The Golden Age of the Underground Press
Jeff Potter
"Portrait's From Memory: New Orleans in the Sixties."
If anyone wonders what things were like at the "NOLA Express" where
Bukowski first was published, check it out. It's a little picture of the
old days, as they are connected to today. The NE editors were early
folks in the Mimeo Revolution as well, which kicked off the small press
and zining.
**Golden Memories**
Brenda and I moved to New Orleans in the Fall of 1969 to attend graduate
school at Tulane University, in anthropology. I
remember the vendors selling NOLA Express in the French Quarter asking
you for 11¢ for a bottle of wine. Usually, you'd give
them more than 11¢. At least I would. I'd give them a dollar, which was
enough for a bottle of wine and a cup of coffee, then.
Fortified wine. Chicory coffee. It would also buy you a plate of red
beans and rice, or a po-boy sandwich.
The NOLA Express was where I first read the short stories and poems of
Charles Bukowski. I didn't know what to make of them.
I liked them. But were they literary? Were they an accident? Was
Bukowski a primitive writer? In the sense naïve? What I'd now
call a vernacular writer, by analogy with folk, or outsider art?
I didn't know. I didn't care. I liked his stuff.
I liked the cartoons of Patrick Kelly. Kelly's cartoons would later
grace the covers of Screed and Evil Genius, two of my books.
I didn't know Robert Head and Darlene Fife, but I knew who they were.
Later, they were the first underground writers I was to
meet. And Patrick's little magazine, Blue Horse, was the first little
magazine to print something I had written (a couple of recipes,
or poems, or anecdotes, from Raw Energy: A Cookbook for Action
Painters).
In fact, I'd sent my work to Bob and Darlene and Darlene had sent it on
to J. T. Bradley and Patrick. J. T. showed it to Patrick.
J. for Jacqueline.
So really, Darlene Fife and Jacqueline Bradley discovered me. If anyone
did.
(I was already being read by Larry and Hazel Schlueter, Jim and Cindy
Miller, and Dick Vajs. Shit, I don't have many more readers
than that now.)
One of the issues of NOLA Express that was an eye-opener, to me,
identified members of the board of regents, at Tulane, and
showed what other boards they served on. Interlocking directorates. The
movers and shakers who ran things, businesses, ran
newspapers, radio and television stations, and universities. Newspapers,
radio and television stations, and universities were
businesses. Businesses first, you might say. Then newspapers, radio and
television stations, and universities. If it didn't interfere too
much.
It reminded me of the old joke, "Stop the presses, Chief--I have a story
here that's going to break this town wide open!" "Who do
you think owns this newspaper, son?"
Or, an example, right in front of us, when the sportscaster on one of
the local TV outlets said something bad about the New Orleans
Saints, he was denied access to the locker room and not allowed on the
team plane. You can bet the sportscasters on the other
stations got the message of that.
A magazine, or paper, or media outlet is a trade press for whatever
industry it reports on, uncritically peddling the party line. That
includes the culture industry, and the knowledge industry. The arts and
higher education. An artist, or a scholar, who doesn't sing
the company fight song does not get a teaching job, or a fine arts
grant. If he has one, he loses it, and is blacklisted.
This was a hypothesis I tested, and confirmed, in my life. Not a theory.
A crank, or conspiracy theory. To conspire means to
breathe the same air, and the people breathing it can't imagine any
other air to breathe.
Sometimes, to see what's on the end of the fork, you have to eat with
chopsticks.
The business of business is culture. Is manipulating the culture,
managing the zeitgeist. Through the media, and higher education,
and by controlling what books are published, reviewed, and taught, what
artists are supported, enabled, rewarded. What artists are
put down, made an example of. Silenced.
Thank god for underground newspapers, small presses like the ones that
kept Bukowski going, independent bookstores, readers.
Hippie redneck freaks. Redneck hippie freaks with grandchildren,
free-school operators, the do-it-yourself ethic, health foods,
thrift-shop clothes, booze and dope and coffee, sex, jazz, folk music,
street theater, paintings, posters, costumes, back-to-nature,
hiking, tent-campers, bird-watchers.
It's like (1) that never happened, and (2) it's still alive, still going
strong, although you have to look for it, know where to look. The
old broke-dick dogs carrying the flame are getting a bit long in the
tooth, to mix a metaphor. Dispersed. Isolated, and alone. In
touch, through the mail. Over the Internet. Carrying the message.
Passing it on.
Where we came from is interesting, and an account like Darlene's
Portrait's From Memory: New Orleans in the Sixties brings
back memories for me. Familiar names.
I worked a salvage archeology job at the Old Capitol in Tallahassee with
Henry Baker.
Any port in a storm. Demolition laborer was better than being
eighty-sixed by state government as an information specialist for
filing a grievance when I got sacked, for writing on the job. This was
not long after I met Darlene and Bob.
He tells of being hassled by the fuzz in the Quarter, for wearing a
double-bitted axe on his belt.
Then he tells of being tried for obscenity, after the "What Kind of a
Man Reads Playboy" issue (WELCOME BAPTIST
CONVENTION), the prosecutor demanding of him, on the stand, "What gives
you the right to publish such filth," Bob taking out
the business card with the Bill of Rights on it which he gave to cops,
who wanted to know what gave him the right to wear an axe
in his belt, and reading, aloud, calmly, "Congress shall make no law
abridging freedom of speech, or of the press," the prosecutor
quailing before his recitation like a vampire quailing before the cross,
or a clove of garlic.
You want stories like that--and who doesn't?--read Darlene's memoir.
* * *
I wrote the above before I read the book. I read the book in a sitting,
the day it came. I got a couple of facts wrong.
Robert gave the cops copies of the Constitution. You could get a plate
of red beans and rice, bread and butter, and a glass of water
at Buster Holmes' restaurant for 30¢. And the NOLA Express combined the
personal and the political, the muckraking and the
avant-garde, literary, the alternative and the above-ground, straight,
hard-fact reporting in a way I had forgotten.
It wasn't an underground newspaper. The underground never is. Just as
the marginal, the fringe, is often in the main American
stream, down the road, and the mainstream is an ad for Hadacol,
tail-fins, the tight, white collar, and laff-track sitcoms mixed with
happy-talk news.
The underground is open, erect, and fully-exposed. It's the
establishment, power-structure organs that are secretive, furtive, and
clandestine, with their code words and memory holes and
conflict-of-interest judgments about what's beneath consideration,
what's
not fit to print, what's obscene, a threat to public decency, or order.
Hooray for people like Darlene and Bob, their friends, many of whom
aren't with us, anymore. May they rest in peace. They had
little enough of that while they were here.
Pretty good eulogy for them, Darlene's book.
More at....
http://thedailybugle.com/prize/oct21a.htm
--
Jeff Potter j...@outyourbackdoor.com
"Out Your Backdoor": Friendly Zine of Modern Folkways and Culture
Revival outyourbackdoor.com ... for a full line of alternative
outdoor culture books, bookstore & forum