Part One: Up Against the Wall: New York City's Armed Love Movement

Margaret talks with Mia Wong about Black Mask and Up Against the Wall, the artists who took on the system and looked good doing it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're
twice weekly dose of people who lived for what they believed.
I'm your host, my great Killjoy, and with me today
is Mia Wong. Hi are you I'm trying I'm trying
pretty good. Um, yeah, being Mia, it's a good time. Yeah.
Do you want to explain what you mean by that? Oh? Yes,

(00:23):
since I guess I have not explained it anywhere else yet.
I'm trans Mia now out. Um yeah, me as one
of the many hosts of the podcast. It could happen
here that if you don't listen to, you should be
listening to. And it's been really funny because I'm really
bad at remembering more than one name for somebody, and

(00:44):
so I'm very excited to completely forget what your old
name was, because it was really hard for me to
remember two names. I'm sorry, really it was hard about
me that you were in the closet. That's the hardest
part about other people. I really did feel bad, just
like making all my coworkers like shandered me all the time,
and I was like, I'm sorry, I'm gonna be honest.

(01:05):
It was easy. You're not an ounce of burden. Yeah. No,
And it was not burden some I'm just really excited
to have you on as a guest to fair Market.
You don't remember most people's names, even if they have,
even if it's just one. Oh yeah, well what it
is is that if, especially if you have an Instagram
handle and it's not what your name is, that's your name.

(01:29):
After about a year, if I see you in public,
you're going to be like rat Pizza Man forty seven
or whatever. This is. This is oh yeah, did you
care that person? Yeah? I remember things, which is why
I'm such a trustworthy history podcaster. Our producer is Sophie. Sophie,

(01:49):
how are you doing? How's your dog? Anderson is great.
She's wearing like a really nice like green vest that
my friend got her that is like water resistant, which
is a looks like a cape. Yeah, it does look
like a cape, and um I think she feels powerful
in it. And um that's nice and I love her. Yeah, Miam,

(02:11):
do you have any pets? No, it's okay. So anyway,
Mia likes animals. Yeah, it's okay. So what if? What if?
What if one of the most terrible things about my
human conditions that I love cats and unbelievably allergic to
them love me like every single kind of ever met

(02:31):
loves me. For one, who was my grandpa's cat who
just bawl everyone who walked past them. But other than
that and like her allergies legit. Yeahah like I get
like after about an hour, I sound like I'm dying.
It's it's okay. So in order to record my next
metal album, I'm gonna get you over and bring a cat. Mhmm.

(02:54):
You're gonna get some incredible coughing excellent. Yeah. Our audio
engine years Ian high Ian. It's funny to say hi
to Ian because he can't say anything back. Everyone say
hi to Ian. This is the first time I've ever
made this joke. I don't recycle jokes. Our theme music
was written for us by a woman, So Mia today

(03:17):
it's really fun I love that. I don't tell my
guess what I'm gonna tell the about today. We're talking
about some like street trash punks before punk, like ten
years before punk. Actually they're one of the aesthetic inspirations
for punk, but we'll get to that. In the late

(03:38):
sixties in New York City on the Lower East Side,
there was a crew of weirdo artists. They named themselves
something unprincipal. They were the up against the Wall Motherfucker's.
Today we're gonna talk about them. You ever heard of
the up against the Wall Motherfucker's. Some incredibly vague memory

(03:58):
of being in a college US where I hadn't slept
for three days, and I took a class of like
The Underground like thing. We started with like the actual
book The Underground, and then went do a whole bunch
of off and I think they mentioned them there, but
I was so tired that I remember I remember nothing
about them at all. Yeah, yeah, no, um, they are.

(04:21):
They did not seek the limelight. And that's one of
the things that's so interesting and amazing about them. They
did as much as like not any of the other
groups that are around at the time, right, but as
much as like a great number of the ones who
are a lot more famous. Um, And they just like
very consciously didn't seek the limelight. And so there's it's
harder to know about them. And I'm going to talk

(04:43):
about them. One of the one of the Motherfucker's they
called themselves the Motherfucker's, among other epithets for themselves. His
name is Oshan Newman, and he wrote a memoir called
Up against the Wall Motherfucker and No It's for next Time,
and his memoir starts off this way. In nineteen sixty seven,
I became a founding member of an anarchist street gang

(05:04):
called Up against the Wall Motherfucker's. An unexpected career move
for a nice Jewish boy with an m A and
history from Yale. We called ourselves the Motherfucker's. We saw
ourselves as urban guerrillas swimming in the countercultural sea of
freaks and dropouts. We didn't like the media term hippies
who had swarmed the cheap rent tenements of the Lower
East Side of New York. Those young dropouts were a base,

(05:25):
and we attempted to organize them for total revolution through rallies,
free feasts, raucous community meetings, and a steady stream of
mimeographed flyers. Against the vapid spaceiness of flower power, we
proclaimed the need for armed love. Um. The history of
these people is incredibly hard to pin down, right, because, oh,

(05:45):
they left behind a lot of like mimocraft flyers, right,
But there's there's two Motherfucker's who are still alive who
talk about this stuff publicly, and they really don't see
eye to eye about what happened and what it means,
and whether or not they were like totally on the
right track or whether they were a bunch of fucking

(06:05):
asshole kids. You've got Ocean Newman, who I just quoted.
His Jewish family had fled from the Nazis and he
grew up in a privileged, academic Marxist household. He joined
The Motherfucker's as a disaffected artist, but after he left
he started really questioning the whole thing, and he wrote
a book about it. And his primary focus is basically, like,

(06:26):
we were dumb kids, and mostly it was bad. That
is my takeaway from what he wrote about his time
in the Motherfucker's. So he has his bias going on
these days. He's a Bay Area movement lawyer who helps
people fight shitty landlords. Actually specifically helped one of my
friends fight a shitty landlord, so that's awesome, thank you.
Then you've got Ben Maria. He's the opposite in so

(06:50):
many ways. He grew up rough and poor. He grew
up first in the Maryland, Virginia area, but his mom
moved to Hell's Kitchen when he was ten. He's also
white and he spent the rest of his youth on
the streets New York. He's still alive too. He hasn't
written a book about the Motherfucker's, but he gives a
lot of interviews, and his take on the Motherfucker's is
a fucking one eight from OSHA's. And he's full of

(07:11):
pride about the things that they changed and the lives
that they impacted. His interest these days are animism, anarchism,
and painting. And he's actually on Instagram and you can
buy his paintings, um and I suggest you look him up.
He's an abstract painter and he's got his biases coming
into what he talks about. Two and all of them
only started writing about the ship forty years later. They're

(07:33):
like and both of them will fess up to being like, look,
I don't know. This is the best we can relact
and recollect. And some of them are like, now I
remember it like this. Now I remember it like this,
and they're just like, I don't know, I don't know
what happened. Also, they did a fucking lot of crime,
like a lot of crime. And one of the things
about crime that I would recommend my listeners is to

(07:57):
not talk about it much. Yeah, So the shadowy history
of the Motherfucker's is what we're talking about today. And
I've got my biases to right as I try and
figure out this story. But this is the best understanding
that I have of what happened between all the conflicting sources. Usually,
when one person is like, no, this is right and

(08:18):
one person is like this is right, I'm like, Okay,
you're both right, you're both wrong. Whatever you know. Right,
We're gonna start with Ben Murrayam the guy still likes
everything that he did the Animist. He grew up in
Hell's Kitchen as a teenager and he got into jazz
and he played the vibraphone, which I had to look up.
I didn't know what a vibraphone was. It's like a

(08:39):
marimba or a glockenspiel or whatever. Like it's like I
got a bunch of bars, you hit them with things
with like a mallet um. It really will make everyone
know that I'm like not, I don't know much about jazz.
It's a very major jazz instrument of the time. It's
case called the vibes, right, Yeah, they're cool, they sound

(09:00):
really cool. He was also really into Heroin. I didn't
have to look up heroin. That makes whatever. Okay. This
wasn't as good for him as playing vibraphone was. He
went to prison. He was still a teenager when he
went to prison. And when he was in prison, he
quit Cold Turkey. Um. During his stay in the prison

(09:20):
hospital for the aforementioned quit Heroin Cold Turkey, which put
him in the hospital, because that's one thing that happens
if you quit Heroin Cold Turkey. Thank you, prison industrial complex. Um.
He started doing art therapy and he learned to love painting,
so he gets out of prison. There's conflicting stories about
whether or not he got back on heroin, but that's

(09:41):
not my or anyone's business. Um. When he got out
of prison, he was really into art now and painting.
And then he met the anarchists and Ben Maria and
the Up against the Wall motherfucker's. They're like these like
really raucous anarchists, like kind of like you, the listener
who's not super familiar might like expect of the archists,
like they're gonna like wear all black and ski masks

(10:02):
and like carry round switchblades and like scream revolution and ship.
They're close to the media conception of anarchists, right, that's
not the anarchists that Ben met. And this is really
cool to me. He met the pacifists. Oh, he met
really fucking based anarcho pacifists. Specifically, he met Judith Mullane

(10:25):
and Julian Beck, who are the anarcho pacifists who founded
a place called the Living Theater, which is still around.
It's an experimental art theater as the oldest experimental theater
in the United States. It does really amazing ship. We'll
talk a little bit about it. Let's just talk about
them now because I like them. Uh. Judith Mullaine was
a German Jewish immigrant. Her parents had come over when

(10:48):
she was like three, bringing her with her. There were
some of the first people, well not the first people,
but they were in the earlier waves of people being
like this is this isn't gonna go. Well, it's this
whole Nazi thing is it's a little bit concerning. Yeah,
like it's not really the place for us, And they
got the funk out and Julian Beck and her husband

(11:10):
um or sorry, Judith Mullaine and her husband, Julianne Beck,
we're in an open marriage. He was bisexual, or queer
or whatever. And I think this is part of why
they were in this open relationship is good. He wanted
to also funck dudes. He had his own boyfriend outside
the marriage. But also the couple were in a triad
with like yet another guy that's like doc worker guy
who was also married to someone else. Glad, glad to

(11:31):
see anarchism no matter where you are in what time period,
never changes. No, dear listener, you did not invent polyamory.
They were a fucking polyamorous Polly Cuel queer anarchist theater couple.
Ever changes, and and this is part of just makes

(11:55):
me happy in six after all of the stuff we're
going to talk about, he's the villainous preacher in the
movie Poltergeist too, Oh my god, because he's an actor, right.
He actually he died the year before the movie came out.
After he died, but and he wrote a ton of books,
mostly poetry, some about Feeder itself. Judith, this is my

(12:16):
favorite part. She played Granny in The Adams Family, the
crazy awesome like witch Crone Lady. She's also been on
like the Sopranos and a bunch of other ship and
this matters to be because like, this is the original Crone,
which from my childhood right, I was exactly the right

(12:36):
age to be really excited about the Adams family. And
Granny Frump from the Adams Family was the first Crone
I've ever met seen was played by polyamorous anarchist Drew,
who fled the Nazis at the age of three. Oh,
we love to see it, Okay, So to talk more

(12:59):
about how well this couple is. At one point they
got arrested for not paying their taxes, and their argument
was basically like, we don't want to pay taxes. The
government's bad and for anyone at home who is playing
cool people did cool stuff bingo. They represented themselves in court,
which is not my recommendation, to be clear, but I

(13:21):
will say a disproportionate number of the kind of people
who get written about like this represent themselves in court.
In this case, she dressed up like a Shakespeare character court.
I'm not, like, I wasn't a big theater kid, so
I don't it's like Merchant of Venice costume. But I
don't actually know what that means, you know. And they

(13:42):
also kept getting arrested over and over again for like
one thing. They get arrested over and over again for
it was indecent exposure because they did experimental theater and
a lot of their plays in bolth, nudity and a
lot of the stuff that I think that people take
for granted while we can no longer take for granted.
Thinks the way that whatever the way that the right
wing is trying to push things. You know, you get
arrested for having to play where some of the actors

(14:03):
were naked and um so they got arrested a lot.
The Living Theater is still around. It's one of the
oldest experimental it's the oldest experimental theater in the US.
It tours, it performs on the streets. It's performs in
prisons and stuff for prisoners, and basically they try to
undermine authority and content and form. I think they're fucking swell.

(14:27):
It's possible that the first organizing medians I went to
as a baby radical in New York City were at
the Living Theater, but I I'm not certain. I know
it was at a theater, at a weird experimental theater.
I'm not sure, But to be fair, this is anarchist
New York. There could be a lot of those totally
so Ben Murrayam the crazy jazz loving Painter street kid,

(14:53):
meets them, they teach him anarchism. He got real into it.
The passive ism didn't rub off. Instead, he started hanging
out with what he refers to as the political wing
of the anarchists, which I think is in contrast to
the art anarchists like veterans from the fucking Spanish Civil
War who are on their like sixties and ship and
he's like in his early twenties. He starts going to

(15:15):
political discussions at the house of this other guy, Murray
book Chin. Mm hmm. Murray book Chin is famous for
two things. Murray book Chin is famous first, and probably
more importantly, his concept of municipal libertarianism is what inspired
the Kurdish concept of democratic and federalism, the system that
a few million people are trying to live under in
northern Syria today right very influential in the lower leftist,

(15:39):
the you know, anti authoritarian left in the world. The
other more important thing about Murray Bookchin is that people
who really like him tag read Murray Bookchin on walls
and I think that's funny, literally constantly. My other favorite
bush and thing is just He's just so grouchy the time.
This is just his like he I don't know, like

(16:00):
I feel like this is kind of like the art
of public access television. It's like it's sort of like
a lost art now. But you could just be on
TV being unbelievably cranky all the time. Yeah, yeah, they're
TV show, and he like, like specifically, one of the
things he would do was he would go on public
Access TV and ranch about how Bertie Sanders had sold

(16:22):
out the movement after like the three after he won
a election because three specific anarchists voted for him, because
it's it's amazing, Yeah, okay, cool. So Marie bucktions this
character who runs throughout twentieth century anarchism and radical politics,
and he and he and Ben Mariam meet on repeated basis.

(16:43):
But Ben's not really a big fan of politics, and
so Ben would show up to these discussions and then
he get annoyed at them for being like hopelessly stuck
in bullshit theory instead of like doing action. So he
would stand up and call them all bourgeois white honkys,
Ben is a white as well important understanding this, and
then storm out. But then he'd be back the next

(17:04):
day for the discussion again, and probably more importantly to
our story, he did what any anarchist artsy type would do.
He got together with some friends. They started attacking the
bourgeois art world. They called this group black Mask. They
aren't sure if they started nineteen sixty five or nineteen
sixty six. Is a man after my own heart right here?

(17:27):
Why remember things when instead you could just not remember things,
always living in the moment, to be fair as sixty
years ago. One of their first big actions is Black Mask,
is that they shut down the Museum of Modern Art
the moment. And they did it too because, to quote
Ben Quote, the museum and gallery system separated art from
that living interchange and had nothing to do with the

(17:49):
vital creative urge. Museums weren't a living house. They were
just a repository. Because this is like that, they're just
like on his anti art kick right there, like fuck
the mainstream art world, fuck the commodification of art. We're
gonna we're gonna fight it. And the way they shut
down the moment is really clever. They printed up a
manifesto about how they're going to come funk up the museum.

(18:09):
Quote on Monday October tent at twelve thirty, we will
close the Museum of Modern Art. This action has taken
at a time when America is on a path of
total destruction and signals the opening of another front in
the worldwide struggle against suppression. We seek a total revolution,
cultural as well as social and political. Let the struggle begins,
very Let the struggle begins in all caps, of course.

(18:32):
So the moment closed an anticipation of their arrival, which
was their point all along. They closed the moment, and
the manifesto they printed and distribute about it talks about
their struggle within in the context of black liberation. And
this is gonna be some of this stuff that I
would like try and piece out to the best of

(18:52):
my white ability, white historian ability. Six years later, the
opening line of the manifesto is a new spirit is rising.
Like the streets of Watts we burn with revolution. And
it's kind of presumptuous, right. They're mostly these white kids
in black mask. At this point, I've had a hard
time figuring out the makeup of black Mask and the
motherfucker's uh. They mostly get talked about as a white group,

(19:15):
but if you read the history, it seems like by
the end they were actually primarily Puerto Rican and Puerto
Rican race and ethnicity especially at this time, which were
could talk about in a future episode when we talk
about the Young Lords. Plays very strangely into the white
and black assumptions about race um within the United States
at the time, and I don't know at the time,

(19:38):
I believe white black mask was primarily white group. I
can't really cleanly do an ad transition right now because
I can't. I'm sorry, But now you, dear listener, are
going to be subjected to exactly the kind of thing
that the protagonists of today's show feel very negatively about,

(20:00):
which is the commodification of entertainment. I hope that the
irony is interesting to you. It is to me, and
we're back as if nothing ever happened anyway. So they

(20:21):
tie their struggle in in this particular way, and it's um,
I'm only beginning to wrap my head around race relations
in late sixties radical movements. I've been trying for a
very long time, right, but it it doesn't map cleanly
or nicely to current conceptions of race. Are racial politics
within the United States and within the left. Black struggle

(20:42):
at the time was moving towards a black nationalist approach
and away from sort of a liberal multiculturalist approach. And
it seems like in a lot of ways white radicals
were being challenged to throw their lot in with black struggle,
but in separate ways. Right. Um, So their methods here
seem to be actually fairly scepted within the black radical
community at least Apong the Black Panthers and stuff will

(21:03):
talk about the relationship with the Black Panthers and a
little bit. But I'm not trying or maybe it was
all terrible and I'm not trying to like say it's
above approach. I'm just kind of pointing out some contradictions.
So Black Mask they continue to do anti art stuff.
They disrupt exhibitions and galleries and lectures. They're basically like

(21:23):
kind of doing the whole thing experimentally. They're like, oh,
I wonder if this works. They're not like sitting around
planning really carefully. They're just like, like, you want to
go funk that thing up, Like I want to suck
that sting up. Whatever. They figure as artists their job
was to attack the infrastructure of art with a capital
a how it fueled the war machine and bourgeois culture
more broadly. At one point they disrupted an art lecture

(21:45):
at NYU and the professor challenged Ben to a debate,
and Ben was like, yeah, sure, I'll debate you. But
then the whole thing was getting set up is this
like elitist closed event, which was exactly the kind of
thing that Ben hated. So Black Mask went around and
distributed flyers saying that the actually the event was free
and that everyone was invited into debate and there would
be free food and booze, and NYU had to block

(22:07):
off like streets, like blocks and blocks in order to
keep the public from attending the debate. It kind of
turned into a riot outside, which is sucking cool because
anti art art stuff all very complicated. But I don't know, whatever,
if you're gonna sucking debate someone, yeah that that definitely
using the debate to start a riot just seems like

(22:28):
the best way to possibly do a debate. Actually, I
feel like there's there's other times where like you're doing
a debate and you walk up and it's a trap
and you've you have now trapped they've always wanted to do. Yeah, well,
and it's interesting too write because like they're not necessarily
coming at like the right wing in this case, right

(22:48):
they're coming at the bourgeois world. And so it's like,
you know, it's like, right now, we talk about debate,
and it's usually the like kind of right wing being like,
debate us about whether or not trans people are alive. Know,
I'm like, no, I don't really want to. I don't
want to debate you about that. But like if someone
was like, I don't know, debate me anarchism versus of

(23:09):
social democracy or something, that's like an interesting debate that
could be had. Right, I'm not volunteering MIAs volunteering anyone.
MIA says that that should unless I really don't like you,
which case any trap, you've already played your hand here,
all right, yeah, you know, not very good at this
whole time I organized the riot. No, I won't. I

(23:31):
would never do that, Okay. So they started doing all
this stuff, and then after they started doing stuff, they
started publishing a magazine. I believe that was their belief
was that you should go in that order pointed out there.
It was a four page periodical called Black Mask, and
it ostensibly cost fifties five cents, which is about fifty
cents now, but they didn't actually charge money at all.

(23:53):
Their point was if we put free on it, people
will take it and throw it away. If we put
five cents on it, people will be like, here's five cents,
and then they'll be like, no, we don't need your
five cents. But someone has to actually like kind of
want it so it won't just get thrown away. It's
actually very clever, and I get really excited about radical
publishing and and this magazine that they put out was

(24:13):
really cool and one of the better books that you
can get is there's anthologies. I think it's also called
Up against Black Masking, Up against the Wall, motherfucker. I
think PM Press puts it out. It's just their journals, right,
it's the stuff that they put out. And the first
issue who to use as an example that three articles,
and the first was their manifesto for attacking the MoMA
and then another anarchist from Seattle's like critique of their

(24:35):
dumb bullshit action and then their response about why it
wasn't dumb in bullshit. I'm kind of in between the two.
I think they're both right. And the second was a
ten year old interview with Camue about how art for
art's sake is bullshit. But how art can't be entirely
subsumed to struggle And you've gotta like, um do the
secret third thing to use the modern way of referring

(24:57):
to it. And the third article was a call for
action and mutual aid to support black struggle and civil
rights and Alabama reprinted from SNICK, which is, you know
the student Non Violent Coordinating Committee that we talked about
in December. Who around this time, you're about to um
come out with the whole black power thing and black
panthers are gonna start showing up. So their magazine is

(25:18):
information about what they're doing, engaging in public debate, about
what they're doing with people who are on the same
side as them, right, more about their broader philosophical approach
to art and how to be directly engaged in supporting
black struggle, even when that struggle uses different tactics than
these anarchists might have personally advocated, Like it talks about
sucking voting. I really like this magazine. They put out

(25:39):
ten issues between nineteen sixty six and nine. They distributed
mostly on the Lower East Side, where people were like
into the magazine. Um, sometimes they went uptown to sell it.
But that was just a funk with people, you know, like,
let's go be antagonistic. It's all magazine called Black Mask.
But how we're going to come to destroyer shitty world

(25:59):
or whatever. But that that seems like a really good time.
I know, they kind of just had a lot of fun.
That's like it. Really they're they're complicated, but I really,
I mean whatever, of course I put them on my show.
I clearly think they're cool. The most iconic image of
this period when they're Black Mask is them marching on

(26:21):
Wall Street. They're wearing black ski masks and they're holding
fake skulls on sticks, and they have a sign that
says Wall Street is War Street. They passed out flyers
because of course they did, and those flyers announced that
the name of the street was to change to War Street.
And I personally think in their legacy we should continue
to try and push that Wall Street is War Street.
They kept sucking with the art world. One time, this

(26:42):
poet Ken Coke was doing a reading in ninety seven,
and he was the symbol of the bourgeois poetry world
at the time. A lot of people really like him.
If you read his Wikipedia page. It's just like clearly
written by someone who really really likes him, and the
talk page is like, why is this Wikipedia page written
by someone who clearly just likes him and was leaving

(27:04):
out all of it's like just his side of everything,
and it's about how he's great and like he uses
all these anyway, Ken Coke. Some of the Black Mask
people were like, well, let's go funk with him. We
don't like him. He's the symbol of the bourgeoire world.
And you know how when people throw pies at politicians,
it's like a fun gag, but in also in some
ways it's like a simulated dissassination. You know, it's like

(27:27):
a we can get to you, you know, like the
Pietro and thing that wasn't literal enough for Black Mask.
Oh no. So one of the Black Mask folks, his
name is Alan van new Kirk. He was the most
anarchy looking of them all. He got picked for this
role because he looked like the cliche anarchist. He was

(27:50):
this like gun toting, black wearing biker who was like
tall and gaunt and had just fled Detroit after starting
a similar newspaper up there called gorilla Um spelled you know,
like the War, which included poetry by Diane Deprima, who
rules in one day. I'm gonna just talk about my
favorite poet, Dianne Deprima, who wrote Revolutionary Letters Um has

(28:11):
one of my favorite poems in it. She worked with
the Diggers in San Francisco in nineteen sixties, which you
can listen more about in her episode on the Diggers
and the Levelers, which we did last year. Anyway, Alan
van Newkirk, since he looked the most proper classic cartoon
villain fall and lanky, wearing all black, they printed up
some leaflet saying poetry is Revolution with a photo of
the poet Amry Baraka and handcuffs and wounded by cops.

(28:34):
Because here was a poet who actually like throws down
and cares about struggle. And you know, in comparison to
this dude ken Coke, Alan loads some blanks into a pistol,
goes to his poetry reading, stands up and fucking shoots him.
Did he get injured? But and here's a funny thing,

(28:55):
depending on what you read, the way I end up
reading ken Coke's Wikipedia is in one of the books
about him about this event. The book is like, but
that's not what the Wikipedia page says. But I think
that was written by someone who really likes Ken Coke. Anyway, up,
they shoot him and he probably faints, and so everyone's like,

(29:19):
oh fuck, he's dead. Everyone starts freaking out. The black
mask people throw fucking flyers around, screaming revolution, and then
run screaming out into the night. The version on his
Wikipedia page that's referenced again in this book is that
Alan did not faint, looked at them and said, oh,
grow up. Either way, they simulate assassinate this poet. I

(29:44):
don't actually i'm coming on as neutral about this. I'm not.
I'm not being like this was a morally good decision
they all made whatever. Yeah, I mean, like I don't know,
because like you you actually can kill, like or like
severely injured someone by shooting blanks at them like that.
That is an actual thing. Yeah, I mean they're like,

(30:05):
they're they're far enough away, they're not like it's not
like I think it's like prettier. Yeah, but no, it
it it's traumatizing a ship for every outside of kind
of funny because yeah, you know, I'm not casting the
stones here. They were polarizing for some strange reason. It's

(30:27):
hard for me to imagine exactly why their actions and
words drew lots of new supporters, and their ideas behind
total revolution were infectious. The idea that revolution need to
be cultural as well as political, and and also that
you couldn't just have cultural change like some of the
dropout hippies were saying, you also needed political change. The
political hippies didn't like them because they were too political.

(30:49):
The super serious, no smiling radicals, especially the Marxist Landness,
didn't like them because they were too weird. And the
good proper communists, you know, they were like, they were like, look,
you're against the U. S. War machine and for the
Vietnamese people, but you're not directly supporting the North Vietnamese
government either, so you're terrible. And in the art world,

(31:10):
of course, is like, yeah, we don't know these guys.
They're not with us. No ridea where they came in from,
which meant that the people who didn't fit in anywhere,
the radicals who wanted to see a different world, who
didn't fit in anywhere, drifted towards black mask and Ben
Morea gets called the informal leader of all this stuff,
and I think that's both true and not true. Whenever

(31:33):
you're doing a bunch of like cool crime stuff, sometimes
you don't really want to take credit for it. And
so sometimes the leaders in this kind of situation are
as much like the fall guy as a formal leader.
And so when I say, like Ben Morea started a magazine,
it wasn't him. As three people started a magazine, he
was one of them, and he's the one who like
talks about it a lot, And they were very informal.

(31:54):
They didn't have like visioning meetings, official membership or hierarchy
any of that stuff. Um, but you know who does
have official hierarchy? Actually, you know, capitalism is sometimes kind
of enough very hierarchical in this weird way. Yeah, I
mean like in terms of formal Yeah. No, And I

(32:16):
have really come off Okay, I'm gonna like, I know,
I just like talked about like, oh it's cool, I
all ran round had guns, And I'm gonna do this
like serious thing for a moment, like actual serious thing
where I am now a very staunch I've always been.
I've always believed in gun safety. But you're all going
to be hearing way too much of it from me.
For a while. If you own firearms, they need to

(32:37):
be locked up. If they're not on your person. I
don't care. I don't care what your reasoning is. I
don't care what your excuses. If you're gone is not
on you. It needs to be locked up or it
cannot be accessed by people who should not access that firearm.
That's my super seriousness miling thing for today and probably
for a while. So yeah, if you're going to make

(32:58):
that decision to armed, you need to do that. That's
my ad, the ad for gun safety. I guess there's
probably actual ads for that too. Whatever, here's some other
ads and we're back. Another cool thing about black Mask

(33:21):
is it's where the term affinity groups comes from. Oh really, yeah,
well it's where it comes into English. Uh. There's this
model that a lot of people who participate in various
street protests use, and also a lot of other like
ways of trying to change the world called affinity groups,
where you basically like it's like your crew of friends
and you do stuff together. Um, and it's usually somewhat informal,

(33:41):
but you have like shared affinity and you're a group
of people and you go out and accomplish things in
that way, and it's a very effective system. And it's
like part of the way that if you want to
be very effective in demonstrations, get yourself an affinity group. UM,
that's the add I should have done. Whatever it comes
mostly from or it comes into came to them through
the Spanish anarchist who are part of the Spanish Civil War.

(34:04):
But basically at one of these like talks with Murray
book and the public news public TV anchor who rants
about Bernie Sanders, basically he was like, and we show
all call ourselves group off a sinada or odd and
then like and everyone's like, we could probably use the

(34:24):
word affinity groups, and Murray Bookchin is like, no, it
must be the Spanish um. And they were like, okay,
but we're not gonna And and actually I ran across
three different and three different fucking books exactly what the
word that was being translated as affinity groups was like
in Spanish. And I don't fucking know because there's three

(34:47):
different fucking things. So I'm just gonna call them affinity
groups and two black mask. An affinity group was a
street gang with an analysis. More modern usage is, of course,
a group of friends who worked together to accomplish stuff,
usually as part of a part of, but autonomous from
a larger movement. One more thing they did before they

(35:11):
stopped being Black Mask, and then we're gonna make everyone
wait on a cliffhanger. It's not very I I spoiled
my own cliffhanger. Black Mask is on the scene. They're
doing their thing. It's nineteen sixty seven. I don't know
if you knew about this, but um, the US was
invading other countries in the middle of the twentieth century.
It only happened the one time gets called the Vietnam War,

(35:33):
probably only lasted a year or so. I think that
all the whole thing is sarcasm. Vietnam War had been
going on for more than a decade in nineteen sixty seven.
The war for civil rights was raging at home. Sit
ins were happening. We talked about a lot of that.
In December, Black and White freedom writers have gone into
the South to registered voters and were met with the
organized armed violence of the Ku Klux Klan. Vietnamese monks

(35:56):
were setting themselves on fire to protest the US bombs.
Just the year for a black veteran, James Meredith had
been shot as part of his March Against Fear, which
again we also covered. Um, and you've got this hippie
thing going on. At the same time, the Lower east
Side was a major haven for what gets called the hippies.
The name is a media construction by and large. Malcolm

(36:17):
X said in his autobiography that the word was coined
in Harlem in the nineties for white people who tried
to act blacker than black people did. And a lot
of people who get called the hippies at this time period,
they didn't call themselves hippie as they talked about hip
culture and counterculture, or called themselves freaks or did all
of these. They basically all hated the word hippie, and um,

(36:40):
I would have to if that was where I lived.
And then um, the motherfucker's in particular we will talk
about to the black mask evolves into spoiler alert, they
called themselves freaks rather than hippies. So these freaks or whatever,
they pour into the Lower east Side because they're all
dropping out of the mainstream society, instream white society. So

(37:01):
all these white kids are pouring into Lower east Side,
which is I'm gonna go complicated. If people have more
negative things to say about that. I'm fully here for that.
They weren't buying large. Okay, this depends on who you ask.
Oh boy, they weren't either. They weren't buying large hanging
out with their new Puerto Rican neighbors, or some of

(37:21):
them were, or everyone was getting along fine. I expect
that by and large, the especially a political white hippies
were probably not interacting with the Puerto rican um culture
that they moved into, and they were mostly just trying
to live somewhere where rent was cheap and no one
gave a ship if they like, smoked wheat and hung
out in parks all day. And yeah, that is one

(37:46):
of the messy dark parts about hippie history. A lot
of these freaks are artists. Some of them started calling
for artists to get more involved in politics, and in
particular they wanted to stop the Vietnam War going on
for that fucking kid. And if you listen to Ben
talk about it now, he points out that one thing
that people don't quite understand is the like um, the

(38:08):
urgency that the Vietnam War was felt, how by the
countercultural left, that this war was being done in their name,
and of course because there was the draft. Everyone you
know is like dying and ship but also just this
like war against the Vietnamese people being waged in your
name and a lot of people the motherfucker's included basically

(38:30):
were like that war is gonna stop or we're gonna
die um, and people really meant it. And that's like
some of the stuff that gets left out of more
liberal history about the hippies or more like history. That's
just like and then they did drugs and had tight
eye shirts and stuff, you know that said some of
the ways that they tried to stop the war. Let's
talk about angry Arts weak. UM flyers went up around

(38:55):
town calling for what got called angry Arts weak and
it started. They started having meetings to get ready. And
this is where this guy, Oshan Newman, the guy who
kind of regrets joining UM, he started hanging out at
that point because he was a painter. In the Lower
East Side. There was also a quote quasi Marxist street
through the theater group called the Pageant Players, who I
can't find more information about, but I want to know

(39:17):
more about because they sound cool. Yeah, that's name I know.
Bread and Puppet was there also, and they rule Bread
and Puppets still exists. I've been to a bunch of
their plays. There into the idea that art should be
for the people, not only for the rich, and they're
involved in all these like cool lefty things and they
just have been forever. Um. They like go around like
they like they call their movement like the cheap art movement,

(39:39):
um that art should be affordable to people and stuff. Originally,
actually there was gonna be a chance that this week
was going to be fifty fifty split between the Motherfucker's
and Bread and Puppet um, just so you know how
cool Bread and Puppet is. But I didn't have time
because there's so much about the motetherfuckers, because they're really opposite.
But in working in parallel with each other anti art
and Arctic movements, none of the famous established art people

(40:02):
from the scene were at those meetings, just actual working
artists just for the better. Yeah, probably. And at these
meetings people start saying, like, look, art should mean something,
Art should direct people towards motion, towards action, towards unfucking
the world. And this is a radical viewpoint at the time,
because avant garde was it was really big at this point,

(40:25):
and it was really into art for art's sake. Um,
any art that had a purpose, even if that purpose
is to arouse, like pornography was not true art with
a capital T and a capital A. That's an unbelievably
annoying way to think about art, right, I know. It's
like I should have lead with that, so you all
like better understand why they're like, let's go funk up

(40:46):
the galleries and ship It's it's also funny too, because
it's like, okay, like you guys have named you guys
have like you guys have named yourself like the vanguard
and the thing you're van guarding is don't do anything.
Oh my god, that's what vant guard mean, isn't it. Yeah?
Whoa the vanguard of nothing? Oh but that see that
sounds cool. I like when market learned something. Okay, but

(41:12):
I'm saying this is this is all based on like
a very very dem memory or something I remember David
Greeber writing like two decades ago. No, I'm sure, like
I don't know. I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean that. Yeah, No,
I I there's no part of me that doubts you.
I run into this idea all the time as a musician,
I'm in black metal, and black metal is awful and

(41:34):
full of terrible people, and true black metal not even
spelled with a capital T, but instead with a V
instead of a U. What, Yeah, it's true. And it's
also cult with you instead of a C instead of V.
I know letters, I'm a writer with a V instead

(41:54):
of a U. So cult anyway. It's supposed to be
a political and which of course means remoting rifling values
in some circles. And I don't give a ship. What
isn't isn't true art or true black metal. I just
fucking want to make the things that I want to make,
and so fuck you whatever anyway, that's my rent. So
as a counterpoint, there was this other sort of anarchic

(42:16):
radical round at the time, Abby Hoffman, who wrote the
book Steal This Book. He was with the Yippies. I'm
sure we'll cover him some other time, and his quote
in the Village Voice about Angry Arts Week was demanding
that artists do anti war art is demanding that chefs
cook anti war food, which sounds like a sick burn
and so you actually, like think about it. Food has

(42:39):
always been part of resistance movements. Um, maybe people who
are like chefs with a capital C and a V
instead of a something might not cook anti war food,
but like people in movements cook anti war food because
they're like feeding mass numbers of people as they go
off to go protest wars. And so it actually it's

(43:00):
exactly that. It's, well, let's get rid of chefs in
this context, right, So let's get rid of the artist
in this context. If the artist can't make anti war art,
then what's good as the artist? And this is me
arguing with someone who's been dead since I was six,
and I'm right, uh, come at me Abby Hoffman's ghost.

(43:21):
Except I used to believe that my one of my
teachers in school was actually secretly Abby Hoffman. Abby Hoffman,
I faked his own death and he was working at
the anyway, that's a separate story. So angry art seek
it goes on despite Abby Hoffman's misgivings. January seven, some
angry artists went to high Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

(43:44):
The Archbishop of New York was his asshole named Francis Spellman,
who was all in on the war. Even the Pope
was like all the funk out man like pieces usually
you know, Archbishop of New York. Now, I wasn't listening
to this pope. He was like, no, we demand quote
total victory in Vietnam. Jesus Christ. Uh yeah, would not

(44:07):
have supported the mass bombing in Vietnam. Yeah, I don't think,
even on his bad days. So they disrupted mass. They
unfurled posters in the aisle in the middle of it. Um.
I think they like came in and sat in a
fuse and then like in the middle of mass like
unfurled posters because they're artists, and as a poster of

(44:28):
a main Vietnamese kid with the words Thou Shalt Not
kill and Vietnam written on it in case anyone like
didn't get the message. It was like too subtle. Look,
you know Ben Ben Ben Garrison overdoes it. But so
some sometimes you do have to just tell people what's
in the picture and what they're supposed to believe about it. Yeah, okay,
fair enough. Yeah, cops were on them immediately. They had

(44:48):
been tipped off. It's possible that they had infiltrators. It's
possible that these just didn't have very good op seck
and someone told someone, and someone told someone. The angry
artists got dropped off. To jail, to the tomb, which
is practically just gonna end up on the fucking cool
people did cool stuff bingo. Everyone goes to the tombs
the jail in New York that's been around for goddamn

(45:08):
hundred and seventy years or something. They spend the night
in jail before they're bailed out. I don't know whether
it's by the larger anti war movement or just like
specifically angry Arts funds, No one ever talks about the
cool organizing stuff. What about the people who organized the
cool fundraisers to bail out the people who made the posters?
What about the people stayed up all night making the
posters who couldn't go get arrested because they had kids
or anyway whatever. Um I'm making drawing attention to the

(45:33):
fact that I'm end up talking about the people who
get arrested. So the people did the cool behind the
scenes work that's more anonymous. However, if the people did
the actions were more anonymous, they wouldn't have gone to jail.
It's okay. Most of Angry Arts Weeks action was less action.
About five hundred artists participated in total. They did a
bunch of poetry, readings, collective murals, film screenings, et cetera,

(45:56):
mostly at n y U, and there was some other
cool stuff they did. They drove around a latbed truck
with people doing performances on the back of it. On
the streets. They passed out leaflets and poetry. Um Bread
and Puppet did a performance that was kind of interesting.
They put on a play that was like a physician
lecturing in a med school about what napalm does to you,
and then just like descends. Actually, you know, I wrote

(46:16):
Brendon Puppet, but I actually think this was living theater,
but I'm not sure. I'm sorry. I know both of
you groups are still around because I know that living
theater was into theater of the theater of cruelty, where
you're kind of like kind of mean to your audience,
and this is very much a mean to your audience thing.
It starts off. This play is cool in retrospect, it
would suck to go to. It's a physician lecturing in
a med school class on what napalm does to you,
and then turns into him going on a tirade for

(46:38):
hours about all the statistics about how fucked up the
war is. I wouldn't want to go to that play.
I'm glad they did it. I'm glad someone else said
through it so and an Angry Arts Week it you
were shocked to notice? Yeah, it didn't actually stop the war? Yeah?
No way? Wow you think I think it's was it

(47:02):
Kurt Vonnegut who had the whole lion about how like
the entire arts world like through which Way to gets
the Vietnab war to had the effect of a pie
drop three ft on a ladder. That sounds like something
Vonnegan would say. Yeah. So, a group of artists wanted
to keep going after Angry Arts Week was over, and
they tend these are the wolks attended towards the spicy

(47:24):
side of things, and Black Mask was like, well, if
you like spicy and we like spicy, let's do something spicy.
And that's who we'll all hear about on Wednesday. In
the meantime, Stay cool everyone, Thanks, that's my name's tagline.

(47:44):
I hope you like it. It's not going to be
my tee cool everyone. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry. Okay, great, I think we should Okay,
I think I think we should put it on pause
and and bring it back in the summer because it
is so cold right now, because you live in a
terrible place. That's true, it's it's a real disaster. Well

(48:09):
that's black mask. Any any any thoughts on these Mary
pranksters who aren't the Mary Prankster has actually gotten a
lot of fights the Mary pranksters. What if our line
was that's it, chill out, chill out people that chill stuff.
We're I'd say, we're open to suggestions, but we're not. Yeah, yeah,

(48:30):
there's a closed dear listener, don't don't send any suggestions.
I don't know why I said that. It's just terrible.
So anyway, m either thoughts or things that you want
to tell the world, you know, I guess I saw this.
I think it's it's really easy to be very hard
on the people who tried to stop the Fetnomb war.
It didn't sop the Fetnomb war. But I don't know.

(48:52):
I like, I think it's worth understanding that anti war
movements very very rarely work, and that people tried. Yeah,
like you know, like the rain, like a lot of
the art stuff sounds really silly and it's like, well,
how is it ever gonna work? But people tried a
lot of stuff, like they tried bomb like, they tried marches,

(49:13):
they tried bombings, they tried regular politicis just none of
it worked. And I think that's I don't know, I
I think that's something that it makes it easier to
sit back and judge as opposed to like I don't know,
like dude, Like I don't know what people people listening
to this are probably old enough to remember, Like you know,
there's sort of like the the second half of the
anti war movement where just it's just nothing like it

(49:36):
against the rocks, like nothing nothing stopped it, right, like
people people tried a lot of stuff and just nothing worked.
And yeah we shut down the city of Portland and anything. Yeah,
and it just didn't. Yeah, It's it's like on one
once the sort of war machine is got going, it's
really really like impossibly difficult to stop. And I don't know,
I think like people should be slightly less dejugmental about that,

(49:58):
especially given I mean, I don't know, maybe maybe maybe
there were people who listening to the show who weren't
alive due to rock Like I guess I guess that's
technically possible now, But yeah, I don't know, like we
we we all also failed to stop our awards. So no,
that's such a good point. And I think one of
the reasons I'm like art doesn't do anything is because

(50:19):
I'm coming at this as an artist, and so I'm
like self negating about like the efficacy of the kind
of thing that I would most immediately be drawn to,
and instead I'm like, all that matters is and it's like, no,
it probably changing. Trying to change the cultural consensus was
a very valid thing that they were trying to do
and had a lot of success with it took a

(50:40):
long time, the inertia of changing because most of the
US think it was like split eight um. I think
of America was like, yeah, funk them up, get the commies,
you know, and was like mm, we'd rather you didn't,
you know. And so trying to change that matters, and

(51:02):
I that's true. I need to. I need to. And
I think I think it's also because if if you
look at the things that actually ended the Vietnam War, right,
there's a lot of sort of political movement going on,
and then then then there's the sort of mass revolt
inside of the American army. And I don't think the
master in the American Army. Yeah, but like I like,
like I don't think that happens without people doing this ship,

(51:22):
you know, because I mean like like like people like
people who are in these things get drafted and you know,
like it's it's it's a really slow process. It would
have been a lot better if it had worked faster.
But I think I think people sort of like people
jump from Okay, here's all this in effective stuff and
then they sort of like take this leap into oh hey,

(51:45):
there was the sort of master resistance. They have one
killing their officers in Vietnam, And you have to look
at like the through course of how that actually happened
and how we got to that point, and that wasn't
and that was something that that was you know, an
active political quatch. It wasn't just that people want to
Vietnam war, like oh my god, this ward. It turns
out finding a ward is bad. Like there was you know,
there was sort of decades of like active political struggle

(52:07):
in like outside of the military, but also affecting the
people who are getting put in. And I think I
don't know, like I think I think that matters, and
I think it's you know, there's there's this bow quote
that I think is real that I've seen because you know,
so some someone asked him in like I think someone
asked him like seventy like like it was the Chinese
Revolution successful? And he was like, we'll know in fifty years,

(52:31):
and yeah, it's it's it's it's you know. On the
one hand, like yeah, like there there is with with
all movements, there is this incredible urgency that you have
to deal with. But then you also have to deal
with the fact that you know, the stuff that you're
doing might be incredibly successful. It might be incredibly successful
like fifteen years down the line, and it's it's really
hard both in the moment and tracing it back to
actually see that. No, that that makes a lot of sense.

(52:53):
And actually some of the stuff that we're going to
talk about on Wednesday, UM is going to talk about
some of the stuff that they really did accomplish, like
some of the stuff that they feel like that they're like, hey,
this this worked. Not everything they did worked, Uma, but
some of what they did worked and things are about

(53:14):
to get spicier. That can't be that. No, we can't
use that one, um no, no, no, no, I got it. Yeah, stay,
I stay, I see everyone. Yeah. Yeah, and then you
gotta do a little hand gester. You all got to
make up with and at home you just have to
figure it out on your own. Yeah, you won't know
what I did. Yeah. Everyone can do what they want

(53:34):
with their hand gestures as long as they're not a scene.
I guess. Yeah. I was gonna say, uh, playing with
fire here, all right, we will see Wait, no, tell
tell us what you do? Yeah, oh yeah, I am
one of the hosts of it could happen here. What's
that about. It's it's a podcast about things following apart

(53:56):
and putting them back together again. Okay, that sounds exciting. Yeah.
You can find it in the places you find podcasts
every single day of the week except for the weekends. Um. Yeah.
You can also find me at Twitter at a c
HR three. I need to change that at some point
because it's it's it's it's it me. Yeah, but that
that will happen later on the line. So right now,

(54:18):
it's a c h R three, or if you just
search it since be destroyed, you'll find it. Why do
you have against I never mind, I don't know why.
I am all right, I'll talk to you all Wednesday,
See you Wednesday by everyone cool People Who Did Cool
Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more

(54:41):
podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
media dot com or check us out on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.