THE GOOD OLD BAD OLD DAYS

Long ago in San Francisco — the year was 1969 — John Bryan and I put together an issue of Notes From Underground³. As you can see, it had a self-mocking cartoon cover (by Gary Grimshaw, our “art director”), which showed a newsie shouting, “REVO LOO-SHUN!!” while hawking the Daily Grind. I don’t know if you can make it out, but the front page of the Daily Grind is illustrated by a pig-faced plainclothes cop in a pork pie hat offering the peace sign. The news stories above the fold are headlined “OINK” and “BLAH BLAH.”

The issue led off with an article by Jerry Rubin (in his anarcho-leftist phase), “The Thoughts of Chairman Jerry,” which began:

We of the white middle class are not children of violence. But increasingly, day by day, we are becoming enemies of a system whose basic means of control is violence, or the threat of violence. One never knows if he is going to return from a demonstration anymore with his precious head in one piece.

Rubin’s article was illustrated by another Grimshaw cartoon, which showed what the demonstrations were about and again mocked the contradictory nature of the times.

A middle-class shopper in the supermarket is staggered by the produce in the meat department. “OMYGOD!!!” She can take her pick of fresh Dead Vietnam Babies 29¢ lb. and U.S. Choice Ground Pigburger 89¢ lb. Her shopping cart is filled with goods, one of them brand-named Junk. The shelves behind her are stocked with Goo, Zip, Fuz and Poo.
The second article, by Charles Bukowski, was called “Should We Burn Uncle Sam’s Ass?” It began:

Or will he burn ours? I’ll be 50 in August so don’t trust me. That’s 20 years over 30, and I wonder who the boys under 30 are going to trust when they are over 30? But maybe you ought to trust me a little …

We were self-mocking but serious. Bukowski’s piece was followed by Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “Violence,” which was followed by White Panther Party founder John Sinclair’s “Letters from Prison,” then by “Student Revolutionary Poems” written during the 1968 student strike at San Francisco State.

And we were arty.

We printed Fluxus writer Dick Higgins’s letter to French “happener” Jean-Jacques Lebel, “On the Artist as Revolutionary”; Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem, “In a Time of Revolution, For Instance”; Harold Norse’s article, “Cyanide Genocide”; a Lenore Kandel poem, which began: “I offer you one hundred ways of love”; an illustrated game of revolution, “Us & Them”; two poems by Nanos Valaoritis; Jack Micheline’s poem, “Five Generations of Freaks”; a cutup by Carl Weissner and yours truly, “If the Revolution Fails”; a reprint of William S. Burroughs’s “After the Inauguration,” and Sinclair Beiles’s comical tales from a mental ward:

In the washroom I reckoned the specific gravity of my fellow inmates’ urine by floating bottles of it in a washbasin alongside bottles holding the same quantity of water. The nurses were suitably impressed. From then on I was Dr. Beiles who had taken his medical degree in Cairo.

And, because we were also psychedelic, we featured the Notes from Underground “Psychedelic Cookbook,” which provided formulas for synthesizing mescaline and LSD. Oh yeah. And what have we got to show for it? The bad old new days. Oh yeah.

Postscript: If you think Grimshaw’s supermarket cartoon is overstated, Bob Herbert has news for you about “an ocean of blood” in Iraq.