(Roughly) Daily

Feeling for ferment, as we are in fraught times like these, we might wonder if something is brewing… and we might cast our eyes back to a somewhat analogous time…

Ben Arthur revisits a transformative moment in American culture through the lens of J. Hoberman’s Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop….

… A few months before “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was released, Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders of the Fugs formed LeMar, short for Legalize Marijuana. The organization formed to push for the active use of marijuana, as well as to combat police oversight. On July 29, 1965, the New York Police Department took in two LeMar members (Jack William Martin III and Dale Wilbourne), but the man they really wanted was Ginsberg. When offered a lighter sentence in exchange for information on the poet, Martin declined to rat. His bail jumped from $5,000 to $100,000.

On August 11, LeMar had planned a benefit for their two fallen comrades at the Broadway Central, a sprawling hotel between the East and West Village. On the program was Jack Smith’s glamorous, experimental drag film Normal Love, and Barbara Rubin’s Allen for Allen,a tribute to her muse/lover. The Fugs were to play, along with the Falling Spikes, a garage rock band featuring John Cale, Lou Reed, and at one point Tony Conrad. Allen Ginsberg had poems to read, along with William S. Burroughs, Piero Heliczer, and Andrei Voznesensky.

The event never took place: the Great Bust finally happened. Dylan was a few months off, but who’s keeping track anyways? Heliczer, the benefit’s emcee, had just begun introducing the night’s proceedings when a group of plainclothes officers stormed in. They weren’t wearing trench coats, and they weren’t wearing coonskin caps; they wore Hawaiian shirts that Smith likened to the “moldy 1940’s saloon-rioting waterfront scum of Flatulandia.” Five cops lunged toward Martin, their former detainee, and dragged him out of the room. All hell broke loose. Cops shoved, punched, and kicked. The attendees returned the aggression, making it an all-out brawl. Outside, people were thrown into police cars, only to escape and keep fighting. Smith sucker punched an officer from behind. He was slammed onto the sidewalk and tossed into a cop car. The entire group, now outside on the street, turned into a so-called “mob,” refusing to let the NYPD leave. Once the officers took off, a full detail flanking them, they beat Smith and threw him in the Manhattan House of Detention, colloquially known as “the Tombs.” Just a few nights later, the narcotics division raided Ed Sanders’s apartment, searching for drugs. Instead, they took two of his films, Amphetamine Head: A Study of Power in America and Mongolian Cluster Fuck.

These raids were all too common in Manhattan’s underground: bookstores, studios, offices, apartments, theaters, churches, and gallery spaces were all targeted. Locally, the NYPD would press charges of obscenity, distribution of pornography, or drug possession, flying in blatant opposition to artists’ civil liberties. It seems that nearly everyone in an alternative scene was targeted. Nationally, FBI surveillance zeroed in on Bob Dylan, his manager John Hammond, and Broadside, a magazine that published Dylan’s lyrics alongside political satire. Cranking a cheap mimeograph machine, they published early Dylan protest songs, like “Talking John Birch,” a Guthrie-esque satire of communism. The jokey song, published in 1962, was a far cry from the deep, interwoven “Subterranean Homesick Blues” of 1965, which captures an intense surrealism that defined the decade.

In 1966, less than a year after the Broadway Central melee, the Falling Spikes were performing under a new name. Now under the guidance of the enigmatic Andy Warhol, the band morphed into the Velvet Underground. At the corner of Park and 59th stood the Hotel Delmonico, where the Velvets were attempting to attack the senses and minds of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. This incarnation was called “The Chic Mystique of Andy Warhol,” and it combined the films of Warhol, the drone rock of the Velvets, and the transgressive interrogations of filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Jonas Mekas. Apparently, the event was a chance for the shrinks to understand the inner workings of the “creative mind.”

Cocktail hour began with two Warhol films: the first being 1964’s Harlot, in which Jack Smith’s prima donna Mario Montez sensually eats a banana. Next, the group was subjected to Henry Geldzahler, a 97-minute silent film in which the former curator of the Met smokes a cigar, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the camera placed before him. One could connect this film, with Geldzahler’s literati status, to this group of psychiatrists: growing ever more disconcerted and fearful of the sights before them.

After nearly two hours of films, dinner was served, and the Velvets took the stage, accompanied by poet Gerard Malanga and superstars Edie Sedgwick, Mary Woronov, and Ingrid Superstar all fervently whip-dancing to the music. As these unsettling disturbances occurred on stage, Rubin and Mekas catechized the black-tied psychiatrists: “What does her vagina feel like?” “Is his penis big enough?” Shoving disorienting lights into the shrinks’ faces, Rubin insisted they would be stars in an upcoming Factory film. Grace Glueck, in a New York Times article the next day, documented the reactions of the doctors attending, who, of course, psychoanalyzed the night’s proceedings: “‘I suppose you could call this gathering a spontaneous eruption of the id,’ said Dr. Alfred Lilienthal. ‘Warhol’s message is one of super-reality.’ said another. […] “You want to do something for mental health?” asked another psychiatrist. “Kill the story.”

Over time, the one-off event morphed into something of a regular institution. At first, it was called “Andy Warhol, Up-tight,” but it would later become the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” an anti-hippie version of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests with the Grateful Dead. “The auditorium, every aspect of it—singers, light throwers, strobe operators, dancers—at all times are screaming with screeching, piercing personality pain,” Mekas wrote in The Village Voice. “I say pain; it could also be called desperation. In any case, it is the last stand of the ego, before it either breaks down or goes to the other side.”…

So very much more at “Delicate and Dirty” from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social‬.

* Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (and here, the “offical video” of the song, whihc was filmed by D. A. Pennebaker for the documentary Dont Look Back)

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As we remember that, while history doesn’t repeat, it can rhyme, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977 that South Park premiered on Comedy Central– where it runs to this day. The animated saga of Stan, Kyle, Eric, and Kenny and their exploits in their (titular) Colorado hometown has won five Emmys and a Peabody Award. A theatrical film, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, was released in June, 1999 to commercial and critical success, and scored an Academy Award nomination.

The show’s 27th season recently launched– with a bang.

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