{"id":1897,"date":"2012-01-01T23:51:09","date_gmt":"2012-01-02T07:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2012\/01\/fug_you_poetry_politics_and_ro\/"},"modified":"2012-08-25T13:36:11","modified_gmt":"2012-08-25T17:36:11","slug":"fug_you_poetry_politics_and_ro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2012\/01\/fug_you_poetry_politics_and_ro.html","title":{"rendered":"A Decade of Poetry, Politics, and Rock ‘n’ Roll"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Speaking of Lower East Side legends<\/a>, Ed Sanders<\/a> has written a new memoir, FUG YOU {An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, The Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side}<\/a><\/em>. Just out from Da Capo Press, with a dust jacket based on an historic Life magazine cover<\/a>, it’s a picaresque chronicle of the 1960s filled with scrupulously documented recollections of Sanders’s adventures and misadventures in poetry, politics, and rock ‘n’ roll.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

FUG YOU<\/em> reads like a nonfiction outtake from Thomas Pynchon’s V.<\/a><\/em> The tales Sanders tells, bizarre but true, are buttressed by illustrations and citations from a mammoth archive he compiled through the years. They include everything from mimeo magazines and antiwar flyers to FBI memos and news clippings; from poems scribbled on napkins to set lists and lead sheets; from Peace March photos and concert posters to literary relics such as the “well-scooped cold cream jar” that Allen Ginsberg used as a “cock lubricant.”<\/p>\n

A sample vignette:<\/p>\n

I was working weekends — Friday, Saturday, Sunday — on the 5:00 PM to 2:00 AM shift at the cigar store where I had toiled off and on, and learned a lot about the underground world of Times Square, since 1960. It was freaky. One evening a guy who worked at the 2-for-25\u00a2 hamburger place next door came in for cigarettes. I asked him why he was barefoot. He replied, “I have a date with a Toe Queen, and my date likes dirty feet.”<\/p>\n

All that evening I wrote a series of poems depicting the life and times of “Tillie the Toe Queen” on white, elongated slats of thin cardboard from cigarette cartons. By the next weekend I had published The Toe-Queen Poems.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I read them at Le Metro, the response, in applause and overwhelming laughter, was the first I had received for anything I’d ever read in public, and I think it was an impetus to form a satiric proto-folk-rock group called The Fugs a few months later. One of the first Fugs songs, never, unfortunately, put on an album, was a ditty called “Toe Queen Love.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although FUG YOU<\/em> has no sewer-dwelling alligators hunted by a posse of misfits with shotguns, it has plenty of details that are equally preposterous and Pynchonesque. For instance, an anti-yodelling edict at the Chicago 7 trial. The presiding judge won’t let Sanders demonstrate from the witness stand how well he yodels. “I was disappointed,” Sanders writes, “for verily I was and am the only Beat who can yodel. However, I resisted the dramatic impulse to weep and show trembling agitation in front of the judge at this restriction on my yodeliferous genius. Why? Six-month jail term and maybe a $1,000 fine for insulting the dignity of the court. I had to get to L.A. and start investigating the Manson family.”<\/p>\n

(Which he did.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

(Crossposted at HuffPo)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaking of Lower East Side legends, Ed Sanders has written a new memoir, FUG YOU {An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, The Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side}. Just out from Da Capo Press, with a dust jacket based on an historic Life magazine cover, it’s a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1913,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1897","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-literature","8":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/refsr_1_1.jpeg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-uB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}