told, that Pound’s wife, Dorothy, was blocking publication. So why not put out an edition for the world through the Fuck You Press? Tom gave me the manuscript, and we asked artist Joe Brainard, who lived nearby, to come up with a cover.
How did this manuscript wind up in Tom Clark’s possession? Donald Hall had interviewed Pound in Rome in 1960 for a series in the Paris Review called “Writers at Work.” Hall was then poetry editor of the Review. Pound had requested payment, and rather than break the tradition of not paying for “Writers at Work” interviews, George Plimpton, the editor, chose to buy rights to publish new material for the Review. Pound gave Hall “Cantos 110–116”—and Hall was to choose for publication those that related to the interview. Hall made his own typescript of the “Cantos.”
Meanwhile, Donald Hall lent a carbon copy of the “Cantos” to student Tom Clark, who had a friend retype the poems (it was pre-photocopy), a copy of which remained in Clark’s hands. For four years, beginning in 1963, Clark had studied Pound’s poetry at Cambridge, England. He had returned to New York in 1967 and by now was himself poetry editor of the Paris Review.
Being a Greek major, I corrected the Greek, and I did my best to reproduce the Chinese ideograms. In a way the “Cantos” project paid for the renting of the flatbed truck and the sound system for the Pentagon Exorcism. It turned out that the very days in which I was having the printing paper delivered to our house on Avenue A, drawing the adornments for the edition, and cutting the stencils for Cantos 110–116, Allen Ginsberg was spending time with Ezra Pound in Venice. On October 28 Pound’s longtime companion, Olga Rudge, told Ginsberg during lunch in Venice that Pound now had enough new poems for a fresh book of the “Cantos.” Little did they know that I was on that very day hard at work on an edition of them!
Joe Brainard’s cover for The Cantos.
Pound, of course, had been deliberately silent for a number of years (since ’61), but the voluble Allen Ginsberg, who had studied intently Pound’s Cantos for the better part of a month, looking around Venice for specific places mentioned in the poem, managed to spur a historic conversation with the bard of Rapallo. That was the afternoon that Pound, depressed and remorseful over his life’s work, rubbing his hands together, told Ginsberg that his writing was “stupidity and ignorance all the way through.” He then opened up to the core element of the Pound quest
ion, saying, “But the worst mistake I made was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism. All along, that spoiled everything.” It was the first public statement of the remorse he felt for his radio broadcasts in World War II.
I didn’t learn of Allen’s conversation with Pound until a bit later, but at the time I was not that impressed. I recalled vividly scanning the anti-Semitic elements in his World War II radio broadcasts at the Library of Congress just an hour or two before Martin Luther King delivered his great “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial and then filming the Nazi’s on the edge of the crowd making “Jewish noses” signs at those trying to listen to the music and speeches.
The E.S. Year of Love D.C. (adapted from one of his shrine doors).
All I knew at the time was that Pound had given the Fascist salute not long after he had been released from the asylum in Washington. And that he supposedly was intransigent in his World War II beliefs. I remember how back in 1963 Pound had allowed one of his poems to be published in the right-wing National Review. And so it went. Another project crowded into late 1967 was the so-called Gash Cow edition of Cantos 110–116 of Ezra Pound.
King Tut’s Divine Cow.
