{"id":325,"date":"2010-07-14T21:27:47","date_gmt":"2010-07-15T01:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/wp\/2010\/07\/anti-heroes_of_jazz-beyond-jaz\/"},"modified":"2019-09-13T12:42:23","modified_gmt":"2019-09-13T16:42:23","slug":"anti-heroes_of_jazz-beyond-jaz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/2010\/07\/anti-heroes_of_jazz-beyond-jaz.html","title":{"rendered":"Anti-heroes of jazz-beyond-jazz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fug Tuli Kupferberg<\/a> and comic-book depressive\/trad jazz fan Harvey Pekar<\/a> dying the same week thins the ranks of American refuseniks, those Bartleby<\/a>-like individuals who didn’t drop out of society so much as dive in by insisting on their contrarianism, right or wrong. In my book (or blog) they join Henry Miller<\/a>, Charles Bukowski<\/a>, Harry Partch<\/a> and William Burroughs <\/a>in the pantheon of unapologetic warts-and-all individualists, cultural heroes who speak their truth, regardless of consequence, and offer devastating critiques though from often dysfunctional points of view.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n
\"harvey

Harvey Pekar – IFC<\/p><\/div>\n

I never met Pekar,\u00c2\u00a0though we talked once or twice and I dug the film about him, A<\/a><\/i>merican Splendor<\/a> –\u00c2\u00a0<\/i>in which he participated — for getting some of the texture of life of U.S. bohemians of a certain small success closer to right than anything else I’ve ever seen.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Tuli I became aware of decades ago, as a teenager amused by his greatest hit, “Nothing<\/a>.” \u00c2\u00a0I got to interview him in 2004 for an overview of the first (only?) genuine don’t-give-a-damn-art, poetry & truth band, the Fugs, prior to the release of The Fugs Final CD, Part 1<\/a><\/i>. That story was published in Signal To Noise<\/a> magazine.<\/div>\n
\"tuli

Tuli Kupferberg – Melville House MHPBooks.com<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
Below is a slightly edited transcript of my hour with Tuli Kupferberg. I clambered upstairs to his dark, dusty loft on Sixth Avenue in New York City on a cold day in February 2004. To my polite opening “Nice to meet you, how are you?” Tuli answered, “Pretty good. Still above room temperature.”<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

HM: Let’s talk about what you’re doing now.<\/p>\n

TK: Now I’m a jew peddler in the daytime. Someday my prints
\nwill sell. A friend of mine has a license. I do cartoons and collages, and I
\nsell some of them and then I sell other peoples’ materials, too. I don’t work
\nthere [on the boutique-lined streets of fashionable Soho] full-time, I sort of
\nrelieve my friend. And it’s become quite an issue in New York City politics,
\nbecause the landlords and the art dealers and the storekeepers, especially the
\nones who aren’t doing well, object to the peddlers. But I think it works two
\nways, because a lot of the people come down for the street merchants — street
\nmerchants, they like to be called. But I like the term peddler. What’s happened
\nlately is that there are more and more people coming down, but the proportion
\nof peddlers to people has gone up, so generally income has dropped.<\/p>\n

The word store means a place where you store things. Let’s
\nget this straight from the beginning. I’m severely anti-capitalist, anti-class
\nsociety. I’m an anarchist pacificist —
\n<\/span>pacifist,<\/i> Mr. Ashcroft<\/a>, and I
\nwish you were a pacifist, too. So a lot of the people don’t like this stuff, or
\nsay they aren’t going to buy it because they don’t have the money although most
\nof the people here do<\/i> have the money,
\nand then my partner, sometimes, will stay out there all day and not sell
\nanything. But a lot of people like<\/i>
\nthis stuff. So if we lived in a rational world, if they liked it they’d just
\ntake it. That’s the ultimate aim of a socialist, or communist or anarchist
\nsociety. That you produce or give what you can, and you take what you need. I
\nguess we’ll have that in a few weeks, right? It could happen.<\/p>\n

I set up on Spring Street — actually she sets up, she does
\nmost of the work, Selma Blitz, and she’s been doing this for 25 or 30 years.
\nBut not everyone can get a license. Someone named Robert Lederman<\/a>, who’s been
\narrested 20 or 30 times for peddling, brought a case I think it went up to the
\nSupreme Court establishing first amendment rights for artists to sell stuff. I
\nthink everyone should have that right. Now you can sell anywhere except the
\nblocks the city has decided you can’t<\/i>
\nsell on, and those are the blocks you have the best chance of making money.<\/p>\n

So
\non the weekends, for instance, it’s forbidden to sell on Prince St. and Spring
\nSt. Supposedly it’s a traffic problem, but I think the storekeepers are having
\ntrouble with too many people on the street. They put these huge planters out
\nwhich block stuff. The planters are put there to block the peddlers, because
\nthey’re on the curb. But anyway, that’s
\nanother program. <\/i>She [Selma]’s <\/i>sold
\nall over the city, but we’re in Soho, right, fashionable Soho, where I think
\nHelena Rubenstein was paying $50,000 a month’s rent for a store. That must have
\nbeen a tax right-off. The rents are going through the roof.<\/p>\n

There’s also music there, street groups, what’s the term —<\/p>\n

HM: Buskers?<\/p>\n

TK: Buskers, no, but these are street singers, and they’re
\nblack groups, doowop singers, and they’re really great, and they sell cds, too.
\nI sell some of my cds on the street, too. The Fugs cds? Well, I used to. I did
\na couple of single cds. One was called No
\nDeposit, No Return<\/a><\/i>, <\/i>which was found pieces set to music. I guess the most
\nevolved piece was a ’60s ad, two ads, actually. One was for a Hyper-hemiater.
\nHemi is “blood,” you know. It’s basically a vacuum tube that looked
\nlike one of those old bicycle pumps, you know? And you put it over your dick, and
\nit’s supposed to make give you a big prick. They still sell something like that
\nall the time. You get too many of these ads over your computer. And the funny
\nthing about that ad was they told you not to use it too much, because a too
\nlarge penis might be too uncomfortable for your partner.<\/p>\n

Then I found an ad for an artificial vagina, that was used
\nto collect bull semen from a bull for a cow. I saw the pictures that didn’t
\ncome with that ad, I don’t think, but what they used to do — maybe they still
\ndo it — the bulls that are productive, it’s prize semen, so how do they
\ncollect it? They have a machine, and they cover it with a cowskin, and they
\nhave an artificial vagina. And maybe they have some scent, some artificial
\nsent. So the bull comes into this, and then they collect the semen. This is
\nvery primitive jerkoff methodology of the early ’60s, and they tell you that
\nyou can buy it through the mail. So I used to do a performance. First I had a
\nhyper-hemiator, then I had a cow-sound, you know how they had those things they
\nused to sell from Japan or China? And then I’d sing or play “Here comes
\nthe bride,” and then when it stopped I’d say, I now pronounce you man and
\nmachine. That’s one of the pieces I did on No
\nDeposit, No Return<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I call them parasongs. I’m collecting them — I’ve put out
\nfour of these songs books. Two I self-published, but two are [commercially] published
\nand one was even translated into German. It’s a very old tradition, there’s a Latin
\nterm for it, which I lose track of it, so I made up a new name.<\/p>\n

Martin Luther had this wonderful quotation: “Why should
\nthe Devil have the best of tunes?” He wrote religious hymns to the popular
\nmusic of his time. And the Wobblies, the IWW<\/a> — my voice is cracking, I must be
\nreaching adolescence — the IWW at the beginning of the century — it was
\nfounded in 1905 and is still going, sort of — they found religious hymns and
\nturned them into working songs. The best one was Joe Hill’<\/a>s “Pie High.”
\nNot the Communist Part song, “I Thought I saw Joe Hill Last Night.” No,
\nthis one goes:<\/p>\n

Long haired preachers come out at night
\nTry to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
\nBut when asked for something to eat,
\nThey are sure, they are sure to repeat:
\nYou’ll get pie in the sky when you die
\nIn that glorious by-way up high,
\nWork and pray, live on hay,
\nYou’ll get pie in the sky when you die —
\nIt’s a lie!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/blockquote>\n

That’s a hymn. I forget the popular American hymn it was
\nbased on.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I also did “I’ve been working for the landlord,”
\nbased on “I’ve been working on the railroad.” Nothing — it’s taken
\nfrom a song called Potatoes. Instead of “Monday nothing” it’s “Monday
\npotatoes. . . Friday for a change, potato kugel, Saturday again it’s potatoes.”
\nI was surprised, about 15 years after I wrote that song, to find it again on a
\nRomanian record.<\/p>\n

The jews are travelers. There are lots of nationalities that
\nwander, that are wanderers. The Scottish people, the Greeks, the Armenians,
\nIrish: for one reason or another, they’re all over the world. And you pick up
\nmelodies. Also food. Jewish food is basically Slavic food, or East European
\nfood. It’s good to travel; then you can pick the best, not the worst, of
\nwhatever you meet, whatever you find.<\/p>\n

Where is my wandering Jew? Wandering has it’s disadvantages.
\nWe’re all wanderers on the earth, we’re sort of issued a visa that lasts a little
\nwhile. I think Voltaire<\/a> said it, “Comedy’s a bad very last act.” But
\nwe’re all visitors, we’re all tourists here.<\/p>\n

I read a lot. It takes your mind off living. I think some
\nBritish wit said, “Between life and reading, I prefer reading.” But
\nthen some American said, “I prefer tv.” Balance, balance . . . A lot
\nof these books [his loft is lined with bookshelves] I’ve read each one three
\ntimes. A lot of them I use for illustrations. I do collages, and sometimes I find
\nstuff other people have done before.<\/p>\n

HM: What are the collages about? What do they have in
\ncommon?<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0TK: I never thought of it that way. I guess they share in
\ncommon a kind of inventiveness. You don’t want to do something that’s already
\nbeen done. You want to do something that strikes you, that makes a point. I’ll
\nshow you an example. It’s the end of an ambition which was to do a whole series
\nexplaining my career, which is ironic, because career means fun. But my
\nexperiences, I guess as an activist, as a radical.<\/p>\n

I grew up in the Depression and I came of age, I guess, in
\n1934, I would have been nine or 10, and I saw things. If you didn’t become
\nradicalized by the Great Depression<\/a> in America, you were an idiot. So anyway,
\nthis was part of a longer piece, it was going to be a suite, covering my and
\nthe world’s history, starting before the Russian revolution and ending in hell,
\nwhere we are now. Instead, I did this one: I don’t think I’ll have the energy
\nand I know I don’t have the interest to finish it.<\/p>\n

But I’m imagining a young
\nman in Moscow. . . It’s the first of May, 1920 and it says “Long Live the
\nFestival of Workers of the Worlds’ Countries.” It’s beautiful, . . . The
\nonly one [Soviet era Social Realist poster] I found after going through
\nhundreds of them that didn’t have a weapon. It’s just a beautiful woman and
\nordinary people celebrating the first of May, which goes back to pagan times,
\nspring time. So this was the only Russian poster I could use. And why were the
\nRussian posters full of guns? There was a reason for it. In the first years of
\nthe Bolshevik revolution there were 14 capitalist armies in the Soviet Union
\ntrying to destroy everything they were working for. But that didn’t work out. So
\nthis is an amazing illustration, the only one I could use that expressed my
\nideals. I was happy to find it.<\/p>\n

That will be on the next Fugs album.<\/p>\n

HM: So you’re about to release The Fugs Final CD (Part 1).<\/i> Will there be a part 2?<\/p>\n

TK: I think we hope so. Mel Brooks has never done his second
\npart to a History of the World, Part 1<\/a><\/i>.
\nSo I’m looking forward to the History of
\nthe World, Part 2<\/i> and The Fugs Final
\nCD, part 2<\/i>. And you continue with it until it ends. Most of the songs are
\nEd [Sanders]’s<\/a>. . .<\/p>\n

HM: There’s something in the vein of Mark Twain<\/a> in the Fugs’
\nhumor, I’ve always thought.<\/p>\n

TK: Well, Mark Twain had a pretty tortured life. His kids
\ndied, he self-published, started his own publishing house, his big economic
\ntragedy was his attempt to invent a typesetting machine. . . .One of my
\nfavorite expressions of his was “Members of congress are idiots — but I
\nrepeat myself!”<\/p>\n

Humor, I don’t know. . .But the thing about proverbs — I
\ncollect them — is you can find very wise sayings prove the very opposites. Like
\n“A stitch in time saves nine,” but “Haste makes waste.” That’s
\nexact opposites. I like to combine them. Like, “You can lead a horse to
\nwater, but what if he’s another color?” Or, “If at first you don’t
\nsucceed, fuck it.” You can have a lot of fun with that.<\/p>\n

When we [the Fugs] started out, we didn’t intend to become
\nas rich as we never became. We were just having fun. A lot of Americans are
\nagainst fun. Because as Ed will tell you, this started out as a Puritan
\ncountry, and it hasn’t really gotten over that. One of the first people
\narrested was, I forget his name now [Thomas Morton<\/a>], he had a place in or near
\nthe original Massachusetts Bay Colony, and he had a May Day thing, supposedly
\nthere was sex and drunkeness with the Indians, so he was arrested, and exiled
\nout in the middle of the wilderness [This is a slightly inaccurate account of
\nthe scandal of Ma-Re-Mount, or Merrymount]. That was the end of America, before
\nit started.<\/p>\n

We [the Fugs] are accused of being predecessors of the punk
\nscene, and I think we were, because we had two things going for us. We were
\naccused of being anti-establishment, and we didn’t care to “make it,”
\nwhatever that meant, and we were poets, as a matter of fact we were writers. When
\npeople ask me if I’m a writer, I say “Yeah, I know how to write, I’m a writer.
\nYou’re a writer too.”\u00c2\u00a0<\/span>Because I
\ndon’t likd to make a distinction about people who are artists. Matter of fact,
\nin Bali there is no word for art, and if you look at the household utensils,
\nthey’re all what we’d call works of art. So we had the advantage; since we
\nweren’t primarily trying to sell things, we could do whatever the hell we
\nwanted, and have some fun with our friends. We were surprised it took off.<\/p>\n

We started out of a poetry place on Second Avenue called The
\nMetro, and when we were done we’d go around the corner to a place called the
\nDom, and pop music — the Beatles and the Stones — were around, so pop music
\nwas becoming the next big thing. We’d go and drink coffee at the Dom, and they
\nhad a jukebox with the Beatles and the Stones on it. And the Beatles’ early
\nsongs<\/a> were not anywhere near what they did later. So Ed Sanders said, “We
\ncan do better than that. Or as good as that.” It was the mid ’60s, and we
\ndid as good as their early songs, I’ll say that. I picked the name Fugs, out of
\nNorman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n

Some of these stories are too good to be true: When Dorothy
\nParker<\/a> met Norman Mailer <\/a>at a party, she’s supposed to have said, “Oh,
\nyou’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell ‘Fuck.'” But I think it
\nwas Mailers’ publishers who didn’t know how to spell it. You know, if Allen
\nGinsberg’s poem Howl<\/a><\/i> hadn’t been
\narrested, it would have taken a lot longer to become popular. Anyway, the best
\nstory like that I know goes back to the 19th century, and prints were very
\nimportant. There was a print store, I think it was on Madison Avenue or Fourth
\nAvenue, and they had this painting of a woman with her breasts exposed, leaning
\nover — maybe later on she became the White Rose? Or “September Morn”?<\/p>\n

\"september<\/p>\n

I don’t know. But anyway,
\nthere was a private person appointed by the U.S. Post Office to make sure we
\nwere all pure? Especially children. So the owners of the print shop put the
\nposter in the window, and they hired, they found some newsboys — who were like
\nthe charity kids, everyone wanted to protect the newsboys — and they posed
\nthem in front of the poster, and then they called the cops. And it became a big
\nstory. Then the print became the best selling print in history up to that time.
\nSo it just goes to show you . . .<\/p>\n

HM: When I first heard the Fugs, my high school buddies had
\nthe records in a pile with a band called Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts<\/a>, that sung
\nraunchy songs.<\/p>\n

TK: I didn’t know about Doug and the Hot Nuts . . . I
\nknew about Redd Foxx<\/a>, and his party records. But we [the Fugs] didn’t invent sex,
\nyou know, it goes way back. As poets, as writers, we thought we could make use
\nof it, and do something in pop music, which I love — the stuff from the ’20s. ’30s
\nand ’40s that I grew up on, hearing it on the radio and everywhere. Some of
\nthose songs are wonderful. They’re romantic. They’re all courtship music,
\nthough that’s a very limited part of human life, getting married. Sex is even a
\nlittle bit broader than getting married. Other popular music, like country
\nmusic and maybe black music, the blues, had more themes than courtship. All you
\nwould hear on radio would be courtship songs.<\/p>\n

So we [the Fugs] wrote about
\neverything we felt like. There was<\/i> a
\nsexual revolution. Of course, it goes in cycles. Restoration England was pretty
\nwild. In Victorian England they had sex — people actually fucked in those days,
\notherwise there wouldn’t be any Brits today. It was sort of undercover, but it
\nwas strong. So it goes inside sometimes. And now we have Ashcroft, who covers
\nup a woman’s breasts on a statue before he does a press conference in halls the
\nJustice Department. I’ll leave that to the psychologists. . .<\/p>\n

Hey, this parasong goes to a jazz riff, and you’re a jazz
\nguy, right? [He sings] “Spread your legs\/ You’re breaking my glasses\/Baby
\nI’m in love with you” — What’s the music to that?<\/p>\n

HM: Count Basie’s “One O’ Clock Jump<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

TK: That’s going to be in the next songbook, though it’s a
\nvery short song.<\/p>\n

HM: Did you know Lenny Bruce<\/a>?<\/p>\n

TK: I went to Lenny’s trial. There were three judges, a
\nthree-judge panel. I’ll name their religions. The head was a Catholic, the good
\nguy was a Protestant and there was a black judge. And the persecuting, I mean
\nprosecuting attorney, was a Jew, a Mr. Kuh. It turned out he was a Bruce fan,
\nand he asked Lenny at one point in the trial for his autograph, Meanwhile, he’s
\ntrying to send him to jail. Alright, there was a lot of guilt down the line.<\/p>\n

But the story that impressed me was that someone named Eric
\n[Hobsbawm]<\/a>, an Americanist from a London school [Kings College, Cambridge], was
\nthere. I met him years later, and I said “Why didn’t you come back?”
\nAnd he said, “I was terrified and horrified. It was a fascist trial.”
\nI’m reminded of Dave Dellinger<\/a> at the Chicago Seven trial<\/a> when the judge came in
\nhe didn’t stand up. And the judge said, “Stand up!” and Dellinger
\nsaid, “No I won’t, I only stand when I respect the judge and the proceedings.”
\nI think he got a year for that. It reminds me of that joke: “Are you
\ntrying to show contempt of court?” “No, your honor, I’m trying to
\nhide it.”<\/p>\n

Phil Ochs was at the [Chicago Seven] trial. We were
\nmentioned by Country Joe MacDonald<\/a>, who was at the trial. The Fugs were almost the
\nonly group — Ed and I were the only ones– \u00c2\u00a0<\/span>who went to Chicago [for the Democratic Party convention of
\n1968, and protest by the Yippies], the others were too afraid to go. And we
\nnever got a chance to play. The MC5 <\/a>played, then someone pulled the plug. There
\nwere eight or 10 different undercover spies there in the park before the riot —
\nArmy, Navy, state, federal, city. I think the guy who tore down one of the
\nflags was actually a cop. They were starting to do things that would make other
\npeople do things to get them arrested. So Country Joe got beat up on — his
\nband went somewhere to do a gig, but his arm didn’t let him play a guitar. Phil
\nOchs<\/a> tried to sing at the trial, but the Judge wouldn’t let him.<\/p>\n

HM: Sometimes it seems the counterculture you guys
\nrepresented won the culture war.<\/p>\n

TK: It’s happening. But what we really have today — one of
\nthe problems, there are a lot of problem — we walk into Tower Records, and
\nthere are three or four thousand cds. Among those there must been some good
\nmusic, but how in the hell are you going to find it? You know, when we played
\n[in the ’60s] in the Village we knew everybody, all the other bands, all the people
\nwho were here. We knew people who were making movies, we knew the artists.
\nToday there is so much of everything. There are a lot of good songs being
\nwritten. But at the same time, the media monopolies are taking over, and
\nthere’s so much noise you can’t hear the signal. So it’s very difficult. And in
\naddition, the overlay of this is the general crisis. All of America, on account
\nof the war, we’re either going to go for Bush in this election — if there is
\nan October surprise, there are enough fools in this country to elect him, or he’ll
\ntry to steal the election. And if that happens, there are a lot of people who
\nwill be going somewhere else. Or else fighting in the streets, and that’s not a
\npopular alternative today.<\/p>\n

Even real people can’t afford to live here. If you walk in
\nManhattan any night, walk to Union Square, you see all the construction. What’s
\nhappening is that the rich are getting richer, and they’re coming here from all
\nover the world, and the poor are going down. If you walk in Soho, you see all
\nthe leading merchants of the world are here. Obviously they’re making money.
\nAnd obviously they’re putting high-rises up in which a million dollars is cheap
\nfor an apartment. That’s happening at the same time that the middle class and
\nthe lower class are getting lower.<\/p>\n

We all knew, a lot of us knew, that we were getting screwed
\nall the time, but now they don’t care, it’s transparent. It’s like Bush, who
\nwas a draft dodge<\/a>r. Good for him, for not going to Viet Nam. But he has no
\nhesitation about sending other young men to get killed, something he wouldn’t
\ndo. Accept all these contradictions. And the torture — torture has been going
\non in American prisons for a long time. But we’ve transferred the technology. You
\nknow how Rumsfeld<\/a> is settling that problem? He just forbad using digital
\ncameras on any military installation. That<\/i>
\nwill solve the problem! And meanwhile, they’re releasing thousands and
\nthousands of these pictures. I mean, if they [the Bush administration] weren’t
\nguilty six months ago, I assume they are not guilty now.<\/p>\n

There is too much going on. I must say, the left and the
\nradicals have a very fine criticism of what exists, but we haven’t found what
\nwe can really do to make things a lot better. So we need the help of everyone
\nreading this to really think about it and to\u00c2\u00a0 <\/span>join with other people to figure out what we can really do.
\nBecause the forces against us are just amazing. incalculable, more atrocious
\nthan anything we’ve ever seen before.<\/p>\n

HM: Do you have ideas about what to do?<\/p>\n

TK: Pursue the small utopias: nature, friendship, music,
\nintimate love. That’s what you really have to do in our world. You can have the
\nbroad ideas, too, to change society but don’t neglect your own personal life.
\nAll art and music, every song is a personal utopia, because you can control
\nwhat happens — when you write a song, you create a small universe. Enjoy it
\nwhile you can. It’s true of all the arts, and also of good family
\nrelationships, or the relationships with a friend, or a lover. Even your wife
\n— it happens sometimes.<\/p>\n

Also: whatever trade or skill you use, take pride in what
\nyou’re doing. You should always make space and room for that, and not let the
\nentire world crush all the joy from your life. And the communes . . .\u00c2\u00a0 <\/span>You go back to Brook Farm<\/a> in the 1840s,
\nwhen the old America, rural America, was being transformed into “satanic
\nmills,” as Blake<\/a> called them. In New England there was a movement to go
\nback to the land, and to small communities — Brook Farm was just one example
\n— and they’re still going on. They really bloomed in the ’60s, and they’re
\nstill going on. There are whole magazines devoted to them, but they don’t want
\nyou to know about them . . . There was one in upstate NY that was religious,
\nbut you could have sex whoever you wanted . . .<\/p>\n

Choose very carefully. You’ll learn that if you get in a
\ncoop. It’s the same thing. The Soviets had a slogan: they were going to create
\nthe new man, the new human, because everyone else was raised in a fucked up society,
\nso they were fucked up. But it’s very difficult to create more perfect beings
\namong people who have been raised in an imperfect society. One of the main
\nthings fucking up America is all the competition. Remember that slogan,
\n“America Number One, but Only With A Gun?” In America, if you’re not
\nnumber one, you’re a piece of shit, you’re nothing. I always use this example:
\nIn America there’s a best actor of the year, who is chosen every year. Well, I
\ngo to a number of off-Broadway plays, and off-off Broadway plays, and in my lifetime
\nI must have seen 50 actors and actresses that are just as good if not better
\nthan the ones who are called the best actor in America, and the best actor in America
\nis going to be the biggest property owner in Hollywood because they’re going to
\nmake a fortune. That’s one the drawbacks of capitalist society and American
\nsociety. America only needed one poet, Allen Ginsberg, and everyone else. . . Well,
\nif you enjoy doing something, and are getting paid for it, and you get an
\naward, that’s just gravy.<\/p>\n

I was saying about Brook Farm: they had intellectuals there.
\nMost of them went to Harvard, they were ministers, but everyone worked the
\nfields. . . Later there were communities inspired by Charles Fourier<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0[French
\nwriter and social theorist], who was insane and wonderful. Everyone had to change
\ntheir jobs every six months or year. Like in the Wobblies you could be a union
\nofficer for six months, but that was it, and you got paid the average wage of a
\nworker, not $100,000 dollars a year. There is a lot of work to be done. . .<\/p>\n

I met a fellow on Wall Street, he was walking down Broadway
\nwith a three-piece suit on and he comes up to at me and says, “I remember
\nyou from the ’60s. And now I’m working on Wall Street, but when I go home, I
\nstill listen to the Fugs. We had an effect not just on the hippies, and it
\nwasn’t just a movement of music. Of course, the general atmosphere has changed
\na lot, but some of it will never go back to the way it was in previous times —
\njoyless, as it were. Although they’re doing their best [the opposition forces].
\nBack in the ’60s you could live on beans. And in one of the drawings I’ve done,
\nbeans have gone up to $2 a pound. Where are you going to get the $2?<\/p>\n

You know Gore Vidal<\/a>? The subtitle of his new book is
\n“the United States of Amnesia.<\/a>” \u00c2\u00a0<\/span>Whenever I hear about $100,000 million going to education, I
\nshudder to think about the ridiculous things that are going to be taught. The
\nbest parts of our Constitution are the amendments. What kind of a document is
\nthat?<\/p>\n


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