Alternatives
According to Robert Glessing’s recent book, The Underground Press in America, some 400 newspapers and magazines now serve the counter culture. There are probably as many likeminded radio stations; and more than one underground “wire service” exists, along with radical film and video-tape studios and street theater troupes and poster artists. The preferred name for this considerable activity is “alternative media.”
Alternative in more senses than one: the other media offer one of the few opportunities for a radical occupation, and for some the underground is a place of corporate drama. Rolling Stone, the most successful of the underground papers, has a circulation of 200,000 and has started a book publishing division, headed by an editor hired away from Holt, Rinehart and Winston (though at last report the paper had run into trouble owing to overexpansion). But commercial success is abnormal and not wholly relevant: what counts, of course, is the alternative media’s vision of who, and why, they are.
Speaking to this question recently, Paul Krassner said, “We want a chance to do some distortion of our own.” But he was mostly kidding. Krassner, the founder of The Realist and ideologue for the Yippies, was addressing a group of fellow workers in the underground press, talking to several hundred of them sprawled on a sunny Vermont hillside this past summer. The occasion was the first of what may, or may not, be an annual conference sponsored by the Alternative Media Project. It was an alternative to the straight world’s convention; problems of identity, not profits, occupied most minds. The four-day conference, at Goddard College, attracted 300 broadcasters, representatives of such papers as The Liberated Guardian and Rat, and such philosophers of the counter culture as Krassner and Baba Ram Dass (the former Richard Alpert). Every sort of communicator not associated with the “straight media” was welcome and was there (and several straight personalities, especially record company men, were there too, if not wholly welcome): about 2000 people at the peak. A chartered-plane-load flew in from California, an apparently marvelous journey of which Krassner said fondly: “I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a flight where the stewardess was turning on . . . and the captain pointed out some lightning in the sky and said, ‘That’s God’s own light show.’”
I had arrived at the conference simultaneously with a truck that said on the outside, in NASA-style lettering, “Cosmic Labs.” (The driver of the truck wanted to know the way to Montpelier. The girl at the registration booth told him to take a right on the first “real road.” “You mean the others aren’t real? Oh, far out.”) Inside, I moved across the campus and sought the crowd’s flow. Goddard College is set in a high valley and surrounded by pinewoods; architecturally it is an uneasy mixture, brownshingled, summer-place buildings amidst several small, pastel structures, which serve as dormitories. The crowd was heading through the campus and down a pine-bordered road to a field where a contingent from the New Mexican commune, the Hog Farm, had an encampment.
You might object that the Hog Farm and its many followers in the meadow (which had been provided with sanitation and water, courtesy of the college) had little to do with the “media,” but perhaps this is placing too narrow a construction on the word. One way to see the Hog Farm is as a sort of ambulatory magazine: clear instructions in how-to-live come with the commune’s festival services. They provided a great circus tent and food: garbage-can-sized containers of peanut butter, bread, brown rice, and a black kettle full of soup made from lettuce, carrots, and onions. To drink, electric lemonade in gallon jugs. Everyone who received some of the Hog Farmers’ free LSD was painted with a bright red dot on the forehead, or occasionally treated more elaborately to warpath streaks.
The Hog Farm’s buses and those of others were drawn up in a circle at noon on Friday, and in the midst of them, barebacked communicants were swigging acid from gallon jugs. A man lay spread-eagled on his back. A girl stroked his throat. He stared at the sky. His stomach, shallowly heaving, was rippled with tremors. In a moment of quiet you could hear his breath and then a choked bellow: “Hap-py! Hap-py!” he yelled.
A crew with a Sony video-tape outfit moved through the scene, shooting and taping voices, and for a while I followed them. They were Fobile Muck, a free-lance organization devoted to traveling around the country and making tapes, with which they hope to “explain the alternative world to the straight world and the other way around.” I sat with them under the Hog Farm’s circus tent and listened to their tapes. Nearby an entangled couple moved in languid copulation. On the machine, sounds of swigging, as the jug of electric lemonade went around, and a recorded voice said, “This is really alternative media.”
Meanwhile, up the hill, “workshops” were in session under such headings as “Multi-image Stereo Environment Newsletter,” “The Spiritual Responsibility of the Alternative Media,” “Capitalism and Alternative Media,” “Radical Software.” Competing with the Hog Farm’s encampment and swims in the college pond, the workshops were often sparsely attended, but they had their moments. At a discussion of “Free Enterprise and the Cultural Revolution” a man brandished a gun (“This may turn into a workshop on killing people”), and the workshop leader was assaulted by some of the audience at his workshop, carried bodily away, and rolled down a hill; ceremonial copulation was used at another to demonstrate the uselessness of words.
I have no adequate record of the ideas generated by the conference, but a random few of them follow. An intercommune linkup of ham radio operators is proposed; already the Aquarian Family of San Jose has such a rig. And techniques of guerrilla radio (broadcasting from the back of a moving truck on unused frequencies) are discussed. A revolutionary magazine aimed at radicalizing straight society is planned: America Now. Liberation News Service, the underground AP, now mails its stories; the possibilities of a genuine wire service are explored. (Ken Kesey would reportedly do the job with trucks full of Pranksters, serving as town criers.) Plans are formed to share radio tapes, and three video tape makers in New York— Video Freex, Raindance, and Global Village—discuss a national data bank of tapes: “radical software.” (Not clear how the tapes will be used— until video recorders become widely available and cable television opens the airways.) Practical information is sought: a man from a New Haven radio station has broadcast an unexpurgated Jerry Rubin speech. Does anyone know how to light an FCC complaint? And forward-looking advice is proffered: the Penguin book Civilian Resistance As a National Defense will be useful in the days of repression sure soon to come.
At the outdoor meeting, Paul Krassner surveys the crowd and says, “Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah. I’m just trying to articulate the consciousness of the group.” And defining the consciousness of the group is a problem. Has Goddard been transformed into “a fantastic energy center”? Is what is really being born here “an alternate circulatory system for information”? “A fantastic alternative to Time Inc.”? Maybe, but obstacles intrude. Women’s Lib is angry over a male-sponsored orgy the day before: “We’ll call our own.” And several speakers want to remind others not to be deceived by the green hills and sunshine. (Frank Oliver, counsel for the Chicago 15, says in a thick, deep voice, “Does any prudent person believe that a meeting like this one will be possible one year from now?”) And unavoidable schismatic questions arise. Flowers or guns? Confrontation or counterinstitutions? Politics or transcendence?
Alternative media men, like virtually everyone else, find it easier to say who they are not than who they are; perhaps this is the chief reason that the journal I heard mentioned most often was not A Different Drummer or the Berkeley Barb, but the New York Times. Even at one of the Hog Farm’s luncheons a girl with bare, tanned breasts stirred the soup in the iron kettle, and another girl chewed up carrots and spit them into the broth, remarking: “Tomorrow the New York Tunes will say ‘Hog Farm Poisons Hundreds With Regurgitated Carrots.’ ”
One organization at the conference was devoted to specifying the differences between alternative and straight, and to offering regular criticism of the aboveground press, and to making gestures, at least, at subverting them. This is the “Media Project” (distinct from the Alternative Media Project), a New York-based coalition of people from various papers and from such nonprint media as Newsreel (the film-makers) and Radio Free People (producers of political radio tapes). The MP publishes a paper of its own called Pac-O-Lies, which includes occasional unbylined pieces by straight media people.
I talked with one MP member, a man of thirty-five, who had worked in commercial television, but now is with Blue Bus, a film-making company that lives and works in a blue bus. “I was making $20,000 a year,” he said. “I had a house on Cape Ann. I had everything. I had nothing. I realized one day: I was shelling out $5000 a year to kill people.”
The man (who did not want to be identified) accompanied almost everything he said with a kind of incredulous laugh, a sound that seemed to express gratitude at being the survivor of an accident that might have been fatal. He said that he contrasted his actions with those of many of his relatives who were victims of the Nazis in Germany. “Fifty-four people in my family went right into the gas chambers thinking everything would be all right if they just kept their mouths shut.”
I promised him that if I quoted anything I would quote the Media Project’s statement on the occasion of the conference. (“I trust you as a person,” he had said, “but I don’t trust the place you work for.”) The statement appeared with a drawing of the RCA Victor logotype (“His Master’s Voice”):
This is a conference about alternative media.
We are participants in the conference who are part of the media of the political left.
We feel that for media to be a true alternative, they must be tools to build and struggle toward an alternative society. The struggle is for a society in which power is in the hands of the people. Media which create that society must also be in the hands of the people.
All media are political. The same forces control the media that control all other institutions. True alternative media do not undermine the people’s culture by making the culture a commodity. True alternative media undermine the institutions of oppression.
The Media Project published a critique of Newsweek’s cover story, early this year, on the Black Panthers. The text of the article is reproduced on the page and a running commentary follows it, in the manner of a gloss to a page of poetry. It is an interesting document, though it demands some complicated quoting.
The Newsweek piece begins: “They were the Bad Niggers of white America’s nightmares come chillingly to life—a black-bereted, black-jacketed cadre of street bloods risen up in arms against the established order.”
The MP responds: “This article reduces serious political movements to theatrical productions produced solely for the benefit of the media.”
Newsweek: “They are guerrilla theater masterfully done. . . .”
The MP: “. . . everything is transformed into a matter of style.”
Newsweek: “It matters little to the national imagination that there are fewer than 1,000 of them or that their gift for getting shot considerably exceeds their gift for shooting.”
The MP: “BULLSHIT.”
Newsweek: “If the Panthers survive as a party, they will be powerfully indebted to the police. The Panthers have fared best when they have had a martyr—a Newton bound for prison, a Cleaver in flight—and Fred Hampton’s death in bed in Chicago gave them the best martyr they have ever had.”
The MP: “Read: If the Kennedys survive as a dynasty, they will be powerfully indebted to political assassins. The Kennedys have fared best when they have had a martyr—a Joe Kennedy Jr. killed in flight, a Joe Kennedy Sr. disabled by a stroke, a Jack Kennedy murdered in Dallas— and Bobby gave them the best martyr they have ever had ....
“If you reacted to this as being in bad taste, and you didn’t react to the parallel Panther paragraph, then you begin to understand the depths of your white supremacy.”
Newsweek: [citing a Panther’s remark] “ ‘I refer to crime as being the exploitation of poor people by filthy rich, money-mad, avaricious capitalist pigs. . . .’ Tabor had mastered his catechism well.”
The MP: “Political analysis is called a catechism, an attempt to depoliticize the content of the Panther’s program. . . . The black community has been raped by this country for 200 years. . . .”
What to make of this exchange? All that seems truly dear is that no one—quoted Panthers or Newsweek or the Media Project—is engaging in something that ought to be called “political analysis.” I don’t want to enlarge that vacuum, except to admit for the record that Newsweek’s political assumptions seem defensible to me (though they ought to be made explicit), and that the Media Project’s position (though it has the virtue of candor) seems to me simplistic at its best.
There are real issues here. One can feel several ways about the Panthers, and some of those ways allow for genuine outrage on hearing, for example, Newsweek’s ironic remark that the Panthers have “a gift for getting shot.” And yet, I think there is a useful way to read the Media Project’s critique that has not much to do with politics (though I hear the MP calling this approach evil or naive), except in the broadest sense of that term.
At least this much is true: reading the article, even as I cannot swallow the MP’s ideology, I want to object, at virtually every moment they do, to Newsweek’s treatment of the subject. Assuming one is less than outraged, what is it that is troublesome? What goes wrong, for instance, at that moment when Newsweek remarks on the Panthers’ lucklessness at gunfighting? As it happens, the sentence is one on which the article turns. In a short space the Panthers have been reduced from a “black-jacketed cadre of street bloods risen up . . . against the established order,” to performers of “guerrilla theater,” to bumblers. The progression introduces Newsweek’s unstartling argument: that the Panthers are something less than a menace, and that the police must share in the responsibility for the violence between them. But the menace that Newsweek debunks seems in some measure to have been invented by the magazine: those elaborately dressed Panthers at the start were made out of straw. It is true enough, as the MP charges, that Newsweek is preoccupied with the Panthers’ style. And whether or not this amounts to “depoliticization,” it is certainly a kind of gratuitous diminishment.
The nettling thing (whether or not you are a Panther devotee) is Newsweek’s pretense at certainty. It is a pretense only, I think; sounds of stifled doubt recur in the piece, as in the edgy overkill of he “had mastered his catechism well.” But the magazine speaks as if it were addressing an audience that will find nothing to argue about, that needs no persuasion. The reader is supposed to believe what the magazine believes; indeed, is supposed to know what the magazine knows. (Thus Newsweek’s references to “bloods” and “Bad Niggers,” which say to the reader, “We are all very familiar with this scene.”) In fact, of course, many readers don’t know, and are unsure of what they believe. The function of the article is to provide minimal information, and a way-to-think about the Panthers, but under the guise of stating what is obvious to thoughtful men. The method works against exploration and complication: the magazine is not unwrapping but packaging the Panthers.
But of course in its melancholic way the Media Project is doing much the same thing. Seeing the magazine and the MP at loggerheads (and yet with more in common than either would like to admit), it is interesting to wonder if only ideology separates alternative from straight. Could the underground press have flourished these past years without the political provocations that are its central subject? My point is that it should have flourished; there are reasons for its existence that are more complex than “capitalism” or “racism,” and that will no doubt remain when Vietnam and the Panthers are memories.
One reason is that we lack a common voice. It is true that phrases move from NBC to Wyoming with unprecedented speed, become universal cliches, and evanesce (“Would you believe . . . ?” “Middle America”). But who has hold of a way of speaking that begins to be adequate even to the daily experience of the society? You can hear Newsweek struggling to speak in a tongue shared by all who listen; you can hear an allied attempt on the objective pages of the New York Times, or on these pages. “We” live in a world where the only true sentence seems to begin with “I.” I once heard a reporter for the Times defending the integrity of his job to a New York magazine editor. “I’ll believe you,” the editor said, “when they let you write in the first person.” In this situation, the alternative media’s opportunity is to allow the private voice to prosper and reinvigorate the larger language. Occasionally it does, and the MP should not, perhaps, be made to symbolize its brothers: its rhetoric (like the newsmagazines’) only illustrates a characteristic snare, the temptation to create a set of beliefs, and ways of expression, that are all too symmetrically a “counter culture.” While Newsweek cajoles, the MP throttles the reader; an alternative only in the sense that the other side of the coin is.
“. . . some distortion of our own,” Paul Krassner had said at the mass meeting, and lightly enough. Then, with what seemed to me sincerity, he offered a vision of communication in the longed-for future. He was taking off after some radicals who had played along with the system, made some money at it: the new media should be noncompetitive, and not personal showplaces; they are not for profit or ego-tripping, but all and only for the good of the movement. “What the revolution is all about,” he said, “is making no distinction between your private and your public life.”
Whatever “the revolution” may gain from our loyalty, who cannot hear the personal invitation of that remark, who has not felt a longing for the condition it implies? Freedom from compromise, from mincing distinctions, from a life lived in compartments; a wholeness of mind and purpose; authenticity. There is, though, a distance to go between here and authenticity, and questions about the route: Is, say, the Media Project’s orthodoxy freedom enough for you? And can you lose your self in confidence that there’s another waiting to be found? Well, no need to be abstract: consider the last event of the conference.
Held in Goddard’s rather opulent library, a multilevel structure with stark stone walls and plush, brightcolored carpets, the last session is a workshop on “Cartoons and the Mass Consciousness”: in the nature of things that the final meeting should not be planned as a summary, but natural too that it should, in a way, take on that function. The discussion ranges far.
—It is pointed out that radical art may be pasted irremovably onto glass windows with a concoction made of Carnation milk.
—A boy leaps into the center of the rough circle of participants, screaming, at first incoherently, until he yells in explanation: “I am the freak man! I am the freak man!” He is wrestled to the ground. A girl says afterward, “I love you for doing your own thing.”
—Clapping, in an approximation of their rhythm, occurs as two couples make love in the center of the discussion. Later, one of them explains that an invasion was once headed off somewhere, China perhaps, when the women gave themselves to the attacking army.
—Capitalism may be used to the advantage of the revolution, it is argued. “To say ‘use capitalism’ is to extend a logic that doesn’t work,” it is countered. “What do you want? Nam in Day-glo?”
—A considerable debate occurs on whether to cover the walls of the new library with graffiti. Only the cleaning ladies will suffer, someone says. “Hip the ladies, off the school,” a voice responds . . .
At moments like this the mind often turns into a camera, saving judgment for later. Had I been doing a film of the couple who. toward the end of the workshop, were making love on the floor, I think I would have resorted to a lot of stylized editing—perhaps beginning the sequence with the girl’s blond head flung sideways, her gasps, her partner‘s twitching, thrusting buttocks; and back then to the unhasty preparations and to the friend of the couple who bent over to talk to them as they began; and finally to the girl’s face as she stood, still naked, afterwards (though it would have been right to prepare for this with the quickest cut), her lips tremulously holding a cigarette, her face abruptly uncertain and inward. The point of all this, I guess, would have been to suggest that the distinction between public and private life is not often a thing to surrender.