University of California Berkeley
Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California
Berkeley, California
Gerd Stern
FROM BEAT SCENE POET TO PSYCHEDELIC MULTIMEDIA ARTIST
IN SAN FRANCISCO AND BEYOND, 1948-1978
With an Introduction by
Ivan Majdrakoff
Interviews Conducted by
Victoria Morris Byerly
in 1996
Copyright 2001 by The Regents of the University of California
and by Gerd Stern
Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral history is a method of
collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a
narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-
informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the
historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for
continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected
manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.
************************************
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between The Regents of the University of California and Gerd Stern
dated June 21, 1996. The manuscript is thereby made available for
research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including
the right to publish, are jointly reserved to The Bancroft Library
of the University of California, Berkeley, and to Gerd Stern. No
part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the
written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the
University of California, Berkeley, or of Gerd Stern.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Bancroft Library,
Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley 94720-6000, and
should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted,
anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
The legal agreement with Gerd Stern requires that he be notified of
the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Gerd Stern, "From Beat Scene Poet to
Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San
Francisco and Beyond, 1948-1978," an oral
history conducted in 1996 by Victoria
Morris Byerly, Regional Oral History
Office, The Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley, 2001.
Copy no.
Gerd Stern etcetera by Bobbi Carey, Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa 1940.
Cataloging Information
Stern, Gerd (b. 1928) Artist/poet
From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San Francisco and
Beyond, 1948-1978, 2001, ix, 397 pp.
Childhood and education in New York City; discovering poetry; moving to
California, 1940s; writing poetry; meeting Allen Ginsberg, Maya Angelou;
marriage to Jane Hill; marriage to Ann London; writing for Playboy
magazine, 1960s; living on houseboat in Sausalito; USCO (multimedia art);
marriage to Sally Shaw; Michael Callahan and Intermedia Systems Corp.;
entering family cheese import business; reflections on art, poetry,
counterculture, drugs, and the cheese industry. Includes sixty poems, with
some commentary.
Introduction by Ivan Majdrakoff , longtime friend and collaborator.
Interviewed 1996 by Victoria Morris Byerly, Regional Oral History
Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
TABLE OF CONTENTS--Gerd Stern
INTRODUCTION by Ivan Majdrakoff i
INTERVIEW HISTORY by Victoria Morris Byerly vii
A Few Lines by Jak Simpson ix
I 1930s: A NEW YORK CITY CHILDHOOD 1
Immigration to the U.S. 2
Family Cheese Business 2
Father and Stepmother s Parenting 3
College and Leaving Home 4
The East Village and New Friends 5
Jewish Background and Education 8
Bookstores and Village Authors 8
Black Mountain College and Poetry 9
II LATE 1940s: CALIFORNIA AND THE WEST COAST ALTERNATIVE 10
Elaine Goldman and San Francisco 10
Poetry and California Life 10
Big Sur and Jaime D Angulo 11
Jane and Wally Hill 12
Developing a Poetic Style 12
Virginia City Mines 13
North Carolina 15
Back to New York 16
III 1950s: POETRY AND THE BEAT AESTHETIC 18
In the Psychiatric Institute: Carl Solomon and Allen Ginsberg 18
John Hoffman and the Norwegian M.S. Bowhill 20
Poetry and Trouble in Brazil 22
Hitchhiking to California 23
Hitchhiking with Jane to New York 23
Arrival in New York and Odd Jobs 24
New Paltz, New York 26
Marriage to Jane Hill 28
The Barge 36
Boobam Bamboo Company 38
Lewis Hill 40
More of Life on the Barge 41
Bill Buck 42
Maya Angelou 44
IV 1960s: PLAYBOY MAGAZINE AND SAN FRANCISCO HIGH SOCIETY 47
Marriage to Ann London 47
Playboy Magazine 52
The Sausalito Houseboat 54
Public Relations Work 55
Sausalito Houseboat Revisited and Maya Angelou 60
Single Life after Ann on the Barge 65
Move Back East 66
Visual Poems 67
"The Land" Artistic Community 68
Back to California 71
Psychedelic Multimedia 74
Taking the USCO Show on the Road: Vancouver, Seattle, The
Psychedelic Theater and the Timothy Leary Lecture, MIT,
New York, Riverside Museum, the LSD Conference, Harvard 75
Intermedia Continued 106
Marriage to Sally Shaw 108
V 1970s: ART AND PSYCHEDELICS 110
Michael Callahan and Intermedia Systems Corp. 110
Jonathan Altman 110
Rabbi Zalman Schachter and Other Eastern Spiritual Influences 111
John Brockman and USCO 116
Huey Newton 117
University of California, Santa Cruz 118
The Venezuela Project 119
Intermedia Goes Kaput 123
VI 1980s: FOOD AND POLITICS 126
Entering the Family s Cheese Import Business 126
Jamaica 134
Jamaican Marijuana 136
Rastafarians 136
Jamaican Food Imports 136
Global Village 137
VII 1990s: REFLECTIONS 138
Writing Poetry and Memories of the Reality Club 138
John Brockman 138
Stewart Brand 141
Israel: Karl Katz and "The House of the Diaspora" 143
Returning to Poetry 147
Sexual Identity 148
Sexual Thesis in Poetry 151
Kinetic Poetry 153
Disillusions, Obscenities, Corruptions 155
VIII POETRY 157
Poetry 157
"The Poet s Premise" 159
"Reflection, A Fragment" 160
"PEAK Song" 160
Elaine Goldman & "Harvest 1" 161
"He" 163
"Yin Chant" 163
"L Autre 1" 164
"L Autre 2" 164
Sami Rubinstein 165
More Poetry 166
Marga Richter and "Relations (one)" 166
"Day after Year" 168
"The Idea of Order at Key West" 170
"Fragment; after W. B. Yeats" 170
Afterimage 170
"Zum Gedachtnis" 171
"Stern Airlines" 171
"Afterimage" 172
"Bad to Believe" 173
"Grounds" 174
"Eppes Epic" 175
"Reflections Before Rising" 176
"Mirage" 177
"Mea Culpa" 178
"Harvest Tale" 178
"After" 179
Untitled Poem 179
"Oh You" 179
"Why Yes" 180
Sidonie 180
"Difficulties in the Beginning"
1
181
"About Us" 182
"That Y Am Matt ..." 182
"Go Man" 183
Hugh Hefner and "Hip Hip for Hef" 183
"Baby Blues" 184
"Prejudiced or Something" 184
"Strength of Inaccurate Convictions" 184
Untitled 185
"My
Joint is Out of Time" 185
"Paradiddles" 185
"The Cock Horse" 187
"Enjoy Gravity" 188
"Watch Out" 189
"The Priestess Gagged" 189
"Poetry at the Paraclete" 190
"One of Many" 191
"The Bomb Syndrome" 191
"Now" 192
"Public Hanging" 193
"A
Dirty Story" 194
"Necessity is a Mother" 195
"If You Can t Count Don t Blow" 196
"Take Five Jungle" 197
"You Think You re So What" 197
"Shock Strike Toggle" 198
Other Poetry; Michael Callahan 200
More Poetry 200
"Poppa-Wopper" 200
"No Man Like to Dead" 202
"Me without You" 203
"Caribella Poems for Sally" 204
"Conspire": A Poem for Radha 216
"Poemthink" 217
"Checkin
1
the Set" 226
"Against the Main Gain Game" 227
"The Idea of Order at Key West" 228
IX CONTEMPLATIONS ON BOHEMIAN LIFESTYLE 230
Chronology with Leaving Home 230
Migrating to the East Side 230
Moving to a Coal Bin 231
Getting Back to California 231
Pivotal Occasions 231
Richard Wirtz Emerson s Archives 232
Disillusionment in Life 232
Lew Hill and KPFA 232
Elsie Petersen 233
The Post Office 235
More on Early Reminiscences 236
Radio 236
Museum of Modern Art 237
Almay Cosmetics 237
Mona Carmel and the Ideational 238
Music As Major Influence 239
Ska 239
Black Mountain and M.C. Richards 240
Recurring Themes /Targets of Opportunity 240
John Brockman and The Reality Club 241
Jimmy the Greek of Greenwich Village 242
Nature 244
The Sternist Movement 244
More on Mining 246
Early Marijuana Smoking 247
Maya Angelou 247
LSD 249
After the Mental Hospital: Life with Father 250
Kinetic Art 252
As a Marginalized Poet 253
Art as Preoccupation with Technology 254
Relationship between Poetry and Artwork 257
Michael Callahan and Video Technology 261
Steve Durkee and Stewart Brand 263
X ART 265
Michael Callahan 265
The Tape Center 266
The San Francisco Museum Show: "Contact Is the Only Love" 268
"The Verbal American Landscape" 269
The Reviews: "Landmark of a Flop" 274
The Technology: Then and Now 275
"Who Are You and What s Happening?" 276
Billie Master 277
"Resurrection" 278
The Billie Master and NO OW NOW 281
On the Road Performances and Noteworthy Meetings 282
Salt Lake City Performance 282
Charles Campbell s Gallery, California State University at
Hayward, California College of Arts and Crafts 283
IBM Meeting 285
University of Rochester 286
Woodstock Artists Association 286
The Box Show 287
Prayer Wheel 287
Remsen and Rosie Woods, Process for Making Diffraction
Gratings 288
Our Time Base Is Real 289
Visual Gallery Shows 290
Counter Influences in New York 291
Bill Graham 292
The Wetshows 292
Ronny Davis and the Mime Troupe 292
Ann Halperin 293
Harry Partch s Morals 293
Cramps: A Classic Big Ampex Tape Recorder 294
Magnetic Tape, 1963 295
Refugee Syndrome 296
International Federation for Internal Freedom 297
The Timothy Leary Lectures 298
Mekas Brothers and the Avant Garde Film Scene 301
Carolee Schneeman 301
Ghost Rev 303
Jud Yalkut 303
MIT s Harold Edgerton 304
Saarinen 305
Michael s Kick-ass Controller 305
Paul Lee 306
Rhode Island School of Design 307
Richard Kostelanetz 307
Ken Dewey and Terry Riley 307
Michael Myerberg 308
Kublai Khan Styled Pleasure Dome 309
Lily Ente 309
Murray Kaufman and the Multimedia Theatre Discoteque 310
The Incredible Idofor 4 310
The LSD Conference 311
On the Cover of Life Magazine 312
USCO and Jud Yalkut s Film 313
Llama Foundation 313
The Confidet Commercial 314
On the Front Page of the Wall Street Journal 315
More on LSD Conference 316
The Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston 317
Maverick Systems Company 318
Michael Callahan Becomes Technical Director at the Carpenter
Arts Center, Harvard University 319
XI CONTEMPLATIONS ON WEST COAST BOHEMIAN CULTURE 320
Influences of Spiritual Content 320
Life Below the Skin of Society 321
San Francisco s Openness to the Arts 321
The Country Coming to San Francisco 322
Media s Impact on Style 322
Taking Advantage of the Historical Era 323
Bob Rauschenberg 323
Herb Caen and the "Beats" 32 A
The Restrictions of Contemporary Technology in Process 325
The Cheese Industry 326
Cheese and Its Metaphors 326
A Profession May Not Be an Occupation 326
Becoming President of the American Cheese Society 326
Cheese in California 327
European Cheeses 327
Migrating People Replicating Ethnic Foods 328
Computers and Technology Affecting Cheese 328
Preventing or Promoting Illness 329
Being Creative, Responsible, and Ethical in the World 329
TAPE GUIDE 330
APPENDIX 332
A USCO pamphlet 333
B Flier, "Don t Flee the Scene Salty" 385
C Flier, "Twice a Man" 386
D Letter from Department of Art, University of Utah, 1964 387
E Flier, "The Beard," 1967 388
F Flier, "Murray the K s World" 389
INDEX 391
.
INTRODUCTION by Ivan Majdrakoff
To introduce Gerd Stern, my path is to recall my dehydrated
memories. It was in New York s P.S. 187 concrete school yard that I was
first aware of Gerd. Thick glasses and short pants signaled
"different." His name then was Jack.
Later in my drama class at the High School of Music and Art, he
emerged for me as a personality but an outsider. He was going to the
prestigious Bronx High School of Science. I was aware that he had been
successfully involved in a science competition with his own biology
project. He then also became involved with our amateur theater group,
called "The
Rolling Players," named after our director, Hubert Rolling.
We did many ambitious, passionate, "serious" plays together. About that
time, and very startling to me, he, Jack, decided to change his name
back to the original German, Gerd.
Our friendship grew and I discovered myself as the only one at his
early graduation from William Howard Taft High School, to which he had
switched. He now had his own room away from home. I recall drawing
there from a nude person. It was almost an illicit feeling. Most
adult !
While I worked for a year in my father s portrait photography
studio, we slightly drifted apart. He, having left home, had another
life and now was somehow living in Greenwich Village which in those days
meant beret-Bohemia. The next summer, I worked at a kosher summer camp
in upstate New York. Out walking on a day off, amazingly, I
encountered, coming from the other direction, a sandalled Gerd, also
hiking. We now became closer linked, even though for the next three
years I was attending the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside of Detroit.
After Cranbrook, I returned to New York. We connected, did similar
things, knew some of the same people, and moved in criss-crossed paths.
I was aware of some hospitalization weirdness of Gerd s but I linked
this to the vagaries of living in the Village. About then, I
illustrated, or rather abstractly interpreted, Gerd s first book of
poems. This really made me confront his chanted, very solo-word voice.
It was a lean, demanding territory.
An art gallery job was offered to me at the University of
Minnesota and I was soon to leave. Gerd now had a west-side apartment
and was involved with an older woman-- Jane! She had left her husband
and children for Gerd. Phew! Going away, they lent me their apartment
where I held a farewell party. I decorated the walls with dozens of
head drawings. The next morning, I cleaned up, and left for Minnesota
in a $25, 1936 black Buick.
ii
That winter, 1 returned to New York to marry the painter and ex-
musician and artist, Julia Pearl. We spent our first married night in
New Paltz, New York, with Gerd and Jane. Memorable was the meal of a
very large white rabbit--a pet that Gerd and I had reluctantly shot and
butchered.
After three years at Minnesota where I had become Acting Director
of the University Gallery, Julia and I decided to move to California.
Mutual correspondence and criss-cross meetings with him continued over
these years. Contact was maintained.
Arriving in California, we stayed on Jane and Gerd s Sausalito
barge and visited them also on Partington Ridge in Big Sur. Jane helped
us look for a place to live. One barge night, I remember a group
conversation about verbal visualization. Say the word "rose" and what
image comes to mind? The variety of responses was fascinating. To hear
Gerd claim that he thought of it only as an idea and abstraction, unlike
my pink Whitman Chocolate sampler box image that flashed in my mind, was
jolting.
In later years, another conversation boiled down to his insistent
phrase, "think of the world as object." Often as a painting and drawing
teacher, this was to be a useful and important pointer. It focus sed on
the relationship between meaning and its physical coat, or the
psychological intertwined with the pictorial. The focus was on all the
grappling that visual form demands . It encouraged me to expand my use
of words, numbers, and phrases in painting and assemblage. I spend
several years working over this territory that Gerd had gestured
towards. It has never left me.
To go back, his connection to Jane, an earth and woods mother, was
profound. There was a first birth, Adam, and a second birth, Radha,
whom I still remember holding in my arms on that barge . Now that I
think of it, it was the first just-born that I had ever held.
Upon arrival in the Bay Area, I immediately got involved in one of
Gerd s group productions. It was a puppet show, and I recall my
recording the voice of the newly arrived hip, heavily accented New
Yorker. Gerd s voice languorously intoned a laid-back Kenneth Rexroth.
It was originally done in San Francisco s Fugazi Hall, and later to a
crowd on the Sausalito barge.
Gerd s life seemed to dramatically change after Jane s departure.
Ann London arrived on the scene. Ann was good-looking, literate, and a
poet. Julia and I shared their wedding day. Quickly it seemed, Gerd
became a public relations person, and actually had some good accounts.
I recall Alexis 1
Tangier, for one. Herb Caen also seemed part of Gerd s
expanding territory. Certainly to me, this was a new and surprising
placeanother world of words. There was Bill Ryan s Contact magazine.
ill
I contributed a black-and-white drawing and did a composite collage head
for the Criminal Man issue. It was the literary world. For instance, I
got to meet Theodore Roethke, and spent time with Evan Connell.
Ann and Gerd conceived of a very ambitious subscription project,
called "Poems in Folio," for which I did their logo--a lyre. Also in
another issue, I did a color drawing for a Louise Bogan poem. Their
collaboration gave monthly subscribers a beautifully printed broadside
poem. It was a combination of a fine Bay Area press printing of a new
poem by a nationally-acclaimed poet.
Later, after separation from Ann, Gerd returned to the East Coast.
He eventually took up with Judi. After a while he showed up in
California with Judi. He was very excited by all the new ramifications
of Pop Art and the electronic world. I was only too willing to listen,
as I had gone through a backwash decade of what has since been called
Abstract Expressionism. He saw that I had been painting words and said
that it was unlike anyone in New York. When he lectured at San Jose
State College, I went along and chimed in with my new pop enthusiasm.
We also did a performance with multiple projectors flashing word slides.
These I photographed. At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, we
took over their vast rotunda space. There were screens and constructed
booths within which personal interviews were held. There were many
voice-overs and projected words and phrases culled from what Gerd called
"The Verbal American Landscape." This complex, raucous performance was
greeted with bewilderment and confusion. The second night, it came very
close to creating an audience riot.
Sometime later, at a party, he asked me if I wanted to do a film
with him. And I said "sure." But I did insist we spend discussion time
to be sure we understood each other s point of view as much as possible
before we started. We made the film, and it was an adventure. George
Walker, the attorney, backed us and eventually we needed his help with
censorship problems. In a Victorian house next to the Stockton Tunnel,
I filmed at a six- inch distance a close-up trip upon Judi s body. This,
combined with road-striping and several hundred road signs, was
eventually edited into a 12-minute, 16 mm black-and-white film called
"Y." There were several hundred cuts and Gerd and I collaged/edited it
together. The soundtrack, done by Michael Callahan, was orgasmic
breathing and the roaring of trucks. Earlier film of pubic hair (and
armpit hair) was seized in the lab. George had to threaten legal action
to get it back. Out of context we were dead, but we prevailed. It was
a moving, nervous film. Amazingly, it won awards and we also eventually
showed it commercially in North Beach.
Gerd also stimulated my attitude towards the presentation of
events that I put together independently and called performances. These
were in Fresno, San Jose, and for the San Francisco Art Institute s
iv
"Farewell to the Back Yard." They used multiple projectors, film,
slides, tapes, and other diversionsa general audience media assault.
Later, at the San Francisco Arleigh Gallery of Lee Carlson, I was
given two backroom galleries. There I made an environment and included
my painting, assemblages, and collages. Additionally, all the senses
were engaged- -smell, uneven flooring, flashing lights, Vietnam machine-
gun fire and the collaged music of that time. Interspersed in all of
this, Gerd s influence was strong. His earlier participation in an LSD
conference in San Francisco, for instance, had found me aggressively
handling a spot-light that continually disturbed the audience. I then
moved naturally into the assemblage area with a successfully reviewed
show called "Things." That exhibit announced for me the firm arrival of
my assemblage attitude.
Gerd left San Francisco and took "Y" and what seemed like a group
of people on the road, ending up on the East Coast. I ve just come
across a lost accumulated correspondence from 1964-1965. There are over
seventy closely typed pages from his side and I m amazed by his drive,
rushed energy, and clarity as he described ongoing projects and future
possibilities. Alas, all my other correspondence with him was destroyed
in the Oakland firestorm of 1991. We saw each other on my trips to New
York and vice versa. So I was aware of his multi-media development in
Woodstock, N.Y., and eventually his move to Cambridge, Mass. My ex-wife
Julia Pearl was then Intermedia Systems art director.
When he came to the West Coast, we would often meet together. I
was now married to Ruth. Our exchanges and interests were personal and
creatively ongoing. While we were together we seldom saw our original
high school friends. In fact, a hostility on the part of a number of my
old friends towards him startled me. They refused to respond or to
believe in him as a poet. As the years have passed, I have wondered
about this and recognized on my part a constant conviction and loyalty.
As an artist, I ve been strongly influenced by him and respond to Gerd s
myriad world of words. For four decades, I ve been exploring words and
feel confident in using them in my art. It s a natural part of me.
His attitude towards classical poetry and that of his
contemporaries seems to me to be guarded. Broadly, I think, his
seeming avoidance of nouns and lyric or narrative sweep makes audiences
work hard. He demands people respond, and the beat-beat simplicity is
off-putting to many. That, and not publishing traditionally, have
delayed the evaluation of his poetry. But for me, there was always a
flow of work coming out. His letter-writing voice is poetry. The
writing is so multi- level- -the pun, joke, duality, over and over. This
alertness is his poetry.
My own feeling toward "poetry" has always been cautious, even
confused. I knew it existed, read a bit, and as a heavy book reader
myself could not avoid considering it. But I ve seen that I m not a
natural abstractionist, perhaps more an expressionist with formalist
tendencies and most of this in the fantasy world of the mind. At times
I do give myself to visual, graphic pictorialization. My ability in
this world still shocks me and I tend to avoid it. Perhaps for me the
poetic is represented by the lyric.
Now comes a newfound power. Gerd began making thingsassembling
and collaging occurred. His arrival in San Francisco with new pieces
was a great joy. I liked and approved of the direction. One remembers
his carpentry skills and his ongoing interest in the contemporary
painting world. I thought he was trying to fuse the word and object.
It brings a smile to think that we now hang together in Renee di Rosa s
collection in Napa.
As I watch the arch of his life from afar, particularly during the
USCO days, it seems apparent that a huge part of his medium is people.
Gerd s involvement with people is part of his palette. He easily moves
from the "I" to the "We"--a natural collaborationist.
He has always seemed to intuit where the action is. His multiple
contacts who were often on the leading edge continually surprised. He
operated naturally in that area and only occasionally did I get a peek,
a taste. These introduced contacts and brief events were always
interesting but I never overly pursued them. Gerd s vision is to look
out, contact, and then gather people and mold them to make events.
Projects were always ongoing. It reveals his great creative gathering
strength.
Years ago I asked him if he planned to write a book about his life
and I lamented having lost most of his letters in the fire. He said
"no." But he is almost doing it in this vast monologue. He once said
of my father, the photographer M. I. Boris, that he was the first
example of a father that creatively seemed to know what he wanted to do
and was doing it. This finding of one s own way seems one of Gerd s
quests. He swings through different media. Just to list a few of his
project involvements would start to reveal his scope. "Poems in Folio,"
"Teleportraits,
"
poetry, conferences, tapes, films, electronic systems,
object-making, multi-media efforts and recording. They all add up. I
used "Billie Master," Gerd s half-hour collage tape of voices made from
KPFA s archives, in my experimental classes at the San Francisco Art
Institute. All these are bindings of an intricately wrapped collaged
figure. And the message is sometimes delivered verbally with ecstatic,
messianic, almost rabbinical verve. Gerd s taped history is not only an
attempt to document, but also to unwind and clarify what I am convinced
is a unique fading historical time span. Perhaps he has verbally
written a book!
vi
Let me end here with some personal speculation. He has been a
hard worker, a builder, and a wordsmith. His life has been one of
elasticity. The word chain is there, binding it all. There is his
sense of humor, at times wry, cynical, but most often he sees the
comedy. There is a collage pounding sexuality to his life. He has been
criticized as an operator, an entrepreneur. Of course money has been a
nagging source of concern in his life. It even might be a nemesis to
him. The role of women in his life seems a drama world in itself. I
appreciate Gerd s putting on tape his analysis of his relationship with
his father. There also is a pleasure in hearing Gerd s thumbnail
descriptions of well-known public figures. Most often there he is
generous, fair and apparently quite accurate. He is also a thoughtful
connoisseur of the good life. The section of this oral history on the
topic of cheese is a passionate gem!
These remarks --kaleidoscopic in natureare concerned mainly with
our relationship and are mostly without precise dates. I believe that
as you listen or read, you will be led through a map of a particular
fading time. You will also follow an evolving life that develops slowly
into an amazing photo. Here is the portrait of a person involved in
recreating and redefining himself as a complex artist. This ground
breaking time in America s cultural history should be recognized for its
unique seminal contributions. And Gerd s journey, which is complex,
rich, and ambiguous, is certainly not yet over. Sail on Gerd!
Ivan Majdrakoff
October 1998
vii
INTERVIEW HISTORY Gerd Stern
Gerd Stern arrived in San Francisco in the late forties just
as the Beat scene was emerging here. Shortly after moving to the
California Bay Area, he found himself with his new wife, Jane Hamner,
living on a barge in Sausalito in the middle of an alternative bohemian
culture of poetry and art. There he experienced the spirit of the times
set against the backdrop of jazz musicians, weed, all-night parties
around bottles of cheap wine, free love, and the birthing of a radical
and iconoclastic alternative aesthetic.
By 1953, Stern was publishing his own poetry and was one of the
founders of the Boobam Bamboo Drum Company, which produced a musical
instrument that resembled the bongo drum. Later, he went on to write
for Playboy magazine and, after Jane, was lover and manager of Maya
Angelou. By the late sixties, Stern was a counterculture artist
producing innovative kinetic art that involved light shows and surround
sound, and as a founder of the artistic company USCO, produced the
Timothy Leary Psychedelic Theatre. His avant-garde style, which was
representative of the late sixties and early seventies psychedelic art,
was taken seriously by both Harvard University and the University of
California at Santa Cruz where he held lectureships. His artwork drew
national attention in both Newsweek and Life magazines.
Stern and colleague Michael Callahan formed Intermedia Systems
Corporation, in cooperation with a group from Harvard Business School
during the seventies, which produced multimedia art internationally.
Stern and Intermedia consulted and produced projects for the Venezuelan
government under Presidents Raphael Caldera and Carlos Andres Perez, for
the United States Government, as well as for the National Endowment for
the Arts and others. As the seventies gave way to a more reserved
eighties, Stern gravitated back to New York City where, with his step
brother, he carried on his family s international cheese import
business, always maintaining his creation of poetry.
I met Gerd Stern as an interviewee for another ROHO oral history
project on the San Franciscan bohemian anarchist artist Shirley Triest.
I leaned from that initial interview that Stern had his own historically
valuable account of the California counterculture movements of the
fifties, sixties, and seventies, and after finding the funding to do so,
we set out to document his story. What the reader will find impressive
here is Stern s excellent memory of the names of the many people who
were involved at the center and along the periphery of late 20th century
California social and political history, a cultural history that
reverberated throughout the nation.
viii
This work represents a compilation of twenty-one tape recordings
of interviews which I recorded in April and July 1996; it was supported
by the children of Jane Hamner Buck. The interviewer in this particular
interview exerted little influence on the direction of the interview as
Stern s intense recollections proceeded without interruption for as long
as eight hours at a time. These first interviews occurred in the spring
of 1996. Stern returned to the Bay Area that summer and invited his
long-time friend and former associate of Intermedia Systems Corp.,
Michael Callahan, to collaborate on this project. The conversation
between the two of them, included here, deals specifically with the
early history of multimedia art technology. Also, Stern read some of
his published and unpublished poems here, an inclusion which represents
a different style of oral history than is standard for the Regional Oral
History Office.
The appendix of this volume includes various memorabilia of art
shows and other artistic productions.
I was pleased to work with Gerd Stern on this project and have
personally benefitted from his intimate connection to and participation
in the beat and counterculture waves of bohemianism in the California
Bay Area.
The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to
augment through tape-recorded memoirs the Library s materials on the
history of California and the West. Copies of all interviews are
available for research use in The Bancroft Library and in the UCLA
Department of Special Collections. The office is under the direction of
Willa K. Baum, Division Head, and the administrative direction of
Charles B. Faulhaber, James D. Hart Director of The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley.
Victoria Morris Byerly
Interviewer / Editor
June 2000
Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
ix
the no you said yes to
brought yesterday, now
the way you made contact, love
made now, so wow!
so now
love will show and
the curtain will rise, and
the lights will dim low
jak
I 1930s: A NEW YORK CITY CHILDHOOD
[Interview 1: April 14, 1996] ##*
Stern: I was born on Columbus Day on October 12, 1928, in a place called
Saargebiet, which means Saar basin. And it s actually the basin
of the river Saar. It s right on the border of Germany and
France . In fact , my mother s grave is in a Jewish cemetery in
Saarbriicken, which is the name of the town. The gate of the
cemetery is now in Germany, and the actual grave is in France, so
you can see how borderline a little place it was .
The Saargebiet was the subject of a major controversy
between Germany and France for a long time after the first world
war, in which my father fought in the German army. It was a
protectorate of the League of Nations, and it was the first place
that [Adolf] Hitler took over, and he took it by plebiscite, which
is a form of election. But it was a totally phony election
because he sent in hordes of native Germans who were not citizens
of the Saar to vote in the election, and they forced their way in,
and he won. So we left.
By that time, my mother had died. She died very suddenly of
causes that now would have been treated with penicillin or
antibiotics. My grandmother, who was my closest friend, had left
for the United States to join her son. My father and my mother s
sister and brother were married to each other, which kind of
complicated the familial situation. And my uncle--my mother s
brother had emigrated to the United States. He was a doctor, and
he lived in the Bronx in New York. He brought to America his
mother- -my grandmother- -whom I missed a lot. About the same time,
my father decided to remarry, and I was deposited in Luxembourg
with his new mother-in-law. We left the Saar because of all the
political upheaval, and we were waiting for visas and permission
L
## This symbol indicates that a tape or tape segment has begun or
ended. A guide to the tapes follows the transcript.
to come to the United States. We needed a sponsorship, and that
sponsorship came through an aunt of mine who had lived in the
United States for many years. Anyway, I had a period in
Luxembourg which was rather difficult, and we went to Belgium to
get our visas, and eventually we boarded the S.S. Washington,
which some years later was sunk when it became a troop ship.
Immigration to the U.S.
Stern: We arrived in New York on April Fools Day in 1936, and I was
hurried off the ship to the home of my uncle, the doctor, because
I was in extreme pain. I didn t even get to see the Statue of
Liberty. I wound up having an appendicitis operation my first
week in America. My first literary experience in English occurred
when one of my nurses read Little Black Sambo to me. She gave me
the book when I left the hospital. I remember the tiger [turning
to butter] running around the tree. I had been used to German
children s stories, which are rather horrible: the kid who won t
have his hair cut, the kid who grows his nails and won t cut them,
the Suppen Caspar; I mean, they were all punitive, exemplary,
disciplinary tales. Grimm is grim, right?
Byerly: Very Grimm. [laughter]
Stern: So we arrived, and first we settled in the Bronx, and then
eventually we moved to Washington Heights, which was later
referred to as Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson. It was a neighborhood for
refugee German Jews.
Family Cheese Business
Byerly: This is in New York City?
Stern: Yes, upper Manhattan. And my father continued the family
tradition in the cheese importing business. He had taken over my
mother s father s--my grandfather s--business in the Saar after my
grandfather had died some years before. My father had been in a
different business but he took over the business and rescued it,
and then transported some of the representations to the United
States. Those connections became dormant because of the war, but
he became one of the first importers of cheese from Denmark,
Holland, and Switzerland into the United States. Switzerland was
his major importation at that time.
I went to New York City public schools, then on to high
school. During all those years I had an extremely difficult time
with my stepmotherunderstandable later, but not at the time by a
small boy. I was probably not a very nice child. I wore thick
glasses, and I was dressed in a European fashion, which was always
a problem to me because the other kids wore knickers while I was
wearing shorts. I was an object of derision. And when they wore
long pants, I had graduated to knickers. [chuckles]
Father and Stepmother s Parenting
Stern: My father was a strong disciplinarian. I was shuttled back and
forth between my grandmother and her son the doctor and my aunt--
my father s youngest sister they were the two youngest of ten.
My stepmother and I didn t get along at all. My father took a
strong hand, and I was always encouraged by my aunt and my uncle
to spill all the beans of my horror stories, and of course that
didn t help anything. In fact, they were a negative influence.
Although it was in the guise of being my confidants and friends,
my "rebellions" emanated from those circumstances.
I was an avid reader; I started going to the local library
very early when people didn t even think I could read the books
that I borrowed. I struck up a friendship with the librarian, and
she allowed me to take out books which were beyond a child s
permission: The Three Musketeers, Victor Hugo, [Leo] Tolstoy,
[Fyodor] Dostoevsky, I read quite early.
I was somewhat an enforced loner. Eventually, before I left
public school, I found a couple of other outcast members of the
class, and we spent a lot of time together. My weekends were
always in the Bronx with my uncle and aunt, and with my cousin who
was a little younger than me. He and I were very close, but then
he was somewhat manipulative, and I was somewhat naive. Anyway,
about the time I was at the Bronx High School of Science I became
involvedthrough my English teacher, Dr. Gordon at the Museum of
Natural History in New York where her brother, Dr. Myron Gordon,
was a research ichthyologist. In the meantime, I had become very
enamored of tropical fish, and although my father wouldn t allow
much of an involvement at home, I had friends who bred them and
who collected them and whose parents were much more supportive.
So I joined the Aquarium Club at school and at the Museum of
Natural History.
Somehow through that connection I met people in the
Astronomy Club at the Hayden Planetarium which was in the museum,
and we used to go out into Central Park with telescopes and watch
the stars . I became friendly with a girl who was going to the
High School of Music and Art, and I started hanging out there. I
then re-met Ivan Majdrakoff , a neighbor who had gone to the same
public school as I P.S. 187, Manhattan. We became close friends.
Also, there was a circle of friends who had already decided to
become artists or actors or writers, and I fell in with them.
We spent gobs and gobs of time together, and I started
ignoring my studies at Bronx Science. Eventually, in order to get
finished with high school in a hurry, I transferred to a much
easier school where my Bronx Science credits helped me, and I was
able to get out early. Now, that wasn t really early because I
had started late in public school due to my arrival in the U.S. at
the age of seven. I was a year behind. Of course, I didn t know
English the first couple of years too well, although I wound up
being one of the more literate students by the time I left that
school.
I wasn t quite sure what my connection was to all this
creative ferment among my new friends, and I was having more and
more trouble at home because I would stay out what now would not
be considered late, but at the time, I would stay out late, which
meant after six o clock. When my nineteen-year-old gets home at
three in the morning, I think that s normal. [laughter] Anyway,
six o clock; that was difficult.
College and Leaving Home
Stern: I was also working. My father took me down to the local grocer
when I was about nine, and I started lugging packages for a nickel
a shtikel, five cents per delivery. Later, I worked as a
temporary at the post office. I did that for some time; it paid
much better than anything else in those days. It was hard work,
but it was fairly easy to do, and the people were nice to work
with- -most of them.
Anyway, I left home when my stepbrother was born. There was
a lot of excitement around that, and I just kind of slipped out.
With my earnings from the post office, I rented a furnished room
just a few blocks away but in a poorer neighborhood than where my
parents lived. My leaving was accepted because the apartment was
too small for all of us anyway, and I had been sleeping out in the
hall, which was not something I enjoyed as a teenager. I had a
half-sister and now a baby half-brother.
Byerly: How old were you?
Stern: Probably sixteen, seventeen. That was much younger those days
than it is now. I don t have a good idea of timeline and I don t
remember the years. I couldn t tell you what year I graduated
high school or exactly when all this went on.
But my next step was I needed to get a better job. I
started my freshman year at the City College of New York, although
I wanted to go to Cornell and study zoology, particularly
ichthyology.
Anyway, I didn t like CCNY; I couldn t stand it. On the day
that my English instructor asked us to write a composition on "Our
Summer Vacation," I decided to leave. I mean, I had already been
through all that, and that wasn t what I thought the university
was going to be like. And the other thing was the buildings at
CCNY were connected by underground passages; I felt like I was in
a totally Rafkaesque environment, having recently read [Franz]
Kafka- -it had quite a powerful influence on me.
Anyhow, CCNY was not a long period; it was a few weeks. I
then somehow gravitated downtown toward Greenwich Village, and I
got a job through the newspaper classifieds at a place called
Almay Cosmetics, which, I believe, still exists. At that time, it
was owned by a liquor company, Schiefflin. They called me an
assistant chemist, and I was in charge of this little ball mill by
which I ground up various things to make custom anti-allergic
cosmetics.
The East Village and New Friends
Stern: The important part of that story is that it brought me downtown to
what s now the East Village (although it was at that time not
considered the Village, but very close--just a few blocks away).
And I wandered around with some of my friends from Music and Art
whom I had met through Elsie Peterson, the young woman I had met
at the museum and who kind of got me into the whole music and art
crowd. She was working for a jeweler, Henry Lobell, in the
Village by that time. I visited her there, and I went to this
pottery shop next door and met a guy who was working there,
Stanley Gould, and he introduced me to some people. Before I knew
it, I was sharing an apartment with somebody who turned out to be
a junkie, but I didn t know a junkie from a hole in the ground, I
was so naive back then.
It was really a very intense period; the energy of my youth
and the dive into a world so different from the world I had grown
up in. My first apartment in the Village was with a guy named
Dick Winard, whose real name was Winanski, and he was a junkie.
We were basically sleeping in the same bed. And I didn t
understand what he was up to. He was taking injections, but I
thought maybe he had an illness. [laughter] That just gives you
an idea of where my head was at .
And the second night I was there, all of a sudden there was
a woman in bed with us. She said her name was Rose Gorgeous.
This was really before I had had any sexual experience. I didn t
get involved with them, but that was unexpected. I wasn t
horrified or terrified then; but I was later when I finally
understood what was going on with the drug-taking. There were
policemen, and when there were not enough drugs there were
physical symptoms of trying to kick the habit. This was a few
weeks now, this wasn t months. Around that time, I had my first
smoke of marijuana from a guy named Jimmy the Greek. I remember I
also went to the party of a guy who was a translator at the United
Nations, and he was gay, and I didn t understand what that was all
about .
In the meantime, I had moved to the east side, near the
Bowery, to a little apartment on Stanton Street. And I was still
involved with people from Music and Art, and one of the painters
had fallen in love with me. She insisted that we had to go to bed
together; that was my first experience, in my apartment, this
little bedroom which I had painted dark brown. Not exactly an
illuminating color. [chuckles] I later added one wall in orange.
It s not a palette that I have any love for. Anyway, here I was
living near the Bowery among bums, and my father came down, and
you can imagine the explosion.
Right next to me, on Stanton Street, right off the Bowery,
was a family named the Sauers. Augie and Hattie Sauer took an
interest in me. He was in the window display business and the
building of exhibits and floats, and, eventually, hired me as an
assistant. He was in charge of the May Day parade for the radical
unions. [begins singing] "The Furmakers Union is a very fine
union." And we built these floats of Bilbo and Rankin; they were
two federal legislators who were the bane of the liberal and
radical establishments at the time. They were horrible, gross,
huge, three-dimensional caricatures which opened their mouths and
tipped their hats. Those were a lot of fun to work on; I had
never done anything with my hands. I remember one time when I
changed the electric plug on a lamp in the house, my father took
it down to the local hardware store to have them redo it because
he didn t think that any son of his could handle anything like
that. [laughter] Of course, at Bronx Science, people were a lot
more into doing things with their own hands. My father
desperately wanted me to go into his business. I mean, he thought
that was the only solution, but I had no intention of following in
his footsteps. I had been listening to him scream at his business
associates and haggle with customers for years. I didn t want any
part of that. It was not a way of life that I was interested in.
I wanted to be an ichthyologist because I loved the whole
involvement with the lives of fishes and turtles. I had been a
nature counselor and I had earned all of my nature badges up at
Bear Mountain Park. I was really into animals of all sorts,
mostly reptiles, amphibians, and fish.
I couldn t get the support from my father to go to Cornell
Agriculture, I didn t get a scholarship, and I was somewhat
depressed about that until I discovered that poetry was my call.
In a sense, throughout my life, I had a strange feeling about not
having gone to a university, which was balanced out later on when
I became an associate in education at Harvard, and I taught at
[UC] Santa Cruz. People are always wondering how, without a
college education, I got into that, but we ll go into it later.
Ellis Kramer, the gentleman whom I referred to as a
translator at the United Nations, lived in the Village. I met him
at a cafeteria where everyone hung out and where Jimmy the Greek
sold toothpicks of pot, which had precious little dope in them,
[laughter] but we managed to enjoy them. And he the translator
invited me to a party at his house. I stayed overnight. I
remember I was in his bed with him, and he tried to make an
approach to me, and I just didn t understand, so I rejected him.
The next night at the party, I met Elaine Goldman who
basically dragged me back to her apartment and raped me.
[chuckles] And I lived with her for months. Elaine came from
Boston. She was working in a publishing company. She wasn t
quite sure what she wanted to do. She later married another poet,
and I lost track of them.
Now somewhere during that time in the Village, I met a group
of people who were around a man named Michael Fraenkel, the author
of a book called Bastard Death. He also had a series of
correspondences which were in several published volumes with Henry
Miller. Through that group I met Michael and Henry. That became
the connection to Israel.
Jewish Background and Education
Stern: My Jewish background is rather odd because my father, like so many
German Jews, was not a religious Jew. Although he had grown up in
a religious setting, not in this family necessarily, but in the
community, and gone to a Jewish school, which- -characteris tic of
Germany at that time- -had a Catholic priest who was a Hebrew
scholar as principal. My family only went to synagogue on high
holidays. But I went to Hebrew school, and I was Bar Mitzvahed.
And that was about it. And I was taught rote Hebrew; I was not
taught the meanings of anything, and when I did my Bar Mitzvah, my
teacher was very happy because I had learned the cantillations
perfectly and gave a great performance- -but without meaning.
Bookstores and Village Authors
Stern: Then when the whole political situation in Israel surfaced, one of
Michael s followers, Harry Hershkowitz, who was the editor of
Death magazine--they had poison rings to keep them conscious of
death at all timeswell, Harry was the one who introduced me to
this whole circle of people who were raising money to buy the
boat, which was an ancient freighter. I met, through Harry, the
leader of this group, Nick Kisburg. He and his family lived in
the Village. All these people became very critical to my life; we
spent a lot of time together, we ate together, we drank cheap wine
together, we got high together, we listened to music and went to
art exhibits. They took my poetry seriously, and I took their
work seriously. When I decided to go to California, it was kind
of a break in sequence. I had become somewhat isolated in any
case because of the relationship with Elaine; before that I had
been really circulating all the time in a fairly nervous manner.
I was heavily into jazz, also.
Friends in the literary scene, through another involvement
with the Four Seasons Bookshop which was owned by a lady named
Toshka Goldman, was the Partisan Review crowd that hung around
there. This crowd included Delmore Schwartz and Lionel Trilling
and a lot of highly intellectual literary types. I worked next
door to the Four Seasons in a place called the Jabberwocky Shop
where we made lamps out of vases and bottles and anything that
anybody brought in. There was pottery and jewelry and really
craftsy stuff. It was run by a sculptor named David Raucher. He
was crippled, and he was bearded, and he always wore a beret. A
real Village character. Having the Four Seasons next door, I
could borrow any books of poetry. I spent many hours sitting,
waiting for customers in the Jabberwocky Shop, reading poetry.
Black Mountain College and Poetry
Stern: We had interesting customers. I remember delivering a set of
lamps to Eleanor Roosevelt and her giving me cookies and tea. She
lived in the Village on Washington Square. But among the people I
met through the bookstore and Ginny Miller, Paul Goodman s first
wife, was Isaac Rosenfeld. Isaac was a literary guru of that
time, and he was very kind to me. He had an academic bent, and he
really felt that my lack of formal education would be a problem to
me in the future. Yet he understood my radical kind of leanings.
He had taught during the summer at Black Mountain College, and he
persuaded them to give me an interview for a scholarship. I
hitchhiked down there at his behest, and I loved it. It was
really the perfect place. There was this idyllic oasis in the
mountains with a lake and modern studio building- -something
paradisiacal.
M.C. Richards, who was teaching poetry there at the time,
was exactly who I wanted to study with. And they gave me a
scholarship! Wow! I hitchhiked back down and I arrived there in
the middle of absolute chaos. The management or the
administration and the teachers were all fighting with each other
on philosophical and financial grounds. M.C. s husband at the
time was Bill Levy, the dean, and he left, taking M.C. with him.
I was desolate because the guy who then took charge of the school
was Hans Albers, a painter. Albers was out of the same mold as my
father: the Germanic disciplinarian. I couldn t take it, so I
split. Probably a major piece of misthinking on my part, but I
was young and carefree.
I met a lot of interesting people in the two weeks that I
was down there who later on became influential in my life: M.C.,
John Cage, the Williams --Paul and Vera--on and on.
.
10
II LATE 1940s: CALIFORNIA AND THE WEST COAST ALTERNATIVE
Elaine Goldman and San Francisco
Stern: Eventually, I met Elaine Goldman, and I moved in with her. She
had gone to UC [University of California] Berkeley, and some time
later her roommate- -a woman whom she had an affair with during her
time at UC--came to visit, and Elaine was the one who persuaded me
that I was a poet. "Bard" [Barbara] Norville, who was the friend
who came to stay, and Elaine decided that I really should be going
to UC, and Bard invited me to stay with her and her husband when I
got to San Francisco. I persuaded my father to give me air fare,
which at that time was very low, and I got on this plane that
landed four or five times before it got to California because that
was how things were in those days .
My father had agreed to send me twenty dollars a week, which
he reneged on because of another tale. I was followed out to the
west coast by a young lady whom I had gotten involved with at
summer camp where I was a garden and nature counselor. My father
and her father got together, because she had told her father we
were going to get married. We never had even talked about
marriage, but my father was very upset so he didn t send me any
more money. So I was kind of at a loss in San Francisco.
Poetry and California Life
Stern: In the meantime, mostly because of Elaine s encouragement, I had
accepted my role as a poet, and I was writing poetry. At first
blush, I was totally innocent, and I was starting to read poets
through people I met and who had libraries . Soon after I arrived
in California I went to a poetry reading at the San Francisco
Museum of Art which is now in a different building than it was
then. I met Bill Everson, who later became Brother Antoninus. I
11
met Philip Lamantia. I met Paul Goodman, whose first wife I had
had an affair with in New York.
Big Sur and Jaime D Angulo
Stern: I arrived in California, and I stayed with Bard and Mac [George
McCarthy, Jr.]. They [Bard and Mac] were breaking up at the time.
Mac left to get a divorce, and he went up to Virginia City,
Nevada, in his 1928 Model A Ford with a rumble seat.
I m skipping a lot of stuff becausethere was the poetry
reading- -actually, that wasn t the first day. The first day they
picked me up in the Model A, and they took me down to Big Sur, to
Partington Ridge, where we stayed with one of their good, close
friends, Jaime D Angulo. And Jaime and I, through later years,
became very close, and actually I was the one who got his Indian
Tales published through Carl Solomon, who was working for his
uncle A. A. Wynn at Ace Books and I was their west coast rep. It
was very informal.
Quite an experience for a New York boy. They pick me up at
the airport and it was the weekend, so we re heading for Big Sur.
I m sitting in the rumble seat coming down the California coast,
and we re going to the ranch. You can imagine what a New York
refugee thought a ranch was going to be like after having seen
"Abbott and Costello in the West" or Bob Hope or Shirley Temple
movies. Anyway, first we stopped at an auto wrecking yard just
before Monterey in Seaside. And there s this character right out
of John Steinbeck who runs the yard and then there s this big guy
who s a fishing boat engineer called Sandy Justice. There s mucho
alcohol. I ride with Sandy to the ranch in a dump truck, and then
we go up this winding, dirt road, and it s late at night, and we
go up the mountain and go over the edge. We have to shovel, and
it s madness, and I think it was about six o clock in the morning,
and at dawn we wind up on the top of the ridge and here s Jaime de
Angulo dressed in basically nothing and with hair coming down to
his whatever, and his beard, and he s burnt by the sun, and he s
obviously drunk. And he looks at me and he says, "Shalom!"
[laughter] I m with Bard and her husband, whom I ve just met, and
a drunken Sandy--! had never been driven anywhere by somebody who
was drunk. Then Jaime recognizes my accent and says, "You must
have come from somewhere in Germany near the French border, but
you ve grown up probably in New York City; not in Brooklyn, for
sure ."
[laughter] Then we go into his house, and he has a
fireplace in the middle of the room, and he s made a big hole in
his roof for the smoke to go out of. I m sleeping on basically a
12
concrete slab with kind of an Indian blanket thrown over it. All
of a sudden I feel at home. I don t feel alienated or strange. I
feel okay; this is it; life.
Jane and Wallv Hill
Stern: Jane lived right across the alley on Telegraph Hill from Bard, so
that s where I met Jane and her husband Wally [Hill], and I
believe at the time--I can t remember whether their third daughter
had been born by then or not. But there were definitely two
little girls and maybe three little girls. They very soon
thereafter moved over to the Berkeley Flats. But at that time
they were on Telegraph Hill.
Anyway, they invited me for dinner, and I regaled them with
tales, none of which were true, about my supposed political
experiences . I had been involved with the Sternist movement to
send a boat to Israel, which was principally financed by Ben Hecht
and Harpo Marx. My involvement with that had been peripheral, but
I blew it out of proportion into some romantic tale worthy of a
third-rate movie, [laughter] and they believed me.
Jane was fascinated. But Jane was a person who at that time
was ready to change her life already and had been involved with a
lot of other people
Developing a Poetic Style
Stern: In the meantime, I had been writing poems. I think I started out
in a very abstract manner language-wise, and I ve never departed
from it. It s a style which has never somehow been conjunctive to
any of the other movements or schisms or literary coteries. It s
isolated me, which is still true. And I don t understand in the
least how I developed this particular verbal style; I imagine it
must have its roots maybe in the fact that I started out being a
German speaker and translated then to English. The relationships
that I ve had in the literary and artistic world have all been
kind of social and intellectual rather than connections between my
work and the work of other people.
13
Virginia City Mines
Stern: I started looking for a job. At that time, if you were resident
in California for six months you could go to UC free of charge.
That was my plan but I got waylaid. I was living with Bard after
Mac left. I didn t have any money, and I didn t know what was
going to happen. I was kind of looking for a job, and I couldn t
find one, and Mac called up from Virginia City, Nevada and said,
"Hey, Gerd, why don t you come up here? This is great up here.
I m working in a gold and silver mine; you can work here too."
So I hitchhiked up to Virginia City, Nevada, and I worked in
the gold and silver mines for Consolidated Chollar, Gould, and
Savage [Conchollar] . And that was [laughter] quite an experience.
In Virginia City, it was incredible how much snow there was.
It was the blizzard of "48. The blizzard was so bad that you
couldn t drive. I had just learned how to drive, although I
didn t have a license yet. I had learned to drive in Mac s 1928
Model A Ford. We went down the grade to Reno and had a good time.
Mac liked to gamble. He was from Charlotte, North Carolina.
Anyway, we were renting a house for ten bucks a month, a former
whorehouse in Virginia City. It had a lot of bedrooms. [chuckle]
It was a great old house.
There was practically nobody in Virginia City in those days.
It was like a ghost town. There were about ten saloons. It was
before it become gentrified and before Lucius Beebe and those
people who I later knew in San Francisco moved up there . We
worked on the other side from Reno in a little place called Gold
Hill at the Consolidated Chollar, Gould, and Savage Mining
Company. Actually, first Mac worked at another little mine--at
Conchollar. I didn t work in the mine, I worked in the refinery.
There was no water: we had to get water from a truck that
came up once a week. Finally, Mac had had it; he was working in a
smaller mine which shut down. It was bizarre. We went to dinner
one night at his boss 1
house, and he and his wife had rigged up a
chair for their German shepherd--a huge, huge dog called Sonny--
and he ate at the table. And they treated him just like their
son. At the mine, the dog could carry a four-foot piece of two-
by-four in its mouth. It was a big, big dog.
This was a small old mine, and it was quite an experience--
you went down in a bucket. I don t mean an elevator, I mean a
bucket. It was the same bucket that came back up later with the
ore. You went down and then along these little sideways shafts,
and you had a little carbide lamp on your head, and you spent the
14
first part of the day mucking out, shoveling the ore that you ve
blown the night before. What we had to do was fill this bucket
which is on wheels and take it to the place where it goes up the
shaft to the surface. In the afternoon, with this pneumatic
drillit s not exactly a dance, but you shakeyou drill out
holes into the spot where you re going to get the next ore, and
you plant charges with a long fuse which goes practically all the
way to where the up and down shaft is. Then you get the hell up
out of there in the bucket. [laughter]
##
Stern: My job in the refinery was the crusher man s assistant. I was
called "Whiskers." This was somewhere between a Charlie Chaplin
movie where he gets caught on the little cogwheels, and a
nightmare. It was an enormous refinery, and you couldn t see for
more than a few feet because the air was full of dust; clouds of
dust. All the people who worked there had silicosis. They used
to compare the size of the spots on their lungs on their x-rays,
and when there was a certain amount of square inches then they had
to stop working.
The trucks would bring this ore with a lot of big rocks, and
they would dump them on what s called the grizzle. The grizzle
was a bunch of metal railroad rails laid a certain width apart.
If the rocks were too big they would take a charge of dynamite
called "salami" because it was shaped like a big roll of salami,
and they would place it on the rocks and blow them up until they
would fall through the grizzle. When they fell through the
grizzle, they fell into our crusher, which was these two huge jaws
that went [makes crushing noises], and they crushed the rock into
slightly smaller sizes. Once in a while, at least four or five
times a day, a rock would get caught in the jaws just right so
that the jaws couldn t close. There was a metal bar over this
crusher, and the way you handle the situation, as Ike demonstrated
to me--Ike was the crusher man and my bossthe first day I worked
with him it was you would grab on to this bar, jump into the
crusher and try to move the rock with your boots. [chuckle] You
push on these big rocks until they adjusted themselves. The
crusher would go boom, boom, and as soon as you adjusted it you
had better get your damn feet out of the way because otherwise it
would crush you too.
They had tales of losing people. Actually, we lost one guy
while I was working there. You had to clean out these many story-
high tanks, and they were full of fine ore, and if you slip when
you were in there, you could really get hurt even though you had a
safety belt on. When we had to change parts on the fine crushers,
15
we used a twenty to thirty foot wrench with twelve men on the end
to put enough pressure.
Then one day it was really cold; we were working in a
completely unheated environment in the dead of winter. Each
little work station had a fifty-five gallon drum which served as a
stove. We would throw scraps of wood into it and sit around it
for lunch. One day, we were sitting aroundthree or four guys--
and we were talking about religion and going to church. They
looked at me and said, "What religion are you, Whiskers?" I said,
"I m Jewish." They laughed like hell. I was offended and I said,
"Hey, what s so funny about that?" They said, "Oh. You weren t
kidding?" [laughter] They had never met a Jew. It was okay. I
just didn t understand. It was quite an experience. Turned out
they had also never met a black person.
North Carolina
Stern: Anyway, it got so cold, we had no water, and Mac had lost his job,
so he decided he didn t want to come work for Con Chollar. Mac
wanted to drive to his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. The
problem was getting out of Virginia City; all the roads were
blocked. We decided not to drive to Reno or through Carson City,
but to go down the middle of the canyon. The Model A was so light
that it could run on top of the snow. The problem was if you ever
got stopped, it was hard to start again because the wheels would
sink into the snow. So we had shovels and everything. Within
half an hour of leaving, we got stuck behind a bunch of cows that
were running down the canyon. There was nothing for them to eat.
Around there there was a lot of cattle left in the fields to
graze. Fortunately, the cattle had tromped down the snow so we
were able to get started. We had lots of experiences. We had two
cocker spaniel puppies in the rumble seat that we had acquired
somehow in Virginia City. At one point--! mean, it was the big
blizzard, and the Joshua trees were covered with snow. Later,
when we were on Highway 66, we were out of the snow, but
everything was wet where the snow had melted. There were these
signs that read "Dip".
I was driving, and I had never seen a
"Dip" sign, so I didn t know what it was. Well, we got into this
dip, and there was like about two feet of water in it. So here is
the Model A Ford stuck in the middle of this dip.
Mac gets out to take the distributor apart and dry out the
points and the spark plugs. He was mechanically oriented. He
taught me a lot. However, he put the distributor cap on one part
of the engine, and when this truck came running through the dip
16
next to us. The distributor cap goes high up in the air and lands
in this two feet of water. We can t find it, so now Mac has to
hitch to the next town to buy a distributor cap for a 28 Model A.
[chuckle] In the meantimethis was incredibleanother truck
comes through the water, and I see this distributor cap leaping up
into the air, and I catch it, dry it, put it on, and off I go and
meet Mac about six miles down the road. [laughter] Anyway, it
was that kind of trip.
We finally got to Charlotte, and we stayed at his parents
house. His father owned a chemical plant of some kind. His
parents were really southern types. I had been to Black Mountain,
but Black Mountain was really not the South. Charlotte, North
Carolina, is the south. It s different. His father had just been
to Cuba and had brought back a case of banana liquor which Mac
proceeded to drink. We were on the way to have dinner with two
gay friends of his; one of them was a veterinarian. I hadn t met
them, but on the way there Mac ran into the back of a Greyhound
bus, and he smashed our Model A Ford, never to be seen again. I
got cut right here on my chin; there s still kind of a scar there.
The veterinarian lived in a trailer, and they had prepared this
really wonderful meal for us. But first, the veterinarian sewed
up my little cut.
Back to New York
Stern: Anyway, now we were without a car. We were on the way to New
York, and Mac s father was really upset with his son s drunkenness
and his weird Jewish friend from New York with a beard, etcetera.
Still, he bought us a burnt-out Willys. A Willys was practically
like a Volkswagen bug but a little bigger. It had had an interior
fire, and it was all black, but it drove fine.
We went up to New York, and Mac only stayed a couple of
days. He couldn t take the city. So I wound up with this car,
and I was living in it on the streets of New York.
There was a bar at that time that we all went to the San
Remo on Bleeker and MacDougal streets and who should show up at
the San Remo a few days later but John Hoffman, a poet from San
Francisco whom I had met there with Philip Lamantia at a bar right
across the street-- 12 Adler Place from the City Lights. Anyway,
the bouncer, Trent, was a guy I had known in New York through Fran
Deitch.
17
So I m in New York, and the two of us are living in the car.
For about two weeks, this folk singer lent us his apartment. We
didn t have anything to eat, and there were about twenty-five
pounds of oatmeal, and there were a bunch of spices. So we had a
lot of oatmeal with curry powder and with oregano and with
everything else even soy sauce. When he came back he was very
angry that we had eaten up his oatmeal so he threw us out. And
there we were back in the car again.
We decided to go to P town [Provincetown, Massachusetts].
In New York, they used to deliver bagels about five o clock in the
morning. They would leave them in front of the storefronts, and
they would also leave milk. We would kind of cruise around and
pick one bagel and one quart of milk from one store and another
bagel and a quart from another--it worked pretty good; we never
got caught, and that s how we had bagels and milk. We got up to
Provincetown, and we barely had enough money for gas. We were
sleeping in the dunes, and we didn t have anything to eat there
either. We decided to go into Provincetown and try the same
trick. Well, we picked up a few things outside of a store, and
all of a sudden we see this truck driver coming after us . He was
parked down the street, and he obviously saw us take the stuff
which he had just delivered. We got in the car, and we sped down
the highway away from Provincetown. We could see behind us this
big truck chasing us, and we were scared, really scared. Finally,
we turned into a sand road--the side roads are all sand--and we
get stuck in the sand. The truck just keeps on going. [chuckle]
We were relieved, but it took us a couple of hours to dig out.
We finally drove to Providence, Rhode Island, and on the way
back to New York we didn t have enough money for gas. So I called
the local rabbi. That was a stupid idea. He just told me to get
lost. I finally had to call my father, and he Western Unioned us
some money. But he was angry. He was very angry, and he said,
"You better come and see me as soon as you get back in New York."
18
:
III 1950s: POETRY AND THE BEAT AESTHETIC
In the Psychiatric Institute: Carl Solomon and Allen Ginsberg
Stern: So I came and saw him, and he dragged me to my uncle the doctor.
My uncle supposedly discovered I had some kind of a problem with
my kidneys. They put me into the hospital. After the hospital,
they made me go see a psychiatrist who was a friend of my uncle.
The psychiatrist says to me, "Look, I can t help you because your
father can t afford to pay me, and besides, I think what s wrong
with you is that you re malnourished, you don t have a place to
live, you re wearing dirty clothes, etcetera. I ve got an idea;
listen to me carefully, and I never told you this. There s a
place called the Psychiatric Institute at the Presbyterian
Hospital. You call them up; here s the number. You tell them
that you are a young poet and that you just tried to commit
suicide and that you need help. They re looking for interesting
people.
"
So I do it. I get an appointment, and they ask me, "What
happened?" So I said I m driving my burnt-out Willys down the
Henry Hudson Parkway, and I have this terrible impulse to drive
over the railing and into the Hudson River- -which was totally
untrue. They accept me; now I m in this ward with a bunch of
really funny people. Nobody violent, but interesting. And I m
getting fed three times a day, and I have a doctor who sees me
twice a week- -a Doctor Hambidge, one smart guy, and, over time, he
listened to me, and finally told me, "Look. This is not difficult
at all; this is very simple. You ve gotta decide whether you re
going to live your life or you re going to live the life that your
father wants you to live. You can t manage both of them; they are
not compatible. You re not going to make your father happy if you
decide to do what you want to do, and I don t know if you can be
happy doing what your father wants you to do. I can t help you
any further than that." It was amazing. At the time I think it
would not have been seen as a psychiatric solution; I mean, that
was still a very Freudian period.
19
Anyway, at the same time, one day there walks into the ward
a guy dressed in a dark blue shirt and dark blue trousers and blue
suede shoes with huge stacks of books under both arms . He looks
around kind of dazed, he s got this wild hair, and he s got a big
face and big glasses. So I walk up to him, being a new patient,
you know, and I say, "Hello, my name is Gerd Stern." And he drops
all his books on the floor, and he sticks out his hand, and he
says, "Define your terms!" That was Carl Solomon.
Carl had gotten into the Psychiatric Institute because, at a
lecture by a proto-anarchist named Wallace Markfield at NYU [New
York University] , he had gotten up and thrown potato salad into
Markfield 1
s face. [chuckle] Carl was bizarre. He and I had a
great time for a while. He had just come back as a merchant
seaman from Paris. There he had acquired a lot of really
fascinating books. He had Jean Genet, whom I had never heard of.
I had read [Marcel] Proust, [Andre] Gide, and I was fascinated by
Gide s journals particularly, because, in a sense, they persuaded
me that it was possible to be self-conscious, and that was like a
positive practice, and somehow I think I had grown up thinking
that was a negative practice being self-conscious. But Genet and
Celine were something else entirely.
Carl and I were there together for some time, then one day
Allen Ginsberg showed up. Now there we were, three weirdos out of
the literary world. Carl had Christopher Smartthat was a great
little library that he had brought with himand [Louis-Ferdinand]
Celine. The problem was that at P.I. they thought Carl was
really, totally crazy, insane; they gave him first insulin shock
and then electric shock, which took him pretty far out of it.
Allen came because he had been acting weird at Columbia
[University] . Mark Van Doren and Trilling and all those people
decided there was some kind of problem--! can t remember what
happened. I think there was a trial of some sort involved, too.
Anyway, we wound up at P.I. together and we had a number of
adventures. We drove one of the aides crazy. One of the aides
had to be taken away in a straightjacket!
Carl was very mischievous. We used to play ping-pong with
this aide, and if he was losing, we always changed the score to
where he was winning. When he was winning, we changed it so that
he was losing. He wasn t very balanced; I mean, we were patients,
you know? He should have understood, but he never did. [chuckle]
What finally drove him over the brink- -it was Easter, and they had
put these papier-mache bunnies up on the tables where we ate.
Carl went into the bathroom and masturbated into the inside of
this rabbit, and then put it back on the table and it drooled out
this little pool of cum. The aide came and said, "What is that?"
20
Carl said, "I
jerked off into it." The guy went mad, and they
took him away.
Later on, I was at the San Remo with Carl, and a blind man
came in and asked the way to the men s room. Carl took him, and
when he came back to the bar, I said, "Carl, that was really
unlike you." He said, "No, it wasn t; I took him to the ladies
room." [laughter]
So there we were. We misbehaved badly and consciously. We
were in an asylum, and we acted out, and of course they think we
were crazy. Anyway, eventually, I got out for the weekends
because nobody thought that I was dangerous. But Carl and Allen
couldn t get out for the weekends because they were under
observation. Carl was having shock and Allen supposedly had
violent episodes. So they asked me if I would bring some grass in
when I came back. I did, and then they turned me in to the
authorities. They were acting out Genet did that with his
confederatesand they felt that was something they wanted to
experience. Of course, both Allen and Carl were gay, and I was
not. Anyway, I was ready to leave by that time.
John Hoffman and the Norwegian M.S . Bowhill
Stern: John Hoffman was still in New York, and he and I wanted a change
of scene. So we decided we were going to go to sea. Actually, I
think I got inspired for that by what Carl had told me about his
time as a merchant seaman. We couldn t get American seaman s
papers; it was really a catch-22 at that time. We would go to the
union, we would ask for union papers, and they would say, "Well,
you have to get a job first." You d go to a shipping company, and
they would say, "We can t hire anybody who s not union." They
would send you back and forth, and it was hopeless.
We heard that there was a hiring hall for Scandinavian
seamen in Brooklyn. We finally found the address, and we went
there, and they hired us on the spot. We left later that day on
the M.S. Bowhill from Bergen [Norway] --a Norwegian shipfor South
America.
We had two jobs that were offered to us: one was galley boy,
and the other was the officers mess boy. John was a space cadet,
I mean, before the term was invented. He was blond, tall, and
very skinny, and he came from the peninsula south of San
Francisco. He was really good-looking, but he had this vacant
kind of look in his eyes . And he was a really good poet . So he
21
said to me, "Which job do you want?" And I said, "I think I would
take the officers mess boy, and you take the galley, John." And
John says, "Well, I think I ll take the officers mess boy." I
said, "All right," but the reason I was going to take it is
because I think it was the more difficult jobdealing with the
officers. He said, "I can deal with the officers." Well, he
should have taken the galley boy job because he got into nothing
but trouble, he was so spaced out even without any drugs. We
tried to score some grass before we got on board, but we got
burned by Bob Kaufman.
Finally, we got to Rio [de Janeiro, Brazil], and John had to
clean the cabins. Part of his job was cleaning the cabins. He
had devised this method of cleaning the cabins by taking a pail of
soapy water and throwing it on the floor, and he would lay on the
officer s bunk and read with the door locked until the motion of
the sea had drained all the water, then run the mop a little over
the deck and leave a couple of soapy streaks. The officers
expected him to scrub the cabin deck on his hands and knees every
day.
So we get into port and we get leave off the ship, and John
thinks he s a smart guy, and he goes through each of the cabins
and throws a bucket of water on the floor and then closes up the
cabins. Of course, the ship was laying at the dock, and it wasn t
moving [laughter] so the officers all found water on the floors in
their cabins. Then they understood what had been happening. It
didn t go over too well.
I had a good time in the galley. I got to peel potatoes and
wash pots, and I got to drink a lot of beer because the cook was a
twenty-one-year-old Dane. He was fantastic. Seamen are very
particular because food is about the only thing that they really
get. They don t get paid very much, and it s hard work. He was
fabulous; he was one of those people who could cut a turkey, slice
the whole thing and then put it back together, and you wouldn t
see that it had been cut up. So I had a good life; I ate well, I
drank well, and the work wasn t that bad. John had it worse.
We had taken all kinds of books of poetry, and one of the
books we took was a surrealist work--Les Chants de Maldoror by the
Comte de Lautreamont who happened to be born in Montevideo
[Uruguay], which was one of the ports that we were going to. It
was a coincidence that John happened to have the book. We felt
that it was very poignant. So we read the poems to each other.
We would lie out on the hatch under the moonlight. It was a good
trip.
22
Poetry and Trouble in Brazil ##
Stern: In Rio, we were looking for suspicious -looking characters, and we
would go up to them and say, "Marijuana?" One of them started
screaming and yelling, "Calaboso, Calaboso" which means "jail".
We ran down the street fast, because he was calling for the police
to grab us. We never did manage to score.
I nearly got killed in Santos [Brazil] , which is a heavy-
duty Brazilian port- -we got into the nightclub and bar scene. I
wound up spending a few nights with a little seventeen-year-old
girl, Huda, who was quite precious. We went to Argentina, to
Uruguay, and when we came back, we went to the bar again, and she
wasn t there. There were some other young girls that were having
some drinks with us. I was very friendly with an Australian who
was an engineer on board and John had done something wrong, I
remember, and they didn t give him leave that time- -but the
original girl came, and she and the new one that was sitting at
the table got into a big fight clawing each other up, and before
you knew it the whole bar was fighting. Somebody hit me on the
head with a bottle, and the Australian dragged me out and got me
back to the ship. Two days later I came down with gonorrhea, and
the first mate had heard about this whole ruckus and he was very
stern and so Scandinavian that he could barely speak English.
"See what that kind of behavior does to you?" And he takes this
syringe like it was a knife, and he sticks it into my rump,
[chuckle] I got cured very fast anyway, so that wasn t too bad.
John and I were writing poetry like mad on that trip. I
don t know whatever happened to a lot of it. I have a lot of his
poems; in fact, the famous reading you remember at the Beat
Conference they were saying who had read, and they said Philip
read that night but he didn t read his poems.
Byerly: Yes.
Stern: That was John s poems that he read that night. John, by that
time, died very, very young. He was found on the beach at
Zihuatanejo in Mexico dead. What probably happened is he had an
overdose and lay down to sleep in the sun, and the drug and the
sun killed him.
He was an abuser, you know? The abusive personalities are
so different--I ve always enjoyed and appreciated getting high.
I ve been smoking grass ever since I was seventeen years old. I
can still get high on two or three tokes. I don t need to smoke
any more than that. I ve never been into hard drugs; I ve done a
lot of acid and peyote, but not for many years, and I don t need
23
it anymore because those were very ecstatic experiences. One of
my own sons is a chronic abuser. His mother s family were all
abusers of one sort or another. He s living on the piers in San
Francisco at this very moment.
John and I got back from South America, and, ever since I
had my appendicitis operation, I had a hernia which kind of popped
out. The Europeans had very different ways of treating things;
all through my childhood I wore this belt which had a thing on it
to keep the hernia in place. Ridiculous. It was terrible--!
mean, when you re in gym and had to wear a thing like that. So I
decided since now I had the protection of the Veterans
Administration because- -even as a foreign seaman, if you have an
American passport you qualifiedso I went to the V.A. Hospital to
have my hernia fixed. But it was another Kafkaesque institution,
and I couldn t hack it so I managed to get my clothes and spirit
myself out of there after two days . There were all these old men
with really serious diseases. I was on this big ward--whew- -it
was not conducive . So it was years before I finally got that
condition operated on.
Hitchhiking to California
Stern: I was living with my friends the Kisburgs, and I got this letter
from California, from Jane. It was very enticing. As you have
noted, she wrote well. It was like a clear invitation of some
sort. I didn t know what it was, but I responded. I got on the
road, and hitchhiked out to California. By that time, they were
living in Berkeley, on the flats. Wally, her husband, was a sheet
metal worker. I wouldn t say he was conservative, but he was a
working man; he worked every day, and he had a working-class life,
and he was satisfied with it. But she wanted more, more, more,
more, more, and more. So she was always extending herself out of
that family life in many directions.
Hitchhiking with Jane to New York
Stern: When I came to stay with themshe was a big potsmoker, tooafter
a day or so, we immediately fell into bed. She wanted to know
what I wanted to do, and I didn t have any idea what I wanted to
do. I mean, I was just hanging out and scuffling my way through
life. I had come out there basically because I received a letter,
and because I had liked California the first time. Within days
24
she had, with my total assent, decided that we were going to go
back to the East Coastshe had never been to New York, and she
had this friend, Violet, who was on the East Coast. But first she
wanted to go visit various friends of hers to say goodbye. Here
we were, her husband and herself and her three girls little kids
--staying in her house in Berkeley, and we re making plans to run
away together. It was beyond my ken, really. She was much older
than I was, but she was very attractive and very passionate.
Off we go, and first we went to stay with some of her
friends near Los Gatos on a mountain near a town (Alma) which is
now at the bottom of a reservoir--Jack and Shirley Shore. He was
a jazz musician, and Shirley was a singer. I think they only had
one child at the time.
Jack was a pacifist. We had mutual friends like Paul
Goodman and Bill Everson and so forth. But Jack was violent;
pacifism is often one face of people who have very intense
emotions. It was true of Frank Triest; he was a pacifist, but he
also had these violent tendencies, right? I saw Jack Shore the
pacifist, who had been a conscientious objector both in jail and
camps, tear a telephone out of the wall and throw it at his wife.
It kind of upset me. It kept on happening in my life I mean, Lew
Hill, who was not only a conscientious objector but who started
KPFA and with whom I worked closely, committed suicide. Self-
violence. A very odd kind of matching emotions.
So we visited Jack and his wife for a few days, and this was
all really bohemian, a lot of pot, poetry, music and having a
great time.
Then we hitchhiked up to Eureka [California] , where Jane
came from. I met her mother. I met her father, which was not a
very nice experience. Later in life, he used to refer to me as
his refugee kike son-in-law. He was really some piece of work. A
dentist, an American Legionnaire, and a Mason. We stayed with a
good friend of hers that she had grown up with a man named
Wallace Look, who was a librarian at Arcata, at the CSU
[California State University] campus there. A gay guy, very
civilized. We were very friendly in later years. Later, he spent
some years in a monastery.
Arrival in New York and Odd Jobs
Stern: And then we hitchhiked back to New York, which was quite an
experience. We went to a cowboy barbecue in New Mexico; we were
25
picked up by a cowboy and his wife who had just won a race with
the horse which was in the back of the pickup truck. Grand old
time. All the experiences weren t positive, but anyway, we got
back to New York, and we got a cheap place to live. I didn t have
any prospects for what I would do for work. At that time, in San
Francisco, wherever there was a public place they had metal
containers with advertisements from hotels and restaurants for
tourists, but we didn t have those in New York. I thought maybe I
could get something together like that. So I tried it, but I
didn t have the right connections; so finally I gave it up.
Violet, Jane s friend, was working as a taxi dancer at a
ten-cents-a-dance place down on Fourteenth Street, and over my
strenuous objections, Jane went to work there. She enjoyed it;
she really enjoyed it. She met a lot of strange people there,
among them Ross Russell he was a record producer. He produced a
lot of Charlie Parker s music, a lot of interesting jazz.
In the meantime, we had found a nice railroad flat up on
101st Street on the West Side. And I was painting it and
decorating it. I got a bunch of odd jobs, I remember. I got a
job in a factory where I was supposedly putting plastic insulation
onto copper wire, you know, electrical wire. The machines were
very old, but I still couldn t keep up with them. I was the only
non-Puerto Rican working in the factory, and at the time I didn t
know any Spanish. It was another disaster in my employment
record.
Oh, I forgot that when I was out here I did have a little
job- -that was a bizarre job, too. It was loading tin cans into
railroad cars. John, I think, had the job, and he got it for me.
You had this kind of a fork with a lot of pegs on it, and the cans
came down a belt, and you stuck this fork into them--I can t
remember if it was ten or twelve cansand you ran from this belt,
up a little ramp and into the railroad car, and you would stack
these cans. Now if you weren t in total sync with the other
person who was doing this same thing, and you didn t get back to
the belt on time, the cans all erupted into madness and chaos and
rolled all over the place. I didn t last on that one either.
So here was Jane working as a taxi dancer and having several
affairs on the side with people that she had met there, which also
didn t please her employers. She was supposed to be making money
for the house. And Violet had--I don t know--a protector who was
some kind of a criminally involved person. She had a little
daughter alsowho had she been married to? She was a friend of
Shirley Triest also. I think she was married to--Radha [Stern,
Gerd s daughter] will rememberto the diver?
26
Byerly: Al Podesta?
Stern: There was some kind of a mixed relationship there,
think she had been long gone from that marriage.
Anyway , I
New Paltz. New York
Stern: We decided to go back to California to visit. Jane was getting
letters from her grandmother who was ailing. Her grandmother
always finished her letters by saying, "And I don t know how
anybody could leave God s country." Eureka being God s country.
Have you been to Eureka? Eureka s quite a place. There s a
graveyard on the seashore between Eureka and Arcata, and there s a
redwood tombstone there. I guess it s still there. It says--I
can t remember the guy s name it says, "Murdered by capitalism."
He was a Wobbly.
So we got an ancient car--I think it was an old Pontiac--for
very little money. We started out in the rain from New York, and
we got onto the Pulaski Skyway; it still exists. In the rain a
car hit us from behind, and we hit the car in front; our car was
demolished. So we had to regroup. So we hitchhiked back out.
We spent some time here- -we kept actually going back and
forth quite a lot. When we got back to New York, I had been doing
babysitting and some odd jobs for a family, the Habermans. He had
a mother who lived on an old farm in New Paltz, New York. The
name was Thorborg Ellison. She was a bohemian from the early part
of the century, and she knew all of the figures of that era. They
were all her friends, and she had signed paintings and books, and
she was married at the time to a really mad Yugoslavian. She had
her farm with a lot of buildings that she wanted to have renovated
so she could get some rental income. The idea was that she would
give Jane and I a place to live, and I would work, and she would
feed us. That was like heaven sent. So we moved into an old
granary; it was a little larger than this room, and it had a loft.
It was attached to the barn, and that s the first thing we did, we
made it into a livable space; it was lovely. We ate with them in
the big house, and I worked, and I wrote. Jane did little artsy-
craftsy things, and she helped Thorborg with the kitchen. Jane
was a very good cook.
We weren t married yet. There were other places to stay--we
had visitors. Carl Solomon--at this time, Carl was out of the
Psychiatric Institute, and he had married a very nice lady, Olive,
and--I forgot to mention a girl at the time named Fran Deitsch,
27
who had been going to Temple Arts School with my friend Mona whom
I mentioned before. And we had gotten involved in the Village.
In the meantime, she had married Jay Landesman, who was the
publisher of a little magazine, Erotica, which featured Carl and
Allen and a lot of people in those days. We were all quite
friendly. Carl and Olive and Jane and I were very close; they
would come up for the weekend quite often, and others of our
friends from New York would come up and stay, and it was very
sociable.
Thorborg--we got along. She was a really odd bird. She
gave me a piece of land which I later had to give back. We got
kind of involved in the community. At that time, New Paltz was
only a teachers college; now it s a rather substantial campus.
Other artists lived around. Right above the farm, huge properties
belonged to the Smileys--a Quaker family that owned Mohonk resort
they were kind of despotic patrons. A lot of the locals there
were their tenant farmers.
There was an incident where a farmer down the road who was
an old radical had painted his barn orange because he had gotten
some cheap paint. The Smileys didn t like it because when they
looked down from the mountain there was this orange spot. His
wife was a teacher, and the Smileys came down and they said,
"Look. We want you to repaint your barn, and we ll give you the
paint because it s just an eyesore." And he said, "No
way." A
few weeks later his wife was called into the principal s office
and was told, "Your husband is making problems in the community,
and it is going to reflect on your position in the schools. Now
the Smileys have offered the paint for him to repaint his barn,
and I think it would be a good idea if you persuaded him to
repaint the barn if you re really interested in keeping your job."
I m just telling you this story because it s indicative of that
period. And the guy repainted his barn- -these people, you know,
the Smileys --Quakers, pacifists, people who you would have thought
were of liberal bent, but that was the way they behaved in the
community. And they kept the local farmers in a position of
servitude. I mean, you wouldn t have thought it existed in the
twentieth century, but it did. They got some food, they got free
firewood which they could cut on the land. They were basically
kept in bondage. And those properties still exist, but now of
course there are no more tenant farmers . It s now a very fabulous
resort. You can t drive there; you park, and then they have
carriages with horses.
New Paltz was an experience. I renovated a large chicken
coop, and a Juilliard composer named Marga Richter, who I wrote an
oratorio with, moved in with her Steinway piano, and unfortunately
she left her kerosene stove on--the whole thing burned down. This
28
caused some tragic circumstances, and of course Thorborg was very
angry at us, and it wasn t insured. Marga was insured for the
piano, but anyway--it kind of disintegrated the relationship.
Marriage to Jane Hill
Stern: In the meantime, Jane had gotten pregnant, and we were married by
a justice of the peace who was watching television over our heads.
And this was by a justice of the peace. We decided on getting
married in Austerlitz because it was the town where Edna St.
Vincent Millay had lived.
We decided when all of these bad vibes happened at the farm
that we would go back to California. Coincidentally, this
musician whom we had known in California- -Keith, his strange wife,
Barbarawe all drove out together here. It was some trip. I
think we went through the national parksaw Old Faithful we had
a high time driving out. And Jane was quite pregnant.
Jane had an old friend, a doctor, Marion Wagner, who lived
at that time in San Jose [California] , and we spent some time with
her. We had actually stayed with her on a previous trip. She was
gay, and she came from a fairly well-known California family. She
was a very generous and intelligent woman.
Stern: We re about at the point where our son Adam was born, which was in
San Jose, and he was delivered by Dr. Wagner whom I was just
talking about.
I did leave out the publication or the printingof my
first book of poems, First Poems and Others. One of the jobs I
had in New York one of the times when I was doing odd jobs I
worked for Clarence, a friend who had a photo offset shop where
they did mailing and folding and all that stuff. I was kind of
good at organizing that stuff. I got him to agree to help me put
out my first book of poems. It was in the [Greenwich] Village so
we called it the Village Press. It s a handmade book, really,
called First Poems and Others, and my friend Ivan Majdrakoff did
the illustrations, and Julia Pearl, his first wife, did the
calligraphy, the hand lettering of the poems, which I think are
quite good. And I ve loved Ivan s work ever since we ve known
each other. And I still do. There s a painting of his right here
in the next room; in fact, several of his works are, including the
one hanging right there [points] which is an early piece, about
29
the same period that he did the illustrations for my book. It was
a fairly limited edition, and it was put together by hand and hand
stapled, and the cover was made by hand. It was a small edition,
and it was quickly sold outmostly by friends and acquaintances
and various people. I think it took another fifteen or twenty
years before the second book, and it s taken over thirty years
since the second book for anything else left. I m writing now,
actually, for another book, but who knows?
I would really rather do a CD--a spoken version CD, maybe
with some music, because I agree with what was brought up at the
Beat Conference at the UC, at The Bancroft Library by Lawrence
Ferlinghetti--that we managed to re-oralize the poetic tradition,
which had gotten to the point where it had become just words on a
printed page. During much of my life, I ve written poetry in
print, but also written in visual print; in artwork rather than
just in books. A lot of my audiovisual experiments have been done
with poetry.
When we came back out here [California] , Adam was born, and
we stayed here. We lived for a time in Berkeley, also down on the
flats near the bay. We had a very active literary and social
life. I m just trying to think, and it isn t coming back too
quickly, about the following sequence of events.
Byerly: What was that literary life like?
Stern: Well, Kenneth Rexroth was kind of the major glue of the literary
life in the San Francisco world. And he had a weekly salon--!
can t remember offhand whether it was Friday nights or Saturday
nights--but everyone was welcome. Whether we were totally friends
with Kenneth was beside the point; practically everyone went to
his soirees. Sometimes there were periods during which, for
instance, Robert Duncan wouldn t be there or other people would
stay away. But in general, everyone kind of circulated through- -
anybody who came to town in that world would wind up there. And
it was an opportunity to meet and to exchange information and to
listen to people s work. Later, I actually took a workshop from
Kenneth; the only poetry workshop I was ever involved with except
for a couple I ve given myself.
Byerly: Is this at the Scott Street apartment?
Stern: Yes, I believe so.
Byerly: So you and Jane--
30
Stern: No, not necessarily; sometimes. Jane and I, I, alone, and later
on Ann and I would go.
Byerly: Was Jane into the literary scene?
Stern: No, not so much. 1 think Jane didn t like the company of well-
known people, actually.
Byerly: Why?
Stern: Well, you may not take this well. Jane liked to be the center of
attention. She was not comfortable in situations where she was
not the center of attention. In a salon like Kenneth s, she would
have been outnumbered, outranked, and outspoken- -not in that sense
of the word, but you know, there was no opportunity for anyone.
Kenneth would rap ad infinitum, and you could not get a word in
edgewise. Some people would scream and yell to get a word in
edgewise. There was a lot of disagreement with Kenneth because
Kenneth had opinions about just everything, and they were not
ordinary opinions or the common opinions either. A lot of them
weren t even his opinions; they were just provocations. He was a
very provocative guy. He would do anything to get a rise out of
people, especially out of somebody whom he found on the other side
of radical politics, and I don t necessarily mean conservatives,
but I mean in those days the schisms were--Kenneth was a
prototypical Chicago product, and there s a certain- -Nelson
Algren, Kenneth Rexroth, Paul Goodman- - there s a certain
sensibility that comes out of that midwestern capital which is
very different than what you get from New York or from the West
Coast, or even from other midwestern cities like where Michael
McClure and some of that whole gang comes from.
I guess, one of the principal connections for Kenneth was
labor. The labor movement was very important to him. He was
about as far from labor s proletariat as you could get. [chuckle]
But, he identified with workers, he wore the clothes, he had the
street talk. I don t know how much taped archive there is of
Kenneth; I imagine there would be some, but if you ever listen to
it, he had great rhythm. And you know, he was unafraid of any
endeavor. I mean, the man translated from languages which he
didn t know, which he only knew through the dictionary, and
fearlessly, and a lot of them are really great translations. He
was an exceptional being. What I learned from him was one thing:
I had written a poem with the word "bird" in it. He got very
upset. "Aw, come on, Gerd, what the fuck kind of a bird is that?
It s gotta be a bird, not just bird." Precise images are what we
were looking for. Well, I disagreed with him about the bird, but
he s right; you need the precise image. Sometimes it can be the
generic bird; it doesn t have to be a particular bird. I got into
31
a lot of trouble later on with that very thing with Hayakawa. He
published a number of my poems in his magazine. He rejected one
in which I used the image "washed idol." So he decided that that
was not a precise image. It happened to be a very precise image;
I had picked up a little figure of a Buddha outside my barge in
the dirt, and I washed it off. I was standing there on my barge,
and I said, "washed idol," and that s what it was to me. We had a
terrible argument, he didn t print the poem, never printed another
poem of mine, and we stopped fishing together. [laughter]
We used to go out in Leon Adams little boat. And Hayakawa,
who was not really Oriental in the sense of having been born
there- -he was from Canada, but he was a sashimi addict, and he had
these sharp knives, and we would catch a striped bass, and without
further ado we would be eating it within five minutes. Now that s
really an experience to eat fish right out of the water. Very
different. Anyway, that s much later than what I m talking about
now.
I don t know whether we should just jump or not. Should we
jump? Don t jump. Jump, brother! Jump with care, jump in the
presence punch it is Mark Twain. Punch, brother! Punch with
care, punch in the presence of the passenger. It s a rhyme that
he wrote when he was riding on a train, and he couldn t get it out
of his mindit was part of a short story of Mark Twain s.
the conductor s punching of the ticket.
It s
Where were we? We were with Jane. All right, so we re in
Berkeley and we re--! don t know
Byerly: How old was Jane at this time?
Stern: I don t know. The age thing and the years thing we re going to
have to think about.
Byerly: How much older was she than you?
Stern: Oh, more than a decade. Nearly two.
Byerly: Almost twenty years older.
Stern: Fifteen, maybe. She wound up being over twenty years younger than
her next husband, but they were never married. They might just as
well have been.
Byerly: She was never married to Bill Buck?
Stern: No.
32
Byerly:
Stern:
Byerly:
Stern:
Byerly:
Stern:
Byerly:
She has his name.
That s what I said: they might as well have been. You can check
with Radha, but I m 99 percent sure they never married.
We got involved in the jazz scene also. I used to spend a
lot of time listening to jazz.
In San Francisco?
Yes, in San Francisco?
What was that like?
What was it like? It was super duper. I first got into jazz on
the East Coast. The time, for instance, when I was talking about
that girl who followed me to San Francisco, Lorraine Oyl--I met
her when I was the garden counselor at this camp from the
Arbeiterskreis, a part of the Jewish Workers Circle, a radical
Jewish organization. A lot of the people you are working with,
bohemians and radicals from California, came out of that movement,
actually.
I know they used the Workmen s Center; is that it?
Jewish Workmen s Center?
Was it a
Stern: The Workmen s Circle, it was called. David and Belle. All those
people came out of that movement. A lot of people who were in
that movement came from New York.
They had a summer camp called Unser Camp, which means Our
Camp [in German]. The children s camp was called Camp Kinderwelt.
You know, Children s World. And I was a counselor there. That
was the year that Dizzy Gillespie s Manteca came out. I remember
hitchhiking down to New York to buy it. We had a band at the camp
that played at night at what was called the casino,
father was the concessionaire.
Lorraine s
I had originally gotten the job because I went to public
school with a kid named Sheldon Secunda, and his father was Sholom
Secunda, who wrote [sings], "Bei Mir Bist du Schoen." You know
that song? That s a famous Jewish popular song. It was a big
hit, and he sold it for thirty- five bucks, and other people made
fortunes on that song. He was the musical director at Unser Camp.
I got this job as the garden counselor, and that was also the year
that that tune [sings], "There was a boy, da da da da da," which
was called Nature Boy. That s what they called me. I had my
beard already. I was called Nature Boy, and they would hum that
tune every time they saw me. Drove me nuts. [laughter]
33
That summer I really got heavily into the new jazz. I had
been listening to Dixieland and Chicago music, but the first sound
of Bop really grabbed my ears. It was like what I felt my poetry
was about . And that s in a sense what I had in common with a lot
of the people that we were talking about yesterday at the
conference. I mean, I didn t like Jack Kerouac for various
reasons. But he had a great ear for jazz. He understood the
rhythms. So did a lot of other people like David Meltzer, who
read yesterday. He s got a fantastic connection to jazz rhythms.
Mine are more of the broken rhythms like Bird. I knew Bird, I
knew most of those people in that music world. In later years, I
spent practically every night of the week at the Black Hawk
[Club].
Byerly: Here in San Francisco?
Stern: Yes, it was run by a family named Noga.
We wound up moving to Mill Valley, to Throckmorton Street,
with some friends that we had met through the jazz world: a couple
named Pam and Bill Loughborough and a single guy named David
Wheat. But nobody called him by that name; everybody knew him as
Buckwheat. He was a jazz bass player and guitar player. Bill was
an electronic engineer working for the government, and they were
both big heads. That was a time at which pot smoking was a big
deal.
Actually we didn t move directly to Mill Valley. We moved
to San Francisco first. We moved to San Francisco and then to
Mill Valley. We got involved in a kind of a crafts business. It
kind of developed slowly. Buckwheat was working on athere s so
many threads to this, I don t know which one to tell first.
Meanwhile, KPFA had been organized by poets, basicallyby
Lew Hill. Lew was I mentioned him in terms of the conscientious
objector Lew was from a very wealthy family down in Oklahoma.
His theory was that what America was lacking was a practice of
real communication- -of cultural communication. And he was
determined to give that to the nation, and he was determined to be
president of the United States. I ve never met anyone else in my
life who was determined that he was going to be president of these
United States. And he was serious about it. In a sense, I think
it killed him. He managed to persuade the Ford Foundation, which
was under the leadership of--you know, as I get older my name
memory bank somehow disappearsbut you know, the famous youthful
president of the University of Chicago- -Robert Hutchins who then
became the head of the Ford Foundation. We ll recover it; it s an
easy recovery. He believed Lew s concept; he believed in it, and
he funded the beginnings of KPFA which was not an easy thing to
do. It was the first listener-sponsored station; it was a brand-
new idea. It was a station which was FM--frequency modulated in
a day when very few people had FM receivers, and the content was
not something that was available over the airwaves.
The other poet who was seminal at KPFA--Pacifica Foundation
was the parent organizationwas Dick Moore, Richard Moore, who
then later went to KQED. I don t know whatever happened to
Richard in poetry; I admired his work very much. But he kind of
got sidetracked into broadcasting. I m not sure whether he kept
on writing.
Lew lived up in Duncans Mills, very close to Shirley and
Frank, and they knew each other. And I became the public
relations director of KPFA. My basic job was to persuade people
to subscribe to the station, but there wasn t much point in
subscribing to the station unless they could listen to it.
I was lucky enough to somehow get involved with a company
called Granco, which I believe was Japanese. The Japanese made
these little FM receivers which you could plug into your amplifier
and your speakers. They were cute little things, and they were
not very expensive. What we did was we devised a system by which
you could buy one of these as part of your subscription, and then
we would send in a crew to install an antenna- -you had to buy the
antenna. And we went all the way down into the valley- -into
Stockton and Bakers field and down through the Monterey Peninsula
and up north. We got hundreds of new subscribers. It wasn t that
that could support the whole budget of the station, but it brought
credibility to the funders--like the Ford Foundation- -that we
actually had a viable, intellectual, cultural audience in
California. It was a very satisfying practice.
The problem was that Lew s ambition was so much greater and
his weakness was that he was so into diversity of opinion that he
hired people who could not work together. It was a continuous
battle on intellectual and conceptual grounds at KPFA, and it
obstructed the working. We did some incredible programs that I
was involved with. We did a series on poetryit was his idea
and he got it funded by Ford. Wallace Stevens, you know, various
voices reading the poems and then explicating them. We produced
Alan Watts and Grace Clements, whom I talked to you about the
other day.
It was the first time that I had really gotten seriously
near tape recorders. I had a wire recorder, which was a very
difficult technology, but it preceded tape. I was always
interested in sound and the preserving of sound. At KPFA, at this
point, I was also working with Harry Partch Harry, you know, was
35
an American composer, now dead, who developed the system of music
which depended on a non- tempered scale and which required the
building of instruments, which could play non- tempered scales of
various and exotic designs. Some of them are based on Greek
models , and some of them on more primitive models like marimbas .
I was really impressed by Harry as a person. Jaime de
Angulo was the first person whom I felt was a creative genius and
totally out of the ordinary. I had met Henry Miller, but Henry
was kind of--I mean, you could sit around with Henry, and he was
like people. There are some figures that transcend that; Jaime
was like that, and Harry Partch was even more so. There was only
one of him.
I met Philip Lamantia, and I remained close to him for
years, until the last couple of decades. Philip was a very young
protege of some of the French surrealists. He was in San
Francisco, and he came from an Italian family here. His father
was a produce merchant.
it
Stern: One day Philip and I went to visit the Onslow-Fords, who lived up
here on the mountain in Mill Valley, in a large Victorian mansion.
Jacqueline was a San Francisco heiress who married an English
baronet who was a painter and also part of the surrealist group in
Paris in the early days . He then became kind of an Orientalist
who was a patron of Suzuki Roshi s and Alan Watts --that whole
group of people. Gordon owned the ferryboatthe 7allejo--which
lay outside of Gate Five in the shipyards and belonged to a
Portuguese Sausalitan man, Donlon Arques. The Vallejo was on one
side of Gordon s studio, and, on the other side, it was the studio
of Jean Varda. Do you know who he was?
Byerly: I ve heard the name.
Stern: Yes. Well, Jean also came out of that Parisian world. He was
Greek, though. He was a fabulous painter and a social animal of
the first degree. I mean, he had parties, and he had a marvelous
boat with a lateen rig that we sailed around the bay on. You
could fill it up with everyone in the art world in the San
Francisco Bay Area.
We met Harry at this soiree of the Onslow-Fords, and he was
carrying on about his musical theories, and I was enthralled.
Then I heard his music, and I was further enthralled. He needed
someone to manage his ensemble; he didn t have a penny to squeeze
together, and I volunteered. And I was with Harry with some
years. We never had any money, but we had absolutely incredible
36
experiences of putting together very complex works and building
instruments .
Harry was the child of American missionaries in China. He
was born in China, but he was 199 percent American-grade person.
He had been a hobo, he was in the Southwest and California, he
traveled all over the country on the rails, and one of his works
was called U.S. Highball, which was the story of his hobo days and
the whole hobo life. I still think it s one of the greatest works
in American music.
At the time, he had his studio in one of the old shipyard
buildings down there. We were by this time living on Throckmorton
in Mill Valley. One day after I spent so many months working with
Harry, Gordon invited me to lunch on the Vallejo. Gordon
stuttered I don t imagine he s still alive. He was a wonderful,
kind of comical figure. He was so British, and his paintings were
unique. They were kind of hard to take seriously because they
were sowhat should I say?--they were formula paintings. He had
ideas he had this, like, spirals, for instance, which he used as
an element in many of his paintings in this period that I m
talking about. I m not speaking badly about his paintings; I
really enjoyed his paintings but they were more of an idea than
actual--. He was so wrapped up in calligraphy and Zen and that
world. And that s a world of ideas.
The Barge
Stern: At this lunch he said to me, "G-G-G-Gerd, Jacqueline and I," she
wasn t thereshe was a beautiful, beautiful woman, and she had
one of those high voices, and she always wore flowing robes and
scarves that were transparent. Jacqueline was too much. Anyhow,
Gordon says, "Jacqueline and I are so appreciative of what you ve
done for Harry. I want to give you something, Gerd." I was ready
to be given something, you know? [laughter] I think maybe dollar
signs were dancing in my head, because they were rich. He had a
lot of trouble bringing it out. He says, "Y-Y-You know I own this
land here on the waterfront .
"
He had a little piece there which
was right in the middle of the Arques shipyards . "What I would
like to offer you is a berth for a barge." There was a lot of
stuttering which I m not going to try to imitate. I was
dumbfounded. It was like, you know, what kind of an offer is
that? A berth for a barge? I didn t have a barge. I didn t have
much money to eat, much less buy a barge, you know? But I was
nice, I said, "Thank you very much. It is a great gesture," and
37
so forth and so on. To be a neighbor of his and Yanko--Jean Varda
was called Yanko--would have been great.
About two weeks later, I was having a drink at the Tin
Angel, which was owned by Peggy Tolk-Watkins .
Peggy was a Black
Mountain product, and although we hadn t been at Black Mountain at
the same time, it wasanybody who had ever been at Black Mountain
had a bond with anybody else. Peggy was a fantastic character.
Do you know something about her?
Byerly: Peggy. What s her last name?
Stern : Tolk-Watkins .
Byerly: And it was a barge? The Tin Angel?
Stern: The Tin Angel was not a barge, it was built on stilts. It was
right on the water in Sausalito, right on the middle of the
causeway. Peggy was a raging dyke. I mean, she was something
else- -not a violent person, but an intense, strong, raging
personality. One of her good friends was a sculptress named
Blanche Sherwood. We were talking at the bar and drinking, and
she was muttering on about, "Blanche has a fucking problem, blah
blah blah." I said, "What s the big problem?" She says, "Well,
there s this barge, and it s stuck on the mud in Don s shipyard,
and it s costing a fucking fortune, and what are we going to do?
We should burn the bloody thing." I said, "Barge?" She says,
"Yeah, it s this big old navy laundry barge, 135 feet long, 30
feet wide, and Blanche had no business buying it. She should just
get rid of it." I said, "I ll take it."
So within a week I owned a barge. A huge barge. And it was
stuck on the mud. And I went to Arques, whom I didn t know- -great
guy, a really great guy. Big heavy belly, and he drove tugboats
around Sausalito. A very ethnic Portuguese, although I think he
was born here. His father had started the shipyard, and I guess
it had been a big deal during the war. You know, those were all
Kaiser yards down there. What were they called? Liberty Ships-
Kaiser s specials, which were not great boats but they served the
purpose during the war. I went to Don- -everybody called him Don;
it was Donlon [spells], which I guess is a Portuguese first name.
So he said, "You can do it; I ll help you get that barge off
the damn mud." He didn t like the two ladiesin quotes,
"ladies". I said, "Hey, tell me what to do." He says, "Well,
you ve got to get some guys to help you, and it s--" No, no, I m
sorry; I got this mixed up.
happens much later.
I got this completely mixed up. This
Byerly:
Stern:
Byerly:
Stern:
38
Okay, now we re back at the Tin Angel; we re going to cut
this whole little part out. I get the barge. The barge is
sitting in his shipyard, and we get it upthat s right; she
didn t have anyplace to put it. That was it, she didn t have any
place to put it. She couldn t live on the barge because you re
not allowed to live in the shipyard. And the barge was about to
sink because it had a lot of holes in it. So I went to Don, and
he knew exactly where Gordon s place was because it was in the
middle of his shipyard, and he says, "I m sure we can get it out
there." So we get it out next to the Vallejo, and Buckwheat and
Bill and Pam and I and Jane and Adam move on it. And we re living
on the barge.
Pam? Did you say Pam?
Yeah, Pamela Loughborough.
Who s she?
She was married to Old Bill,
engineer I told you about.
Bill Loughborough, the electronic
Byerly: Right.
Boobam Bamboo Company
Stern: Now there was another guy involved with us named Jak Simpson. We
had founded a little business, and the business was called the
BooBam Bamboo Drum Company. What we did was we made drums out of
bamboo. Buckwheat was working on the President Lines as a bass
player, going to the Orient.
Byerly: On what lines?
Stern: President Lines. The ship line that used to take passengers and
freight. In the Philippines, which was one of their stops, he
would buy this large diameter giant bamboo and bring back a number
of sticks of it on the ship. This really came out of the Harry
Partch world. I had enlisted Bill and Buckwheat into helping
build instruments for Harry. We had built a marimba which
delivered tones down to about sixteen cycles, which is barely
audible. And in order to build something like that and to get the
coupling of the bar which you hit with a big soft mallet over the
chamber which resonates --when you can t hear so well, you ve got
to figure out a way to measure vibration. Now Bill had
instruments that he borrowed from the Navy Yard which could do
39
that. So we were able to work on a new technical level that
hadn t been possible before, and we were able to tune these
instruments using an oscilloscope and an audio oscillator and a
device that read out what the cycles per second were. It used to
be cps [cycles per second], now it s called hertz, after a man
named Hertz, who was kind of the progenitor of audio engineering.
Heinrich Hertz I think his name was Heinrich.
We had two kinds of drums . We had the drums that had two
nodes on the end, and we carved an H out of them and tuned them to
the size of the resonating chamber. You could play them either
with your fingers or with mallets. And then we took the ones in
between which were open at both ends, and we put skin caps on them
like bongos, except we tuned them in half-steps so that if you
had, like, one-two-three, or you had one-two-three-four-five-six,
you could play an actual scale on them. A lot of the jazz groups
and a lot of people generally were fascinated and added them to
their percussion sections.
We went to the big music conventions; Jak Simpson and I
drove there in a Volkswagen Bus filled with drums, and we played
them and showed them, and we got more orders than we could
imagine, but we could never fill them. There wasn t enough
bamboo, and we weren t into making money. The prototype of this
to me was when I really understood what business was about and
what--. Many years later I was in Venezuela, and I was into
cigars, and I found an incredible cigar through--! 11 tell that
story some other time. But I went to the guy and said, "I would
like to import them to the United States." He said, "You re a
friend of friends. I m going to explain to you that I make enough
cigars for my country. If I wanted to, I could sell cigars all
over the world. But I just have a few people working with me;
they ve worked with me for years. I have small fields. I have
enough money to live here the way I like to live. I don t want to
be bigger; I just want to be what I am. Do you understand?" And
I understood. I thought back to the BooBam Bamboo Drum days, and
I said, "Hey,
we didn t have a ghost." If we had just continued
making them for friends and for jazz musicians, and making them by
handbut, you know, right away we went to the music convention
and we were drowned in a world which was beyond us .
Here we were, and Jane gets pregnant again. We re living on
the barge.
\
Byerly: Did you build a house on the barge?
Stern: No, it had a house on it. It was a laundry barge, and it had a
house on it. Blanche had done some work on it. There was a
beautiful fireplace with a copper hood.
40
Byerly: Is that the picture of it? [points]
Stern: Yeah, that s the picture, but many years later. This was long
afterward.
A fabulous place to live. At that time, it was in fairly
good repair. Anyway, we were attached to the electricity. We had
electricity, and we had water. What we didn t have was sewage;
the sewage just went into the bay. Later onwell, that s a later
story.
Pam had lost a baby. She was pregnant again, and she had to
spend all of her time in bed. We were heavily into the jazz
scene, and all of the famous jazz musicians came to the barge. I
was still working at KPFA for a very meager salary.
We were all big potheads, right? And we believed we should
be able to smoke them legally instead of illegally, so we did this
secret program at KPFA. There were like five people talking about
pot, and it was broadcast, and the authorities were, I mean, it
was headlined in the papers. People were really upset, and they
were looking for us. They didn t know who produced the program in
the station; most people in the station didn t know. Several
people who did, refused to talkacted like they didn t know. So
they never found out who produced it. I think it was like the
first act of actual media aggression against the authorities on
that level. Even to this day, I don t think anybody knows who
produced that program [laughter]: yours truly. It didn t improve
my position at the station, by the way, among the several people
who knew it.
Lewis Hill
Stern: Lew Hill- -we were extremely, extremely close. We would spend
weekends up at his place up in Duncans Mills , and he had a little
printing press there on which I printed one of my poems, and he
printed his poems . And he accused me of being a typical Jewish
anarchist, and I wasn t an anarchist by any means. But he felt
that I was chaotic, and that I wasn t organized, and that I didn t
understand the agenda which was necessary. His next step was to
have a first of all, he was trying to replicate KPFA in other
cities, and then he wanted a chain of newspapers, and once he had
a chain of newspapers he could get elected president, you see, and
he needed me and a few other people to be his henchmen. And we
didn t share his ambitions. [laughter] We enjoyed the concept
but we didn t want to do the work; I wanted to write poetry, and
41
other people wanted to do their thing, and nobody wanted to be in
politics for sure. Except Lew.
Now Lew was a terrible womanizer. I mean terrible in the
sense that it was destructive to him. He had a marriage to a
childhood sweetheart, he had two children, but he had a long-term
affair with Richard s wife, Eleanor, which was destructive to his
marriage. It was kind of a triangle which everybody thought was
all right, but nobody really prospered under it. And then I had a
lady who was working as my assistant in public relations. They
started having an affair, Lew and she, and it got terrifying- -she
had a husband too, and blah blah blah.
One day Lew was discovered in his garage. He had connected
the gas pipe to a tube and committed suicide. I was so angry. I
don t get angry much, but I felt, like, betrayed and
disillusioned, you know? Here was this exceptionally intelligent,
wealthy, talented, organized person, and he had let what I
considered just a stupid emotional bind that he had gotten into to
lead him to the point of killing himself? I found it
inconceivable. Just totally inconceivable. I have never really
gotten over it. I don t--after all these decades later--
understand how that was prompted in him. I understand that he and
his wifebut a man of his capabilities--. Anyway, that was
devastating.
More of Life on the Barge
Stern: In the meantime, we were on the barge, and Harry Partch--we had
thirty to forty people involved in an orchestra and a dramatic
performance with singers. We had finished doing Plectra and
Percussion dances, and we were on to his Oedipus. A very complex
piece of work. Harry s main righteous remark on how one led one s
life was, "If
you want it done right, do it yourself." That was
completely counter to writing a work which involved thirty to
forty people. And the conflict was enormous; he was an irascible,
strange dude, you know? He was basically gay but he was in the
closet for most of his life because of the times. He was a- -what
do you call people who really are not in tune with women? I can t
think of the name.
Byerly: Men? [laughter]
Stern: Yeah, men. You know what I mean; there s a word.
Byerly: Misogynist?
Stern: Yes, he was a misogynist. He had women friends, but he was always
critical of them. Jacqueline was so good to him. There were many
women in his life who supported him and were his patrons, who
really understood what he wanted to do. I don t think he had an
idea of why he had this strange relationship, but he really liked
young boys. Eventually, [chuckle] he got into it, which was good.
He was also an alcoholic, and he didn t use drugs at all. He was
kind of terrified and against them.
I was lucky; I managed to interest a lot of people in his
work. Carl Haverlin, who was the head of BMI [Broadcast Rights
Incorporated] , and who gave him money from then on for the rest of
his life. BMI is a rights association like ASCAP [American
Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers]. You know, every
time something is played on the radio or television, the composer
has the right to collect money and do it through these two
organizations. Carl really appreciated him. He s been dead for
many years .
We did Oedipus on the waterfront in Sausalito for a number
of days with great critical acclaim. A lot of our band I had
recruited from the Presidio military band. There were a lot of
jazz musicians who were part of that band because they got into
the army and, what do you do? You re a musician? Oh, we need--.
Well, these guys were great musicians, and they loved being in
Harry s band. They learned the instruments, they learned the non-
tempered scale, they were super duper musicians.
Then one day one of them brought this gangly- -in Yiddish you
call him nebbish--! mean, a guy who just doesn t somehow fit in,
you know? And I felt sorry for him. Bill Buck. He was in the
army, and he was hanging around the band. He wanted somehow to be
involved with Partch, and Harry didn t want any part of him. I
finally talked to Harry and said, "Let him turn the pages on the
harmonium," which was this reed organ that Harry had converted to
a non- tempered scale. Bill started hanging around the barge, and
we turned him on and kind of changed his life. He was wearing
like old clothes when he wasn t in uniform, and he drove a ratty
old Ford.
Bill Buck ##
Stern: He did not appear to be from any wealth, or any fine family; he
looked like something that the cat had dragged in. He would sleep
on the couch, and you have some idea of what Jane was like. He
was introduced into Oriental philosophy and art and all kinds of
43
literaturethings he never had really known about, and he took to
them like a proverbial--. Then one day Jane is gone, and the kids
are gone. By this time, Radha was born. Radha was a baby, less
than a year old, I think. I m not quite sure about the time and
everything. But Jane s gone; she s disappeared with the kids.
It s like ten days or two weeks before I find out what happened.
But Bill Buck is also gone. It turns out thatremember I told
you about Wallace Look, the librarian? In the meantime, he had
come back out of the monastery which was on the Hudson in New York
State, and he had a little apartment in Sausalito. He had
sheltered Bill and Jane and the children. They went to Nevada,
and they lived in Nevada while Jane was getting a divorce from me.
/
But in the meantime, we found out that Bill Buck was a
millionaire. He had just turned twenty-one, and he inherited the
first part of his fortune. He bought her a Mercedes, which at
that time was not something that you saw every day. And they had
my children! They were not friendly; they were unfriendly. I
wasn t the nicest person in the world; I m not saying that I was a
virtuous husband or anything like that, but on the other hand I
wasn t expecting this at all. I was not pleased. I was hurt. I
was particularly hurt because I was the guy who had brought Bill
into our group the other guys, Buckwheat and Old Bill, had
thought that Bill Buck was the FBI. I said, "You ve got to be
kidding. This nebbish kid couldn t be the FBI." I was right
about that, [laughter] but he turned out to be even worse in a
sense. Now it s all turned around kind of strangely.
There was this sequence of bizarre events. I know I ve used
that word a number of times. One day, I came back to the barge
and Old Bill and Pam and Buckwheat are gone. They ve moved
everything out while I was somewhere, you know. And now it turns
out that they- -Bill- -has formed a company and financed them to
build drums out of redwood in the same pattern that we were
building them out of bamboo, but square instead of round. They
now have capital and a company, and they ve left me.
The next thing that happens is all of sudden there s this
book of poetry. The poetry is Jane s and Bill s and Look s. I m
beginning to think that I m being co-opted, and I m right.
The next thing I get is an anonymous offer to buy the barge.
I was a little slow, but it didn t take me very many days to think
about who was making the anonymous offer to buy, and it turned out
it was Bill Buck.
44
Maya Angelou
Stern: In the meantime, Jak Simpson and I had remained fast buddies. He
had been a good friend of Old Bill s and Buckwheat s the same as
me, but when they left, he was quite offended. He stuck with me.
Jack was from Kansas City, he was a friend of Bird s, of Charlie
Parker s, and a lot of people. He knew a lot of people, and among
them was a Greek guy named Tosh Angelous. Tosh had been married
to Maya. They had a breakup, and Jack remained a friend of
Maya s, and he introduced me to Maya. Maya at the time was
between jobs. She was trying to get into the Purple Onion [Club],
and she had been on the road. She just came back from the road;
she was the primary dancer in the Porgy and Bess company that
toured Europe.
One of my neighbors was John Drew. He lived on the
waterfront, and he was a real queen. Wonderful guy- -from the
Barrymore family. He was the manager and impresario of the Purple
Onion. I became Maya s manager, and we got her into the Onion.
She was an instant star there.
Byerly: What was the Purple Onion?
Stern: Well, there were two hip clubs in North Beach. One was the Hungry
I, and the other was the Purple Onion. Enrico Banducci was at the
I. That was before your time, huh? You know, Mort Sahl, the
Kingston Trio, Phyllis Diller. Phyllis and Maya and the Kingston
Trio was the bill. Great bill.
Byerly: And Maya danced?
Stern: She sang and moved. [Sings] "Don t let the sun catch you crying."
Anyway, we lived together, and we had a great time.
Byerly: She moved into the barge?
Stern: Yes. With her son, Clyde. Clyde was, I don t know, eleven or
twelve at the time.
She came from a very difficult family. I never knew her
father, but I knew her mother. Her mother was basically lesbian.
And Maya was very bisexual herself. Her mother ran a kind of a
coffeeshop in the Fillmore with her lover. They were really tough
dykes, man, oh boy. One day a guy came in and held her up, she
pulled a gun from under the counter and shot him dead. Boom. No
problem, right?
45
So Maya and I, you know, we--. She got in the Purple Onion
because she was a great talent. She still is a great talent. She
was a performer. She could magnetize an audience; wonderful,
wonderful onstage personality, and a good repertoire of songs.
She moved, and she wore these very simple strap gowns with nothing
under them. She was over six foot tall and skinny, and when she
moved people just gasped. She had studied originally with Pearl
Primus, New York, who was the black modern dancer.
We were together for some time. Maya is not an easy
temperament; she s a difficult woman. She used to introduce me to
men as, "This is Gerd Stern, my manager, and my man." But if it
was a woman, it would be, "This is Gerd Stern, my man, and my
manager." It was very clear, right? [laughter]
It was a difficult life. We lived at night. In those days
we had to live in the black world. Not in Sausalito, but like in
Los Angeles. We couldn t stay at a hotel; we had to stay at a
hotel in the ghetto. Well, not ghetto, but in the black section;
it was a nice hotel. I m not saying it was a dump or anything.
It was difficult for me being accepted in that worldeven though,
for instance, in New York, I had had black friends.
Just about that time, problems started developing. Percy
Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet wasyou know, he and I had even
slept in the same bed together, not sex--and then it got to the
point where John Lewis, who also was a friend of mine, was saying
to Percy, "Look, Percy." Pussy, they called him. "You ve got to
think of the race. I mean, all these white friends and all this
pot smoking, you know? You re not thinking of the race." There
was a lot of ambivalence toward white people. It was very
painful. Like in Chicago. In New York there s no problem, no
line at the hotels. I mean, there were hotels where you couldn t
stay at, but one knew which ones. But in Chicago and in the South
and in other places, in Los Angeles, hey, if you re a mixed couple
you had to stay in a black hotel, and you got a lot of bad vibes
even there.
We were very friendly with people. She had a lot of fans.
You know, the famous black singer, Lena Home. Lena loved Maya s
work. Lena played the Fairmont, and we were very friendly. Her
husband was still alive then. He was a fabulous arranger and
pianist. He was white.
So one time we came homewe had had some difficulties. Her
son was not easy to deal with, and school, and so forth, and so
on, and living that life and not having anybody to take care of
him. Her brother was in jail for murder, etcetera. One morning
about six or seven o clock in the morning she woke me up and said,
46
"Oh, your baby s so dry; go get your baby some water." And I
said, "Bitch! Let me sleep!" [laughter] And she took this
bottle of Dixie Peach--you know what Dixie Peach is? It s a hair
gel, and she smashed it onto the floor. "No white motherfucker is
gonna call me bitch !"
[laughter] And she went after me with
this bottle, and she cut herself. Then she started crying.
"Waah, you made me cut myself!" That was it for me. I just
couldn t take that, and within a week we had come apart. It was
all right. We both understood it, and she went on, and I went on.
>
IV 1960s: PLAYBOY MAGAZINE AND SAN FRANCISCO HIGH SOCIETY
Marriage to Ann London
Stern: Anyway, that was right after Jane. In the meantime, I had left
KPFA. I mean, after Lew, and after--. The guy who had succeeded
me was a guy named Henry--Sandy Jacobs. He had become public
relations director. And he then became a partner of my partners
who wereyou know, Old Bill and Buckwheat. Henry, whom I had
known because of KPFA, was going out with a lady well, there were
other friends that came out of this group. They were from
Chicago. One was a sociologist, Howie Becker, and his wife, Nan,
and his sister-in-law who was part of the Second City troupe, you
know, the comedian. Anyway, Henry--or Sandy--was going out with
Ann London, and that s how I met Ann. Sometime after Maya left, I
ran into Ann somewhere, and- -you know, she was a poet also- -we got
to talking, we went out together. Before we knew it, she was
living on the barge with me .
We were very much in love, and we had many similar
interests, although she was a lot more classical and academic than
I was . And we knew a lot of the same people in the literary
circles .
Carl and I had kept in touch all this time, and he was
working for his uncle, the publisher of Ace Books. I had some bad
trips in New York after the hospital- -with Allen and Jack and the
gang and people around him. At one point I had been in an
apartment, and we had all gotten high--I think I was the first guy
to actually turn him on. They held me down and tried to get this
guy to fuck me in the ass because they decided that what was
really wrong with me was that I didn t understand homosexuality.
But the guy couldn t get it up. So I was saved that experience,
[laughter] It didn t endear them to me. I never did like Jack;
Jack was a fucking voyeur. He was a dirty alcoholic; he just
really liked to get drunk, and he wasn t nice to women. He
treated women badly. I m not attached to any feminist causes, but
48
I ve always somehow felt differently about women than I think that
a lot of men do.
Byerly: In what way?
Stern: Well, women have been very important in my life as confidants and
as romantic and intellectual peers. Elaine, whom I talked to you
about, was the foundation of my self-confidence as a writer.
Jane, I learned an incredible amount of cultural knowledge from
Jane--like I told you, she was a dilettante; she knew a little bit
about everything, whether it was archaeology or anthropology,
Buddhism, etcetera. It wasn t deep but it was enough to get you
started in practically any direction. Maya was a fantastic
experience for me; I must say I don t regret any piece of any
relationship that I ve had. I think Maya s the only person, the
only relationship that I would have voluntarily broken up.
I guess I have a very deep-seated fear of violence. I will
notstrange thing about my grandson s murder--! can t stand to
have guns around, and I never have been able to since I was very
young. I don t know where it came from. I won t tolerate
physical violence. And it isn t like I haven t been bad about it
once or twice in my life. I used to be very hysterical. I had
absolute fits during my relationship with Jane, all the way up
until much later in this tale when I took acid. I haven t had a
hysterical episode since my first acid trip, which is somewhat
different from other people s experience.
Ann and I were a very successful couple for some time. We
lived together for quite a while. Ann was the West Coast editor
for McGraw-Hill at the time, a job which her father had gotten
her. When I met Ann, and even when we started living together, I
didn t have a ghost about who her father was. I mean, I knew what
his name was. His name was Dan London. I wasn t into San
Francisco society; I didn t know, you know? Ann had all these
fabulous connections; she knew everyone. She never believed until
the moment that she died that I didn t know who her father was,
that I didn t understand what I was getting myself into. But I
had no knowledge of it. And the fact that she didn t believe me,
which didn t come out for a long time, was somewhat devastating to
me because why would I? A refugee boy from New York. [laughter]
Sure, I was involved in the San Francisco kind of poetic scene,
but I never read the Chronicle. Once I was with Ann we had the
Chronicle every day so I started reading it. I had no idea who
Herb Caen was, who later became a very close friend of mine. I m
really pleased as punch that he got the Pulitzer.
Byerly: Herb Caen was her father?
Stern: No. Herb Caen was just somebody she knew. Dan London was her
father. Dan London was the manager of the St. Francis Hotel, he
was the Commodore of the Golden Fleet, he was a director of the
Golden Gate Bridge, he was a personal friend of the Shah and of
President [Dwight] Eisenhower, and etcetera. He was a bigshot, a
big deal. It wasn t my world, and I didn t understand the world.
Later on, when I got to know him, we got along fine. He was
unfortunately another alcoholic, and the whole family was
alcoholic, and it was very sad. But he was all right. He was
only happy when he was piloting or driving his seventy- some-odd-
foot cruiser, the Adventuress, which was the leading boat of San
Francisco s Chamber of Commerce Golden Fleet. You could invite
fifteen people to sit at the table on this boat and have dinner
while you were cruising around Alcatraz [Island]. Wow. We used
to do that; we used to have literary dinners on this boat,
[laughter]
It was a whole new world for me. But Ann was convinced that
part of my original motivation was that she was a rich girl and a
society girl, and it couldn t have been further from the truth. I
didn t have any idea. The family had come from Seattle
[Washington] ; she had gone to the University of Washington. And
Ted Roethke, who was her teacher, was a friend of mine; he was a
poet . Remember I told you about Ruth Witt-Diamant at the San
Francisco Poetry Center? When Ted was here reading, I was the guy
who drove him around and took him to the right bars and etcetera.
And he was one of the few poets who appreciated my work. She was
his student, so that was the major connection.
The London family lived in the St. Francis Hotel. They had
a floor basically or half a floor there. Of course, it wasn t
until somewhat later on that I met her mother and father, and I
had met the sister, Mimi, who was a fashion model, younger than
Ann.
But Ann was rebelling from her family at the time, so she
wasn t very attached to them. Well, all of a sudden, some
reporter at the Chronicle realized that here Dan London s daughter
was living on a barge in Sausalito, and I can t remember, but they
came and took pictures, and they published this big story with a
picture of Ann. I can t remember--! think I was in it also. And
it was very embarrassing to the Londons because here was their
daughter living with somebody. So Ann was called in and read the
Riot Act. She had been married before to a composer in Seattle.
The marriage had broken up- -without children. Ann pleaded with me
that we had to get married immediately and that actually it should
be thought of that it was retroactive, et cetera. Hey, big deal.
50
So we went out to Inverness [California] with my friend
Ivan, who at the time was married to his first wife Julia Pearl,
another painter. Ivan and Julia were the witnesses, and a justice
of the peace married us, and that was the time he was watching
television over our heads, and we just thought it was the funniest
thing in the world. We got back to the barge, and I cooked--! was
a very good cook--I remember I cooked oxtail soup. That was our
wedding feast. So we were married.
Now all of a sudden I understood. They didn t come to the
wedding. But now I got to meet Dan and Claire and have dinner at
their apartment. Now I got some idea of the world that she had
come out of. I mean it was a world which was like Madeline s--
that book about the little girl who lives in a hotel.
That s how Ann grew up. She grew up with room service and
had practically never seen her parents. And she had this awful
ambivalent relationship with her father. He had abandoned her,
and he hadn t spent any time with her, and he demanded that she be
this kind of person, and she wasn t, and he was basically an anti-
intellectual, and she was a highbrow. He was a dead-conservative
Republican, and she was a liberal Democrat; he was for the death
penalty, she wasn t, and so on.
[Interview 2: April 15, 1996] ##
Stern: Ann and I were each deeply involved with poetry. We decided early
in the relationship to publish something in the nature of single
broadsheets of poems. It was called Poems in Folio. It was a
monthly subscription where people who subscribed got one poem per
month. Each one was printed by an artisan printer, most of them
here in California- -the Grabhorn Press was the first onethey did
William Carlos Williams Sappho version or translation. A very
beautiful poem. We did it for a year; there were twelve poems.
As usual, Ann and I were on kind of opposite sides of the
coin. She was a fairly strong-willed woman, and she won the day.
What that involved was that I felt that we should publish young,
unknown poets such as myself at the time, and Ann felt that the
only way that this would be successful is if we had important
poets who would get people to subscribe and who would give the
whole thing a cachet. I understood that that was a reasonable
point of view. It didn t match my feelings about what I wanted to
do in terms of my poetry or others of my peers and contemporaries.
But that s how the thing went .
Ann had had an affair with a very well-known older poet who
also--I think she had attended one or two of his workshops when
she was still up at SeattleStanley Kunitz. Stanley was one of
51
our editorial board, and we had--I can t remember at this time,
but it s a matter of record the poets that were on our editorial
boards. It was a very uptown kind of a presentation. We also had
a binder which was very handsome, and Ivan, my friend, designed
the logo for Poems in Folio. It was a lyre, which is a long-term
symbol of poetry, of barding. I wouldn t say it was a great
business success, but they were beautiful, beautiful poems. There
was a limited edition, and then there were some other poems. We
certainly didn t make any money, but it created a little bit of a
stir, and the press people were very happy with it. Most of the
well-known hand presses did one of the poems. It did point out to
me the vast distance between the respectable world of academic and
prestigious poets and my own world, which was kind of a poetry
underworld.
At more or less the same time, Ann and I were involved in a
small group of poets. We gave readings and published a little--!
can t remember whether it was mimeographed or photo offsetit was
called Seven Stray Cats . There were seven of us . It was our own
poetry. It brought us together, and we discussed a lot of the
issues involved in our poems. One of the people- -probably the one
who has gotten most well-known- -was Jack Gilbert.
Jack and I wrote a satirical puppet play which was done at
the San Francisco--! can t remember exactly what it was called
Art Fair. It was kind of an open-air thing. There was a group--!
can t remember the namebut Helga Williamson was the puppeteer.
And it was called "Don t Flee the Scene Salty," after a tune by
Lionel Hampton.
We did this in the studio; we recorded it with music in the
studio of Richard Wirtz Emerson. Dick recorded a vast array of
Bay Area poets. He was one of the first people to have the
technology; he worked for a big company (Shell) during the day,
and this was his passion in the evenings and on the weekends. He
lived in Sausalito, and he was really a big help to a lot of poets
in terms of not only appreciating their work--. There were a lot
of interesting people around that time: Bern Porter, who had been
involved in the Manhattan Project and was somehow assuaging his
guilt by publishing in the arts. The "Don t Flee the Scene Salty"
music, the tune, is by Lionel Hampton, and the play was a satire
on friends like Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Rexroth, and the music
was Charlie Parker and Hampton, etcetera, etcetera. It was very
well accepted at the time. The strange thing is that it s a lost
piece of work. I don t know what happened to Richard; I lost
touch with him. I m sure that it exists on tape, but I ve never
been able to recover a copy of it. It s definitely a very
interesting typical kind of take on that time. It would be a good
addition to this archive if we can figure out how to find--! don t
52
know if Richard is alive. I wouldn t be surprised if he were. I
think he was a little older than I am. But I m sure that
somewhere his treasure trove exists .
Byerly: Who were the other "seven stray cats"?
Stern: Oh, you would ask me that.
Byerly: You and Ann--
Stern: And Jack. I ll get it for you. In fact, I will send you a copy
of the Seven Stray Cats; I think I have three or four of them
left. I ll make a note of that. Laura- -well, let s just go on.
Playboy Magazine
Stern: At that time I hadn t been working. We needed money, and as I
think I said on an earlier tape, Ann was extremely well-connected
in the Bay Area, and one of her friends was Herb Caen. Herb at
that time was married to Sally Caen, several wives ago at this
point. It turned out that Sally and I had quite a lot of mutual
acquaintances in the past, in the Village: Mason Hoffenberg and
Stanley Gould and other people that we knew in common. She came
from a much wilder side of the world than Herb did, certainly, but
Herb and I wound up with a very close friendship. The four of us
saw a lot of each other. He helped me to get work. I had never
written really any prose, and he hooked me up with August C.
Spectorsky at Playboy.
Augie Spectorsky was another incredible human being. He was
a fantastic writer, and he had been enticed out of New York by
[Hugh] Hefner s money very early on to become the associate
publisher of Playboy, and he was the one who injected the
intellect and the appreciation for both fiction and articles of
socially positive content into that magazine. He took it from a
kind of medium success to its peak. Unfortunately, he passed on
very early. He was ultra-sophisticated. His book, The
Exurbanites , was a best-seller. It was about people who lived
outside of New York City and commuted in. When Hef found him, he
was the major writer on the Arlene Francis Home Show. He kept
saying no, and finally the money got to be so much, and the perks
got so much that he and his wife moved to Chicago and took over
the leadership of Playboy. She was the personnel director and he
was the associate publisher.
53
Spec had conceived of a series called "Playboy On the Town"
done on certain cities, and he had asked Herb to write the San
Francisco "On the Town." And Herb s policy was that he only wrote
things with a byline. I mean, he was already very well-known, and
there was no reason for him to write something which would be
house-written. He said to me, "Gerd, you write it. I ll
introduce you to Spectorsky, and you write it." I said, "I ve
never done anything like that." You know, write about restaurants
and nightclubs. He said, "Look, it s easy. Believe me. I ll
introduce you to three or four PR people here; they ll take you
around, and you write about it. And I ll look at it."
Sure enough, it was a ball; I had a marvelous time writing
it. Spectorsky and I hit it off immediately. They sent me a
ticket to come back to Chicago to meet with them. And here all of
a sudden I was writing for a major national magazine, totally
courtesy of Herb s rep. Then I met all these flacks: one of the
principal ones was a guy named Frank di Marco. He was Ernie s PR
guy and a number of other places. We became friendly while he was
taking me around to all these restaurants and introducing me to
the owners and getting my story down for me. It was a little
coterie of people in that world, like any other coterie. All of a
sudden I was in this little world. Then Frank said to me, "What
are you going to do when you finish this story?" I said, "I don t
know; I ve never done this before." He said, "I ve got an idea
for you. I have a friend who owns a restaurant, and I can t
represent him because he is in competition with Ernie s--or at
least Ernie s thinks he is. I don t think he is, and Ernie s
doesn t want me to represent him. So I ll take you there, and you
write about them in Playboy, and you take the public relations
post. You ll get a good fee every month. And from there on, Herb
will help you."
Now all of a sudden I was in the public relations business.
I represented the guy who was Alexis Merabishvilli of Alexis
Tangier, which was, basically, as far as I was concerned, by the
time I got to know it, the premier restaurant in San Francisco at
the time. And Alexis was some character. He was born in Tbilisi,
in Georgia. He had been a movie actor. He worked with Pudovkin
and [Sergei] Eisenstein--! mean, these people were to me heroes of
the avant-garde; I found it rather unbelievable when he first told
me the story. I don t think I really believed him but it turned
out to be true. He also taught me most of what I know about
wines .
At the same time, I had become friendly with Leon Adams, who
was the head of the California Wine Institute. They represented
all the small wineries. I knew his son, Jerry, who was a
reporter. Leon would invite me--we were still living on the barge
54
Byerly:
Stern:
in Sausalito, and we would go fishing in his fishing boat for
striped bass. He wrote one of the first books about California
wines, but he also wrote the first computerized survey of where
striped bass were caught in San Francisco Bay. Very early use of
computers for something that you wouldn t even think you could
compute. And it worked; people could understand where and when
and how the fish bit.
Spec was also an old friend of Hayakawa s--now this was long
before Hayakawa was either at the university or in politics.
Hayakawa s wife s brother was Frank Lloyd Wright s principal
associate. They lived in Mill Valley, in a Frank Lloyd Wright-
inspired house. When Spectorsky and his wife Theo came out here
we had dinner together, and I got to know Hayakawa, and that s
how, as I mentioned--! don t remember; was that on the tape?--he
published some of my poems, and we got into this stupid argument
about the washed idol.
[inaudible] ?
Yes. Anyway, Hayakawa used to come out with us too on the boat--
with Leon Adams. It was a very "ferment" time in Sausalito. We
got into a lot of political fights because there were people
trying to kick out the barges because of sewage problems and
because of land values. We managed to win most of those battles
at that time, and eventually we did connect to the sewers. Most
of the boats at least the ones that were close to the land like
ours .
The Sausalito Houseboat
Stern: I ve now skipped before Ann. Somewhere in there, you know, after
Gordon Onslow Ford s ultra-generous offer to me of a berth for my
barge, he went ahead and sold the land [chuckles] that my barge
was on, and I had to move. By this time, the barge had a lot of
holes in it because there s a marine worm here in the bay called
the torridos. They re really ferocious little critters. The
torridos had eaten a lot of the timbers. I had to go back to
Arques and say, "What am I going to do? Can I save the barge?"
He says, "Ah, don t worry about it. I ll give you a place up on
my land. We ll move it." I said, "How are we going to do that?"
He says, "What you gotta do is you gotta get a bunch of old
mattresses, and you go down below, and you stuff all the holes up
with mattresses, and you cement them in," and he went through
that. "Then, at high tide, we put the pumps on board, and we pump
the rest of the water out, and we move the barge up."
55
I spent a month with a few friends who volunteered to help
me. It was a filthy, dirty job in the mud. It was dark down
below and not quite headroom, you know, so you bent over, and we
did all this work and stuffed mattresses and hammered boards
behind them and with cement and all kinds of stuff. The time
came, and we put the pumps on board, we pumped out, the tide rose,
the barge stayed where it was. No way was it going to move.
I was ready to give up. At the No Name Bar in Sausalito
this became a cause celebre. People were betting on whether the
barge could be moved or not. Don Arques kept telling me, "You can
do it, you can do it!" With one more month, right? Okay. So now
I got about twelve people from the No Name Bar who are all betting
on me, so they re helping me stuff mattresses. Of course, you can
only do it at low tide. So another month goes by, and the pumps
get going on board, and I m below fixing last-minute leaks, and
the tide rises, and all of a sudden there is this thunderous
crack. I mean, it was like the world had ended, from where I was
down below. Everybody thought I had had it, you know? The barge
popped up, and the tugboat towed it to the new site. Nobody could
figure out what this noise had been. I mean, it was really earth-
shaking .
The next morning at low tide we went to the site where the
barge had been and what had happened is the bottom planking of the
barge was left in the mud with the nails sticking out of it. It
had been so stuck to the mud that the barge, with its main
timbers, lifted up. But the bottom planking just stayed in the
mud. The guys who bet on me won. That was quite something.
Anyway, the barge was there for many years --long after I
left it. That s another story.
Public Relations Work
Stern: I represented quite a few clients, and I worked very hard at it,
at this public relations business. It was a lot of fun. One of
the accounts I worked for was a guy named Angelo Sabella. The
family was one of the original Sicilian fisherman families on
Fisherman s Wharf. Angelo was one of the side sonsnot the main
family that s on the wharf. He had just opened, right by
Richardson Bridge, Sabella s of Marin. He was dying for lack of
business. It was this big round restaurant, and it was empty. He
asked HerbHerb was kind of the guru of all restaurateurs and
night club operators-- "What can I do?" Herb sent me over, and I
worked for Angelo for a number of years. He was a wonderful,
56
wonderful human being. Tough. He looked like something out of
the sea himself: he was short and squat and not by any means
handsome, but he was generous, warm-heartedand the whole family,
wife, daughter, and son, worked with him a wonderful family.
I devised a lot of really silly, stupid stuff to promote
that restaurant. First, we had a grand opening, and I brought in
waters from the seven seas of the world. And we got the volunteer
fire department with hoses to baptize the building with all these
waters from different places. We got pictures in the papers.
Then we entered a frog in thethey served frog legs in the
restaurantCalaveras County jumping frog contest. We got
tremendous space- -the Independent Journal here was a great help,
and the Chronicle. In those days you could do things, and people
just responded. There wasn t a whole bunch of problems to relate.
These days, you try and get a reporter to take a free meal, and
it s iffy. I m not in that world anymore, but I know it for a
fact- -in those days, you would invite people, and they would come.
You could get twenty or thirty journalists to Sabella s of Marin,
and it wasn t exactly a gourmet s hangout but it was before the
whole culinary movement took over in the United States and the
food was fresh, well prepared.
One of my very good friends--he and his wife, Ann was Fred
Lyon, who was a nationally prominent magazine photographer. Leon
Adams introduced me to a wonderful couple, Mary and Jack Taylor of
Mayacamas Vineyards, which was on the slopes of an extinct
volcano, Mount Veeder. And Jack had spent his life being a
refinery designer for Shell Oil. He was an Englishman. And Mary
had been a student of Gurdjieff , whose work I was familiar with
"All and Everything". There were such wonderful people around. I
mean, there still are wonderful people, but all of a sudden in
this little period I was meeting all these great characters. Mary
was a superb cook, and she had a line of spices which [actually?]
still exists in the marketplace. She sold the company.
But Jack had bought this vineyard. His lifelong ambition
was to be a winemaker. He had personally, with very little help,
terraced the side of the volcano in very Italian fashion, and
planted vines there. And Mayacamas was according to him an
Indian word, meaning "the
cry of the mountain lion." He used to
when he would tell you that, he would howl it out; I won t try to
imitate it. It was a beautiful old stone winery up there. They
made remarkable wine very early on. I devised a concept- -because
they were having trouble selling this little bit of wine that
people would buy shares--
57
Stern: --shares. And the privilege for shareholders was to buy a certain
amount of this limited-edition wine. It worked well. The reason
it worked well is because I brought Fred Lyon up, and he made some
incredible photographs of the terrace and the Taylors. It was
published in the Chronicle s Sunday magazine. Well, [snaps
fingers) the shares were sold out very quickly. I went from an
unknown poet to a successful public relations man practically
overnight. It was very amusing to me. I, however, didn t let it
go to head. For instance, when Vic Bergeron from Trader Vic s
offered me a job, I refused it. I refused it really because I
thought he was an awful man.
Byerly: Who was this?
Stern: Vic Bergeron was Trader Vic. Trader Vic s was the place where San
Francisco society went. First the original one in Oakland, and
then the one in the alley downtown in San Francisco. I don t know
what it was that drew them to him. I don t think it was the
excellence of the food because it wasn t really--it was kind of
tricky dicky Polynesian food. Of course, society here in San
Francisco was to a great extent based on alcohol. That may have
been it because alcohol consumption at Trader Vic s was
prodigious. But you see, now you ve got kind of a line between
the St. Francis Hotel and Trader Vic s and maybe the Fairmont, and
you have this little world. Here I am kind of bouncing back
between the Beat poets and San Francisco society. My wife was
usually driving around not in our old beat-up car, but in her
father s black Cadillac with the Golden Gate Bridge Director s
badge on the back so that no matter how fast she goes, she doesn t
get stopped by the police. Kind of a bizarre little world that we
were living in. You know, famous poets coming in from the east-
Robert Lowell--. And we re giving a dinner party on the
Adventuress, and Robert Lowell is groping my wife, and I go after
him, and nearly threw him overboard. [laughter]
It was kind of heady. And I was writing a lot of poetry.
It was at that time that Allen Ginsberg showed up in San
Francisco. Of course, I was still in touch with Carl Solomon, and
we were in the publishing world because Ann was the West Coast
editor for McGraw-Hill. It was a job her father had gotten her
because he was a friend of the chairman of the board s. Allen
worked for a short time for an ad agency here, and then he got a
job on a ship--I think he was an assistant purser or something.
Then came the Howl period and the reading at the gallery--! wasn t
one of the people who read that night. Philip read John Hoffman s
poems. That was in 55. By the way, we had a date there you
asked yesterday about when Adam was born. And Radha says he was
born in 51; we were thinking more like late forties but it was
later than that.
58
Jane and Bill Buck had come back from Nevada. You remember
I mentioned that one of my friends who stuck by me was Jak
Simpson. He was married by this time and living somewhere in the
East Bay. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Jane and Bill went off
to Thailand, an Asia trip, and they left Adam and Radha under the
care of Jak Simpson and his wife at their house. And while they
were gone, Adam and Radha contracted polio, which in Adam s case
later on developed into muscular dystrophy. He died when he was
about, I don t know, fourteen or so, I think. As you ve
discovered by now, I m not very good with dates. We ll have to
check that. Radha wasfirst she had to wear, I think, a brace,
but her polio disappeared after a couple of years, completely.
She did have some after effects which are no longer evident. Adam
was crippled badly; he had to be in a wheelchair with braces.
They eventually came back; it was hard to contact them at the time
in Thailand. There was some bad feelings involved, whether the
Simpsons understood what was going on, et cetera. But Jak and I
remained friends . I used to take the kids on the barge on the
weekend. There are a lot of pictures of them with Ann and I. We
established that much of a re- relationship with Jane although Bill
would never be seen--I mean, he would not physically be in the
same space with me, and I kind of understood it although I
realized that there was a guilt trip going on which had some
legitimate rationale to it because from one day of being basically
my friend--boom! He absconded and tried to take over much of my
life.
The reason I m concentrating on this is because as you know
already, this whole thing has turned around with his son who
appeared on the scene slightly after the time we re talking about,
and who at this point is an important and positive part in all our
lives.
By this time, I was going off every few months to write
another Playboy story in some town. Acapulco I think was next.
Hotel people throughout the world are, you know, kind of related,
and they all comp each other. I was in Acapulco with a
photographer and models and the whole big deal, and we were hosted
by a lot of the important people--Miguelito Aleman, the president
of Mexico s son on his yacht, et cetera. We were staying in this
hotel which had Chagalls in the elevator. My wife, Ann, wanted to
join us so she got, through her father, a suite in the hotel that
was made available to us free of charge. She arrived in about two
days and I got a telegram from Hef at Playboy saying, "Playboy
writers are not married." [laughter] I called up Chicago, and I
said, "What do you mean they re not married? I m married; you
knew I m married." "Not when you re on assignment!" I didn t pay
any attention.
59
I had a couple of run-ins with Hef. He s a funny guy. He
was at that time young and very unsophisticated, and he came to
San Francisco for the first time. I introduced him to Herb, and
we had dinner and so forth and so on. He had this friend who
owned a big nightclub in Chicago. I remember running around the
streets with them and them pulling out hundred -dollar bills and
waving them at people--! mean, and that was not San Francisco
style.
I took them to Ann s 440, a night club where Lenny Bruce was
working. I already told you I was quite involved with the jazz
scene, and I didn t really cover that so much when I was talking
about Buckwheat and Old Bill and on the barge, but we knew all
those people, and they would all come to the barge, and they would
go to Harry s studio to see the Partch instruments. I told you we
were all big pot smokers; in fact, on the barge this is before;
this is still when I was living there with Jane and Bill and Pam--
we had a bathtub, and we had rigged up the whole bathtub as a
water pipe. It was absolutely too much for most people.
Byerly: How would that work?
Stern: Well, we had a bowl which probably held about a half ounce to an
ounce of grass, and we bubbled it through the bathtub full of
water in kind of a glass distillation tube, so it was cooled, you
know? When it came out, you could barely get any throat burn on
it, so it didn t taste like it was very much that you were doing,
but actually one was overpowered. I remember one time we took--
Old Bill had an ancient Cadillac limousine, I mean really ancient.
Kind of square. We took Count Basie back to his gig on Grant
Avenue--! can t remember the name of the big club there. As he
got out of the limousine he shook his head at us, and said, "I
don t know whether to love you or to hate you." [laughter]
Actually, I used that line in a poem somewhere along the way.
Two of the jazz musicians I d gotten to know were a couple
named Lorraine and Herb Geller. They lived down in L.A.. One
time when I went to L.A., they were playing out in the Valley in a
strip club. Jazz musicians really had a very hard time making
enough money to get by, and they were excellent musicians; they
had, as I remember, classical backgrounds, and here they were
playing a strip club in the Valley. Not just a strip club but a
freak s strip club--a midget, a lady who probably weighed about
three hundred and some-odd pounds, a bearded lady. And Lenny
Bruce was the M.C., and his mother was the cocktail waitress, and
Herb and Lorraine were the band, the orchestra. They played the
strip music, not their usual jazz, but with a touch of their
music. But they thought it was kind of a kick to take me out
60
there, and we got high when we went there, and it was really
strange. Anyway, that s how I first met Lenny.
At the time, Lenny wasn t really interested in being a
stand-up comedian. His ambition was to write movie scripts, and
he had written quite a lot of them, and none of them were bought.
He was married at the time. Later, I was able to help him get a
job up here in San Francisco.
Sausalito Houseboat Revisited and Maya Angelou
Stern: During the time I was with Maya- -and now we re going back again;
you don t mind going back and forththis semi-mobster came to see
us, and he owned one of those stripclubs on the Barbary Coast.
You know, that one-block thing which was like an unbelievable
little microcosm of--the closest thing that San Francisco still
had to a red-light district. The D.A. [district attorney] was
closing up the stripclubs because of the bar girls and the whole
tourist thing. He came to see us when we were working at the
Purple Onion. Maya was on the bill with Phyllis Diller and the
Kingston Trio, and it was a great time. They were all friends.
He said to us, "I
got this problem. I gotta shut down- -I don t
want to shut down; you guys know what you re doing. Look, you got
the I 1
over here and the Onion here; I want to do the same thing.
It ll be three or four months and then everything will die down,
and we can go back to the girls." He had his wife and his sister-
in-lawa menage-a-trois. The two of them were really "B
girls",
but they were his family. It was a bizarre scene. I keep using
that word; it s embarrassing. I named it the Hollow Egg. We sent
out these invitations in hollow eggs--you know, those Chinese
eggs --to everybody for the opening.
Helen Noga from the Black Hawk at that time had said to me,
"Gerd, you gotta help the boy- -I found this fantastic boy. He s
still in high school but he s such an incredible voice, you
wouldn t believe it. Johnny Mathis." [laughter] So the bill was
Johnny Mathis, Mayathere was a female lesbian comic who was a
protege of Edgar Bergen s. And Edgar Bergen was supposed to come
up for the opening, which is how I met his daughter who- -later on
we became fairly good friends Candice. We had a little
orchestra, and sure enough the I and the Onion were really kind
of comfortable little clubs, but the Hollow Egg was a stripclub,
and it had these tables which were just very narrow tables with
seats behind them that the Johns watched the girls from. Well, he
didn t want to change the seating or anything, so here we were in
this reconverted stripclub, which had been slightly decorated to
61
be the Hollow Egg. And everybody came; all the society people,
and Herb, and it was a big laugh. But it worked. And sure
enough, a few months later, things died down, and it went back to
being a stripclub.
There were fabulous entertainers. The guy who made Ann s
440, a female impersonator named T.C. Jones--he later was on
Broadway; he and his wife owned Persian cats. This man did a
fabulous show. Oh, I remember how I had gotten into it: because
of Hef. So I took Hef to Ann s 440 club, and his nightclub
friend, and Lenny totally bowled them over; they couldn t believe
Lenny. Lenny was unbelievable. When he did his- -drive the car he
drives or- -the genie comes out the bottle, and he was going to
grant any wish, and the guy doesn t believe him, and he says,
"Make me a malted." He says, "You re a malted." [laughter] The
obscenity and the humor. So they hired him immediately for
Chicago, and that was the beginning of Lenny s big fame and
downfall. It was a very disillusioning experience for me as the
guy who had made the intros. I had a few of those. Another one
was when I introduced McLuhan to Gossage.
Ann got more and more involved in political consciousness
and organizations. At the time I met her, shelike most
everybody we knewwas smoking grass. At one time, we went to a
party, and they had pot brownies, and I think Ann didn t realize
how strong they were, and she ate too much, and she got into a
really paranoid scene, and after that she turned into a real
prude, and she didn t want anything. It was difficult for me.
Also at the same time, she got pregnant. By this time- -I told you
the story about how we got married because of the Chronicle. It
got to the point where I couldn t have any grass in the house, I
couldn t smoke in front of her.
It really bothered me because I ve always kind of used pot
to change my head. In other words, likenow I m in the food
business. In order to get my head out of the food business and
into my poet self --if I would take two or three tokes boom! It s
like a transformation, you know? I ve always used it that way
not as some people to "get out of it." I don t want to get out of
it; I want to get high, and I want to get on it. And I do, and as
I said before, I m still at the point where I can take two or
three or four tokes, and I get very, very high, very stimulated
and inspired. Now I don t know whether that s actually the drug
or my kind of acquired behavior. But whatever it is, it works.
If it works, it doesn t need fixing, right?
It was a complicated situation. Ann was getting less and
less into me and more and more into other things and other people.
It got kind of very mixed up. There was a group around the No
62
Name Bar who published a little magazine called ContactBill Ryan
and Herb Beckman, and some of the writers were Evan Connell and
Calvin Kentfield. I wrote some things for them which I don t
think they ever published. I ve had that kind of historyas I
say, my poetry is not of a very acceptable style; it s too
abstract and obscure for most people, which is okay. To tell you
the truth, I ve kept a consistent voice ever since I ve started
writing, and I really like my poetry; I know it s good. It isn t
that I don t give a damn what other people think; I do give a
damn, but nobody can convince me otherwise about my work. Also,
I ve steered away, really, from putting myself out into the
public. A number of timesand it ll come up later when I
surfaced, I didn t enjoy being out there; I really enjoyed more
being just in the it s funny because the other day at the
conference I talked about margin and mainstream. I think I m on
the margin of the mainstream, or maybe I ve submerged in the
mainstream. I don t know. But I was thinking that the image is
not an accurate image; you re not either /or.
So now I went off to New Orleans to do another "Playboy on
the Town." There was a strange little story, and maybe I
shouldn t tell it, but I think I will. I had an apartment over
Brennan s restaurant that was given to me as the Playboy writer
and I had twenty-four hour room service from the restaurant, and I
met a young painter there, and she stayed with me through the four
or five days. When I got back to Sausalito, I discovered again
that I had gonorrhea. I went to our wonderful doctor, Doctor
Mackenzie. "What are you going to do about Ann?" I said, "I m
going to tell her. What do you mean what am I going to do about
Ann?" He said, "You re serious?" I said, "Sure, I m serious." I
said, "Now I m going to have to tell Georgia too." [laughter] He
says, "Oh, I see. Well, I ll tell you something, Gerd. This
isn t the first time that I ve heard this situation; this is the
first time I ve ever met somebody who I didn t have to talk into
telling people that they re sleeping with." I said, "What are you
going do? Are you going to try to hide it and take really big
risks?" So I come back for a second shot, and here in the office
is Calvin Kentfield. I say, "Hey, Calvin, what s up?" He says,
[mutters inaudibly] . He said, "What are you here for?" I said,
"I m here to get a second shot for the clap." He says, "Yeah?"
So I look at him, and I say, "Who are you sleeping with? With my
wife or with Georgia?" [laughter] Anyway, kind of a funny story.
But that was typical of that time. I don t think it s very
typical of this time that we re living in.
Next thing that happens we have this friend, Les, who was
kind of an architect. He was living in Muir Beach. He was my
connection. I can t smoke at my house anymore, and who wants to
go all the way to Muir Beach. In the meantime, I m having a
63
little thing with a reporter on the Sausalito News, and she turns
out to be also his friend except they had a big argument, as it
turns out, and I go to Tiburon Tommy s to score with Les. We re
having lunch, and everything works out fine. I give him money,
and he gives me, you know. I get back to the barge, and a couple
hours later I get a phone call from Sheriff Louis Mountanos, whose
campaign I had worked on. He says, "Gerd, I need you to come down
here." "No
problem, Louis." So-
Stern: --I get down there, and he says, "Let me play a tape for you,
Gerd." They had a tape under the table at the restaurant, and
they had taped me buying from Les. Sheriff Mountanos said, "Gerd,
how could you do that? This is terrible; I don t want to book
you, but I don t have any choice." So he takes me up to San
Rafael, to the jail, I get a cause celebre- -headlines in the
Chronicle about being Dan London s son-in-law. What can you do?
We had another friend, because Ann had worked on the publication
of his book Never Plead Guilty-- Jake Ehrlich. We go to see Jake.
Jake says, "Son of a bitch. Don t you believe what you read?" I
said, "What do you mean?" He says, "What the hell is the name of
my book?!" I said, "Never Plead Guilty." He says, "So what did
you do?" I said, [sheepishly] "I
pled guilty." He says, "That
was the stupidest thing you ever did in your life; I could have
gotten you off no problem. That was an illegal tape."
So it cost us some money, and I got probation, and I had to
go to a psychiatrist. The judge was the head of the law office,
and a former partner represented me. My father-in-law forgave me
eventually, although he couldn t believe that people use drugs --
after all, he was an alcoholic.
It kind of worked out. Now I m going to this psychiatrist
who also happened to be in Tiburon [California] . His name is
Doctor Richard Prest. I called him D. Prest. [laughter] He was
a very interesting guy. He grew little miniature trees. He
didn t like them to be called bonsais because they were American
trees. Every week he had a different little tree in his office,
and they were beautiful. Sometimes he had a row of aspens. But
he was a lot better at doing that than he was at psychiatry, as
far as I was concerned. So I tell him the story, and I said,
"Look. I think it s time for me to break up this marriage because
it just isn t working anymore for me. We re both playing around,
and we have a son, but she doesn t like the way I relate to kids,
she doesn t like me anymore. I mean, I know what happened: she
was rebelling, and she met me, and she had been married before,
and then we had to get married because she felt embarrassed to be
living with me, and it just isn t working." He says to me, "No
64
way. You re just like a cock on a leash." Not a rooster, but a
penis. "If
you divorce Ann now, you re just going to redo it one
more time. That s the worst thing for you; you ve got to try to
make it work, and see what happens, all right?"
It gets worse and worse, and we re barely talking to each
other now. All this time that I ve been with her she s been
taking Dexedrine to keep her skinny. She thinks she s heavy; I
think she s great. This woman was a beauty. She was a beautiful,
beautiful woman, and she had a great figure. She danced well.
Marvelous and intelligent, but fucked up from family and from
wanting to be a super duper intellectual. She [wound up being?
wanted to be?] a professor of Anglo-Saxon. And she screwed up her
next marriage too. Then, you know, cancer. She smoked like a
chimney also. She could drink me under the table easily.
Finally he says to me, "I think what would be wise would be
for me to have a session with Ann and see what s going on there."
So he has a session with Ann, and he advises her that she should
see a psychiatrist after all, marketing. Not only does he advise
that, but he says, "I have a colleague right across the hall."
Same office, very convenient, right?
Okay, so we decide she s going to go see this guy. The
second session he tells her, "The
only solution for you is to
divorce." So the next time I go in and see Doctor Prest I say to
him, "You know, I think your conduct is miserably unethical."
"What do you mean?" I say, "When I tell you that I want to get
divorced you tell me that I m supposed to stay with this marriage.
You then see my wife, then you send her to your damn colleague
across the hall, he tells her to get a divorce when you tell me I
gotta stay married. What kind of shit is this?" He says to me,
"You surely don t think, Mr. Stern, that I have any influence over
my colleague s policy?" It was just too much for me. I said, "D.
Prest, this is it. Goodbye." And I walked out. I explained the
situation to my probation officer, and my probation officer
understood. Very nice. I was nearly through with probation by
that time.
We were in this kind of unsteady relationship now. Now from
years and years and years ago when I was living with Jane in New
Paltz--! was redoing the house from the fire; you remember the
whole story there?
Byerly: Yes.
Stern: All of a sudden we get a call from this guy, Joe Kerrigan. Joe
was married to the farmer s daughter next door--Mort DePew s
daughter. He was the dairy farmer where we used to get our milk.
65
He called me, and he s driving out, and can he find a place to
stay? Sure, I invite him to stay on the barge. Three days later,
he and Ann run off together. It lasted about two weeks [laughter]
but then she was gone. Finite. Finite.
Single Life after Ann on the Barge
Stern: Now I m living on the barge alone. I m tired of public relations,
and the Playboy thing is kind of wound down. I started working
odd jobs. I had kind of learned to be a carpenter when number
one, I was fixing up New Paltz and Jane s mother s house, and also
originally when I did that work on the floats with Augie Sauer on
the display for the Labor Day parades. I worked in a display shop
too at that time, which I haven t mentioned. Actually, I was
doing spot welding. Then I get a job at the Bay Model in
Sausalito. The U.S. Engineersas a carpenter; it lasted about
four days because they asked me to hang doors . I was a failure at
hanging doors. They were ancient doors which had been ripped off,
and the frames --this was not the kind of thing that you give a new
employee to do but they were putting me on. So I ve been put on.
But I wound up doing odd jobs, and I did a lot from an old
lady who lived right near here, actually. Right down the road
from here. She got to the point where she was so sick and so
alcoholic that she couldn t drive anymore; she gave me her car. I
drove her around, and it was in my name. An old Austin.
I was living on the barge. I went to a party. A composer- -
Steve Reich--! didn t know him at the time, but it was his wife
who I took to the party, and I met there a lady named Barbara
McCallum. She was out from the East Coast, and we had a good
time, and we got pretty high, and she came back to the barge with
me. We had a nice fire in the fireplace, and we made love, and at
breakfast the next morning she looked at me, she said, "Boy, that
was the best fuck I ve had in weeks," which I didn t expect
[inaudiblelaughter] . But you know, she was a California girl,
raised in southern California, and it was very- -her remark really
got to me; I thought it was so genuine.
She was there for a few more days , and I kind of told her
what had happened to me through the years. She says to me, "Hey,
why don t you come back east? You re from the east; what are you
doing out here?" Then she started telling me about where she
lived, and she lived right across the road from a community of
people who had left Black Mountain.
66
Black Mountain fell apart. There was a guy named Paul
Williams, and Paul s father had made a lot of money, and Paul was
a student at Black Mountain. He was an architect, a designer. He
bought Black Mountain; they were in a lot of financial
difficulties. Despite the fact that he solved a lot of the
difficulties, there were always tensions in the faculty, and they
just couldn t make the thing work anymore. They decided to close
down, so Paul sold the property to a seminary, and he bought this
fairly large property up in Rockland County in New York. The
people who were living there were M.C. Richardsthe woman whom I
had wanted to study with, and who I kind of kept in contact with--
John Cage, David Tudor, and Karen Cams, La Noue Davenport --who
was an ancient music instrumentalist, formerly a jazz musician-
there were a lot of interesting people. She kind of whetted my
appetite, and I was beginning to get a bad taste in my mouth from
having lived on this barge with three different women, and nothing
ever working out. And I kind of blamed myself, but on the other
hand , you know- - .
Move Back East
Stern: So I decided okay, I ll move back east. I rented the barge to a
transvestite, it turned out. I didn t know he/she was a
transvestite until later on. He was very convincing. He didn t
speak English too well; he was Scandinavian. But it turned out
later he was a she. So I rented the barge, and I took off in my
car with my little tape recorder, and a good stash, and I drove
across the country making poetry on the tape recorder as I went
along, singing.
I arrived, and I had called Barbara to tell her I was
coming, and I moved in with Barbara. Actually, I didn t go
directly to Barbara s; I went to some friends of hers, and it
turned out that the woman, Ethel Hultberg, was somebody I had
known in the Village, on the East Side, years before when John
Hoffman and I were banging around before we went on the boat.
There was an interesting group around at that time of anarchist
poets, like Bob Stock, who also had been here in California.
Jackson McLow. A lot of people who made an impression on that
world over time.
Before John Cage became so famous, he had a lot of influence
because of his work with random ideas and his knowledge of
technological theories. Now I arrive here, and I meet people that
I met at Black Mountain years ago also Paul and Vera Williams--
and M.C. welcomes me with open arms. It was like coming back to a
67
richer intellectual environment. Let s face it: the East Coast
and the West Coast both have extraordinary virtues but they re
very different. In those days, I think what happened and this
happened again the next time I came to Californiathe people on
the West Coast were very receptive and laid back and welcoming,
but the people who came here from the east and the midwest had a
lot more energy and a lot more drive and a lot more motivation to
succeed. It was easier to succeed on the West Coast in the arts
in any of the artsthan it was on the East Coast. The East Coast
had establishment, you know, and there were a lot of barriers
especially to young people and especially to anybody who had ideas
that didn t fit in to the academic and the commercial ends of the
arts. It s different now; that was a different time. Anyway, all
of a sudden I felt reinvigorated and reintegrated into an East
Coast environment.
Visual Poems
Stern: I got into kind of two modes. I started doing visual poem
collages. There were a lot of painters and sculptors around, and
I saw that they had a world of exhibitions and performances and
all kinds of ferment was going on. A lot of them were successful.
John Chamberlain
So I was surrounded by a lot of people who were more into
the visual aspect of things than I had been. I had always been
very involved in going to museums and galleries ever since I first
got my friendships with the whole Music and Art crowd. They
really turned me on to painting and sculpture, and I had a lot of
connections to painters and sculptors in those days, and now here
I was kind of coming back to that scene.
M.C. Richards had been given by John Cagethey lived just
across the road from usa report to the National Association of
Educational Broadcasters, the NAEB--I knew what the NAEB was all
about because of KPFA and KQED by Marshall McLuhan, which later
became the verbatim manuscript for the book Understanding Media.
Now when M.C. got that manuscript, she immediately thought of me.
She gave it to me to read. She said, "John, I need it for a few
more weeks .
"
I read it, and it was a revelation; I understood immediately
that his perceptions were seminal for my development.
Particularly things like his statement that what you need to do is
pay attention to the effect rather than the content. But there
were a whole slew of insights which just kind of got me turned on
68
and working. I was particularly taken with what I then
considered--! don t agree with myself anymore nowthe limitations
of the written word in poetry. I started making these word
collages, and I wrote a proposal for a work titled The
Transformer. It was a total audio-visual experience of words and
images, and it never went anywhere. Nobody really was that
receptive to funding it or to building it at the time, but it was
an important step forward for me.
I then started developing a concept called the Verbal
American Landscape. I was cutting up words out of magazines and
posters and anywhere I could find them, and then I kind of
expanded that into road signs and advertising messages, and I was
really beginning to collage my mind and physically, and a
landscape of words which were not necessarily linear. I mean, the
whole McLuhan perception from Gutenberg type to electronic media
was [snaps fingers] hitting on me, and it was also very somehow
compatible to the "high"
state of mind in which you tend to
associate more than to just build from grammatical sentence
structure. My poetry, even though a page had become less and less
linearbefore this, it just was like a fantastic mish-mash of
these ideas with where I was heading.
"The Land" Artistic Communitv
Stern: Among the people I didn t know and met at that time, was a painter
named Steve Durkee and his wife Barbara. They were living
downtown on the lower East Side, and his gallery owner helped him
to buy an old church which was very close to Gatehill Co-op, which
was where we were in Rockland County. the co-op was known as "The
Land," this little artistic community of Black Mountain people.
And people had been added. We became friendly immediately. Steve
was a skinny, red-headed giant--! loved his paintings and I still
do. He was a great painter, and he s given up painting now but I
had a lot of work, which was left behind to me. He was, and I
assume still is, a very difficult personality, but brilliant both
visual and conceptual ideas. We got on famously, and we wanted to
work together. He was very taken with my ideas. Steve s wife was
a San Franciscan. The patron of this whole group was Paul
Williams because he had inherited money, and he designed people s
houses , and he helped people buy land and things . He funded The
Living Theater, and he was a primary funder at that time of
radical causes and artwork. And he was a very modest and
hardworking guy.
69
Barbara s house was old and needed a lot of work. I did a
lot of work on it for her while we were living together. And then
Steve and I decided he would help me to rebuild the bathroom. We
built a really wild little bathroom with trees growing through it
and a mandala stone floor. Barbara and I had a very good
relationship but she was one of those people who always wanted
more. And after we got through with the bathroom she wanted me to
redo the kitchen.
In the meantime, I was very busy working on what I
considered my new three-dimensional poems. I had designed some
ideas for sculptural poems which I was so enthusiastic about, and
I talked to Steve, and I talked to a lot of people. I talked to
Paul Williams, and it got to be, conceptually, an idee fixe. Paul
offered to build them for me; he said, "We could do that." And
Steve s gallery was a very prestigious gallery, the Alan Stone
Gallery in New York. The gallery owner said that if we built
them, he would show them. Here I was in seventh heaven.
In the meantime, I was near my parents again. We had a
rocky relationship which had been somewhat repaired during my
marriage to Ann, because- -wow- -she represented real middle-class
splendor beyond any--. We went back for my brother s bar mitzvah,
and I was called up to the Torah for an aliyah. I had a nice bass
voice.
*i
Stern: After years of basically not talking to my father and my
stepmotherthere s really kind of a disconnected scene going
down. But now I was divorced from my nice society wife, and I was
living up in a bohemian scene in Rockland County, and it started
coming apart again. Barbara and I had had a big fight because I
refused to get involved in this kitchen remodeling, and I stopped
talking. I would not talk, and various people around there would
come around and tell me, "I know you re not talking, but I won t
tell anybody; you can talk to me."
Things like that. I just
wouldn t open my mouth. I was on strike. I would go to Paul s
shop, and we would work on the pieces. There were some really
exciting things we were making.
Then it was the high holidays, and Ethel [Hultberg] offered
to take me to the synagogue. I went, but I still wouldn t open my
mouth even to say the Shmah or anything. I was in total
withdrawal but I was working full time. People would feed me,
etcetera.
This went on for weeks. They wanted me to go see a
psychiatrist, and I wouldn t do that. Once in a while I would
70
write notes to people. I had another friend, Arthur, who was
living with M.C. Richards. He was an artist, a wonderful guy, and
he said I was bewitched. One day, in the evening, I went over to
one of the houses on the land where Betsy and Ep Epstein lived and
they weren t home. There was a woman there, Judi Wilson, and I
may have seen her once before, I don t know. Anyway, I got this
fixation that she was the Angel of Death. I was writing notes
back and forth. She was very attractive. And when the Epsteins
came home she put me in her Volkswagen Bug and took me up to
Woodstock. And I started talking.
Byerly: Woodstock was ?
f
Stern: New York. Woodstock was where she lived.
Byerly: She took you to her house?
Stern: Yes.
Byerly: Oh, okay.
Stern: So now I had left Barbara. But I had to keep going back and forth
from Woodstock to Rockland County because we were building all
these pieces. Some of which were fascinating: there was a garbage
lid on a restaurant table pedestal with a little mechanism there
where the word "enough" except it was spelled "enuf" [ spells ]--
you know those letters they used to use on postboxes on the road
that had little things that caught the light, little reflectors on
them? The garbage can lid was filled with crankcase oil. About
every minute or so, the word "enuf" would rise out of the oil,
dripping oil, and after about fifteen seconds or so it would fall
back into the oil. [laughter] It was a great piece, it really
was. And Paul the idea was simple, but to build these things was
complex. I helped him, but basically he designed the things. He
didn t want his name used when they were shown. That piece
unfortunately--! wasn t there when it happened, but it was
standing in the foyer of the gallery on a plush red rug, and a
delivery man came in with a delivery book, and he needed to put it
down. He threw it in the oil. He thought it was a table because
it looked like it reflected light; it was when the "enuf" was
submerged. He threw the book; the book got wet but it splattered
oil all over the red carpet, and Alan was furious. I mean, this
was a very expensive red carpet.
I was so devastated by the--the other thing that happened
was the day the show opened there was a newspaper strike in New
York. So there was no possibility of reviews. And this was a
big day in my life, my first show. It was a group show; there
71
Byerly ;
Stern:
were three people in it. So Judi and I got into the Volkswagen,
and we went to California- -leaving the show up.
In the meantime, Steve had moved into the church, and I had
helped him with building walls and things. We had gotten very,
very close. I mean, Steve was the guy who arranged the show for
me. Our mutual appreciation of each other s work was a very, very
powerful bond.
As a fascinating side story to this, Judi and Steve had
lived together, and Barbara had come to visit them with two
Mexican friends of hers. She was on her way, I think, from Europe
back home to California, and she had decided that Steve was going
to be hers. And she invited him to California--she comes from a
wealthy family, related to the Mellons. And Steve bit; he left
Judi, whereupon Judi allied herself with David Weinrib, who was a
sculptor and who had been married to Karen Cams. He was one of
the founders of the community at The Land. That had been just
kind of breaking up when I met Judi that night.
All three of us are LibrasSteve, David, and I. Now there
was obviously some not- so-great feelings both between Steve and
Judi and between Barbara and Judi. David and Steve were also
friends, but the bond between Steve and I, and, ergo, Barbara, was
so strong that it overcame that. In the meantime, during the time
I was living with the other Barbara, a lot of people had come
through--! mean, this little community was a central focus --
Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg and all kinds of people from my
past and from other people s pasts. A lot of black activists and
anarchists, Igal Rudenko and Bayard Rustin and David Keren, for
instance .
Say that again.
Rudenko was a printer who was an anarchist and a very close friend
of David and Belle s, for instance. And Vera Williams did all the
covers for Resistance, which was the anarchist publication. And
what was his name now--a big figure in the black movement, a gay
guy-- Anyway, Ethel and Paul, in the meantime, had lived at The
Land, but they had had a lot of philosophical differences, and
they had been kind of pushed out, but they were around. There
were a lot of strong inputs and outputs.
Back to California
Stern: And Judi and I went to California carrying all my collage
materials and things with me. I was designing new works on the
72
road. We stopped to see friends along the way, including her
parents who, of course, I hadn t met. Her father was a dirt
farmer in Tennessee. He called me "Santi Glaus," which was better
than Jane s father s "refugee kike son-in-law."
I was really turned on to audio-visual, electronic use of
words in media. I had made a lot of kind of excerpts out of the
McLuhan thing which I took along. We didn t have copy machines in
those days, at least available to us. But I had written it out by
hand. Eventually, Understanding Media came out. I don t remember
when that was in this context.
I got to California, and by that time we were able to move
back onto the barge. The transvestite had absconded. I had
evolved on the way a concept for a piece called "Contact is the
Only Love." I built a paper mock-up of it; it was a seven-foot
octagon with flashing lights and audio components. It was a
sculpture, kind of a pop kinetic sculpture. Some of it was
somewhat derivative, to tell you the truth. I had met Bob Indiana
through Steve, and I was extremely taken with his work which--!
love wordswas another kind of very strong pop image. It was
different from what I wound up doing but it had given me a very
strong hint that it was possible to do things in a completely
different manner that I had conceived of before.
I started building pieces, and I related to Ivan Majdrakoff
--again, after years of not seeing him, we got very closehe was
living here in Mill Valley. We started working on a film
together, the first film that he had ever made.
I m getting confused again about the timeline. There was a
certain problem about this piece; it was a very ambitious piece,
this big one. In the meantime, I was doing collage works. I got
back together with Herb Caen, and he was still married at the time
to Sally. Herb helped get Judi--I referred to Judi as my nurse;
by this time she was no longer the Angel of Death although that
was in the background of my mind, but people here thought of her
as my nurse, that s what I told them she was, and Herb got her a
job working in David s delicatessen as a waitress.
I needed several thousand dollars to start buying the
equipment to put into this piece. One of the people I had known
well through Sally Caen was Rene di Rosa. Rene is the major
collector of California art. He has a place called Winery Lake.
He was another element of San Francisco society whom I knew when I
was married to Ann. I was just writing poetry then. In fact,
there was another guy who lived in that same section, Frank Granat
from Granat Brothers Jewelry. He wanted to be a songwriter, and
Ann and I wrote some lyrics together with him. Now Rene, when he
73
saw my collagesat that time I was working not only with a lot of
words, but I was superimposing other words on top of them, and I
had a Superman figure that swung back and forth on a little motor.
Rene was the first one who bought my work. It s in his museum up
in Napa [California] ; there are three pieces there. That was a
big help even though he got them for very little money. It was a
big help. They are very nice early pieces.
The connections started developing. I went to see, at the
time, George Culler, who was the director of the San Francisco
Museum of Art, and I went to him cold. I showed him this thing
and this was this roll of paper, which was a seven- foot octagon,
red and blue and yellow; it was a little like a highway sign. I
have a film of it, and I have photographs of it, etcetera. He
really got turned on by the idea, but he didn t have any money to
fund it.
So he told me that the museum would accept contributed
funds; that would be a tax incentive. We started meeting every
few weeks, and he was wonderful. I mean, he didn t know me from
Adam. Then I was having difficulty raising the money, so he
suggested, "Well, you re a poet; why don t you do a poetry reading
at the opening of your show. We ll charge money for it. It ll
help you defray the cost."
In the meantime, I got to know some other people. There was
a gallery owner who was the heir to the Piggly-Wiggly grocery
fortune--! can t remember his name now, but it ll come back. Hal
Babitt, who was one of Henry Kaiser s assistants and had been with
Kaiser forever, got interested in the project and gave it some
personal money and some Kaiser money. And a number of other
people contributed hundreds of dollars , and we got enough money
together, and we built the piece right here on Mount Tamalpais.
An old friend of mine who s a wild constructor/designer/architect/
carpenter /guru named Roger Somers--he s still there. He was a
fantastic craftsperson; he could make wood do anything. He s
particularly good with routers and making curved edges and things.
A little too much for me; I needed some hard edges, and we made
some compromises .
I needed audio help. I got an introduction to Morton
Subotnik who at the time was with Ramon Sender, the co-director of
the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which later moved to Mills
College, but at that time it was on Divisadero Street. There was
a young guy there about sixteen years old named Michael Callahan.
By this time, I decided, Poetry reading? Who wants to do a poetry
reading? I mean, that was old stuff, right? I started working on
plans for a multimedia experiencemultimedia, mind you, wasn t a
word that was known in those dayscalled "Who are You and What s
74
Happening?" I got all my old friends involvedIvan Majdrakoff
and Allen and Michael McClure, and what we finally wound up with
and I needed audio help to set up this elaborate thingand
Michael Callahan was their technical director at sixteen. Morton
and Ramon said, "Okay, Michael, this is for you." It was much too
big a job for him at the time, but he was incredible. He borrowed
a lot of equipment.
It was in the auditorium of the museum. We had transparent
isolation booths onstage in which each of themthere were four
people all together- -you know, Herb Caen, Allen Ginsberg, et
cetera, et cetera- -we were able to broadcast and switch the
signals from the various booths onto a series of speakers. In the
meantime, we were projecting a series of slides which came from
the Verbal American Landscape. Those had been chosen by me I
didn t do the photography; Ivan and Stewart Brand did the
photography. We borrowed some closed-circuit television
equipment, so there were television images. We were able to
switch the whole thing. There were people in costuine it was a
very elaborate affair.
Psychedelic Multimedia
Stern: The technology was not by any means perfect. We had telephones
and microphones, and there was a lot of feedback. There was
absolute chaos. In the meantime a little antecedent to this we
had started getting into the psychedelic period, and I had had my
first acid trip at Roger Somers in kind of an orgiastic setting.
Roger was close to Alan Watts and Elsa Gidlow. Alan and
Elsa both lived on the same property down here on the flank of Mt.
Tamalpais. There was a picture of Elsa in this week s Chronicle,
and the books that they were reviewing.
The acid had kind of given me an even more precise idea of
the kind of mixture that I wanted to create. Mixed media.
Between that and McLuhan and et cetera.
We did this for two nights. Alfred Frankenstein was at that
time the San Francisco Chronicle arts and music critic, a
nationally or even internationally known critic. I found out
later on he had wanted to go to some [Bela] Bartok quartets that
were playing that night, but his city editor had gotten the
release of this thing at the museum, and it had really sparked his
interest so he insisted that Alfred go to this affair. Well, the
next day on the second page of the Chronicle there was the
75
headline: "Landmark of a Flop." Some enormous eggs have been laid
in the history of San Francisco art, but "[laughter] he went on
and on, and he slammed the hell out of this performance, which
absolutely delighted me. In fact, a couple of years later I was
on a plane and sitting next to me was Alfred Frankenstein. I
started talking to him, and he said, "I didn t think you would
talk to me after that review I wrote of your work." I said, "That
was the best review that I could have ever have expected. It was
a success; it was incredible. The second night, we were turning
away people because of this review."
Well, the second night was even more chaotic than the first
night, and I was on acid during the performance. At one point,
some guy--there was a piano on stage which had just been left
there from something elsesome guy jumped up on the stage and
started playing terrible chords. It was very disruptive. Michael
McClure and I jumped up on stage- -it was the period when he was
doing his "Beast"
poems, and we started roaring, "Ahrg, Grahrr!"
at each other. It was really a very exciting piece of work.
Judi and I were living on Hayes Street at the time; we had a
big apartment, and I had huge collage tables. The show was about
fifteen different pieces by this time. With part of the money I
gathered, I had the pieces from the show in New York sent out, and
I had made a few more things . I d had a little show at the Art
Institute which had been arranged by friends of mine before that.
Anyway, things were really rocking and rolling. The soundtracks
we had made were with FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] , Billie
Holiday, Alice B. Toklas, etcetera and Michael and I had spent
night after night collaging sound in a way that hadn t been done
until that time --although now it s old hat. He and I just became
co-workers; it has been an amazing collaboration.
One of the people who had been thereit was part of the
material that came out of McLuhan--was Alvin Balkind, the director
of the University of Vancouver s art museum. He just happened to
be in town. He called me up about a week later; he had gotten my
number from the museum--
Taking the USCO Show on the Road; Vancouver. Seattle. The
Psychedelic Theater and the Timothy Leary Lecture, MIT. New York,
Riverside Museum, The LSD Conference. Harvard
[Interview 3: April 16, 1996] ##
Stern: I was telling you about the director of the gallery up at the
University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, who had called me
and who had been at the performance at the San Francisco Museum.
76
He had also read McLuhan, and he noted the inclusion of the
McLuhan ideas in the performance. Actually, there was a quote
from McLuhan in the handout that we gave at the performance . He
asked if we could repeat the performance at the university, and I
said I thought that would be possible. He said he was going to
invite McLuhan to speak. He wanted to know if I could bring up
some of the smaller pieces that were in the show and show them in
the gallery. So that was all arranged.
I persuaded Ramon and Morton to let Michael come up with us,
and Michael, Judi, and I got in a little Volkswagen bug--I don t
quite understand how we managed that. I think we had a roof rack,
and we tied all these collages and pieces, they promised to give
us whatever equipment we needed up there, and we took all of the
softwareyou know, the slides and the films and the tapesand
off we went.
It was really quite a great experience because originally
the idea of doing this multimedia performance was simply to raise
money to support the making of "Contact is the Only Love" because
I still owed quite a bit of money for the parts and the
electronics and so forth. Most of it was not exactly electronic;
it was like electromechanical because we were using the kind of
equipment that s made for display signs and neon and so forth and
cam-operated switches . It was before the days of fully electronic
switching capability.
Of course, we couldn t take "Contact is the Only Love"; that
weighed--! can t remember how much it weighed, but it took four
people to lift it, so you can imagine. The base of it was a tire
filled with concrete, and the little pedestal that the octagon
rested on itself weighed hundreds of pounds. Anyway, the notion
of "Who Are You and What s Happening? "--as it was titledor "The
Verbal American Landscape" as being portable was not something
that I had anticipated. I was communicating back and forth with
the East Coast; they were fascinated by what was happening- -Steve
Durkee and the rest of people I had been working with there.
Now we met Marshall, and we recorded him. He was somewhat
taken aback by the performance because he was kind of a Victorian
gentleman, despite his very forward ideas about media transforming
twentieth-century consciousness. We got along well. I remember he
said he was the kind of person who didn t even like pop-up
toasters; he liked the kind of toaster where you have the two
sides, and you open them up, and you turn them around, and you
would close it again. That was his kind of technology, even though
he was writing about the most forward kind of media experiences .
His expertise came out of studying the Middle Ages and medieval
manuscripts originally and then on to Gutenberg and forward.
77
He had an extraordinary way of expressing himself. He would
field an idea, and he would talk a few phrases about it, and all
of a sudden he would be switching, and he would be on some other
track immediately. And that just kept happening. To me, it was a
very dynamic and engaging experience listening to him; I had never
heard anybody express themselves that way. To some people it was
ultimately confusing. Since I ve never been into totally linear-
type expression, it suited me to a T. He followed the
presentation, the multimedia piece, and he spoke about it--not
entirely appreciative, because it was a very noisy little piece.
He did have some remarkable insights into it, and we continued
relating from that time on for many years both up in Toronto where
he was headquartered and in New York when he came down to take a
year-long position at Fordham Universitya controversial
appointment at the time because it used government money, and the
question was if it was right to bring someone in from Canada, and
also he was not exactly accepted as an establishment figure.
From Vancouver, we packed up the little show- -they paid us
what to us was an interesting amount of money to come up there.
It was really just expenses, but it certainly kept us going. Then
we went on to Seattle, and we stayed there with a friendly
collector and his wife the Bagley Wrights. It turned out that I
knew that Ted Roethke had died, but I hadn t realized that he had
died in Bagley s swimming pool. It was kind of a- -here we were.
Bagley owned the restaurant on top of the Space Needle in
Seattle, which was one of the first restaurants that turned
around, and you could view the whole city. I stayed in touch with
him for a few years. He was very generous to us. He bought one
of my pieces. Then we went back to San Francisco.
Sometime not too long thereafter, Steve and Barbara came
out. Steve and I created several pieces together which were shown
in a San Francisco gallery. Things were going on at quite a
hectic pace. After Steve and Barbara went back to the East Coast,
Judi and I decided it was time for us to reassemble there with
them. We did a number of other performances at various campuses
around the Bay Area, and Steve had attended one of them, and he
wanted to get involved in making more materials for the
performances. They were developing: we were getting more images
and more sound material, and Michael had become very strongly a
part of what we were doing. Our initial technical difficulties
were being solved, so there was a lot less feedback and a lot more
supposed clarity.
My intentions in these works were to extend concepts of
poetry into more elaborate modes of expression. I felt that it
worked. For instance, the slides in "The Verbal American
78
Landscape"--each were slides of one word. Now if you had three
screens of one-word slides, the three words together would create
some kind of an associative pattern, and you wouldn t necessarily
change all three of them at once. Some of them related to others,
but all of the words were either cut out of print or they were
shot on the street, out of signsit would not necessarily be the
whole sign; it could be just one word out of the sign. Sometimes
it would be two or three if it was the correct kind of meaning.
It got a lot of impressionistic feelings going from the audience.
I think that was not on tape what I said about the Aha Syndrome:
if you throw enough information up simultaneously not just a
narrow focus of people but a lot of people can draw something out
of it because there s so much. They tend to identify with
something that for some reason does that association for them,
which may not do it for the person next to them.
Somewhere along the line I wrote a sentence, an explication
of some of it which went "in a world of simultaneous operations,
you don t have to be first to be on top." As I said, Ivan, my old
friend--! call him Ivan [stress on long i, not e] , but the really
preferred pronunciation is Ivan [long e, not i]-he and I had made
our first film together. It was used as part of some
performances, and it also won an award at the Los Angeles
Experimental Film Festival. It was titled "Y", just the letter Y
out of a highway sign. It was a physically cut montage of highway
signs and the center line on the highway and a nude female figure,
very close up and panned over as if it were a highway. It had
orgasmic breathing sounds and traffic noises also mixed. It s
quite a powerful film.
There was kind of a complex thing going on here with the
Northwest Review which was up in Eugene, Oregon. I had somehow
gotten them- -I think it was through M.C. Richards, a translation
that she had done of Antonin Artaud, a poet maudit from France--in
fact, I had become acquainted with his work through Carl Solomon;
you remember how I had told you about how he had brought all the
books to the Psychiatric Institute. Artaud also had written about
a Mexican journey he had made trying shamanic, psychedelic
mushrooms; it was a very interesting piece. I can t remember what
magazine it was published in--maybe Transformation. It really
grabbed a lot of us; it was extremely intense poetic imagery, as
was all his work. They published that, and then they found out
about what I was doing.
We had a friend who lived on Lake Siltkoos in Oregon, in a
log cabin. He was a former professor of Latin and a friend of
Martha Graham s, and he had been dismissed because he had had an
affair with one of his male students many years before. He
79
retired to this lake. Jane and I had actually stayed with him,
and I kept in touch.
We didn t do a whole performance in Eugene, but I showed
this film. A couple of days later I went back to a presentation
at the university, from Lake Siltkoos. Another filmmaker and
critic whom I knew from San Francisco was lecturing and showing
some avant-garde films of the time I think, Bruce Conner and Stan
Brakhage. After the films, he got up to talk, and he was saying,
"Well, I hope what had happened to one of my friend filmmakers a
few days ago here doesn t happen to me. I understand the police
are still looking for him." I kind of listened to this; at first
I didn t quite understand what was happening. Then I realized he
was talking about me. [Laughter] So I quietly snuck out of the
auditorium and fled back to Lake Siltkoos. And I then called the
people at the Northwest Review who had sponsored me there. It had
really hit the fan the day after my showing. A twenty-year-old
student had complained to her mother that she had terrible
aftereffects from seeing this movie because of the orgasmic
breathing, it was obscene--and I can t remember all the details,
but the Regents of the university got involved, and the editors of
the Northwest Review lost their positions, and the Regents even
threatened to dismiss the head of the university. It was like a
ridiculous cause celebre. And I disappeared quickly. For sure
the police would have arrested me.
After that we decided to go back to the East Coast, and
several people arrangedIvan and other people arranged stops
along the way with performances . One of them was in Salt Lake
City, Utah, and when the first nude imagesthis was in the art
school, mind you, at the university- -hit the screen, they stopped
the projector, they gave me my film back, and they ushered me
quickly out the door. At that time, you were not even allowed in
that art school to draw from the nude. Mormon edicts.
We went on, and we did four or five little performances on
the way. Michael was not with us; it was just Judi and myself in
the Volkswagen bug. We then arrived back in Woodstock at Judi s
little house in what was called "The Maverick"; we thought it was
a very appropriate place to live. There was no running water,
there was an outhouse, but it was a lovely little place. Very
quiet and very conducive to doing creative work.
We started spending quite a bit of time at the church in
Garnerville [New York], which was a little over an hour away, and
which belonged at that time to Steve. I think I mentioned that
his gallery owner, who also was showing my work- -Alan Stone- -had
helped him buy this church. It was $5,000 for an old church. Not
too bad, huh? Even in those days when money was worth more.
80
I forgotafter the show in San Francisco, there were a
number of galleries that became very interested in my work,
including the David Stewart Gallery in Los Angeles . We also had a
show down there, and a lot of the movie and art people were
fascinated. David also showed Dennis Hopper, who at the time was
doing visual arts it was before he was really in the movies,
although he was married to the daughter of a well-known movie
starand I met him, and we became quite friendly. And by that
time, John Chamberlain, whom I had known on the East Coast, had
moved out to Southern California- -there was a lot of great
associations with people who were working hard and who were either
not known or well-known in the arts. A lot of the people who were
at the Beat show at the Whitney, which is coming out here--Wally
Hedrick, etcetera, were living in the canyons there. We had some
friends who were involved in the popular music business. You
know, those crowds at that time were very kind of mixed up and
hung out together. We stayed with Barry Maguire for several
weeksthe guy who did "Eve of Destruction".
My first psychedelic experience- -my first LSD [lysergic acid
diethylamide] experience, rather, because I had taken peyote both
with the Indians and with Philip Lamantia. Philip and I had gone
down to the de Angulo ranch. It was my first peyote experience.
There was a little cabin on that property called Gloria. We had
an amazing night together eating peyote with very anthropomorphic
and mandalic imagery. At the time I was working with Grace
Clements- -this goes back to the time when I was around KPFA we
had an idea for a rather elaborate work called "The Symbology," of
taking international and interreligious symbols and doing kind of
a comparative analysis and exposition and imagery both from a
philosophic /psychological standpoint from her side, and from my
poetic standpoint. We, through her connections, applied for a
number of grants to realize that project but none of them ever
came through, so it just remained a proposal. I might actually
have a copy of it somewhere. It never occurred to me until this
moment that that Symbology project and later the "Transformer"
project, which had some conceptual relationship, not on a subject
[form?] but the idea of synthesis, bringing together elements in
that kind of a locus --anyway, where am I? That s always a good
question, huh?
Now we re already on our way to the East Coast after that,
doing performances along the way. When we got back- -as I said, we
were spending more and more time at the church, and both Michael
81
Callahan and I were really missing working together. Michael had
decided to leave school, and we arranged for him to come east. He
joined us; he had a little extra room in Woodstock in the cabin,
and there was room at the church. Michael and Steve got along
very well.
I had turned on Steve to grass, and it kind of changed his
life. It somehow made him a lot less neurotic. He also then had
LSD experienceshe and I, it seems to me, are the only people I
know who instead of getting more out of it, got less out of it.
Timothy Leary and his group always resented the fact that I felt
that I had gotten more rational on
Stern: --the LSD experiences rather than further out of it as had
happened to them. Most of the people involved in the psychedelic
movement were very straight people before acid, and they were
looking to get out of their straitjackets. I was kind of a
hysterical--! wasn t straitjacketed because I didn t allow myself
to be, but when I got hysterical the only way to calm me down was
either to put me in a hot tub or to fuck me or do something that
would break the pattern. It was only after Michael and I had
worked a long time together that I understood the nature of
feedback loops. Actually, he started explaining them to me after
the experience at the San Francisco Museum.
A feedback loop is the relation between a transmitter and a
receiver, and once they start interacting- -unless you somehow
break the loopthey just keep accelerating, and they don t stop.
It s called positive feedback. There s no way to stop it except
when the mechanism or organism breaks down or if you are able
yourself or somebody elseto separate the elements. It s a nice
metaphor for hysterical behavior. I think once I understood it
from the theoretical and electrical or acoustic point of view, and
also the chemical point of view from psychedelics, I was able to
handle it myself instead of needing somebody outside of myself to
handle it.
We kept on developing these multimedia performances, and
Steve got incredibly involved in making super-eight millimeter
movies and developing image banks with us. We did electronic
music, mostly meditational in nature, and before long we stopped
doing the performances as individuals . Without our names , we
decided to call ourselves "USCO", the company of Us, because we
were anonymous artists.
82
Now this actually came out of something I had learned from
my time with Grace Clements. Grace had introduced me to the work
of Ananda Coomeraswami , who was curator of fine arts at the Boston
Museum, and who had written a lot of work on the artist in
traditional society. The artist in traditional society was
incorporated in the society; it wasn t a ego trip: he didn t sign
his work. He made objects and images that were used by the
community, and he was no different, supposedly, than the other
craftsmen or the other people who produced food and clothing and
shelter and whatever. It seemed to me at the time that that was a
much saner and compatible role, at least for me personally.
Steve, who has always had trouble in terms of his ego, was
entranced by this idea, and now we became USCO, the company of Us.
We were always looking for more material and more people.
By this time we had gathered another five or six people who were
working together with us, some of them living at the church and
some of them not. I had met in Woodstockbecause we were
neighborsan artist named Bob Dacey. He did tie-dye work, and he
did work in which he collaged a lot of things and then burned them
using glue that he set on fire.
We all got involved in everything, and Dace had a friend
named Jud Yalkut, who was working as a stockboy at a big record
store in New York, Sam Goody s, but his ambition was to be a
filmmaker. At the time, I had gotten very involved in the
Woodstock Artists Association; I was the vice-chairman, and Dace
was on the board, and a lot of our other friends and there was
quite a conflict developing between the old traditional artists
who felt that they were the artists and that we were not. But we
had the backing of the most powerful conservative person who had
been one of the founders and one of the chairmen, Arnold Blanche,
and he taught at the Art Students League, and he was a fairly
well-known painter. He backed us 100 percent against a lot of his
colleagues.
In any case, there was a woman there whose son had died in
an automobile accident, and she happened to have a movie camera
that he had used, and she gave it to us. And I gave it to Jud.
We had another friend, Jonathan Ayers, who had a remarkable
motorcycle; it was called "The Ghost." I was fascinated by the
concept of real time and time as it was represented by the number
of frames per second in film and how you can really manipulate
time on film by simply- -somehow, either mechanically or
electrically or electronically slowing it down and speeding it up.
We conceived this piece of film work, which we used in our
performances it was filmed simply by Judd sitting behind Jonathan
on the motorcycle running down roads around Woodstock- -fairly
woody roads. What we did was we printed three of these films--
83
identical films and we projected them on three screens right next
to each other, and we would adjust the speeds so that they would
go in different directions through each other. We also
superimposed slides of words on the three images. Single words in
black and white. The accompaniment through four channels of sound
was the sound of this incredible motorcycle which was like-
somehow it reminded us also of Tibetan chants [simulates]. In a
big auditorium with big speakers, it was definitely an overload
experience. We kind of got into overload for a while.
Byerly: That was the trend.
Stern: It was the trend, and there weren t many people at that time doing
multimedia work; we were pioneers according to Life magazine. We
performed this in various places: the University of Rochester,
where we had some friends who were professors; MIT [Massachusetts
Institute of Technology]--.
I haven t talked about Santa Cruz. Paul Lee, see, we were
starting to get very involved with Timothy Leary and Richard
Alpert and Ralph Metzner. We were at the church which is in
Garnerville. Garnerville is in Rockland County on the west side
of the Hudsonyou know, New Jersey starts opposite New York and
then goes back into New York. Millbrook--at that time it was
called the Castalia Foundation, after something in one of
[Hermann] Hesse s novels. I had met the people up in Boston
sometime before, but I didn t really know them. My psychedelic
experiences and their psychedelic experiences had not been
connected to this time, but we were invited to come up to
Millbrook.
Millbrook was an incredible estate which was owned by the
two Hitchcock brothers and their sister. They were very wealthy
socialites who became patrons of Timothy s, and of the psychedelic
movement. There was a house which probably had forty or fifty
bedrooms which they turned over. They lived also on the property
but in other houses ; it was quite an estate . There was even a
bowling alley.
Byerly: This was the Hitchcocks?
Stern: Hitchcocks. Billy, Tommy, and Peggy. Billy, I think, at the time
was working as an investment banker with Lehman Brothers. I mean,
there were private planes; on the other hand, there were
indigents, hangers-on, living there. Sometimes you d come up
there, and there would be a hundred people. Can t remember that
famous moviewas it ftfarienbad? The estate reminded one of this
kind of setting.
We somehow became involved. They thought that our
multimedia performances were kind of simulations of psychedelic
experiences . One of the people who had been one of Timothy
Leary s early subjects with LSD was a guy named Paul Lee, a
professor of philosophy and religion at MIT and Paul Tillich s
assistant. We became very friendly with Paul, and Paul invited us
to do a performance firstwell, I m getting ahead of myself here.
He was first [the protestant chaplain?] at Brandeis [University],
and then he moved back to MIT. We did performances at both
universities. By the time we got to MITthere s an incredible
auditorium there; it s kind of like a diaper shape, designed by
Saarinen. We had started building strobes. Strobe lights. Among
the audience when we did this-- We had done a series of
performances in New York City for-- Jonas Mekas and his brother
Adolphus were the leading figures in the avant-garde film movement
on the East Coast. Jonas had decided that he was going to do a
festival, "Expanded Cinema." I ve got all the materials for this;
my problem is I ve got an attic full of stuff in dreadful chaos
which needs to be organized, and a lot of the stuff you should
have access to.
At the same time, Jonas had arranged to go to Europe. I
believe he was Latvian, and he was going back home. So he turned
over the Expanded Cinema festival to a guy named John Brockman.
John contacted me, and we arranged to do performances --and we also
put him in touch with a lot of the other people who were working
in the media by that timeboth using theatre media and
performance pieces. We added at that time to our performance in
New York an artist named Carolee Schneemann. Carolee is a dancer,
a performance artist, and a filmmaker. She and her dancers would
get up during one portion of the performance on stage where we had
this white photographic background paper, very large, and as the
slides and images were projected, they would take paintbrushes and
paint portions of the images with dance motions. They were
dressed up as painters in white overalls, which also of course
caught the images, and each of them had a white ladder. Then when
they finished painting those, they would rip down the pieces of
paper, and there would be more paper behind it.
After a while, we were kind of getting out of overload, and
we felt that we had freaked out too many people. We were changing
the name of the performance, and we finally changed it to "We Are
All One." Now what we did is we would build up to overload, then
from overload we would come down to a meditational transformation
and just [hums] "ommmmmmmmmm." There would be these hundreds of
images just multiplying and overloading and sounds. Eventually
the only image there would be on a big display a CRT [cathode-ray
tube] monitor- -an oscilloscope sine wave which looks like the
infinity sign or a Moebius loop just dancing for fifteen minutes
85
just very low "ommmmmmmmmm.
"
It would cool everybody out; it was
our intention to excite people and to give them the multiplicity
sensation and then to bring them back to unity. It worked
beautifully; it was amazing.
.
By the time we got to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of
Technology] , you know, here was the motorcycle film--Kresge
Auditorium, I think it is. I think it s Saarinen who was the
architect. Woodstock is near Poughkeepsie, which is where IBM s
research and development and some of its manufacturing facilities
were centralized. There was a place there called P&D Surplus,
where you could go and buy incredible electronic devices and parts
and things which weren t ordinarily available. This was Michael s
world; he knew what everything was. We would go- -whatever we had;
a few dollars in our pocket--and Michael would save thousands of
dollars. His technique was "Wow! We could buy this for forty
dollars! This cost somebody $6,450!" [Laughter] We weren t
saving anything; we were spending everything we had, you know?
But we got some incredible thingslike this big CRT. Now this
[points] is considered a large screen, this television, right?
Well, this thing was twice as big. It couldn t show television
programs, but Michael was able to build the circuitry so we could
show very elaborate wave forms that were taken off one or two
oscilloscope inputs into this display tube, and it was the central
piece on stage. After a while, we had somebody sitting in the Zen
meditation position on top of this piece of equipment. We flashed
images on him, and that guy had to stay totally still during the
whole performance [laughter] . It was a kind of obsessional
madness intended to get across our "We Are All One" message.
With the strobes and the overload with the three motorcycles
going, after our performance at MIT, we got a phone call from this
professor who first developed the strobe and who worked with
[Jacques] Cousteau and who was head of the department at MIT. His
name was Harold Edgerton. He s an extremely famous and brilliant
guy. You probably have seen some of his strobe photographs of the
milk drop which looks like a corona. He wanted to talk to Michael
and me. He said, "This strobe you have is puny. Next time you
have a performance, I ll lend you a real strobe," and he took us
into his laboratory, and he showed us these enormous strobes, and
he gave Michael some circuitry. It was a very, very generous
gesture. He said, "I didn t really enjoy the performance, but I
understand what you re trying to do. If you want to use a strobe,
at least get a powerful strobe."
He explained to us that his reputation and his career had
been made on the strobe light. He had arrived at it simply
because his original field was motors, and to measure the rpm,
revolutions per minute, of a motor was very difficult. It used to
86
be done mechanically by holding some kind of a counter as the
motor was revolving. He developed the strobe to count the
revolutions on a motor, and everything came after that. There was
a big manufacturing firm of grandiose proportions that he formed
with two associatesEEC, it s called, and it s a big military
supplier. We were a little put off by all this, but he was so
forthcoming. It s a relationship which we kept going for many
years.
Now we had met John Brockman because of the Expanded Cinema
festival. John, who came from Boston where his father was the
Carnation King of New England, had gone to business school at
Columbia and had become a china buyer at Bloomingdale s but he
wanted to be in the arts.
Here we were: this group of poets, engineers, and painters
living in an old church in Rockland County. You saw one of the
pictures of the church, I think, in that thing I sent you, the
USCO retrospective brochure?
Byerly: Yes.
.
Stern: Right, okay. That was all of us at the church.
John decided that we were something that he wanted to
represent, and he got involved with a guy named Michael Meyerberg.
Michael Meyerberg was a theatrical producer; he had brought
"Fantasia" to Walt Disney, and he was the first one to produce
"Waiting for Godot," and he was by this time very old and very
frail. He had leased the airplane hangar from which [Charles]
Lindbergh had taken off at Roosevelt Field, and he wanted to put
in a major kind of a nightclub, youth center, entertainment
complex. His original concept had been to put a movie studio
there, but he couldn t get somehow the use permissions, and there
were things that stood in his way. He was looking for people to
put this thing together. Somehow John met him- -and John organized
a bus, and all of us and Andy Warhol s group and Ken Dewey s group
and a lot of arts people got on this bus and went out to the
airplane hangar, and we were supposed to make proposals on how to
turn it into this kind of avant-garde rock music palace.
Steve and I and Michael got our heads together, and we wrote
this proposal. I don t know if it was because we were cheap or
whether it was because we were more adventurous and mind-blowing,
but we got the contract to do it.
87
Stern: We tried to negotiate a cooperation of collaboration with Andy
because we really felt badly that he had been passed by for this
fairly ambitious project, but he was involved in the Electric
Circus, and he decided he didn t want to work together, which was
also typical of Andy.
We went on with the project. We had, I think, around the
whole hangar about thirty slide screens, and we also had one of
the first video projectors. It was black and white, and it was an
Idofor, a Swiss machine; it could deliver an image which was, I
think, about twenty-five feet across, and we had three cameras
that could takefor instance, the jiggling behind of a young girl
on the dance floor, blow it up across that whole screen, or back
off and take practically the whole dance floor.
The place was at first called "Murray the K s World."
Murray the K was a well-known macho disc jockey out of New York,
and he was a very powerful personality, and he didn t get along
too well with Mr. Meyerberg so "Murray the K s World" became "The
World .
"
It was a great scene for us because, number one, it allowed
us to work with some technologies and programming that we hadn t
worked with before. Michael was able to build a very large-scale
programmer for all of these thirty slide machines. They were in
pairs because they dissolved, and we had to make them match with
the music, so there were all kinds of little effects that we could
do with them. We actually programmed the slides to go with
certain tunes. I remember one of the popular tunes of that time
was Nancy Sinatra s "Boots are Made for Walking"; we had these
great boot shots all over the screens, and when they dissolved
into each other it looked like they were walkin .
There were fairly well-known groups that played there: The
Rascals, the Isley Brothers, and so forth and so on. I mean, not
the top levelnot The Beatles, you knowbut the levels just
below that. The groups alternated with the recorded music, and
the recorded music is what we had programmed the slides to,
because we had decided ahead of time what music would be played.
Michael actually had the job as an employee to run the
shows. I think it was three a nights a week Thursday, Friday,
and Saturday. It made the cover of Life and the inside of Life.
We had two Life stories within that year. The reason we were so
excited about making the money from "The World", which was not
something we were particularly into- -making money- -was because we
had been offered a very large space at the Riverside Museum in New
York to do a show of our work, an installation of environmentally
installed pieces.
88
It was somewhat ambitious for us; they didn t have any
money. It was a very interesting museum. They had two sides: one
was probably the best collection of Tibetan tonkas and other
Tibetan objects in the country that had been collected by the
founder, Nicholas Roerich--and the other side was devoted to
contemporary work. At the time, we were living up in Woodstock,
and there was this sculptor: a lady named Lily Ente who was very
friendly to our work, and she was the one who recommended us to
the museum, and Steve was in seventh heaven because Tibetan
philosophy and Tibetan art was one of his passions. Somehow drugs
and Eastern mysticism seem to go very well together.
This was a huge space. We had, I think, six rooms. By that
time, we had a lot of associates of various kinds --members of
USCO, including just about anybody who wanted to get involved,
practically, as long as they were marginally compatible. We had a
lot of conflicts because Steve was an irascible and difficult
person. I mean, one time he went so far as to chop a hole in the
wall to prove to us that he wasn t going to compromise. On the
other hand, he was one of the most intensely creative and generous
and hardworking artists I ve ever met in my life. Brilliant
insights into visual and conceptual possibilities. I think he
still inhabits that kind of persona. Later on, he became a Sufi,
a mosque designer, and a Muslim. He has just recently moved from
Alexandria, Egypt, back to Virginia with his present wife who was
his ex-wife s sister-in-lawa development which started while we
worked together.
The Riverside Museum was probably the peak experience of our
USCO time. Paul Williams, whom I talked about when he constructed
my ideas into visual poetry and didn t want his name mentioned, by
this time was making works of his own and was using his own name
and had left "The Land" and had moved to a studio in the city. He
had severed his marital relationship and had gone off with Betsy
Epstein, who was David Weinrib s sister and who had been married
to Arnold Epstein. We were all living on or near "The Land."
Paul contributed one whole room of a light garden- -fabulous work.
Dacey had a tie-dye meditation environment, and we had everything
from the old "Contact is the Only Love", which had been shipped
from San Francisco, to a what we called "The Tabernacle," which
was later installed at the church. "The Tabernacle" was a series
of paintings hung inside a hexagon, and in the middle of the
hexagon was kind of a lingam made of metal with light internal to
it and turning, and a fountain, and speakers on each side with
multichannel capability. It was a big draw. We had oscilloscopes
set up where people could do their own sine wave adjustments.
Rooms full of exciting, kinetic, audiovisual artistic experiences.
89
Dion Wright had done a painting of the evolution of life --a
huge, huge painting. He had come to Woodstock sometime previously;
it was an incredible piece of work later printed as a poster. We
filled all the rooms, and it was the far-out art event of that
year. They had to extend the weeks of time that it was supposed to
be shown, and there were crowds, I mean, there were lines standing
in the streets. Life magazine came out, and we were interviewed on
television. It was a big deal. Too big a deal, really, for us.
It put us in the limelight, and it exposed us to a lot of publicity
and scrutiny, and we attracted hundreds of young students and
hippie wannabes, and wannabeats who then congregated around the
church and made life a little difficult for us .
At that time we also incorporated the church as a free
church under the laws of the state of New Yorkthe Church of the
Living God, believe it or not. After the Riverside we had set up
"The Tabernacle," and we opened it to the public every weekend.
The town of Garnerville was overrun this was after the show
closedby people whothe local blue-collar citizens really
didn t think we re what the town was all about. We had a lot of
police action. We cooled it all out, but it was difficult. It
caused a lot of strain inside the community, inside USCO, and it
was a great idea to put "The Tabernacle" there but it destroyed a
large part of our workspace. We were all living there; by this
time, there were quite a lot of people living in this church.
Barbara was working as a teacher, and Barbara and Judi were
doing silk-screened psychedelic posters which we were selling to
head shops in various parts of the country and selling at our
performances. We had quite a busy scene going.
We were also getting a lot of critics from all over the
world. You know, art critics who had heard about it and who came
and wrote or needed material. We were trying to sell copies of
the paintings in "The Tabernacle." The paintings in "The
Tabernacle" also had lights embedded in them; they were meditation
images, some of them of Shiva Shakti, others simply of geometric
images that seemed to move with the strobes and the pulsing lights
and the various audio inputs that were in there. We had a little
isolation room behind "The Tabernacle" where if you were on a bad
trip or you needed some help, you could stay for a week at a time,
and we would take care of you. It was an odd period.
Across the river, our friends--! mean, an hour or so away by
car at the [Castalia?] Foundation who were having a hard time
keeping their scene together asked us for help. We really didn t
know how to help them, but finally everybody got together. There
was a theater that we were able to I can t remember if it was
entirely contributed, but it was fairly little money, and it was
90
called the New Theater, and it was in a very good location in New
York. We presented, as a benefit, six or eight weeks, I think,
one time a week, what we called "The Psychedelic Theater." All
the proceeds except for the bare expenses went to the [Castalia?]
Foundation which was Timothy and Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner
and their cohorts.
The Timothy Leary Lecture
.
Stern: We did a multimedia show which we had programmed particularly for
this theater event, and Timothy lectured about psychedelics.
Timothy, you know, had been a brilliant psychologist at Kaiser.
He developed various instruments for analyzing personalities.
Nobody doubted his professional ability. His wife committed
suicidefirst wife, I guess. He came to Harvard to teach at more
or less the same time as Richard Alpert, a young psychologist.
Richard was the son of the head of a big railroad. He had
grown up with fairly immense wealth, flew his own airplane. He
became totally involved at Harvard, and they were all proteges of
a motivation psychologist named David McClelland, who was the head
of the Social Relations department at Harvard. He didn t really
quite know what he was getting into. David was a Quaker who had
followed Murray s work in motivation being divided into three
areas: achievement motivation, affiliation motivation, and power
motivation. This is what people s behavior was divided into.
This was a way of looking at the behavioral world. Richard was
probably the most magnetic and the most successful lecturer in
psychology ever to teach at Harvard. Psychology 1, or whatever it
was that he taught, always needed the largest auditorium, and
there was never even standing room available. The guy is a snake-
oil salesman of the first order. I mean, he can go on any subject
and persuade you that this is absolutely it. Wonderful ability,
but also a frightening and destructivebecause you can lead
people very easily down the garden path and he did.
Here we were at the "Psychedelic Theater," and Timothy was
really and always has been an alcoholic. I don t mean this as an
ethnic slur, but what s called a "black Irish" personality. Just
subject to a lot of drink. He allowed the drug world to become an
additional layer on this alcoholism; he never gave up the alcohol,
by the way. Alcohol and drugs are not the greatest mix in the
world; they re destructive physiologically. Especially together,
and when they re taken in large quantities. He s one of the
several people that I ve known that have really burned themselves
to a crisp. Anyway, at that time he was an extremely popular but
also under attack- -he had been thrown out of Harvard as had
Richard under very painful circumstances. They had turned on
students, and that was absolutely a no-no, and they had kind of
destroyed their relationship with the powers that be. On the
91
other hand, they had drawn with them a group of people who were
totally convinced that this was the way to go- -among them a lot of
people who became close friends of ours.
The "Psychedelic Theater" showed up a lot of schisms between
our group and their group. Timothy started lecturing, and he
wasn t Richard Alpert; Timothy was kind of a dry, boring lecturer
in those days. He got more lively as time went on. But we were
appalled; it was the middle of this really turned-on show, and
here was this professor standing up in the front going on and on.
We happened to have a tape of Artaud screaming on a radio program
whilehe was incarcerated in an asylum, but he had been allowed
to do this radio program. Michael McClure had given me a copy of
the tape, which I don t know how he got. In the middle of
Timothy s lecture, we played Artaud screaming. It stopped
everything; people didn t know what was going on. Then we
stopped, and Timothy went on as if nothing had happened, you know?
Then about eight minutes later he was still going, and we played
another little gob of Artaud screaming. Ralph Metzner came
running up to where our media control booth was and said to us ,
"You ve broken your contract!" [Laughter] We just thought that
was so terribly amusing.
It was a great success. The auditorium was always full;
everybody paid except Harry Smith. Harry Smith was someone who
was a spectacular creative being who died recently. I first met
Harry--! think the first time I came to San Francisco he was
working as a photographer for the Examiner, and he was living in a
black hotelhe was pale whitein the Fillmore. He had done
these way-ahead-of-their-time murals at Jimbo s Bop City which
was just like it sounded in the Fillmore in return for food. I
think it was Philip Lamantia who introduced me to Harry, and we
sat there eating Harry s favorite food which was casaba melons on
the house; they kept them there just for him. Then he took us to
see some of his visuals at his hotel. But when we reached the
lobby we had to take our shoes off, and we had to not say a word
between the time we got in and the time we left. We then crept up
the stairs, and he whispered that there was a whore living in the
next room, and she was in the pay of the FBI or some government
agency to keep an eye on him. It was a paranoid, delusional
complex that he had going. He took us into his room, and it was
totally dark. He turned on a flashlight which had a cardboard
tube attached to it. He put these works on the floor, and he
illuminated them slowly so that we could see them, and in total
silence we crept out holding our shoes and went down the steps and
put our shoes on. That was Harry Smith.
Harry came to one of the "Psychedelic Theater" pieces, and
he started screaming about how he was whatever he was, that he
92
wasn t about to pay, these were all old friends of his. Timothy
and Richard had said there were nothing but spongers and people
who didn t have any money in this world of ours, and they all
wanted to get in free, and they all were friends of ours. We had
set a definite policy: No one was going to get in free. Well,
Harry got in free because I told Timothy that if Harry didn t get
in free, there wasn t going to be a show and there d be a riot.
I keep talking about alcoholics, but there happened to have
been a lot of them, and there are still a lot of them. Harry was
one. Most of these people in this world mixed the alcohol with
drugs, so there were episodes of total insanity.
Anyway, the "Psychedelic Theater" went on very well, and
Timothy came to me at the end and says, "Gerd, this was
incredible. It s a little chaotic, though. The next thing I want
to do with you is the life of the Buddha. And we re gonna start
at the time he was born, and we re going to wind up at the end.
We re going to have logical progression." I used that famous Lone
Ranger line of "What do you do mean we 1
, Kemosabe?" [Laughter]
I wasn t about to do the life of the Buddha starting from the
beginning. But he found some other media artists to do it.
The other thing at the "Psychedelic Theater" is we had left
openings, and we had invited any other media artists or any kind
of artists who wanted to participate, and they came out of the
woodwork. There were some incredible people who had projection
things and various instruments and very much in the psychedelic
mainRichard Aldcroft, Jackie Cassen, Rudy Stern, Isaac Abrams.
It opened up a lot of new relationships. Part of our interest was
not to just do it ourselves but to include others.
It kind of got us off on a track which turned out to put a
lot of conflict into the system. About that time in Woodstock,
there were a group of people who were adherents or followers of an
Indian guru named Meher Baba. I was very impressed by Baba, and,
as a matter of fact, at our shows we sold posters that we made of
Baba s face. The idea that somebody in a world where he lived in
in India, which was a world of poverty and illness and really
desperate distress, could say "Don t worry, be happy" as kind of
his major contribution really got to me. His other thing of "I am
God, and you re God; the only difference is I know I am" was also
something which appealed to my religious sensibilities. Then the
fact that he hadn t spoken for all those years and only
communicated with an alphabet board, was somehow an attractive
behavior.
93
Stern: Baba had this group of Woodstock people who were very strong--
maybe believers isn t the right word. A number of them were very
talented artists . A lot of beautiful paintings about the
circumstances of Baba s life came out of the group. They related
to a group that was in New York City, and they related to a colony
of Baba followers who were in Myrtle Beach in the Carolinas, and
we knew them all. When we had done our performance at Brandeis
University- -we were already having these images of Baba on the
screen; they were part of "We Are All One." Baba fit into "We Are
All One" like hand to glove.
There was a guy named Bob Dreyfus who was into the drug
scene heavily and who got totally turned on by the Baba thing. We
sold Baba posters and used to carry around little brochures about
Baba and little pictures--Baba loved to give out pictures of
himself. And Bob bought a poster at the first Brandeis show and
got heavily into Baba. He decided to go to India to meet him. He
did; he hitchhiked through Turkey, and it was a very difficult
journey, but he arrived there. He told Baba about all of us and
all of him and what we were all doing. And Baba sent this very
strong message that drugs were destructive and that we all had to
stop using them. Dreyfus came back to the church and said, "You
guys were the people who got me into this, now I want to tell you
that--" of course, Baba didn t speak; he wrote this out, and he
communicated through his brother-in-law. His sister s husband,
maybe. Anyway, it was his principal assistant. Bob got the
message loud and clear, and he went all over the country to all of
the groups that were involved in drugs, and he told them that they
had to stop using.
Now some of us, like Steve, really got the message, and it
was very hard for him to stop. And he didn t stop for very long,
by the way. Other people were totally offended: "How can somebody
[Baba] who never tried it tell you to stop doing it? He doesn t
understand what he s talking about." This was Richard Alpert.
At the time, we hadyou remember I told you about Robert
Indiana and how I had been somewhat influenced by his paintings
and the way he used words in the paintings. Among that group that
used to hang around there was Richard Baker. In the meantime,
Richard had settled in San Francisco, was working as an event
coordinator for the University of California, and was also the
principal disciple of Suzuki Roshi, the first Zen master to settle
in San Francisco. Richard and his wife, Virginia, and the whole
family were good friends, and we used to stay with them.
One of the events that Richard put together was called--!
can t remember nowthe LSD Conference. It was a conference with
speakers, and we were the featured show. This was at the campus
94
of UC Extension in San Francisco a big gymnasium. By this time,
we had started projecting on weather balloons. Huge eighteen- foot
balloons. We would float them above the audience, and the
audience would push them, and we would follow them by hand-
manipulated projectors. That was just one part of the
performance; we were always adding new things. We put on an
enormous, enormous performance. Richard, for his lecture, talked
about Baba, and he made this whole thing very clear that nobody
was going to tell him, no guru from India- -this was a very ironic
piece of business, by the way, which we ll get to later, because
later he went to India and found his own guru who told him to
stop, and he stopped. But that guy ingested the LSD, and it
didn t do nothing to him according to Richard. Then Richard
turned into Baba Ramdas, selling a very different line of
enlightenment .
Anyway, that s way ahead of the story. Now we had enormous
conflict not only in our group but in this little world of people
who were into drugs and Eastern religious philosophy and painters
and everybody took sides. Steve and I were on opposite sides of
the issue. I said I m not going to advise anybody how to behave
in this way. I was getting to the point where I had had enough
LSD trips, and I didn t want any more acid. But I was and still
am a confirmed pot smoker. I wasn t going to stop for anybody
whether I got a divorce as with Ann- -of course, I don t have a
habit, you understand [laughter]; it s just something I like to
do, and I ve been doing it for fifty years. What I mean
realistically, aside from joking, is that I don t have a habit- -a
habit means you ve got to increase your dose. That s one of the
things which hasn t seemed necessary. And it also means that when
you don t have it that you re physiologically deprived, which I m
not. Sometimes I don t get a high for weeks or months or even
longer, maybe because I m too busy or maybe because I don t have a
source of supply, or whatever. I ve never experienced any
discomfort from either stopping or starting.
The schism became very strong. On top of it, we were still
experiencing huge crowds at the church, and it was becoming a
hassle. Everybody needed this and needed that and wanted to be
fed, and it just wasn t what we were into. We were an artist and
engineer group trying to do creative work; we weren t a charity
service organization.
We decided thatand Steve was kind of at the helm of this--
what we needed was the high-energy charge of the church in
Rockland County, but we needed was a low-energy center somewhere
else where we could go and cool out and meditate somewhere in
nature. Steve and Barbara went off to look for the place in their
95
Volkswagen bus, painted holy orange with the Shiva Shakti figure
mounted on top of it, which I also had one of on my Corvair.
They went off, and they basically started out in California
where Richard Alpert was living at the time. Richard had a huge
house down on the peninsula. He was always wealthy. They lived
with him, and there was another lady, Jane, who was also living
with them. Dick was basically homosexual, but he has always had a
feeling--he may not now--but he was always trying to pass as at
least a bisexual if not a heterosexual. He doesn t have thehe s
neither an auntie nor a real faggot in terms of being flagrant,
but he does prefer young men.
Jane and I met for the first time, and we were attracted to
each other. No big passion or anything. She had a little girl
who was the daughter of the later fairly well-known novelist Bob
Stone.
Richard and Steve were lecturing throughout the country and
doing very well at it. They were being paid fairly well, and the
subject of the lecture was "LSD: Illusion or Reality?" What Steve
didn t know at the time was that Richard, after the lectures, was
selling acid in large quantities to big dealersnot just a few
hits at a time, you know? This was after periods where Timothy
and Richard and the whole groupbefore Millbrook [they had been?]
down in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where they were tossed out because
they were running an acid experience center. The Mexican
authorities had been pointed out by the U.S. authorities that they
were doing bad things. One of the funny stories was that Richard
had at the last minute packed a suitcase with a liter of vodka
which was full of acid, and he had wrapped it in his white linen
suit, and he put it on the plane, and it broke. For months they
were eating little pieces of his white linen suit because it was
all embedded with LSD [laughter] . It was a wild period.
Later on, Steve was quite disillusioned because Richard
hadn t explained to him what was going on. Richard and I did not
get on, and the reason that Richard and I did not get on was
because Steve and I were very close, and Richard was in love with
Steve. Richard and I both had organizational ability. He was the
organizing principle for the whole movement with Timothy, and I
was the organizing principle of USCO. He felt there was only room
for one. I was not about to take USCO into their orbit because I
didn t feel that their orbit was our orbit, you know? As simple
as that .
Now we ve got all of that background, and we re here on the
peninsula, and I m ready to go back to the church but I came out
to see my kids, really. And I stayed with Dick and Jane and Steve
96
and Barbara down there. Before I leave, I wanted to see my old
friend Ken Kesey, but Ken is hiding because the authorities are
looking for him. Jane says, "I m sure we can find him." So we
get in her car, and we drive around all night long. Finally,
somewhere in the middle of the night in a car somewhere in the
woods we make love together, then we go back to the house, and we
wind up sleeping together. In the morning Richard finds us
entangled, and he throws us out of the house. And I m saying to
Richard, "We are all one." [laughter] And Richard says, "No,
we re not !
"
And Barbara and Steve are like wigging out because
they don t know- -they re not sympathetic with Richard but they re
dependent on him. So I understand the situation; I say, "Okay,
cool."
Now I got me and Jane and her baby, and we re flying back to
the church where Judi and Michael and my scene are . Now this is a
very difficult entrance, right? Very difficult entrance. And I
take a lot of shit for a few days . But it turns out that Michael
and Jane get along very well [laughter], so the whole thing turns
around, and now we just have a few more people living at the
church.
We always had lots of people coming in and out of the
church. People would stay for days and weeks and months and
years. We had little bedrooms all over the place and lofts and
mattresses, and it was free and easy. The only thing that wasn t
free and easy was the kitchen.
"The World" went on for a long time. It finally collapsed
and died, and Meyerberg wanted to move it down to Florida, and
they kind of did, but it never worked out. Michael went down
there. We did lots of other shows in the meantime. Some of them
were just installationsprojection environments, like in Boston.
About this time, along comes--Zalman, my son, is born.
Barbara and Steve had a daughter at the church, and when Barbara
was working, Steve not only was painting but he was also taking
care of Dakota, his little girl. Steve tended to stay up all
night painting, and then he wouldn t wake up in the morning, and
Dakota was always awake and trying to get her father to feed her
or something. One time she went to the extreme length of laying a
turd right on his face [laughter] . After that things were a
little more timely.
Byerly: Who was Zalman s mother?
Stern: Judi. Also about that time, Radha came to live with us for a
little over a year. Actually, a little before this time. "The
Land" had atsome distance away near the church, there was a
97
school called the Collaberg School, which was patterned after the
English- -what was his name, Neil?
Byerly: Summerhill.
Stern: Right. Patterned after Summerhill. And Radha went there with all
the kids from "The Land," and other hip kids from around. That
was when Paul Williams had a place on the Cape, at Wallfleet, an
A-frame that he had built. It was, and is, a really nice little
house. Lots of us used to go up there for kind of a refuge.
Radha knew that everybody was taking acid and smoking pot
and things. She was thirteen years old, and a lot of the kids at
the school had decided to do it, and had done it. She wanted to
try it, and I didn t want her to try it with the kids because you
never knew . So I took her up to the Cape, and I took her on a
trip, and it was a beautiful trip she had. Of course, I didn t
take any acid; I was there to guide her through. A lot of people
were bummed out that I would do that. I thought it was absolutely
the correct move for a parent, and fortunately Jane agreed with
me.
By that time, Bill had committed suicide. We don t know if
he committed suicide. Radha? [Radha enters room.] How old were
you when Bill committed suicide or O.D d or whatever he did?
Radha: I was young. I was probably like twelve.
Stern: It was just before you came to the church.
Radha : No .
Stern: No? I thought you were thirteen when you were at the church.
Radha: I ll have to think about this.
Stern: All right, we ll think about it.
Radha: It s in that--I think my sisters took it, but it s in that--I want
to say it was 67.
Stern: I don t know. Anyway, it s just one more artifact date that we re
going to have to figure out, and as I said, I m hopeless about
dates. But at some time, Radha and Jane were out camping; it was
long afterBill had gone from being a recluse to being pretty out
of it, let s put it. Jane and his mother had put him into an
institution. When he came out, he didn t go back to Jane; in
fact, he had another relationship. I don t remember whether he
actually got married or not. Then one day they were out camping,
98
and they came back to their house in Fairfax, and they found Bill
dead on the floor. Nobody ever quite established--! think
partially because of his family s influence and partially because
of the circumstances, whether he had O.D d from a drug dose,
whether he had committed suicide, or whether something else had
happened. He hadn t been living there; he had not visited them
for ages and ages. His son Paul was living in the house also, but
was not there at the time, so it was rather mysterious. But Jane
always kept her doors open.
Byerly: I see. Jane and Radha discovered him.
Stern: Yes. When they came back from their camping trip. At least
that s how I was told the story. You never knew with Jane. Jane
could make hay out of sunshine.
Byerly: [Laughter] Jane was a trip.
Stern: Yes, she was a trip. It wasn t always a positive trip for people.
It was not a positive trip for Bill Buck.
Byerly: Obviously.
Stern: I mean, he thought he was the beneficiary, and he was taken on a
big ride for part of his life. It s nice for a young man to have
an older woman to guide him through a certain amount of passage or
vice versa, but then the young man wants to be his own person, and
that didn t suit Jane s needs.
I don t know if you know that when Bill was living in
Bolinas, California with Jane, he translated two esoteric works.
We are conscious of the fact that the University of California
library was financed by family money to publish those books. How
Bill, who had no formal education in Sanskrit or any other Asian
language, was able to translate those books is another question.
It s one thing for Rexroth, who was an extremely well-educated
person with a high poetic sensibility to translate haiku and other
poetry from foreign languages by the use of a dictionary and by
the use of this experience and understanding. It s another thing
for a kid who had basically no background but a kind of a desire--
or in German we call it Sehnsucht, which is a much broader word; a
strong emotion that you want to do something--that he was able to
carry those off. I have the books; they re very well done. I
don t know the originals obviously, but they seem beautifully
done. Whether he had help, I don t know. Who knows? It s an
amazing story.
Now Radha lived with us, then she went back to California.
In the meantime, we had been visitedactually, it was through
99
Paul Lee. At one of the performances that we did--I can t
remember whether it was Brandeis or MIT Paul Lee had to go to a
formal party in Cambridge with the director of the media center at
Harvard, Bob Gardner. He didn t know what to do with me because I
was staying with him and his wife. He called up a friend of his,
Andre Ruedi, and said, "Andre, you gotta take care of Gerd."
So I went to Andre s. Andre was at the time at the business
school. He was about to graduate, and he was writing his thesis,
and he was also doing case studies for the school, and he was very
psychedelically oriented and also a pot smoker of the highest
persuasion; we had a great time together. He was a great cook,
and he spoke German. He had a lot of girlfriends, and we grooved
together. Andre started coming down to the church and working
with us and helping us schlep our I mean, part of the real
problem that we had at USCO was that everything we did was very
heavy. We would travel with a Volkswagen bus and trailers and
thousands of pounds of equipment. Schlepping. In fact, I once
wrote a piece for one of the art magazines called "The Artist as
Schlepper." The cheese business is just as bad, by the way.
Cheese is also heavy.
Andre was very interested in the media possibilities that we
pioneered, and he talked to his professor, George Litwin, and the
powers that be at the business school that they should be
exploring the use of these forms of media to do case studies and
to do various presentations as part of the business school s
activities .
George Litwin happened to be another one of the group
that had originally been around Tim Leary. We didn t know him.
He was a short guy, kind of a Napoleon type, and he immediately
went to David McClelland, who had been Richard and Timothy s
sponsor. He talked David into the fact that in the school of
education and in Social Relations where David was operativehe
was still department head at the time, I think- -that this was a
wonderful idea to apply these techniques. David agreed, and he
got me an appointment on the faculty- -you know, a legitimate
appointment from the fellows of Harvard University as an Associate
in Education.
Stern: So I m flattered because here I am, not a college product, a few
weeks in the underground halls of CCNY and a few weeks at Black
Mountain College, and an aborted attempt to go to UC Berkeley, and
all of a sudden I m an associate in education with a faculty
appointment at Harvard University. And I m flattered, which is a
big mistake. Don t get flattered in this world.
100
I m coming up there, and I m meeting David McClelland, and
I m not even telling him that I m a friend of Timothy and
Richard s because [laughter] I know there would have been some bad
vibes in there for him. The university wasn t very happy with
him. But he managed; he s a very well-known person. His book,
The Achieving Society, was a bestseller in sociology, although for
years he has been under great attack because he worked a lot in
the Third World developing countries, and the accusation was that
all this achievement training was simply making capitalists out of
people who had no business being capitalists. But he was a
Quaker, and he believed in social good, and he believed he was on
the right side of whatever. An incredible man.
Intermedia Systems Corporation
Stern: George Litwin, who is the guy who has gotten me the appointment,
and Andre Ruedi said, "We didn t just bring you up here to do this
thing at Harvard. What we want to do is we want to form a
company, and we re going to do multimedia productions, and we re
going to make multimedia equipment." Michael Callahan and I and
these two guys and later on other people formed a corporation,
Intermedia Systems Corporation, and we rent a space with an
office, a media production facility, and an electronics shop.
Michael s moved up from the church, and I ve moved up from
the church. But Judy doesn t like Boston. She s not going to
move. She and Zalman, the baby, are back in the church, and she s
going to stay there. Now we re commuting. And I m pissed. I
really am. "What do you mean you don t like Boston? What s the
matter with Cambridge? It s a nice place to be." No, she s
adamant. And I m getting kind of tired of her trip anyway. And
she s getting tired of mine.
In the meantime, we re doing various things. One of the
things we re doing Michael McClure is an old friend, and he s
written this play which was produced in San Francisco, The Beard,
and he wants to produce it in New York. Rip Torn agrees to direct
it, and we agree to do the media background, and it s at a new
theater called the Evergreen Theater put up by Grove Press. Our
media ideas get very elaborate: we project the whole theater, the
side walls, and the stage with projections and sound. It s pretty
super duper. The play is wonderful; I love this play. I m not
trying to upstage the play; I m trying to enhance it, you know? I
think it s a brilliant raise en scene.
My accountant, who was the artists accountant in New York-
he s Rauschenberg s and Martha Graham s is Rubin Gorewitz. He
happens to have as one of his other clients and as a friend of his
the theater and sometimes arts critic of the New York Times. The
guy comes to see the opening, and he writes a long review, and
101
among other things he basically says that the media tops the play
and the acting and the directing, and all of a sudden we re not so
popular with Rip and Michael, which was a drag because it was not
our intention, and it wasn t true, by the way. I think he thought
he was doing us a favor but it wasn t really a favor. Just the
course of life; it s only a little hitch, but it was kind of a
funny hitch which we didn t need. The play ran for a while off
Broadway but not as long as it should have.
We also did an elaborate piece of kinetic sculpture for a
play of Norman Mailer s. Norman and I had known each other
through various other connections. The Deer Park--a play about
Las Vegas, which Rip--in fact, that came before. Rip was the
principal actor in that. That s really how I got to know Rip.
We were very busy doing all kinds of things . We were doing
another very elaborate projection environment for a stage
presentation about Lenny Bruce which was done by Alan Douglas, a
record producer. He had an office in New York, and we did record
covers for him. Kelly was a psychedelic artist who worked for us
at that time at Intermedia although he was really a Californian.
Kelly Mouse studios. They did a lot of the Grateful Dead covers
and Big Brother and the Holding Companyyou know, that whole
period.
Light shows were a big thing; we were into light shows. But
we never did wet shows, liquid shows, which was a kind of a
different form.
This guy comes to visit us in Boston. He grew up in Boston,
and he takes us to a Russian schvitz, a steam bath. We knew him
as Douglas, and we get into this schvitz, and there was a bunch of
old guys sitting around there, and they look at him and say, "Hey!
Rubenstein!" I look at him and say, "Rubenstein?" He says,
"Yeah. Did you think I was born Douglas?" [laughter].
The same with Bob Dylan. There was another scene, a really
bad scene I had with Bob. Bob admired our work, and when we were
in Woodstock he came to our performances at the Maverick Gallery
which was a communal gallery we had, and at the Woodstock Artists
Association. He was always asking us questions how it was done.
One day we were at a party at somebody s house, and there s this
big picture window, and my wife and a bunch of other people are
standing inside, and a lot of people are standing outside on the
wall smoking dope and outside on the grass and various things. Al
Grossman, who was Bob s manager, and Bob and a bunch of other
peoplesomebody had a rifle, they had just bought a rifle. He
showed it to Bob, and Bob picks it upnow he didn t know anything
more about guns than me. I ve always had a phobia against guns.
102
He picks it up, and he points it at the window just about where my
wife, Judi, was standing. I knock it down, and he says, "What the
hell s wrong with you, Gerd?" I said, "I don t like guns. And I
don t like people pointing guns. Do you know whether it s loaded
or not?" He says, "I m very careful." I said, "Have you ever
held a gun in your life before?" He says, "No." Well, from that
day on Bob and I were not friends, and it s ridiculous. It s
okay; I didn t need Bob Dylan. He was good friends with Allen
Ginsberg. But we lived right near each other in Woodstock.
How did I get on that? I got on that through Boston,
through Rubenstein. What was his name? Douglas- -he changed his
name from Rubenstein to Douglas. And Dylan from Zimmerman.
Intermedia Systems Corporation was now making hardware of a
fairly advanced sort, which hadn t been put forth by others yet,
to control audiovisual programming, and we were doing multimedia.
We were working for David McClelland. We had a little room about
20"
by 20 where we could project all over the walls, and the
projectors were in boxes and movies and four channels of sound.
We had a little sound studio behind this wall. He would bring his
classes in, and there were categories of mood which involved
colors and certain images, and we would see if we could change
people s moods. Then we did simulations of climates of
organizations for Harvard using the students to do the filming and
photography and recording. We would do the climate in an
insurance office which had a twenty- or thirty-year-old office
with everybody sitting at desks one after the other in rows, and
then we would do a modern insurance office where everybody had a
little cubicle with rugged walls. The difference in the mood and
the climate of those organizations --we recorded the employees and
the kind of tensions that happened. We did classroom climates,
where we would go into different classrooms with different
teachers, and then we would project all the way around. You would
hear the students voices and the teachers voices . It was an
opportunity for teachers who were in training to analyze the
climates of those classrooms and to judge how they felt and what
worked and what didn t. It was an instrument.
I didn t enjoy Harvard. There was a lot of politics. I
didn t have a degree, and I was attached to the school of
education which is very degree-oriented, and everybody realized
that I was just kind of an adjunct of McClelland s who was a big
deal, but they weren t going to bring me into the fold. Even Ted
Sizer, who was the head of the school of education and a brilliant
and interesting man- -you know how academics are.
103
Then a little later I was taken up by another professor, a
philosopher named Nelson Goodman who wrote Languages of Art. He
got me on the board of the summer arts institute they had a
program where they trained arts administrators . For many years
now, I had been on three or four proposal evaluation panels of the
New York State Council on the Arts: the literary panel, the
television panel, the media panel. And even after I moved up to
Boston, they paid me to come down. I mean, those were the days
when federal money for the arts was really flowing. It was
fascinating; we considered all the grants in our areas, and of
course I knew most of the people who applied, and it s an
important kind of function. People like Erica Jong and Toni
Morrisonyou know, before they were well-known- -were on those
panels--Ed Emshwiller [sp?], the avant garde filmmaker. It was a
great experience.
I was also involved very strongly with the National
Endowment [for the Arts], and I was on the board of Planning
Corporation for the Arts. Kenneth Dewey, who was a descendant of
the admiral s, was a performance artist and an arts philosopher,
and he worked for the New York State Council. I mean, he was
employed by them, and he started this national Planning
Corporation for the Arts to advocate the long-term agendas on what
the meaning of arts were to minorities and what the meaning of big
cultural institutions were. Being associated with the other
people on that board was a very inspiring and important role that
I occupied. Eventually, we also worked with Ken on four of five
commercial and artistic projects.
One day Ken--he did come also from wealthy people, which is
true of a lot of people in that world because you can t support
yourself, you know? So either you have money or you have some
other kind of occupation to supplement what you can do in your
profession. One day he got in his little plane and he flew, and
he crashed and died. It was another of those experiences which I
told you about like with Lew Hill. I mean, for me Ken was at the
height of his powers ; he was a great influence in the
international and national art world and at the New York State
Council. His work was admired by a lot of people, and all of a
sudden, banghe s gone. Why? And I think again, like Lew Hill,
it has to do with his romantic and emotional life rather than his
work life. Both those cases. But I m not sure. How can you be
sure? We did a huge memorial for him at his parents estate in
New Jersey. We floated hundreds of balloons in large masses which
floated away. A few artists and I spent hours blowing up these
balloons and tethering them and then letting them go all at once,
and a lot of people--! "m not even sure if Yvonne didn t do a piece
that day. I think he did. I know Yvonne knew Ken.
104
We had a gallery at that time for our kinetic works, a
fairly uptown gallery, Howard Wise, on Fifty-seventh Street.
There was a show--I can t remember the name of it--of kinetic
pieces. They were all pictured, the principal pieces including
ours, in color on several pages of Newsweek. One day I got a call
from Howard, and he said, "Your piece has been bought." I said,
"Oh, yeah? Who bought it?" He said, "Well, Malcolm Forbes bought
everything that was pictured in Newsweek without ever seeing the
pieces except in photos." I said, "Oh?" He said, "Well, you re
gonna have to put it in really top shape, and you re gonna have to
deliver to his place in New Jersey." All right. It was a few
thousand bucks I mean, wow.
We fixed it up, and we took it downit was seven
diffraction grating hexes rotating with strobes. A fairly
complicated piece. We had a wonderful relationship with Rem Wood,
the man who developed diffraction gratings. Do you know what they
are? Those little rainbow jewels? He gave us lots of the
material, and he also commissioned a piece from us. Actually,
this piece that Forbes bought was a development out of that first
piece that we made for The Diffraction Company of Riderwood,
Maryland. We came to the grounds of the Forbes estate, and the
butler let us in, and he took us down to this other building, and
this was a heavy piece, and Michael and I were schlepping it. We
had to go down some stairs; it was like a bunker. Turned out it
was Malcolm Forbes 1
air-raid shelter, which he had turned into an
art gallery. They were dismounting a show of op- art which he had
donated to Princeton [University] in toto; it had hung up for
about a year. Now he had this show of kinetic art which he
boughtin another year he donated that to Princeton. I wasn t
particularly struck by this, and we were introduced to Malcolm
Forbes, and he gave us a drink. He showed us what he said was his
favorite piece of art, which was a bronze casting of his Marine
boots from the war. We were not thrilled by this experience. But
it s not untypical of the experiences that artists have with
collectors. It was not a relationship that I enjoyed.
Not long thereafter we got out of making pieces for museums
and galleries because I found that the social demands of being a
fiscally successful artist were worse than being in business, and
that museums--! mean, we had museums not only in the U.S, all over
the country, but in Europe asking for pieces. But everybody
wanted something new; hardly anybody wanted to show something you
already had. To make the kind of pieces that we or I were
conceiving was extremely expensive, and nobody had any money.
They would always say to you, "Well, you know, we ll extend to you
our not-for-profit; I m sure that you have a patron that would be
happy." Most of the collectorsthe pieces that we wanted to do
were much too ambitious to put in anybody s house.
105
The next piece we made, which was one of the last big pieces
which Michael and I and others were involved with- -including
Jonathan Ayers--was called the "Fanflashtic." It was a
transparent gazebo which was raised up from the floor with a metal
subway grating under which there were rather powerful fans. There
were four strobes mounted in the gazebo. It had a roof. It was
filled with balloons, and the fans blew the balloons up, and the
strobes picked out the balloons, and people got inside it, and
there was sound. We toured it throughout New York State for the
New York State Council on the Arts. At one point in Rochester, it
was filled with nuns in habits. Incredible. There was a
photograph in Horizon, a kind of a book magazine, and they sent up
a very well-known photographer. He took a picture of it; it s in
one of those Horizons [points]. It s in other books, too. It s
really the last big piece we made. It was also before Ken s
death, because Ken was part of that tour also with a piece of his.
And so was Carolee Schneemann.
The tour was very successful and very satisfying. That was
at the time when Ann London, my ex-wife, was a professor of Anglo-
Saxon studies at SUNY [State University of New York] Buffalo, and
I wanted to see my son, Jared. She didn t want me to see him.
She and her father had used detectives it was a bad trip. The
funny thing is later on after he died, and she died, her mother
and I grew very close trying to take care of Jared who very early
on turned into a terrible abuser stealing his mother s diet pills.
But anyway, I wanted to see my son, and she was a professor at the
university, and I was touring for the New York State Council, and
she said no, so I called up the head of the New York State Council
on the Arts, and he called the governor, and the governor called
the chancellor of the university. The chancellor called Ann and
said, "We have a visiting artist here, and he happens to be your
ex-husband. I understand he wants to see his son. I think it
would be a good idea, Professor London, to make that possible."
So I got to see Jared. [laughter]
Years later Ann and I got back into a reasonable
relationship, when she realized that Jared had become an addict,
and she didn t know what to do nor did her present husband, so she
wanted my help. It was too late. There were years when she
wasn t even conscious of the fact that her supply of Dexedrine was
being raided day by day. How could you not be conscious of that?
Here we were still working somewhat with John Brockman, who
was our agent on commercial things. Another job we did at
Christmas time was Bendel s department store, a collection of
fashion boutiques on Fifty-seventh Street in New York. Geri was
the manager, and she wanted something psychedelic, so we created a
black light environment made out of stretch fabric that we
106
stretched as a ceiling all over the store. She had approved the
design, and her display manager, who was very, very fey- -when we
got it all finished, they didn t like it. So they made us take it
down, and they didn t want to pay for it. We didn t know what to
do. Bendel s was owned by a large corporation, so I called up the
corporate office, and I asked for the CEO, and of course I
couldn t speak to him, so I sent him a telegram telling him that
if we didn t get paid, that the next day they would have two dozen
Greenwich Village artists picketing Bendel s. About half an hour
later, I got a telephone call from his assistant saying, "Mr.
Stern, you will have a check brought out by our driver within the
next several hours as soon as he finds your place. One proviso:
you cannot tell Geri that we paid you." [Laughter] "She s a real
enfant terrible, and Mr. so-and-so doesn t want to have to deal
with that. But the money s not a problem." So we got all our
money .
Intermedia Continued
[Interview 4: April 10, 1996]
Stern: We ve been kind of playing with details and dates which are not
necessarily in sequence. Some of the things that I just talked
about were before Harvard, and some of them were during Harvard.
As we were progressing with the days at Harvard, Intermedia was
growing very rapidly. Early on, we were up in Porter Square- -
remember where that is?
Byerly: Sure.
Stern: Then we ran out of the capital from the people from the business
school who had started this company with me. It was a very
interesting conjunction. It was a conjunction of my naivete and
their hubris. George Litwin, who was a professor at the business
school, thought he was a businessman because he taught at the
business school. The truth was he was a psychologist. They had
done a lot of training work and various kinds of work for business
organizations, but they were no more business people than I was.
They were involved in the subject of business on an academic
levelno idea about numbers or how to run a business, profit and
loss statements, balance sheets. Theoretically yes, but
practically no.
107
We needed money, and we needed investment. The original
policy and the original way that this business was set up was they
said to me, "We ll take care of the business end and the marketing
and the sales. You, all you have to do is be creative." Oh, was
that a lot of bull. Now we re dead broke, and we have these
hardware lines that we re developing- -Michael needs money for the
parts and for the subcontractors and for the techies that have to
do the work. And for the software we need equipment, and we ve
got a little sound studio going; we need more equipment for that.
They don t know where to come up with the money so I call my
accountant and friend Rubin Gorewitz, and he comes up [to Boston].
No problem. He introduces us to an investment banker in New York,
Larry Teicher, and the investment banker introduces us to a little
guy on Wall Street named Jesse Krieger who s a one-man share
f logger. And we go public. What do I know from going public?
I ve never even heard of it. What stock market? I mean, I knew
about the stock market from the New York Times.
Now, all of a sudden, I have 100,000 shares, and we re
selling shares to the public, and we get $600,000. My good
friends from the business schoolthe president of Intermedia
Systems Corporation, Dr. Litwin, goes crazy. I told you he come
out of the whole Timothy Leary group, and he drives a Corvette,
and he s a high liver in ways I never experienced, reallyeven in
the days of the Londons . That was civilized compared to this shit
that s going down. All of a sudden George buys he s also into
scuba 50 percent of the Underwater Explorers Club in the
Bahamas. We had no business we were going to do a surround media
experience there, and we re all involved. That s not the only
thing he invested our money in his money, he s the president, so
he spends it, you know?
At the end of the day, we ve moved to Central Square two
floors in a big old building. I don t know if you remember it
with the arched windows; beautiful old building. Later on there
was an Indian store that we rented the bottom floor of, but at
first we installed big environmental projection installations, and
now we re in bigger business.
Then some dreamer has built a sound studio on Newbury
Street, and he copied the Deutsche Grammophon studios in Germany,
and it was going to be for classical music for groups out of the
Boston Symphony. Two or three weeks or a month after he s got it
together, he goes broke. We take over the sound studio, and now
we have the first sixteen-track studio in the country, with the
first Ampex sixteen-track machine, and we re Intermedia Sound.
Another of the psychologist/dopester/psychedelic group, Dr.
Gunther Weil, who we ve known for a long time and who was a buddy,
108
takes over Intermedia Sound. He was at the time a psychology
professor at Brandeis.
We re going great guns, but basically we re heading into
deep debt. We have a board of directors including David
McClellan. We re prestigious, and we do a lot of interesting
work. We re bouncing around, we re working for corporations,
we re working for the U.S. Information Agency, we re working for
the Commerce Department. By the time we get up to speed, we ve
got maybe somewhere between thirty and forty employees. I m the
creative director, and I ve got a big office overlooking Central
Square.
Walter Gundy is at this point no longer roadie for The
Lovin Spoonful but he s now with The Incredible String Band, and
when they come through Boston there s a lovely high party and I
wind up talking to one of their friends, Peter Beren. A couple of
days later he calls and tells me he wants to interview me for a
piece in the Boston Phoenix and he winds up titling it "Intermedia
Systems: Cinderella Sweeping Up on Desolation Row," and writes
things about me and USCO and ends with, "Intermedia Systems, then,
is a new type of corporation, a living contradiction in our
present vocabulary. A corporation born in art, aiming at
expanding horizons in business and education."
Anyway, throughout the years, Peter winds up being a close
friend, and he s one of the few people who keeps touching base to
find out what s happening with me and us and I do the same with
him. Now he s publications director for Sierra Club and also acts
as literary agent for on or close to the edge writers about
spiritual, musical, health, and literary topics. We have an
uncanny way of sensing when one another is down and giving in
person or by phone support for each other in words and feelings .
That mutuality helps. And I ve always had a problem with one-way
type relationships- -you know what I mean, people with whom you
need to do all the initiating, the "Contact Is the Only Love"
transmissions and if you don t do that, they re out of touch.
Now, when that happens, after a while I give up on them. But
Peter and many other friends through the years are a two-way
street. And, now, with email, the flow increases.
Marriaee to Sally Shaw
Stern: In the meantime, Judi has kept on her path of "I m not moving up
to Boston." So I m commuting back and forth. Then Judi, with
another friend of hersthey want to go away somewhere. So I
109
borrow Rip Torn s house in Mexico, and off Judi goes with little
Zalman and with her friend Patti with her daughter Ever. I m
beginning to feel like I m not involved in a relationship anymore,
that I ve just got dependents.
I m still spending a lot of time with Andre Ruedi. Andre s
now a partner in Intermedia Systems. We re really buddy-buddy,
and he had a girlfriend, Sunny, who s going to Simmons College. A
really well-endowed and hip young lady. One day he takes me over
to her apartment, and her college roommate Sally from New
Hampshire is sitting there. It s in the middle of the summer,
nobody s wearing very many clothes, and we re sitting around the
floor getting high, and we re practically naked. We re listening
to music loud, and we re having a great time. After a couple of
hours or so there s a big noise from above, and some guy comes
practically falling down out of the skylight. Apparently this is
Sally s boyfriend, and he s been calling, and he s been ringing
the doorbell, and nobody had answered, and nobody has remembered
that he s supposed to be arriving. We leave, but in the meantime
I ve gotten a fixation on this young lady whose name is Sally
Shaw. In the next four or five hours, which is probably between
two a.m. and seven a.m. in the morning, I call her four or five
times. In the meantime, she s with her boyfriend. But I don t
give a damn.
The next weekend we drive up to New Hampshire- -Andre and
Sunny and me, and we go to her house, and from then on Sally and I
are a thing. This is a young lady going to Simmons, and she s
from a real Yankee New Hampshire family, with both sides of
Scottish ancestrybeen here since the 1600s on king s grant land.
Peterboro, right? You being from New England will get the
picture. I m not exactly welcome. In fact, I m not that much
younger than her father. He s a doctor, and he was at that time
the doctor at St. Paul s School. They re living at the school, in
a house on campus. I eventually get invited to dinnerby Sally,
not exactly by her parents. I get there, and I m there all
evening, and this man doesn t talk to me. We sit at dinner
together, and really nobody talks to me except Sally, so I m
feeling like--.
Doesn t matter. We get together, and I m really enamored.
I m so enamored that I m not very long thereafter asking her to
marry me, and she says no. But by this time we re living
together.
In the meantime, of course, Judi is getting vibes that
something else is going on. Eventually I go down to Mexico, and I
have a very bad experience there. I get sick with "Montezuma s
Revenge", and I m also not being very happy about the
109a
relationship, and I m feeling bad about my young son one more
time. By this time, this is the fourth child I ve kind of lost.
But Judi and I were still trying to keep it together. Everything
is in limbo now. Judi comes back to the church, and we get a job
doing environmental coverage, an in the round media room at Hilton
Head Island. Judi is also no slouch; she s a good photographer,
she does silkscreens, and she paints. Unfortunately, she never
really does anything with any of it. She s also completely
dependent on me. So we send Judi as the photographer on this job
down to [South] Carolina to Hilton Head Island. She meets a young
rock musician there, and she finishes the job, and she takes
little Zalman and her new friend, Todd, and they go to Colorado.
Now I m definitely out of this relationship. Willy-nilly.
I m determined to make something better out of the
relationship with Sally who is now in 1996 still my wife. It
takes many years for us to get married. In the meantime, she
graduates from Simmons, and she goes to work for an architect.
Eventually, she comes to work for us at Intermedia. I teach her
the elements of sound editing, which I m very good at and she gets
even better. These days sound editing has developed into a
completely different technology, but Michael and I come from the
days where you actually cut the tape and spliced it. We teach
this to Sally, and Sally gets very good at it. She edited Huey,
and she edited Rabbi Zalman Schachter, and she did a lot of great
work on our audiovisual pieces .
Lilly and Otto Stern, circa 1927.
Unser "our"
Camp with Ivan Majdrakoff (in the striped shirt)
et al, circa 1946. Gerd Stern bottom right and Lorraine Oyl
top right.
Gerd and Jared on barge, circa 1959.
Gerd Stern and John Brockman, circa 1963,
A.C. "Augie" Spectorsky and his wife, Theo Fredericks (Spectorsky) , with
Ann London Stern and Gerd Stern on the back deck of the barge at Waldo
Point, Sausalito, circa 1964.
Michael Callahan, circa 1964.
Willow Grove Road, Rockland City, New York.
Back row: Jane, Sheridan, Radha, and Michelle,
Front row: Adam, Kristin, and Paul.
Gerd Stern, Michael Callahan, and Steve Durkee--otherwise known as
Beardo, Electro, and Weirdo--of UCO, Woodstock, New York, circa 1965,
At the Garnerville workshop, USCO, getting ready for Intermedia 68,
NYCA.
Ivan Majdrakoff and Gerd Stern, circa 1970.
110
V 1970s: ART AND PSYCHEDELICS
Michael Callahan and Intermedia Systems Corp.
Stern: Now Michael Callahan he and I are the closest of friends, and we
work together. We were partners in Intermedia he was not quite a
shareholder on my level, but he s a director and an integral part.
The problem with Michael is that he s drinking, and he s drinking
more and more. His father, who left his mother when he was just a
baby, was an alcoholic. This was surfacing, and it was surfacing
in a fairly destructive manner. I mean, Michael is not above
taking a few tokes but he s basically into alcohol.
Jonathan Altman
Stern: It s a very, very hectic kind of atmosphere because we ve got
things all over the place. In the meantime, Steve and Barbara
have continued to explore for a place to buy for a low-energy
center. There s a guy who came into our little world when we were
still at the church named Jonathan Altman. Jonathan is the son of
a wealthy Jewish family, the family that bought the Dead Sea
Scrolls for Israel. His stepfather is the architect for the
shrine of the Scroll, and Jonathan is really into what we re
doing. He has promised to put up the money to buy the land for
our low-energy center.
One day- -and this is probably before what I m talking about,
again. I keep remembering that I m not catching up certain parts
of it to the other parts. You know how that is: it s like you re
swimming in a school, and you don t stay in place; you swim a
little faster than the last guy or a little slower, and you get
caught up in some kind of a time lapse. One day they call up, and
they say, "Gerd, you ve got to get your butt out here because
Ill
we ve found the place." Believe it or not, the man s name is
Israel.
Now I ve got to go back further, on a completely different
strand. I m brought up obviously Jewish. I told you I learned
Hebrew by rote. When I was still in New York, in the days when I
was living in New York with Jane, I spent a good portion of time
studying the mystic Jewish tradition, which is Qabbalah
particularly a little book called Safer Yetzira The Book of
Light. It s been very influential on my poetry and on my way of
thinking. Another mystical strand, one of my favorite poets in
the world, was Yeats. Through Yeats, I get into McGregor Mathers
and into that whole mystical world. Then later, when I come to
California, this gets kind of vermischt with Grace s syncratic
impressions that she s got me reading all of Jung. I had read a
little bit before. And I m also into Robert Graves.
So the whole thing makes sense, right? In terms of Judaism,
I m not observing but I m connected to the tradition more so than
my family. One day, when we re still at the church, Ralph Metzner
calls me up. Ralph was one of the original psychedelic trio of
Tim, Richard, and Ralph. They did the Tibetan Book of the Dead
together I mean, there was also Tibetan tradition that comes into
it. He called me up and says, "Gerd, I know you re into this
Jewish thing," he s a Jewish refugee too, but he s not into it at
all. He says, "You ve got to meet this guy. I took this wild
rabbi from Canada on his first acid trip last week here at
Millbrook. He s something else, and you ve got to meet him."
Rabbi Zalman Schachter and Other Eastern Spiritual Influences
Stern: So next time Zalman Schachter comes down from Winnipeg, where he s
the head of the department of Judaic studies at the University of
Manitoba, Ralph calls me, and we meet on Second Avenue at
Rappaport s. And we fall in love. I mean, this man is a wondrous
human being and an incredibly learned Judaic scholar. I take him
up to the church, and he stays overnight, and I stick him in the
"Tabernacle." He doesn t believe that this exists in the world.
We had really locked right in to each other.
It s now 96, and so it s thirty or forty years later, and
Zalman and I are still very, very close. He s gone through a lot
of different stages. We see each other whenever he comes down,
and the next time Judy and I travel across the country, we don t
go straight across; we drive up through Canada, and we go to
Winnipeg. We stop and see and stay with Zalman and his then-wife.
112
That was his first wife. He had married an Orthodox wife, and
slowly he got more and more interested in studying other
religions. There was a Catholic monastery nearby; he was very
friendly with all of the people there, and he studied a lot of the
eastern religions, and he knew most of the other gurus that were
floating around that world at the time.
And so did we--Swami Satchinanda used to come up to the
church, and the head of the Hare Krishna movement came up to the
church. Suzuki Roshi, when he came east, came up to the church;
that was great. Barbara and Judi didn t know what to cook for
Suzuki Roshi, so they went out and got just the finest vegetables
that they could, and they made a clear soup with little things
floating around in it. He liked the soup, and he says [imitates
Japanese accent], "Ah, what you call this soup?" I m not good at
imitating the accent, but it was a very strong accent. They said,
you know, a little bit of this kind of vegetable and a little kind
of that vegetable and some broth. And he said [again with
accent], "Oh, we used to make that in the monastery. We call it
garbage soup." [Laughter] I very much liked Suzuki Roshi.
We knew him through Richard Baker, who later on became
Suzuki Roshi s dharma heir and became the head of the Zen Center
here and was later scandalously dismissed. Richard and I were
very close; he and his wife Ginny and their daughter and the rest
of their extended family. I ve lost touch with him regrettably in
the last few years, but we hear about each other.
When we were living in Cambridge, Sally and I were living on
Broadway in Cambridge. Richard came and stayed with us for some
months because one of the major contributors to the Zen Center was
a Boston banker whose wife was one of the leading exponents of the
tea ceremony. The banker suggested to Richard that he come and
spend some time in the investment bank learning about finances
because he was running a fairly major enterprise by this time: the
Zen Center in San Francisco, with Tassajara down in the Cannel
Valley, and they had just managed to acquire the Green Gulch Ranch
here on Mount Tamalpais.
When we visited Reb Zalman in Winnipeg, he had established
in his basementin his little studyan array of psychedelic
lights and toys. He had a little strobe light and lava lamps and
black light and tie-dyes, and he had surrounded himself. This
whole interest level of his eventually estranged his
conservatively Orthodox wife and his children because this wasn t
the Orthodox way. He was developing ideas in writing and
extensions of Judaism, and he understood that the gender approach
in Orthodox Judaism was intolerable in terms of the twentieth
century. If a woman couldn t, for instance, read from the Torah--
113
it didn t make any sense anymore. He extended the potential of
Judaism into the twentieth century like nobody else was able to
do. Now there are other groups that have followed, but his is the
seminal energy of New Age Judaism.
Stern: Zalman came from a similar background, Germanic Jews. He was born
in Vienna, which is a little different- -Austrian rather than the
German/French border. But we both spoke German. He was a little
older than I am by just a couple of years. We forged quite a
close relationship which has lasted over the years. When I talked
about the apartment on Broadway, that was an apartment that we
took over from Reb Zalman because he had been at Brandeis for his
sabbatical year, which wasn t his first experience in New England.
He had had a congregation in Fall River earlier.
Zalman came out of Lubavitch, the main Hasidic secthe was
a shliach, a "messenger", which is what the word means in English
for the rabbi of the sect. He traveled through the Caribbean
gathering funds. He slowly rose out of that Orthodox mindset into
a very twentieth- century renewal tradition. If a religion doesn t
renew itself in every century, it doesn t work that well. He has
been the principal renewal agent in contemporary Judaism. And he
was friendly with all of the elements that we ve been talking
about, like Ginsberg, and he now has a chair at the Naropa
Institute in Boulder [Colorado] .
I m getting ahead of myself again, but when his marriage to
his Orthodox wife broke up because he was expanding his
consciousness in ways which were intolerable to the Orthodox set
of mind, he had converted his secretary at the university, who was
a very Protestant young lady. He had then married her. It was
his second marriage. When he was in Cambridge, they were there
together, and they had a child. He had children who were in their
late teens by that time from his first marriage- -three of them.
We saw a lot of each other when he was in Cambridge. There
was an old Orthodox synagogue which had gotten kind of
conservative. He did the high holidays there, and we went there
every year, Sally and myself. Of course, Judy had known Zalman
also, so there was a back and forth. In fact, when Judy s and my
son was born, I called up Zalman, and I told him we re going to
name him Zalman. Zalman said to me, "You know that s not in our
tradition. We don t name people after people that are still
alive." I said, "Zalman, you break rules every day, and now
you re telling me that this is something that shouldn t be done;
besides, I m naming our son after somebody else whose name was
Zalman." He laughed, and it was fine.
114
Zalie Yanovsky from the Loving Spoonful calls me up. We had
done their very psychedelic program book, which their manager-
after paying us some thousands of dollars to do and having to
print it for many more thousands of dollarshad destroyed because
he didn t like the psychedelic image for the group. A real macho
Italian mafia type. I suppose that s an unfair characterization.
So Zalie Yanovsky calls me up, and he says, "Gerd, wow, you
named your son after me?" [Laughter] I said, "Well, not exactly,
Zalie; I named him after Rabbi Zalman Schachter." And he didn t
like it because, you know, he was still alive. But it s
everybody s name who s named Zalman. So about a year later, Zalie
calls me up, and he says, "Hey, we just had a baby! Guess what
we re going to name him?" I said, "What are you going to name
him?" He says, "Gerd. After a friend of ours who runs a kosher
deli in Nashville." [Laughter] It wasn t true at all.
One of the people who lived at the church, Walter Gundy, was
the road manager for the Loving Spoonful, which is how we had
gotten this whole thing going with the Spoonful. There were a lot
of involvements of various kinds with music, with architects, with
collectors, with scientists.
Anyway, now we re back in Boston. Where were we?
Byerly: You were living on Broadway, on Central Square, with Intermedia.
Stern: I was talking about Richard Baker. Roshi Baker. And now, Sally
and I, after years of living together, I finally persuade her that
we should get married. You might well ask me why, but I m pro-
marriage. Like I said, I don t thinkexcept for the
circumstances that I would have gotten unmarried, even from the
relationship where we hadn t had a formal marriage with Judy. But
I wanted to be married. For a long time, Sally thought that
something different, maybe something better was going to come
along. I was a lot older than she was, and she wasn t quite sure
what she wanted to do with her life. I kept hitting on her, and
finally she decided okay, we re going to do it, because we wanted
a baby.
Neither of us wanted our parents involved for reasons which
I think are fairly obvious the way I ve talked about mine. Her
parents were very staid. It just seemed like we wouldn t do that.
So I asked Roshi Baker, who by this time had gotten Green Gulch
going, and we had been there and visited, whether he would do the
marriage, and he agreed. Then I called up Reb Zalman because I
knew he was going to be in California more or less at the same
time because his daughter from his first marriage was getting
married in Los Angeles. I said, "Zalman, would you come up and be
115
with us during our marriage? Roshi Baker is going to marry us."
And I gave him the date, and he was very cold on the telephone. I
said, "Hey, what s going on?" He said, "I can t understand it,
Gerd. Why didn t you ask me to marry you?" I said, "Zalman, you
don t do mixed marriages." He said, "Who s not Jewish?"
[Laughter] Now he had known Sally for some years by this time;
she had cooked for him--funny thing is, she has some kind of an
impression that she s the reborn of a Holocaust survivor.
Eventually she converted, but at this time she was pure, both
sides, Protestant stock and had no real connection to Judaism
except through Zalman and myself. I was amazed because it would
never have occurred to me that Zalman, who knew Sally that well,
would think that she was Jewish. But that was his impression.
It was a great wedding. It was at Green Gulch, and it was
in the Zendo. When we first went into the Zendo, Richard said we
were going to do the marriage here, and we re going to have these
big candles. I had brought theseoh, I haven t even talked about
Venezuela--! had brought these enormous candles from the
Venezuelan Andes, and everything was set, and I said to Richard,
"Couldn t we do it outside under the redwoods?" He said, "We do
all our marriages here in the Zendo." I said, "I
know, but--."
He asked, "What s wrong?" Well, there was this enormous Buddha,
like fifteen or twenty feet high standing there, and I said,
"Richard, one of the Ten Commandmentsgraven images." He looked
at me and said, "Oh. I ll tell you what. You walk over to the
Buddha and invite him to be a guest at your wedding, and
everything will be okay." [Laughter]
Now, by this time, Reb Zalman had agreed to come up because
he understood that he couldn t perform the marriage. So when he
came I told him I d invited the Buddha to be our guest, and it was
fine with him. And during the ceremony he gave us a great
blessing, which he is able to do. On top of this Paul Lee I was
teaching at Santa Cruz at the time who is a Protestant minister
and a philosophy professor--! told you about him; he was the guy
who sponsored us at Brandeis and MIT and then got me the job at
Santa Cruz is in the wedding. He s not supposed to do anything
except maybe say a few words. But he gets up, and he goes through
the whole damn marriage service. And Sally is stunned; she
doesn t want any of this "to honor and to obey" and all the crap
that we had managed to do without. We were somewhat upset, but he
was an old friend, and there was nothing we could do. He just
started it, and then he went through it. [laughter]
We had Bagavandas play the Indian instruments and chanted,
and it was a great wedding. We had my favorite cheese--! come
from a cheese family, and I m now in the cheese business, but I ve
always loved cheese. One of my favorite cheeses in the world was
116
and is Peluso s Teleme Jack, which is a Californian cheese and
which Jane had introduced me to at the Crystal Palace. Anchor
Steam beer and Teleme Jack: a great combination. The Teleme has
to be dead ripe so that it s completely liquid in the center. We
had a lovely wedding meal at Green Gulch, and went off on our
little honeymoon to the Santa Cruz mountains.
John Brockman and USCO
Stern: When I had been working with John Brockman in New York, we got a
lot of publicity- -The New York Times magazineand there was
national and international interest in our work. People would
call up and ask us things. One time we got a call from Hollywood,
from Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, asking us if we would be
interested in consulting with them about a project that they were
doing at the time. Bert is the son of the former head of Columbia
pictures, Abe Schneider. A very substantial force in the
industry. They met us in New York, and they explained to us that
they were doing this film with the Monkees, and it was a very far-
out film. They were both big heads. Mucho smoke, in quantities
that were impossible for me to even conceive of. The Monkees were
not exactly what we thought of as our kind of culture, but they
brought us out and paid us royally. John got the lion s share: he
wound up with a yellow Jaguar sports car out of this gig. This is
still during the days of USCO at the church, what we re talking
about, more or less. It was winding down; I think it was after
Barbara and Steve had left for the coast.
We weren t quite sure of how to handle this scene, but it
was interesting; it was a very odd movie, the way it was shaping
up. It had a lot of surrealistic aspects to it. The problem that
they had was how to promote and how to name it and just kind of
we were communications experts, right? We were friends with and
worked with McLuhan, and all these things and they were hip. I
decided a great name for the picture would be "Head." Don t ask
me why. It seemed like a name that people would really grab on
to--and they loved it. Then I said, "The poster has to be
somebody s head. It s gotta be a really wild poster." I decided
that it should be Rafelson s head; Rafelson was the director. We
set up in Hollywood a photography appointment, and we were all
sitting thereJohn doesn t touch drugs at all; he s a real
straight guy. And Rafe and Bert and I were kind of out of our
minds, and Rafe says, "It s gonna be John s head!" I said, "Come
on, that s ridiculous; it s not going to be John s head. You re
the director, you re the head. That s the idea. The head." He
says, "No
wayit s going to be John. We re paying you; you re
117
not paying us."
[Laughter] This totally typical kind of
Hollywood trip.
It winds up being John s head. John s head gets transformed
by Judi. We do this color poster on mirrored mylarwhich is now
in the collection of the Museum of Modern Artand it s an
incredible poster. But to me it s totally meaningless because
it s the wrong head. John doesn t want to have his photograph;
he s really reluctant. But what can you do? I mean, there s the
yellow Jaguar to pay for, right? [Laughter]
We compromise. Besides, Judi s really anxious to do this
poster. It s a great poster: it s just a head in psychedelic
colors and underneath it says, "Head." The problem was how to
conceptually connect it with the picture. The picture didn t do
well, and it s a very funny, very great picture, I think. But, it
became an underground fad success in the years that followed, and
it s done quite well. It s played on college campuses all the
time and so forth. It worked out after a while.
In the meantime, while we were in L.A. for a few times
running, we met a lot of people. One of the people who was
associated at BBS, which was Burt s and Rafelson s and their
partners company, was Jack Nicholson. My old friend from the
gallery, Dennis Hopper, was at the time making a movie with Peter
Fonda and Jack Nicholson. Bert was putting up the bread, and I
was asked to do the sound for that picture. But I was too busy.
You know, the motorcycle picture.
Byerly: "Easy Rider."
Stern: "Easy Rider." Right. From then on, Jack and Bert and Rafe and I
and John stayed pretty friendly. Bert was married to his
childhood sweetheart from Mt. Vernon, New York, and had two
children. And he had never sown his wild oats. All of a sudden
he ran off and bought another magnificent house in the hills and
lived with Candice Bergen for a number of years. And it was
through Bert, who was the major financial supporter of the [Black]
Panthers and a lot of other radical groups, that I met Huey
[Newton] .
Huey Newton
Stern: I was drawn to Huey Newton because he was an intellectual of great
depth who had read practically everything that there is to read
and who liked to talk about it. He needed people to throw his
118
ideas against who would listen and be able to respondhopefully
respond very shortly so he could have 95 percent of the time to
speak. My father had always told me that I should listen. In
business, in anything, it s a lot better to listen than to speak.
I m not following his injunction. But I usually do; in business,
he was absolutely right. In a lot of human affairs, you can
manage and negotiate better if you listen more than if you talk
more.
So Huey and I became very friendly. When I was at Santa
Cruz, I introduced Huey to Paul Lee, and we managed to get Huey
accepted as a student there, and he actually got a degree there.
That was quite an accomplishment.
University of California. Santa Cruz
Stern: It was kind of a strange scene at Santa Cruz because Paul was very
interested in our multimedia work, and he had decided that Plato s
Myth of Er was an incredible thing to do in multimedia. And he
was right. And he s still right. I m sure he s around; we ve
lost touch with each other. Paul and I had first met in Boston--!
had told you about how he introduced me to Andre Ruedi when he
sponsored us at Brandeis and then MIT, and we had visited him in
his summer home in Wisconsin several times with a woodburning
sauna which you then ran into the cold lake. Oooh, oooh. I can
still feel the cold. We were great friends. He got me the job in
Santa Cruz, first at College Five. He wanted me to produce the
myth with my students, but it was a very difficult piece of work,
and there were no funds. He didn t have the time to get involved,
and I just couldn t bring it off. I was teaching a course in the
History of Consciousness program which I had conceived of as a
communications course about the history of technology, which is
what they wanted, and which I wanted to call, "Turning Tools into
Toys." I was thinking about McLuhan s ideas of tools as
extensions. I was really into trying to get these doctoral
students to understand the successive impacts that various
technologies have had on human activity. I mean, the plow, the
stirrup, electricity, capacitors, resistorsthese are all
concepts that are mechanical, they re electric, they re
electronic, they re philosophical, and trying to bridge all of
these different levels that are contained in the technological
universe.
The course appeared in the catalogue as something like, "The
Role of Technology in the History of Consciousness." They wanted
a much more doctrinaire kind of an approach than I was taking.
119
Norman 0. Brown, the author of Love s Body, was in charge of the
History of Consciousness program, and he and I definitely did not
see eye to eye. He felt that humanism and the humanities depended
on ideas, not on things, and he resented the fact that I brought
the engineer from the communications center to talk to my students
about electricity. He didn t like the blue-collar approach. The
guy was by no means blue-collar; this engineer was a Brit who had
been one of the first video television engineers at the BBC. He
was a sophisticated guy. Brown was up the wrong alley completely.
Later on I had the pleasure when Brown came to consult me- -he
wanted to do a series of videotapes of his ideas and his work, and
he wanted to know from me how he could protect the videotapes so
that people couldn t copy them. Instead I explained to him my
ideas about freedom of information and the technological
unfeasibility of being able to protect a videocassette from
piracy. And those were the early days; they weren t the
videocassettes we have now. And they didn t have any warnings on
them the way videocassettes have now.
Talking about video--! m going way back--
The Venezuela ProiectM
Stern: The potential of using video for other than broadcast television
started out when Sony first put its first half-inch portable on
the market with a small camera, and we got the set practically
immediately. We were involvedas I mentioned, I had been on the
video panel and was still on the video panel at NYSCA--and we were
friends with Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik and the Video
Freaks, Global Village, the Vasulkas, and all of the groups that
were involved in producingvideo, documentation, and in the arts.
In fact, I wrote a chapter in a book which was eventually
published by the MIT Press regarding the funding of experimental
television, which is an interesting history. I did some
experimental videotapes at WGBH in Boston at their workshop. I
also did a little work in New York: public television workshop.
One day when I was sitting in my office at Intermedia in
Cambridge, I got a call- -it was obviously a long distance away--
and this guy in a very accented voice said to me, "Are
you the
Stern whose work is in this magazine that I m reading?" It was an
audiovisual magazine. "Is this Intermedia?" I said, "Yes, this
is me." He said, "Well, this is Jose Ignacio Cadavieco from
Caracas. Are you going to be in your office tomorrow morning?" I
said, "Yes." He said, "Please save some time tomorrow morning
120
because we re going to come up and see you." And he hung up. I
figured some friend of mine was joking around.
The next morning, these two characters are waiting for me
when I come in to the office early in the morning. They re from
Venezuela. One of them is Jose Ignacio, and he is the director of
public relations for the Ministry of Public Works in Venezuela,
and he brought along this painter and sculptor, Fernando
Irrazabal, who is a kind of a jolly, chunky guy, and Jose Ignacio
is a skinny- -it s real Latino Mutt and Jeff country. They tell me
this story about how they have to do this multimedia audiovisual
for the World Bank about a project called "Col de Sur," which is
the opening of part of the Amazonian jungle at the intersection of
Venezuela and two other countriesBrazil and--. They ve never
done multimedia like this before, and they want to buy equipment
from us like they saw in the magazine, and they want us to teach
them how to use it. And they want to buy the equipment that day
and leave back for Venezuela. They have about three weeks to do
this show, and I tell them, "Forget it." I couldn t do it.
"Don t worry, don t worry, we have a lot of people, and--" blah
blah blah. I said, "But I can t sell you equipment. We make this
equipment to people on order; we don t have it standing." "Well,
tell me what you have and--" blah blah. They talked me into it.
Three or four hours later they bring out this huge package of
hundred-dollar bills and off they go, and the last thing they tell
me is, "As soon as we get this finished we re going to invite you
down so you can see it, and we want a seminar so that from now on
we understand how to make multimedia. The minister will be in
touch with you."
I figure, you know, we got thousands of dollars in cash, and
we have no equipment. All right, Michael will make more
equipment, right? We all can t believe this. A few weeks later,
sure enough, I get a telexthis was before fax and phone calls
from the Minister of Public Works, and he invites us down to do a
seminar on audiovisual in Caracas , and we get tickets for three of
us me and Sally and one of our photographer technicians, Nick
McClelland, David s son- -we fly down there, and we give a seminar,
and we meet artists and photographers, and people from all the
government ministries, and we have a wonderful time. At the end
of the seminar we get fed well and put up at a great hotel--!
don t know any Spanish at this point, but we have translators and
we get taken to the museums. They have incredible modern art. We
meet poets, and a lot of them speak English.
At the end of the seminar, Jose Ignacio comes to me, and he
says, "The minister says we can either pay you or if you would
like a week to see our country, we will instead give you a tour of
the entire country with a guide--" Fernando the sculptor, who did
121
speak some English, "will take you around." So I think of my poor
treasurer, Stuart Vidockler up in Cambridge, but I managed to
forget about him, and I said, "We ll take the tour."
I didn t even know what the tour would entail, you know?
The next morning we get a limousine not to the international
airport but to a little airport in the middle of Caracas , and we
have a military jet with two military pilots, and the three of us
plus Fernando get in the plane, and we take off. We fly up to the
Andes, and we land, and we see the whole scene there, and then we
go to the hotel, and the next morning we take off for Maracaibo.
I keep saying at each place, "Wait a minute; I m not ready to
leave," because you don t have enough time to--. All of these
places are really super wonderful in various ways. We go to
Maracaibo, which is where the oil fields are, and we go to the
Amazonas, and we see Angel Falls, and we go to the gold and the
iron Mines. It was just too much. And then we get on the plane
and go home to Boston.
But it s not over. Now we re into the Venezuelan scene, and
the next thing they ask us isthere s this famous Czechoslovakian
group which did multimedia, and they had done an installation at
the battlefield of Carabobo, which was the last battlefield on
which Bolivar won independence for a lot of South America,
including Venezuela. They asked me if I would consider producing
a second production for the battlefield because the Czechs didn t
really do much of a job on the software. The monument is
incredible; a contemporary architect did it. We met the
architect, but the production is kind of lame. This is a major
production. "No
problem; money s not a problem." All right, so
money s not a problem.
We get an apartment that the government gives us at the
Anauco Hilton right in the center of Caracas. Now I m introduced
to historians, and I start researching Simon Bolivar. Now Simon
Bolivar was an incredible figure; a Venezuelan but studied in
France at the time of all of the revolutionary thought. He wore a
medal of Washington and Jefferson. He spent some time more or
less exiled in Jamaica. He came from the upper class and by no
means had any financial problems, but he was a philosophical
democrat, and he wanted independence from tyranny. Without any
resources to speak of, with military expertise learned along the
way, and with help from Irishmen and all kinds of odd people from
around the world, he managed to assemble to peasant army and drive
the Spanish out. Unbelievable story! And then, because of
political infighting, this hero dies penniless under a bridge in
Colombia. And it s all true.
122
We managed to put together quite an audiovisual, and we
installed it, and this took well over a year, and we had a few
other projects going in Venezuela. So now I was commuting between
Intermedia and Harvard and Venezuela, and we had some staff
members down there, and we got very involved with the art world in
Venezuela. I became very friendly with the director, Sofia Imber
Rangel, of the Museo de Arte Contemporanio . I was able to bring
down for an additional seminar video artists Woody and Steina
Vasulka. We did a show of video art at the museum with Charlotte
Moorman and a lot of the American and South American artists who
were working in video. It was creative ferment. We made a lot of
good friends down there in the art world, and project after
project developed.
Our major source of influence- -this was in the days of
President Caldera, who was a sociology professor and is now the
president again except he has gotten really old, and he s more of
a puppet than the president that he was the first time around. I
became friends with the former president who really took Venezuela
out of tyranny and then to democracy, Don Romulo Betancourt. He
was a sophisticated, generous, and wise politician. Our principal
source of influence, who was originally the Minister of Tourism,
was a man named Diego Arria. Diego had been with the World Bank.
He was an internationally known figure, and he persuaded me that I
could really be of great help in bringing liberal ideas and
communications and American expertise to Venezuela. I brought
people, consultants, from all walks of communication and political
consultants, like Pat Cadell, to Venezuela. We were involved in a
lot of work there.
There was the art level which was no problem because it was
art . I was beginning to understand what we were doing not only
for companies like Armco Steel in the United States --we did their
seventy- fifth anniversary media spectacular in a geodesic dome
which traveled all over the country to Armco plants. And they
persuaded me that they were a people-oriented company. A
beautiful show, but there were conceptual cracks in the
propaganda. Now we re doing things in Venezuela, and now we re
putting a huge geodesic dome in the Plaza Bolivar, and we have
this program called "Caracas Para Todos"--Caracas for Everyone.
By this time, Diego was the governor of the Caracas Distrito
Federal, and I m beginning to realize this is also all propaganda.
I m playing idealist and doing good by going into the barrios and
photographing people who are helping to rebuild their own houses,
and Diego being stopped by a woman whose heartwhat do you call
those things?
Byerly: Pacer?
123
Stern: Her pacer has run out of batteries, and he snaps his fingers--"Go
get this woman a battery immediately," and all these great things
are happening, but it turns out to be all kind of surface stuff.
Eventually- -and I m skipping a lot, a lot of high cultural
points--Diego decides he wants to run for president, and we re all
telling him he can t do it, he shouldn t do it. But he s
determined to do it, and he announces, and the next day we are
persona non grata because we re on Diego s trip. And as I say,
I m leaving out a tremendous amount of relationships and things.
In the meantime, Diego has got to leave the country. He s married
to, by this time, not to the lady he was married to when we first
met him, but Tikki D Asencio, whose family is one of the heavy-
duty oil families in the country. Diego and Tikki have mucho
money, a huge house in the country club section of Caracas, and an
important art collection.
I go to dinner with the president; not Caldera by this time,
but Carlos Andres. Carlos Andres is at dinner with his ministers,
but he s not with his wife; he s with his mistress. He s a
policeman, really; he started out as a policeman. He s stupid. I
could tell you some very funny jokes thatthe Venezuelans are
very jokey people. We re having a marvelous dinner, and all of a
sudden we have this wine which has been sent by Hans Neumann, who
is an industrialist who was a refugee from Europe and now owns a
chateau in Spain as well as an enormous industrial empire in
Venezuela and is a director of the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, married to a ballerina. I take a sip of the wine, and the
wine has turned to vinegar. I say to the Tiki, the hostess,
"Psst-- [mumbles]
"
and the butler with the white gloves comes and
takes all the glasses away. Carlos Andres says, "Hey! Give me
back my glass!" I mean, this is all in Spanish. He says, "That s
one of the best wines I ve had for years." Believe me, it s pure
vinegar.
Now not only are we out of it, and we go home, but we are
owed a lot of money by Venezuela which is uncollectible. When
you re through, you re through. Politics is very strong. And it
basically puts Intermedia into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Intermedia Goes Kaput
Stern: We had another couple of disasters at Intermedia, and Intermedia
is kaput. So we fold our tents, and we move into a little office,
and we go Chapter ll--we probably should have gone totally
bankrupt, but I m trying to save; we owe a lot of money, and I
124
don t like this idea of leaving people stuck. So I decide I m
going to spend a year or so closing it down in a civilized manner.
We owe people projects that aren t finished. We were doing one at
the time for Sangamon University, funded through the NEH [National
Endowment for the Humanities], a transformation of the Lincoln
Shrines, mostly in Illinois, into Lincoln sites. We did
multimedia environmental settings in the courtroom where Lincoln
practiced, the railroad station where he came back to on his
campaign trail, one of the cabins where he grew up; it was a
beautiful project. We had film and slides and sound. It was a
solid research job, writing and production, and I did it myself
because I really enjoyed it.
In the meantime, Sally and I were married, and we decided we
were going to have a child. But we were going to live part of the
time in Venezuela until that whole thing broke up, and we named
our son Abram [spells] because, number one, I was working on
Abraham Lincoln--! liked it. And in Spanish, Abram sounds kind of
Spanish, too. In fact, one of Diego s bodyguards was named Abram.
And then when we had the baby we told this big guy with the
muscles, "We heard your name, and we named our baby that: Abram."
He said, "That s just my nickname; my name is Abraham." Of
course, Abram was the name of Abraham before he became the father,
you know, in the Bible.
Now we have a baby, and we ve moved back to Porter Square.
Not to the same place, but to the same area. We ve given up our
great offices and we ve sold our sound studio, and we re really
three people instead of thirty to forty people.
We more or less satisfied all the Intermedia needs, and in
the meantime my brother, Raymond, gets in touch with me. This is
my half-brother who s about eighteen years younger than I am. And
my father s getting much older. I think my father s by this time
eightyit was his eightieth birthday. Raymond says to me, "I
know you have difficulties in Boston. I really need to have
somebody whom I can trust to work with me; Father can t do it much
longer." Ray s been in the business for a few years by this time.
He says, "Why don t you come down and talk to me and see if you re
interested?"
Well, I was offered a job at WGBH in experimental
television, and there were a couple of other possibilities, but I
was a bit burnt out. I was also strapped. I talked to my father,
and my father said, "It has nothing to do with me; this is you and
your brother. I wanted you to come into the business years ago.
If you want to do it--I don t want to influence you." I don t
think he really thought it was a good idea at the time. Raymond
125
and I made a deal, and I started commuting down to New Jersey
three days a week.
126
VI 1980s: FOOD AND POLITICS
Entering the Family s Cheese Import Business
Stern: So I was closing up Intermedia on one hand and starting to learn
the cheese import business on the other hand. And through all
this I m writing poetry. Actually, Intermedia was a fairly low-
production period for me because I was so busy creating, writing,
producing. Sometimes we had three crews going. What I mean by
crews is people doing photography, film, sound, and then having to
put it all togetherand design, visual, and actual presentation
architecture.
While I was commuting, I was staying in the Soho loft of a
good friend of mine, an experimental filmmaker and professor named
Phill Niblock. He had done some work for us on the Lincoln piece,
and he had done some work for us in Venezuela. I had first met
him when I was on the New York State Council panels because he was
one of the artists who had made a grant application, and we went
to his studio to see his work, to evaluate whether we were going
to give him a grant or not. I was one of the first people who
really pushed for public support for his work. He s a first-class
creativenot only filmmaker but also composerand he s now quite
well-known throughout the world of international avant-garde.
It was kind of odd because on the one hand there was all
these arts endeavors, and on the other hand I was getting into the
cheese business. Of course, I grew up hearing about cheese, and
my father would take me down to the office, and I would go to the
warehouses. It wasn t like I had never understood what the
business was all about. And I have always loved cheese, which is
different because for most of the people in the cheese business-
it s just something that they sell.
One of the first pieces of advice my father gave me- -which
was, by the way, a very good piece of advicewas he watched me
starting to get involved with cheese, and he said, "Gerd, we re
127
not in business to sell cheese; we re in business to make money."
I have never, in anything I ve done, been able to concentrate on
that aspect of thingson making money. It has never seemed to me
to be a positive motivation. Why? I grew up in a family in which
materialism was everything. I guess I rejected it because I
didn t like the vibes, I didn t like the principles, I didn t like
anything that concentrated on money as an objective or goal.
My father was a very interesting, a very special person, but
he wasn t nice. Ninety- five years old the man was when he died.
Not once in my life of like over sixty years with my father did he
tell me he loved me. When I said this to my stepmother sometime
after he died, she said, "How many years do you think it was since
he told me he loved me?" He was incapable of that kind of
expression. You couldn t please the man. I had spent so many
years estranged from him that the last years of his life I felt
like, "Hey, he s my father, and I m going to do anything that he
needs me to do, and I m not going to tell him he s full of shit,
and I m not going to argue with him. If he needs me to drive him
someplace, sure." You drive him someplace, and you either go too
fast or too slow. If he knew where we were going, which he
usually did, you never took the right road. You couldn t do
anything right for the man. And he was a cheapskate; he had
plenty of money but he was a fucking cheapskate. He fought in the
German army during the First World War on the Russian front as a
cavalryman and he got frostbitten feet. They gave him up for
dead. He was about eighteen, and at ninety- five he is still going
and he s driving a Mercedes Benz in New Jersey.
II
Stern: I was commuting. And these commute experiences--! ve had a number
of them: I commuted between Cambridge and Santa Cruz when I was
teaching there; I commuted between Cambridge and Venezuela; and
now I m commuting between Cambridge and New York. What this does
isyou re in two different places, and you have different things
going on in the different places, and somehow you manage to both
separate and integrate those two lives. Coming back to my family-
-re-relating to my father, to my stepmother, to my half-brother
and my half-sister-- was an experience, and I felt very positive
about it because I was trying to understand and to empathize and
to use the wisdom or emotional stability that I had gained over
the years to try and deal with a situation which had always been
on my mind as negative relationships and now make them functional
and positive for everyone involved.
However, there were attendant difficulties. Number one, I
was the dependent. When I started out working with my family,
they paid me in a sparse manner, and they put me on short shrift.
128
I very quickly understood what the business was about. From the
time when I expressed myself that I knew nothing about business, I
had some disastrous experiences with my associates in business,
with attorneys, with accountants, with clients and customers. I
wasn t educated or trained in business, but one does learn from
experience, and by this time I could read fiscal reports, and I
knew how to deal with business problems.
I came into a situation where the dynamics of the company,
to me, were difficult and disorganized: the potential profit of
the company was not being realized, and there was a personality
conflict between my father and my brother which was not in the
open. My brother was very biisy. He was very occupied, but he
wasn t working very hard, and he didn t put his mind or his
energiesas far as I was concerned to the benefit of the
business. We had a secretary or a clerical person working in the
office who spent most of the time on the phone talking to her
friends and who was involved with a guy next door who was also in
the same business and who was pumping her for information and
giving her money on the side and using our company to make money
for himself. That suited my brother because the guy was doing the
work and my brother wasn t, so he had a lot of extra time on his
hands to play.
My father was by this time in his eighties but he was
totally compos mentis and had business principles which went back
to the beginning of the century. He disliked the things that were
going on, but in a sense he was afraid of my younger brother
because he was my stepmother s darling, and my brother had
attained some kind of ascendancy over my father which was very odd
to me. When my brother first went into the business, they had
their office in downtown New York where the cheesemongers were all
congregated. They had a very small office with one telephone, and
during the first week my brother said to my father that they
should get another telephone. My father s answer to that was,
"Can t you wait to call until I m finished?" My brother waited a
while, and he finally just ordered a second telephone. He found
that that was the only way to cope with my fatherto do instead
of ask. By the time I was there it had gotten out of hand.
My brother, quite a few years back, had eloped with a Mormon
while my parents were traveling- -my father and my stepmother. And
when they came back, this was a fait accompli. They were
dumbstruck; they couldn t believe that, number one, he would
elope, and number two, that he had married a Mormon- -outside of
the religion- -had converted to Mormonism. So there was a hiatus
when they didn t even speak. His first wife became pregnant very
soon, and the family got themselves back together. The history
goes further back. The only way really to cope with my parents
129
was to deceive them because they were so strict and so doctrinaire
and so unwilling to bend in any way that you either had to do what
they said or you had to deceive them. My brother always chose to
deceive them. He was a good liar. For instance, they sent him to
college--my brother got things which neither I--of course, 1
wasn t even from the same marriagenor my sisterwho wasever
got from them. My brother, when he was supposedly going to
college, wasn t going to college at all; he deceived my parents,
and they didn t find out about it for about a year. He was just
going to the movies and having a good time.
Anyway, to start with, he was not working for my father, and
he didn t want to go into the family business. He was working for
another company in the office products business. My father wanted
him in the worst way, and when Ray and his wife Dixie Lee were
about to have a baby and were living in a small apartment, my
father said, "Look, if you come to work for me, I ll buy you a
house." Quid pro quo. Sure enough, Raymond decided "Hey, yeah,
I m going to have a house."
He started running the business on his principles rather
than on my father s principles. He got my father to move out of
downtown New York into New Jersey with the business. He
incorporated, which my father had never done some of these moves
were very positive moves and smart moves. Some of them were
totally against my father s style of life. He adjusted because,
like I said, he was kind of afraid of my brother. Here I came
into this equation, and I saw the problems, and I saw that I had
to establish a role for myself which had nothing to do with that
dynamic. Instead of just following instructions, I started
branching out. I built new pieces of business and new customers-
some of them things that both my father and brother thought were
not possible to do or not wise to do or wouldn t work. And most
of them did work in the end, and I also developed new cheese types
which I thought would have some reason to fit into the market,
which was not the kind of thing that they did. I used the kind of
dynamic and kind of metabolism that I had used in the arts and
then the media business, and transferred them to the cheese
business. Basically, it worked.
In the meantime, the government regulations and other
elements in the business were changing. My father was coming in
every day, but he was tired a lot of his buddies had retired or
had died, and he was kind of out of the daily grind of things, but
he was very critical of everything that was going on.
My brother had divorced his wife after starting an affair
with the daughter of one of our suppliers. My father was very
disturbed by this because this was a man he had known for many
130
years, and he thought it was going to wreck the relationship.
There wasn t much he could do about it, and finally they decided
to get married. My brother s new wife was very young and very
beautiful, and they quickly had children. She changed rapidly,
and although she was European, became more U.S. -style
materialistic than anybody else. My brother had to buy a bigger
house and bigger cars, and he became strapped for money, and then
started playing games which skirted import regulations.
Things started getting out of hand, and we had an employee
who managed all these matters and who was privy to all the tricks
that developed. Eventually one day--I am getting ahead of myself
and leaving a lot out- -five guys stormed into our office with flak
jackets with "Police" on them. They were U.S. Customs agents, and
they took 150 boxes of papers and arrested us and took my father s
private papers, and there was hell to pay. Actually, I m still
suffering from what happened. My brother was absolutely stupid
because he had not kept the papers from all those tricky
transactions separate from anything else, and the proof was all
there of what had taken place. Since we were both officers of the
company, we had to plead guilty, and we were heavily fined, and I
was put on probation which just ended last month. I still have
six years more to pay the government. On top of it, I decided to
leave the company at that point. I had wanted to leave the
company a couple of years earlier. Things had gotten out of hand,
and the employee I was talking about left because she couldn t
take it anymore. My brother was becoming more and more outrageous
because as he saw that nothing happened to him, he felt that
everything was going swimmingly. What he didn t realize was that
some of his escapades in Europe involved him with people who
didn t give a damn about him and who had no problem turning him
in. He felt he was out of harm s way.
I was figuring that my father, who was by this time ninety,
wouldn t be around for much longer. I didn t really want to leave
the company while he was still around, but finally after the
police and everything, and after my brother lied his way through
the next series of events--! had a very good friend who is a
criminal attorney here in San Francisco. We knew him through the
Caens and through Beth. He came and defended us and made a deal
with the government. The other attorney that my brother had
originally gotten for us had told us simply to plead guilty and go
to jail and serve time. My friend George Walker really broke that
pattern and got us out with money penalties and probation.
I left. I tried to tell my father the truth, and among
other things, to tell my father how my brother and his wife talked
about him, my father. My father didn t believe me. He told me
that I was abandoning my brother, and he didn t approve of it, but
131
I did it anyway. Now I had a difficult choice. By this time, I
had learned the cheese business; there were people whose respect I
had, and who wanted me to continue doing business with them. I
was very tempted to leave the food business. On the other hand, I
knew I was up against paying the government. I also needed to
support my wife and my young son.
I wanted in the worst way to go back to the art world and
the more civilized pursuits. I considered the options; I looked
around to see whether I would be offered anything. There were no
real opportunities in that world. I decidedwhen both our
English supplier and our Israeli supplier wanted me, not the
family company, to represent themto open our own business.
I persuaded my wife, who had not been working but had been
involved in some not-for-profit education in the child abuse arena
and had been thinking about going back to school to get a degree-
that she should help me in the business, at least to get it
started. We worked out of our house, and it was heartening
because here there had been all this bad publicity. I had the
mindset that my brother had led us into this dark passage. On the
other hand, I wasn t entirely ignorant and innocent. I could have
left at any time, but as I explained, I didn t want to leave
because my father was elderly, and I felt that I was so connected
to him and that it would be painful to him. On the other hand, I
knew that there was a lot that was wrong and that I was abetting
it and sometimes even helping my brother. This is not really our
central issue about my life but it s part of it.
At one point, my brother had made a deal with a guy, and he
then made the same deal with somebody else. The first guy was an
Italian, a Sicilian, an older manpractically seventy. He came
into the office one day, and he said to my brother in very
Italianate speech, "Hey, you made a deal with me, then you went
back on it." Then he grabbed him by the crotch, and he said,
"Your wife likes you that way?" Raymond says, "Yeah, uh-huh." He
says, "Your wife likes you that way. You want to stay that way,
you had better fix this deal." And he left. Our employee and I
were there, and Raymond kind of laughed, "Ha, ha- -he didn t really
mean that, did he?" I said, "Damn straight he meant it." He
said, "The old man is going to what?" I said, "The old man isn t
going to do anything. He s going to pay somebody a couple of
hundred bucks. What s the matter with you? Don t you go to the
movies or read the papers? You know where he comes from?"
[Laughter]
He managed somehow, with my help, to reconstitute the deal,
but that was how he behaved. Our employee just shook her head,
132
and she said to him, "Get real. You re really asking for it every
day .
"
We were fortunate, myself and my wife slowly started getting
involved in the business together. She had never had anything to
do with this type of work, particularly in the sales area. She s
developed a lot of expertise, and we now have two little companies
which manage to support us not in very luxurious style, but it s
never easy, in my experience, to earn a living. Despite the fact
that there was maybe a blot on my reputation, I became president
of the American Cheese Society. My brother has kind of dropped by
the wayside in terms of the industry; he s still around, but very
few people want to do business with him.
The next step wasone of the things when I left the
business my brother had promised to take care of the bank
situation where he and I had both signed personal guarantees. He
reneged on that situation, and hung up the bank for a couple of
hundred thousand dollars, and of course eventually the bank went
against both of us. I have a garnishee on my wages, and as a
result of this and the total situation, my brother and I are not
talking to each other.
My father died at the age of ninety- five, and the business
problems weighed heavily on his psyche: First of all, the business
had his name, Otto Stern and Sons, and it had gone downhe had a
really high-level reputation all over the world in that trade. He
took it very hard. He blamed me: "You re the older brother." My
brother owned 100 percent of the company most of the time, because
my father gave it to him, but that didn t make any nevermind to my
father. I had come in late after everything had been organized,
but to him the fact that I was older, I should have had influence
over my brother which my father never had or never exercised. So
that s what I meanthe man couldn t talk to him. Reb Zalman,
whom I had always talked to about all kinds of situations whenever
I had a problem, had advised me that somehow I should manage to
make peace with my father. But I was never able to do it; I
tried, but my father, number one, wouldn t listen. Number two, he
didn t believe me. Although I helped him in all kinds of ways, it
just didn t work. It didn t work.
Our practice when somebody dies a parent, a close relative
is you say kaddish, which is a prayer. It s a blessing to Ha-
Shem. We don t really mourn, because we celebrate life; we don t
celebrate death. I said kaddish for my father for eleven months.
Nobody else did. [chuckles] What gets into these strange
relationships between parents and children. What really pleases
me incredibly is that my children and I have a loving
relationship all of them. Even Jared the abuser. I can see that
133
the significant difference between my father s generation and me
as a child, and my generation and my children. My children love
me, I love them, we express it to each other. They know who I am,
they re not afraid to tell me anything or for me to tell them.
We re close, even though we may not be close geographically. We
see each other a few times a year at least. It s a relationship
without- -there are no stop signs.
I think that that s not just something about me; our
generation was able to achieve that with its childrenthose of us
who had children. Tragically, a lot of the people who we ve been
talking about in terms of the world of the arts and the worlds of
the bohemians and radicalsa lot of them had broken marriages, a
lot of them did not have children. It s a really wonderful
experience to be able to have that relationship between the
generations which works. I guess a significant demonstration of
it is why we re here . It is such a touching experience to me that
Paul, the progeny of my ex-wife s running away with his father,
should have had the idea and suggested that we do this oral
history which he has supported. It s the kind of turnaround which
one could never conceive of. It s a generosity and an openness of
spirit which I think is typical of the next generation--! don t
mean mine, but I mean his. And it s not just that he has the
money, it s the kind of mindset that is capable of it. I think
what it tells me is that history, as badly as we see that progress
is not maybe
If
Stern: ...Sometimes we think that civilization is not necessarily
progressive, that sometimes it s retrograde. Particularly in the
Jewish context, a lot of people think for instance that the
Holocaust is an indication that barbarism down through the ages-
there has been no improvement, there is no progress in
civilization. I don t think that s true. I think both from a
viewpoint of ethics and a viewpoint of technology that our
communication as human beings has been progressive and that people
are in general not in specifics, but in general- -kinder and more
conscious of each other than they have ever been before in
history. It s maybe not a popular point of view, but I hope it s
true.
In any case, during the time that I was involved in the
business and when the business was really doing well, we were
making more money than I had ever made before. I was actually
able to take vacations, which I don t think I had ever done before
in my life. I mean, I had gone places but there had always been
some kind of a reason.
134
When I talked about Reb Zalman, I neglected to mention that
when we had the sound studio we had produced a double album,
"Tales of Reb Nachmann." Reb Nachmann was a major figure in
Hasidic Jewry, and he wroteor he actually said, and they were
written down by a scribestories. They were tales that could be
seen as moralistic. Not in the narrow sense of the word-
spiritually moralistic. A lot of the Hasidic tales have the same
kind of quality that Zen Koan s do. Reb Zalman translated these,
and he told them, chanted them, and they were accompanied by music
and by sound. There were two brothers, the Siegel Brothers, who
were young rabbis --twins --and they did some accompanying music in
the studio to it, and I got to know them, and I then produced an
album of their songs titled, "Hallel." Hallel means "praise" in
Hebrew. One of them is actually a niggun, a kind of a chant
without words that the Hasids sing. One of them is called "Reb
Gerd s Niggun" because I kind of improvised it.
Jamaica
Stern: The Siegels did yearly trips to Negril on the island of Jamaica,
and they talked so much about Jamaica to me and to Sally that we
got intrigued. For years, we had not had a chance to go down
there, and- -we had actually had reservations to go somewhere else,
St. Martens, but there was a hurricane and the beaches were wiped
out. We just decided on the spur of the moment to get on a plane
to Jamaica.
It was a wonderful experience. I had missed the black world
a lot. I grew up and went to school in New York, and I had a few
black friends, and they were just friends. The distinctions had
not arisen. In the jazz world, I had a lot of friends. I won t
say that Bird, Charlie Parker, was my friend, but I knew him.
Percy Heath was a close friend. Other musicians and artists and
poets that I knew- -what had happened is that there had been a lot
of noise in the system between blacks and whites. Then I was with
Maya, and there were tensions and conflicts. Originally not
between us but with the rest of the world. I can t remember
whether I had talked aboutwe had to stay in black hotels, and it
was difficult for me; I was the odd man out, right? Very odd man
out.
Here now we were in Jamaica, a totally black world except
for the tourists and the remnants of British colonialism. I made
some very close friends there, and I understood that we
represented for them a source of information, of food, of money
on the other hand, it wasn t like in Mexico where everybody s poor
135
and trying to take advantage of you. We had relationships, and we
kept going back. Eventually, I felt like I wanted not to have to
schlep everything back every time and that I wanted to acquire a
place in Jamaica. One day a lady who used to give aloe massages
on the beach in Negril said to me, "Gary, "--they have a hard time
pronouncing Gerd, so they called me Gary "I live up the way, and
I bought this house, and I thought I bought the land but my cousin
only sold me the house. I think somebody is going to buy the land
and throw me off. I know you are looking for some place. Come up
and take a look."
We had been looking in Negril, and it was actually my wife s
birthday, and she didn t want to go, so I went up. It was a piece
of land right on the Caribbean in a cove and right on a coral
reef--not on a beach. She had told me to bring snorkeling gear.
I went snorkeling--! love snorkeling. I love to be in a world
where somehow nothing is conscious of you but everybody allows you
to be there with them. It was like paradise. I thought to
myself, Is it really possible that a piece of this could be mine?
She had told me that the land belonged to a Mr. Farmer and
that she thought he lived in Toronto. She gave me a couple of
phone numbers. It took me about six months. I thought I was
looking for a Jamaican named Farmer, but what I really found was a
Hindu named Varma whose family had been in Jamaica and moved back
to Canada during the days when Jamaica had, in Manley s first
administration, gone toward the Cuban Communists. And a lot of
the people who had built some kind of wealth had left.
Indeed, I flew up to Toronto, he picked me up, we went to
his house, he excused himself to meditate and pray in his little
shrine room. I thought, "Hey, this is an okay kind of guy." And
indeed, we made a deal for the land. It turned out that it wasn t
just a little piece of a few acres, but it was eleven acres right
on the seafront. It was really cheap, and I thought to myself,
"How can one possibly own this?" In most places in the world, you
can t even own seafront land. It s a narrow piece, but a very
beautiful little cove. We built a house there, and the property
is called Poetreef. It s been my place to write and to lie in a
hammock on the veranda and look out at the sea and to understand
how one can be in more than one place in more than one time in
one s life. Slowly and slowly I ve gotten to the point where I go
there four or five or six times a year for a week at a time, and
I m able to separate from my business self. Until last month we
didn t have a phone and a fax there because there weren t any
lines. Now we ve just gotten that, which will change things
considerably. A lot of our friends have gone there to stay.
136
Jamaican Marijuana
Stern: It would be wrong of me not to mention that the grass, the
marijuana, in Jamaica is maybe not the best in the world but I
would say the equal of anything anyone can get anywhere. It s
fresh, which means that you get the feeling that you have
something organic and unaged and unpreserved--and it s a somewhat
different feeling than when you get something that s been lying
around for a few months or even a year. Although it s illegal,
it s fairly open as long as you don t try to commercialize, and I
have no interest at all in being a dope dealer, and I never have
hadand it s not expensive. So that makes for a very pleasant
kind of environment.
Rastafarians
Stern: Our associate and caretaker is a Rastafarian, which is a very odd
religion or sect with mostly no organizational or institutional
structure. Most Rastas are just single Rastas; they don t attend
any kind of a community, but the principles and the practices are
the same. They don t eat any flesh, they don t use salt, they
don t use alcohol, they don t drink coffee- -now various of them
have different levels of orthodoxy, and they speak a slightly
different language. The food is called Ital. "I" is very
important, but it s not an ego "I"; it s always "I and I", not
just "I." It s a very poetic involvement; the music and the
lyrics are extremely socially conscious. The people all the way
from Bob Marley down to the latest DJs aremost of them very un-
or even anti-commercial. The sense of justice and ethics and
moral practice are very high.
Jamaican Food Imports
Stern: We ve also gotten into business with a line of Jamaican food
imports, mostly condiments, with some people who are exceptionally
civilized and artistic people. That s been a wonderful kind of
extra added attraction in the last ten years. A lot of the poetry
that I ve written has either been written there or finished,
transformed, there. I have a series of eight poems that are poems
with silkscreens by an artist friend of ours, David Weinrib, whom
I mentioned, and who long ago had been Judi s lover between Steve
and myself.
137
Global Village
Stern: The big mistake I made isthere are always these temptations in
life, and Negril is a beach town which has been in the last decade
urbanized and touristicized. Where there were little places, now
there are large resorts, and I didn t want this to happen to the
community where our house is, Cousins Cove. Across the road from
us, more or less, there was a parcel of thirty-eight acres which
also belonged to my--by this time--friend, Ashoka Varma and his
family. I was negotiating with him somehow to buy it all,
although by this time I no longer had the kind of money that was
needed. Some years ago, Ashoka fell down; no one knows whether he
fell down because he had a stroke or he had a stroke which caused
him to fall down, but his speech disappeared and his liberty of
motion, and he has been in very bad shape.
I visited him a number of times, and then I spoke to his
sons, and I said to them, "Look, there s this piece of land that I
was negotiating for. Why don t you give it to me, and I will
raise money, and we ll have a foundation in your father s name,
and we will do things that are for the good of the local people.
They need a medical clinic. I d like to bring artists and
scientists to live there and to learn and to teach at the same
time, and I think it could work out." They thought about it, and
they said to me, "We have a problem because we don t really own
just thirty-eight acres but within a few miles of there we own
about 400 acres. We re not interested in keeping it. We would
like to sell it. What we ll do is we ll sell it to you at a price
where you think you re getting the thirty-eight acres for free,
but figure out how to buy the whole thing."
And I went to some people I know in Woodstock, the Wapners,
and we got involved with old friends, an attorney whose wife is a
sculptress, and they were very interested. We made a deal, and we
paid a down payment, and then my friend the attorney had a heart
problem and a triple bypass. On top of it, there were about a
hundred squatters living on the land. What I did was I wound up
with an enormous headache. [laughter] I was still involved in
trying to get this not-for-profit foundation, the Global Village,
together and to try to deal with the fact that I am now the white
colonialist owner of land to the inhabitants who think that I m
trying to take advantage of them when I m not. And I feel very
compromised and ambivalent about being involved with it. I feel
that what I should have done is kept my Poetreef acreage and not
had been tempted by this ambitious project. That s life. One
does these things, and then one has to deal with them.
138
VII 1990s: REFLECTIONS
Writing Poetry and Memories of the Reality Club
Stern: My poetry has beenI ve been writing more and more every year,
which has surprised me. There were periods in my life when I
wrote precious little. I sometimes have a hard time breaking out
of the business set of mind. However, when I m driving or
basically when I m alone or when I m with somebody who really sets
me off, I ve gotten to the point where there are very few
situations where I m unwilling to take out a piece of paper and
pencil and write. I don t care whether it s business or love or
what it is, but it s a necessity for me because I know that a
phrase is there only for a moment. Memory is unreliable. Even if
you remember the sense, you often change a word here and a word
there, and it s not to the good. If you have it down and you want
to change it later, that s one thing, but that feeling of it not
being the way you thought it or spoke it is a strange experience.
John Brockman
Stern: This takes me back to John Brockman. At some point along the way,
John Brockman, with a few other people, including myself--! wasn t
one of the conceivers of this; it was really John s concept-
formed "The Reality Club." We met mostly in New York, and we met
to hear one another or some remarkable person in any field of
endeavor talk about his present work and get the response of
supposedly his peers. Multidisciplinary, not necessarily in his
or her field. It was a tremendously inspiring thing to go to
these meetings which were held sometimes in John s house and
sometimes at the Rockefeller Institute and various other venues.
Anything from six to twenty-five people would attend. Soon, the
only way that you could become a member would be to ask to address
or be asked to address the group and do a presentation. I was one
139
of the original members. It took a while before I had my turn,
and actually it was the only time we came to San Francisco for a
meeting, and we had programs, and I was on the program right after
the psychologist Rollo May. I addressed the group with a poem
which is titled "Poemthink." The idea of "Poemthink" came to me
one day while I was lying in bed, maybe not ready to go to sleep,
and I thought of the idea of thinking of lines of poetry and not
writing them downyou know, as kind of a practice of what one
could do with words in one s mind when one had maybe nothing else
to do, when one was waiting for something. So instead of not
writing that idea down, I started writing, and it got longer and
longer and longer, and it turns out to be a very long poem which I
gave to The Reality Club at this session in San Francisco. Heinz
von Foerster, who was a cybernetician of some note, was in the
audience; he was one of our members. He came up to me afterwards
and congratulated me, and said that he felt--in fact, he got up
and said out loud during the question-and-answer period, that
scientists, who had logical minds and who were trained to think in
ways which sometimes were not totally creative and constructive,
could use this technique to enhance their process. Heinz was a
cybernetician who was involved with Norbert Wiener and the initial
group in cybernetics, and he invited me to publish the poem in a
journal called Cybernetics, which unfortunately was short-lived.
But it lived long enough to publish the poem, and I was very
grabbed by that because to be in that kind of a context rather
than in a context of a little poetry magazine was much more
communicative with the world. I ll give you a copy of it.
It was even more of a gas--the piece just before my poem in
the journal was a piece by Heinz titled "To Know and to Let Know,"
and I think it s an incredibly perspicacious and on-the-dot
examination of knowledge and the psychology of how to think about
what you know and what you want to know. It was an address that
he originally gave to a librarian congress. Certainly the
Bancroft probably has it, but I will give you another copy of it
because it s kind of a manifesto for librarianship.
The Reality Club, unfortunately--John and I had been
contracted to write a book together for a publishing company about
media. We went up to the Cape--this was years and years ago--to
start writing it. At the time, I was just starting to see Sally,
and I invited her to come up to the Cape and stay in the motel in
P. Town [Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts] on the sea where we
were staying. We got involved in long hours of lovemaking, and
John was a bit perturbed by that. We weren t doing the work he
was expecting that we would do together. We never wrote the book,
but during the many hours where he was next door in his room by
himself, he started writing, and he published a book called "By
the Late John Brockman." It was a series of aphorisms and
140
interesting ideas. He followed that with another two books, and
they were very abstract and abstruse; they didn t have a very wide
audience, but among the cognoscenti John became kind of a
celebrity.
John was looking for a way to use his talents, and he became
a literary agent. Later he allied himself with a very talented
and beautiful woman named Katinka Matson, who was the daughter of
one of the grandmasters of literary agents. They have developed
their agency, John Brockman and Associates, into probably the
leading literary agency in the country, and have become wealthy,
very wealthy. Unfortunately, we ve kind of lost touch with each
other, which is a pity. The Reality Club, at first not only fed
his intellectual curiosity but also fed his client base, kind of
moldered and is no longer active. Its president, who was a
physicist-
Stern: Heinz Pagels I said physicist; he was really a cosmologist--was
the director of the Rockefeller Institute, and he was an odd,
somewhat perverse person. He was married to Elaine Pagels, a
MacArthur Fellow who wrote the book on the Dead Sea Scrolls . A
very impressive lady and thinker and representative of the kind of
persona that were involved in the Reality Club. Heinz fell off a
mountain near Aspen, Colorado, some years ago to his death. I
don t think he really had any business being there; I don t think
he was in physical condition for such a climb. It was a somewhat
strange way to go.
We had various odd scenes at the Reality Club. It started
out with some very interesting people who were unrecognized. I
think that would include myself. It wound up with fairly
prestigious and established figures, which was kind of a
progression not necessarily to my personal preference but
certainly fascinating. For instance, one of the later people was
Hugh Downs. Now Hugh Downs happens to be an extremely articulate
and intelligent person but he wasn t representative of the people
like Paul Ryan, the video philosopher that I ve referred to early
on, or even in the middle, people like Dennis Hopper. Dennis was
a disaster; I had to take him out of the room. He was cursing and
screaming and being the bad boy, which is an image that he
cultivated in a certain period of his life. I ve lost track of
him, although I was very fond of him during the first years we
knew each other when he was doing visual arts rather than acting
or engaging in the Hollywood world.
141
Stewart Brand
Stern: One thing I ve kind of skipped over which was brought back to mind
by my talking about the session of the Reality Club in San
Francisco was Stewart Brand. Stewart came into our life at the
time I first met Steve Durkee. He was in the army- -he had become
an army photographer and, although starting out as an enlisted man,
they had switched him over to a lieutenant because he was taking
pictures of generals and command people, and they couldn t have
enlisted men associating there closely with officers. So they made
him an officer. He was very fond of heights and parachutes. When
we started renovating the church and when we did USCO and even
before that when I was in San Francisco, he became involved with
our multimedia efforts. He had been in New York, but he wanted to
move out to the Bay Area. I rented him the barge.
And as I say, he liked heights. There was one time we were
all on a psychedelic trip at the church, and we went outside, and
there was Stewart climbing a high-voltage tower which was outside.
I mean, this was a really tall tower. A number of people kind of
freaked, and we couldn t figure out quite what to do; it wasn t
like we wanted to let anybody know what we were up to--or up on
[laughter]. I finally said that we had better go inside and if
we re lucky he ll just go up and come down, which turned out to be
true--he just came down, and nobody noticed.
In fact, the first time I came back to the barge in
Sausalito when we arrived from the east, we went in, and I
couldn t find Stewart. I finally saw him sitting up in the
rafters.
Stewart was an excellent photographer, and he had a
companion- -wife, eventually: Lois Brand- -who came from an Indian
tribe, and Stewart branched out from our multimedia shows and put
together one of his own which we also used parts of for a poster
in our work. It was called "America Needs Indians." Again, we
had a mylar poster which was done at the church by Barbara and
Judi. A really spectacular poster.
Barbara had studied silkscreening, and as I said before, she
was teaching art at the time we were at the church, but she had
studied silkscreening at a nearby convent with an artist named
Sister Adele Meyers. Adele became very involved with us later on,
and in fact she left the sisterhood with a number of her fellow
sisters, but they stayed living in the convent as lay people for
many years. She ran the Intermedia Gallery which was part of our
foundation that came out of the church and which still exists.
It s a 501(c)(3) and it s not as active as it was at one time,
142
partially because public funding has become so difficult and
partially because some of us have scattered about. David Weinrib
is the executive director; I m still the president of the
foundation. There are some activities going on at the church; the
church is the property of the not-for-profit Church of the
Tabernacle.
Stewart, of course, went on to do the Whole Earth catalog.
It started out with him wondering why we don t have a picture of
the whole earth. He made little buttons, and eventually this
became a kind of a cause celebre with him, and he did the whole
catalog, which was an incredible success, progressively, to the
point where I think it commanded one of the highest advance
figures in the history of publishing. And guess who was the
agent, and guess who introduced who to who? Stewart Brand and
John Brockman introduced by me.
At the Reality Club here in San Francisco, Stewart attended
he was very interested in a lot of these ideas, and he was there
for Rollo May, and he came up to me afterwards. I was to go on
right after Rollo, and he came to me and said, "Gerd, I know
poetry is important, but I think I ll get a better deal going out
and lying in the sun on the beach, so see you." Kind of typical
of Stewart. Passive-aggressive type behavior, right? It was
interesting because I had talked before about the kind of
attitudes that Richard Alpert had had about Steve. It was
mirrored by Stewart s attitude. I mean, Steve was and I assume
still isthat kind of charismatic character that people want to
glom on to. I ve never been competitive about people s affections
and relationships--! certainly value them, but who is who s best
friend is hardly the way I go into relationships. [chuckles]
Stewart then put together a foundation with some of the
money that he had earned. The relations although I felt that we
had been extremely supportive and got Stewart going, he had other
fields to plow. Although Lois had been very influential in all
his enterprises and had worked fingers to the bone, so to speak,
with the beginnings of the catalog and so forth, when Stewart
began to be rich and famous and a friend of Governor Jerry s then
Lois was left by the wayside for younger and sweeter fillies, if
you don t mind the expression. [laughter] I felt slightly amused
by that kind of behavior from someone who supposedly is in the
front ranks of the ethical environmental movement, right?
143
Israel: Karl Katz and "The House of the Diaspora"
Stern: I ve left out a few things. One project which came through Karl
Katz Karl Katz had been the director of the Jewish Museum in New
York during the time of our heyday at USCO. One of the rather
elaborate multimedia shows we did had to do with the Lower East
Side, an exhibition which showed the past and present of the
Jewish neighborhood which had turned into a black and Latino
community in New York. We did this with our usual techniques of
multi- screens and multichannel sound, and I think it was one of
our best efforts.
We got to know Karl. I worked well with him during that
show, and he then asked me to become involved in a project in
Israel: Beth Hateputsoth, "The House of the Diaspora." It s a
museum in the middle of Tel Aviv University which deals with the
2,000 years of Jewish wanderings. The process at that time was
just beginning, and they wanted me to come to Israel. There s
some kind of a custom that you re supposed to, when you come to
Israel as a Jew for the first time, you re supposed to do it on
your own volition and your own support. I was in no position to
finance a journey to Israel, and I also felt that since they were
seeking my professional consultation and design and concepts in
this project, it was inappropriate for me to do it on my few
pennies. The gentleman, Nahum Goldman, whose project this
basically was happened to be a very important personality who had
actually negotiated the exit of the Jewish population from where I
was born--in the Saar--at the time of the plebiscite when Hitler
took over. In a sense, he probably saved me and my family, so it
was a very interesting meeting in New York when Karl took me to
meet him. He asked me what was going on, and I explained to him
that I was very interested in working on this project, and he
said, "No
problem. I will personally pay for your stay." So I
felt a little justified in my attitude, and Karl was pleased.
When we arrived in Israel- -this was my first trip there--!
met the two people who were the Israelis in charge from their
side. One of them was a well-known poet named Abba Kovner, now
deceased. He had been the leader of the resistance movement in
his own country, and he had been effective in the wars for
independence in Israel. He was a real hero figure. The other
fellow, Shakje Weinberg, was the managing director of the
principal theater in Tel Aviv.
The odd thing about this project was that the building had
already been built--! mean, before the design and the concept of
what would be in it; that s unusual in a museum that s built for a
specific purpose. The Israeli government, during the period just
144
preceding this, was very hard up to find money to finance their
military expansion which was necessary to protect the country.
But the money had been raised for this project, and the fear was
that by some compulsion, the government would take it over. So
instead they decided to commission the architect and build the
building before the design and plans for what would fill it would
be ready. It was a quite magnificent building; it wasn t
completely finished when we were there, but the spaces were
already established.
Abba and I, at the first instance with a number of other
people both from America and from Israel, were responsible for
developing the concept. The basic ideas that we forwarded were to
divide the museum into a series of Sharim gates . The concept of a
gate or an opening to experience is very central to Judaism. That
is how eventually the concept was developed.
I also decided that--my area of expertise was audiovisual
designwe should collapse the 2,000 years of the Diaspora into a
six-minute presentation which would be in a planetarium-type dome
as a projection environment. The historians who were involved in
the project were supposed to deliver to me a precis of the events
and the structure what this six-minute experience would contain.
Well, the research just kept going on forever. In the
meantime, there was also a need for a fairly sophisticated
computer component in the museum for genealogy and for storage of
information. This was some decades ago, and it was not as
sophisticated technology as it is now, but Eric Teichholz, who was
at the school of design at Harvardremember, I was connected to
Harvard at the time--I involved him in the project, and he
designed the original computer infrastructure technology hardware
and software.
The name in Hebrew is Beth Hatefutsoth, which translates to
"House of the Diaspora." Historians just never came up with the
research, and time was passing, and I got very frustrated, so I
had the chutzpahthis is a Yiddish word which means "nerve" to
construct and submit a script. It isn t like I m a historian, but
I did know Jewish history, and I did have books to do the
research, and we had done for another museum in New York a series
of presentations on Jewish history which went along with models of
synagogues throughout the ages that were constructed by craftsmen.
And Beth Hatefutsoth had commissioned another set of these same
models.
I apparently offended the professional acumen of these
historians who were bigshots in Israel, and I got a telex back
telling me that this was very embarrassing; how could I, someone
145
without professional historian experience, come up with this
timeline? I was so pissed by the whole confluence of events that
I resigned the project. Not until many years later when I was in
Israel for cheese purposes did I visit Beth Hatefutsoth and
discovered that a lot of the ideas that Abba and I had fielded
were incorporated. They had taken the audiovisual experience--
they didn t understand audiovisual, so instead of a planetarium
dome, they had a kind of a frontal diaper screen. What you need
in order to really get people involved in such an experience is to
have full surround. There s no way you can get it with a frontal
screen; you can get various effects, and there are other things
that help like three-dimension, but then you have to wear those
ridiculous glasses, or surround sound, but it just doesn t work.
To me, this was the kind of compromise which people who
don t understand what you concentrate on in McLuhan s terms is. the
effect, not the content of what you re doing. They don t
understand it. That s got to be a basic design principle when
you re designing communications. Why are you doing it? Not to
achieve an aesthetic sense of, you know, "Wow," look what this
person was able to do with space or with time. What you re
looking for is the impression that you re able to make on people
with the information that you want to communicate. The concept of
2,000 years of wandering of the Jewish people is not easy
information to deliver- -where, why, when, who, how--but it can be
done. It didn t work, so I was again somewhat disillusioned by
that realization.
An interesting Israel reverberation: I spent some time with
Abba on his kibbutz. As you may remember, I had been involved
with that kind of fundraising where I never got to go- -by the way,
that boat that we bought at the time to bring refugees from after
the war from Europe to Israel, the Ben Hecht--I told you it was
funded by Ben Hecht and Harpo Marx. Harpo didn t want his name on
the boat because his brother Groucho didn t approve of the whole
enterprise. [laughter] So it was named the Ben Hecht. He was a
screenwriter and a famous Jewish persona. He was gung-ho. But
that boat was seized by the British, and all of my friends
including Harry Herchkowitz, the editor of Death magazine, were
imprisoned in Acre prison. So I was really lucky that when we
drew lots, I wasn t one of the crew. I guess I was lucky; I don t
think it s an experience that I needed, to tell you the truth,
although I m sure it would have changed my life.
Here in the cheese business, we were approached through
other associates to buy cheese from Israel. My father, in his
particular class of wisdom, told me to forget it: "You can t make
any money, and they re impossible people to deal with. They came
to see me before; they think they re always right, they don t
146
listen, the prices are no good," you know, total rejection. I was
the kind of personand I think I still am--who, number one, knew
that the industry was changing, and number two, nobody else wanted
this opportunity. Well, there weren t that many opportunities
left which were open. So I grabbed it despite my father s and
brother s protestations. And when our business fell apart, and I
moved on to my own, it was something that I had started, and the
Israelis wanted me to continue it. It was a little more
complicated than that, but over the last ten or twelve years,
we ve managed to grow
[ Interview 5: April 18, 1996] ##
Stern: --managed to grow it from a business of importing from Israel
maybe forty tons of cheese a year to a business of about a
thousand and more tons of cheese a year. Now that it s there,
there are other people who would like to have had a piece of it,
but since so far we ve been able to maintain our privilege of
representation without too much competition. Business is a whole
different world than art, but it has its own principles and
satisfactions. I must say, I ve gotten a lot of satisfaction out
of doing business in Israel and making it work. And also I ve
gotten to go to Israel several times a year, and that has been
influential in my poetry and my thought processes.
I tend, as I said before, to be interested more in the
mystical and spiritual parts of Judaism than in the ritual and
observances. Although I deal on a daily basis with kosher
products, I don t keep kosher myself. Through Rabbi Zalman
Schachter, I was in touch with the most liberal elements of Jewish
observance. His congregations --women read from the Torah. But
for instance, I can t take reformed Judaism because what happens
there is that they do all the work for you; the spirit of Judaism
as far as I m concerned is that the prayer comes from the people
and not from the stage. In the reform movementat least the kind
of traditional American reform movementthe rabbi and the cantor
perform, and the congregation sits and listens. It s not
conducive, I feel, to partaking of a spiritual experience. The
saying out loud and the chanting of the words are what carries you
into the significance and the meaning of the relationship with
whatever binds the community, and the community to the Godhead or
however you prefer to refer to it. The sound of Hebrew, the
sonorities, are something which I think come out of the same place
that my poetry comes out of.
So at home I attend a small Orthodox Labavitch congregation
which happily appeared very close to home within the last year and
a half or so, and it s made my life much easier in terms of being
able to participate in some kind of formal practice. Before that,
147
I was kind of isolated and only when I could get to where Reb
Zalman was did I really get into that conduit and that experience,
Returning to Poetry
Stern: So I m not quite sure where we are in terms of timeline. I think
we re fairly close to the present. During the past years, from a
time when I really only engaged in my visual and kinetic and
audiovisual poetry, I ve come back slowly to the point where I
mostly only write poems on paper and say them as breath. The
return has been quite satisfying.
It s not satisfying in the public mode, but I ve never
really experienced a measure of success in the public mode as a
poet who writes poems . When we were doing our audiovisual and
multimedia and artworld thing, there was a lot of success but it
had fairly negative side effects. It tended to emphasize ego
gratification which for some reason doesn t settle well with me.
It also has to do with pushing your work out into the world in a
fairly aggressive and competitive manner which also doesn t suit
my personality. I will admit that I have certain resentments and
feelings of not being appreciated as a poet, both from my family
and friends and from the world at large. But in the balance those
don t come very often, and they re not very important compared to
the fact that I know that my poetry is me, and that it satisfies
my standards of excellence and my standards of communication. It
happens that I m quite aware that my poetry is particularly
obscure, and it s significantly experimental. The major reaction
is that people don t understand it, and I keep telling them it s
not necessary to understand; it s just necessary to listen and to
take whatever there is, and there are things to take.
What I mean by, for instance, "resentment": at one period of
my life, I really felt that the homosexual clique in poetry was
rejecting me and not allowing me to have the kind of exposure that
would otherwise have been possible. I certainly was aware that
the academic portion of the poetry world had no use for what I was
doing. During the time I was married to Ann, she at first
couldn t even understand how people like Ted Roethke and Stanley
Kunitz, and I had known Dylan Thomas, and how these people could
actually take me seriously as a poet; after all, I didn t have a
degree, I hadn t studied poetry, I didn t know the difference
between a villanelle and a sonnet. It happens that I do know the
difference between a villanelle and a sonnet, but you know, that
kind of attitude; she was not only a graduate but a post-graduate,
and there s a kind of elitism. Of course, the fact that she had
148
been so powerfully attracted to this kind of a rebellion at first
--that kind of reversal that happens so often, and which has
happened often in my life in my relationships with womenis
something that I would like to get into.
Sexual Identity
Stern: What I feel is that throughout my life, my drive toward sexual
gratification and satisfaction has been both a compulsion and a
direction, and it has been a very positive influence in terms of
imagery and motivation and intention, and also a rather negative
effect on limiting my ability to understand the limitations of
relationships and to achieve some kind of rapport devoid of desire
and need and emotions which aren t necessarily- -in the end
positive. They seem positive, and I have a feeling that it must
I grew up in an era where Freudian ideas floated around, and I
haven t even talked about the period when I was leaving home and
being exposed to a lot of ideas which I had never heard of whether
they were political--Marxism--or Freudianism in both the
sociological, psychological, and even political terms in which
they were seen in those days.
My mother s death at a very early age--I really can t tell
you how that affected me. I was protected from it by my maternal
grandmother. I had a rather strange experience of my father
withdrawing his presence and being taken care of first by my
grandmother and thenwhen she left for America by my
stepmother s mother and sister when I really didn t even know my
stepmother much less understand who her mother was and I didn t
understand the relationship. And then the journey to get the
visa, which was a kind of a terrifying experienceaway from home
and not like going to Switzerland for vacation and swimming in the
Vierwaldstatter See on top of a St. Bernard dog with a bridle with
my grandmother, but being, as I remember it, in a single bedroom
with my stepmother who was a very attractive woman but who was
neurotic in the extreme and a lot of tension with my father going
to get papers. I had no understanding, and then getting on the
boat and winding up here and getting off as an invalid and getting
into the hospital.
My stepmother was a very attractive woman, and I was a young
boy, and she would expose herself when I was around. I didn t
have my own bedroom because my sister had been born and took my
bedroom. My father, as always, was this very strict
disciplinarian, and I often had to eat in the kitchen because I
ate too slowly and I didn t eat correctly. I was wearing shorts
149
when everybody was wearing knickers or long pants. Not too long
thereafter I was able to integrate and facilitate, especially
after my experience at the Psychiatric Institute, I took Dr.
Hambidge s advice and I understood that I had to go out and live
my own life. I wasn t going to live my father s life, so it was
rather ironic eventually that I came back to the business and
helped take care of my father in his later years.
But it worked because by that time I didn t have a lot of
negative energy going on the relationship anymore or resentment.
I resented the fact very much for many years that he was not
willing to cough up the money to send me to college. He hadn t
gone to college, but I understood afterwards; I mean, here s a man
who was born in the 1800s, who grew up before telephones and
electricity, really. What can you expect? Sometimes what our
children expect of us is a whole different level of what I would
consider a real luxury. Our children take it for granted. I
didn t take it for granted; I didn t get a watch until I could buy
one of my own, and I got one for a Bar Mitzvah but I was only
allowed to wear it on special occasions, not on a daily basisit
was an object of value, so weekends maybe.
When I was in high school, my male cousin and I were
obsessed with masturbation and with young girls. But I had heavy
glasses, I was a sissy, I didn t know how to make friends and
influence people, and I just couldn t get it together. Finally,
when I met all the people from the High School of Music and Art,
and I started making friends and spending time with them listening
to classical music and jazz and folk music, joining a square dance
group here was this refugee boy dancing American square dances
with the Margo Mayo group on the ice rink in Rockefeller Center
for the United Nations. Looking back on it, it s pretty out of
it, but it didn t seem strange at the time. What seemed strange
to me is that when I was doing that, and I came home late at
night, that my father acted like I was some kind of criminal and
all I had been doing was square dancing or looking at the stars in
Central Park with the Junior Astronomy Club from the museum.
I remember my first experience on the roof of Julia Pearl s
apartment when Naomi Sternberg stuck her tongue into my mouth. I
mean, it like was a revelation, right?
Ginny. Ginny was much older than I was, and she was a tiny
little lady, very pixie Irish- -her hair floated around her, and it
was like being with the Faerie Queene. I met her through this
homosexual United Nations guy, Ellis, and she was Paul Goodman s
first wife; they had been apart for a long time. She took me
home, and as a favor, really, she took me to bed. It was a
150
totally transformational experience for me; it changed my life
from A to Z. Why? I don t know; I can t tell you.
But from then on, I was confirmed--! wanted it, I really
wanted it very badly. I looked for relationships, and I found
them. They were always, I felt, in the first few years, more
serious to me than they were for the women. I was wrong about
that. I was scuffling through life: I was working at something
where there was never enough to pay the rent and to do everything.
Most of the young ladies, girls, artists that I knew and went to
bed with, came from well-to-do families, and here I was living in
the Village, basically on a level which I equated with the
romanticism of things like Dead Souls--! was into Russian novels.
I had been involved with an acting group when I was in high
school and all my friends from Music and Art were involved in it;
we did Ibsen, and we did Chekhov and Pirandello at little library
theaters in New York public libraries and also down at the Cherry
Lane Theater in the Village, which was a historic little old
falling-apart theater where Eugene O Neill had produced some of
his plays. And we re-did one of his plays there.
I was envious of other people s sexual relationships. When
I finally kind of fell into Jane s arms, I didn t think of it as
being a maternal relationship. But the whole idea of consummating
relationships and oral and coital sex were much more than physical
experiences; they seemed to me--and of course I was familiar with
literature, but at that time the whole idea of sex and literature
was very different than it is today. I was also familiar with the
mystical literature which alluded to sex as a spiritual
experience. I ve never been faithful in my life. I ve lied about
it. And I ve never had a serious relationship in which the woman
was faithful in my life- -up to the present time. I don t know
whether I believe even the possibility of such a relationship. As
a result, my level of trust is not very strong. I tend to feel
that I am a trusting person, and I trust people until they become
untrustworthy whether it s in business or other relationships. I
learned that this was an area, the area of sex and physical sexual
relationships where you can t trust people. That doesn t seem to
matter to me anymore. It did; I was very jealous when I was with
Jane. I mean, I couldn t do much about it because she was in
charge, and I was hysterically jealous thereafter. I now can
experience the emotion but it doesn t have the intensity for me,
and I can shrug it off. But I don t trust my wife; I know she
lies to me about that and about other things. I feel that that
was true with all the other women that I ve related to in my life,
that they lied to me. I don t know what that means; I don t
generally feel that I can extend my experience to everyone s
experience. I believe that there may be people who were very
151
different in the world and have had different experiences . And I
know that in other cultures, things are different. In the culture
that we re speaking of, I think this is extremely typical and the
majority experience. I ve heard it from lots of other people of
both genders, whereas people claim to a level of propriety--!
don t think it exists, actually. Most people that I ve dealt with
have a very sexual side, a very wild side, of their persona, and
when they have an opportunity to engage in it whether it s a
positive experience for them or not, they go for it. They don t
think of--hey, this is not going to work for the rest of my life;
they do it, and they hide it. I ve done that over and over and
over again in the past. I m at a period in my life where I am sad
that it no longer happens to me, and I don t know why. I don t
know whether it is just that the climate has changed so much
because of AIDS and other kind of reasons or whether it s my age.
I mean, I know that I m not capable of very much sexual
performance at all any more. Basically because of the fact that
my wife and I are not intimate, for some years I ve had to resort
to things like massage parlors, which is something that in most of
my life would never have occurred to me to be even a possible kind
of experience. Now it seems like an adequate release, especially
when it s not too expensive, and a way of avoiding the pitfalls of
getting rejected. The rejection experience is something that for
decades I hadn t been familiar with. I was familiar with it when
I was in my teens, you know. Over the decades, it just about
never happened until the last few years in my present marriage.
Sexual Thesis in Poetry ##
Stern: I would say thatand you ll see it when you read my poems that a
lot of my poems either touch on or are centrally about this topic.
It s not that I want to expose all the relationships that I ve
had, but I ve had affairs which have lasted fifteen or twenty
years through various marriages on either side, which were very
intense affairs and which changed my thinking about life. For
instance, when I was here in San Francisco with Judi, my nurse,
and I was preparing to do the performance at the San Francisco
Museum and to mount the show, I needed help. Two long-term
friends of mine- -a wonderful, wonderful painter and poet, Bob
Rheem, and Liam Gallagher, who had lived together for many years
and were friends of people like Huxley and Jimmy Merrill lovely
peoplethey introduced me to a young extraordinarily beautiful--!
don t know what to say anymore; whether to say girl or womanin
any case, another angel named Judith McBean.
152
She was interested in the arts , and she was looking for
something to do. She helped me organize the show and this
performance. The attraction was extremely magnetic, and it took a
while, and it really wasn t consummated by a sexual relationship
until much later, but it was so intense that she asked me to go
away with her to Greece. I was strongly tempted, but I had been
involved already with a society marriage which had failed, and I
had been involved with someone who had grown up with a lot of
money; it had been a destructive influence in our relationship. I
couldn t do it. But on the way to Greeceby this time I was back
in Woodstock- -she came through New York, and I took her up to Paul
Williams place on the Cape, and we made love. It was a
transcendent experience, at least for me. I had very mixed
feelings about my decision. We wrote, and we stayed in touch, and
she then married a friend of oursanother socialite here in San
Francisco- -and our relationship was just kind of touch-and-go.
Then she had a child, her marriage broke up, she went into a
horrible period of drugs and alcohol and self-destruction, and she
called on me for help. I tried but she was too far gone. It s
taken like twenty- five years for her to get herself physically
rehabilitated and psychologically rehabilitated. She bought one
of my big kinetic pieces years before and donated it to the
Oakland Museum. Now she s remarried to a cowboy; she s a horse
woman. We haven t seen each other for a number of years, but the
tug of that relationship and the thread of it has persisted
throughout my life for decades.
I couldn t really say that it s a question of regret, but my
image of Judith- -it s odd; I ve been with a number of Judiths in
my life. My wife whom I was never married to was Judith. Judith
is Judith. My present wife s name is Sara Judith. [laughter] To
a poet, the sound of names is a sonority which has significance.
Judith is also resonant to "Jew." The fact that none of them were
Jewish [inaudible; laughter].
There s my other friend who is also from San Francisco
society and with whom I actually- -while I was married to Ann, we
had a little secret retreat in North Beach at which we would meet
for lunch and engage in hours of acrobatic sex together. Through
her three marriages and my- -well, the first one had been over
already when we met and our friends in the artistic and social
circles in San Francisco we keep meeting and remeeting and keeping
the relations going, although no longer maintaining the sexual
union. She s been like a mother to my daughter.
Now we haven t had a physical relationship for ten or
fifteen years, but the reality of the physical relationship that
we had is still very much part of our relationship. It s a bond,
and it s not a cause for suffering; it s a cause for joy. And the
153
fact that, for instance, at this time when I m sixty-seven I
haven t had a holding physical relationship with anyone for the
last four or five yearswhile I haven t been actively looking for
a new relationship, the fact that I ve missed that contact, I
mean, for a person one of whose important poetic phrases was
"contact is the only love"--I had a response from an artist who
made for me a beautiful graphic piece which said, "Love is the
only contact." [laughter] I don t think this is one of those
places where both directions work equally well, though; I think
"contact is the only love" is the correct sequence of that phrase.
These things that go two ways are fascinating to me. I wear
a ring which I was given first by Rabbi Zalman Schachter--a little
silver signet ring that he had gotten in Israel saying "Gam Zeh
Yavor"], which means "This too shall pass." The incredible thing
about that phrase is that if something is really painful and
disturbing and destructive, "this too shall pass" is an effective
mantra. If you are in the midst of awhether it s sensual,
sexual, emotional, artisticexperience of bliss, "this too shall
pass" is also a very interesting piece of information.
For many years, I was conscious of Goethe s last words which
were "Mehr Licht" ["More light"]. Now I ve always been involved
with light as a medium, as a source of illumination- -lux. "Mehr
Licht," in my early years of thought, meant that he was asking for
more light as he was going out into darkness. I was sitting at
Millbrook years ago with a lady named Susan Firestone, and we were
talking about this, and she said, "Gerd, he was seeing the light."
He said "Mehr Licht" because he saw the light; it was an out-of-
body experience. You can read about it all over the place. I
mean, read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. You don t understand it?
He saw the light, and God knows which one it was or whether it was
either, but both those possibilities are there.
Kinetic Poetry
Stern: One of my favorite expressions, a mantra which I wrote during the
USCO days which kind of came out of this ring funny thing is,
this ring, I was snorkeling on the reef at [Negril?], and my
little silver ring which was fairly tight on my finger just fell
off, and fell into the coral reef. I couldn t recover it. That
ring had passed through many hands because my custom with that
ring was if I saw somebody who was in trouble or somebody died or
somebody was sick, I would take it off my finger and slip it on
theirs and say, "Wear this for a while." It always came back to
me. But within recent years I had these made for myself and my
154
wife and for Radha, my daughter, and also for Reb Zalman. It s an
important kind of symbol to me. But the mantra goes, "Take the No
out of Now, then take the Ow out of Now, then take the then out of
now." Of course, you can repeat it ad infinitum. I ve given it
to a number of people who say it works . There s a short form of
it, which is "NO OW NOW." When we were doing our kinetic poems,
we built electronically--! still have one of them; we built quite
a few of these things which flashed "NO OW NOW" because you ve got
the three letters, and the three words are composed out of the
same three letters.
We built the first one on a commission for Sister Mary
Corita and Magdalene Mary who at the time were involved in the
Convent of the Immaculate Heart in Los Angeles ; these were two
artist nuns, and they had incredible energy and an incredible
collection of art, a lot of it kinetic, and they taught--and I did
some workshops for them. I was introduced to them by a German
professor of art who lived down there and who had worked with the
Bauhaus crowd, a friend of Ivan Majdrakoff s, Paul LaPorte. You
know, the networked friendships in my life have been, I think, in
a sense the most important sort of intellectual and artistic
influences .
The opportunity to do this oral history is kind of an
endgame product of this networkby endgame I don t mean to
suggest finality, but I m feeling now that I m recouping and
regenerating materials and experiences that have been influential
and effective effective in terms I was talking about "never mind
the content; look at the effect." In all of the multimedia work
that we did, that was the principle that I had taken out of
McLuhan and that I was trying to put into practice.
One of the performances that I conceived ofwhich happened
in San Francisco in those same years as the first museum show at
an old movie theater in North Beachwas called "The Destruction."
You will see in that brochure I gave you a copy of the
announcement for it. The idea there was to have people come and
bring objects which were meaningful in their life, but which no
longer were necessary to them. We would destroy them on stage in
a symbolic act that would perhaps free them of whatever possession
that that object had of them or whatever necessity that it
represented. It was a period when the world was conferring about
destroying weaponry. The question was what reverberant effect
mounting such a performance in a tiny little place with a small
group of people would have on the world at large. We got network
television coverage, we got print coverage on the wire services,
and we got local coverage, aside from the effect on the hundred or
so people who were in the theater and who paid admission to come.
155
We had a crew on stage; every object that was presented was
destroyed in a different fashion. It was an exciting evening.
What I wanted to illustrate was the content of that evening was
not the important solution; the attempt to influence was the
reverberant effect that it had on both the people who
participatedthe audienceand the millions of people who were
exposed to it through the media. It probably costaside from the
rental of the theater which was fifty or sixty bucks or something
like that I don t think we spent $150 on doing it. The media
probably spent fifteen, twenty, thirty thousand dollars on pushing
this thing out. That was the kind of idea I was experimenting
with in the same sense as when I was talking about the three
simultaneous movies of the motorcycle, we were trying to basically
fuck around with people s sense of time and to impress them with
the effect that distorting time perception had on their personals.
What is really real? Is it the motorcycle on the center screen
which is ninety or a hundred frames ahead of the one on the left,
or maybe the left and the right sides which are in total sync.
What s in sync in your life in terms of time? What s happening
out there? What s happening in here? Talking about it is one
thing; putting it into the form of art is a completely other
thing .
Disillusions. Obscenities. Corruptions
Stern: Working in the media was very exciting, and it was very engaging.
Over time, I lost it. Didn t want to do it no more, no more, no
more, no more. Why? Partially, I and the other people who were
working together started it experimentally and on a pure level of
dealing with consciousness and artistic forms. I m not saying
that I wasn t personally responsible for it, but over time these
ideas and these ways of dealing with each otheryou know, using
strobe techniques, cutting up film into tiny little segments,
dealing with multiple channelsgot out into the world. We used
it, other people used it, in ways which had to do with buying
things, selling things, dealing with material which I find obscene
and unsavory mostly violence. [chuckle] That s about the only
thing that I really feel is obscene and unsavory. Like I told you
about Venezuela, I got disillusioned. Here we were, "Caracas Para
Todos," and we had this 360 degree projection environment, and we
had this little boy playing an old tire hoop as if it were like a
toy hoop, and you could see him going straight around you on the
screen, and there was a beautiful song that was written by a
folklorical Venezuelan, Fredy Reina. A gem of a genius of a man.
A cuatro player a four-stringed little folk guitar.
156
Yet, at the end it was propaganda for a regime that was
repressive, unconscious of real democratic intention and
motivation and I, we had been used to promote their agenda, and
here I was showing the president of Venezuela and his retinue what
we had done. I was already conscious of the corrupt nature of
what had happened to our original experimental impulses. So now
to be co-opted as propagandists for something which I had felt was
for the people "Caracas Para Todos," "Caracas for Everyone. "--
became painful. It wasn t really Caracas for everybody; it was
Caracas to make the president and his ministers rich and enable
them to be bigshots. That wasn t the only experience of that kind
that I had. And I kind of withdrew; I kind of decided that
writing poetry in the stillness of myself and dealing with cheese
which, despite what nutritionists say, I think is a healthy thing
to eat and is not harmful to other human beings , was a better way
to go than to stick your head out into the world and deal with art
collectors and museums and other patrons who want to use your work
toward their purposes rather than your own.
We have two words in Hebrew; one of them is "dayenu"--used
in Passover--which means "it would have been enough." It s like
if he had parted the Red Sea and drowned all the Egyptians, it
would have been enough. In that way, I ve always asked at each
Passover Seder my friends to say what would have been dayenu in
their own life. I used to say to my father, "If
you had brought
me to the United States out of Germany, and you hadn t done
anything else for me in your life, it would have been enough."
And he would say, "Oh, what did you think I was? Stupid? Of
course we had to leave." But I didn t feel that way.
And the other thing that you say is "omain," which is like
"om" and "amen." That s how I feel right now, like "dayenu" and
"amen."
157
VIII POETRY
[Interview 6: April 19, 1996] ##
Poetry
Stern: Poetry. I m going to read from First Poems and Others, a book
which was copyrighted in 1952 and which I haven t looked at in
years . The frontispiece and the drawings for the poems were done
by Ivan Madjdrakoff and the actual lettering of the poems by Julia
Pearl, who at the time was his wife. It says, "Reproduced in
direct image multilith, Clarence Roth, New York." This is a
private limited edition, and the one that I m looking at is my
daughter s. I think it s 207 of 280. I must have still had some
copies when she was born some years later, although the time this
book was put together was when I was living with Jane. I think it
was before we were married or about the time we were married, but
I m going to have to look that up.
We were living in New Paltz, and our very close friend,
Herbert Vogel--he came from Europe, and his father was in the
business of cashing checks in New York City after he arrived as a
refugeea philosopher and a small man with an intense stare
through heavy glasses and an accent, and a person with whom I
spent countless hours discoursing about various philosophical and
aesthetic theories and ideas and constructs. A circle of people I
hadn t really mentioned around an early love of my life named
Doris Adelberg from Vienna, whose parents were middle-class but
relatively cultivated, and whose older daughter, Lotte, wasand
still--an outstanding painter coming out of the Expressionist
school- -Eric Harder, a practically violent presenter of
Nietzschean ideas; Henry Loeblowitz Lennard, a Columbia and
University of California psychologist, with later bonds to the
mediaa documentation of family situations at UC; he had a lab
with video cameras. It kind of fascinated me that our multimedia
ideas that was really oh, I knew him, the great theoretician who
158
was married to the remarkable anthropologist, Margaret Meadwhat
was his name? Gregory Bateson.
Anyway, I think I will start reading Herbert s introduction
so you can get somewhat of the mindset of the time.
All art is an expression of spiritual freedom.
It is a unique transmutation of the universe
through the artist s representations , but
since all Beings partake of this universal
fountain and bring forth the fruit of
interaction with their natural surroundings,
they all contain aesthetic truths. Wherein,
then, is the artist exceptional in his
comprehension of the universe, in enveloping
in his breath the latent meanings of life? Is
it in his possession of a scope whereby the
manifold nuances of nature may be encompassed
and thus provide a beacon for the endless
manifestations which life affords ; or is this
ultimate truth, to be founded upon
renunciation, a liberation of the soul from
the circumstantial determinations of life,
that is, that the latter are to serve as
points of reference, as vectors of life,
without being life itself. Those who see an
inexorable psychogenic nexus in our Being will
find in these verses a proclamation of
freedom, perhaps illusory, perhaps mad: for
them, I reserve the words of Santayana: "Had
we not license to be mad, we should not be our
own masters, but the ignoble product of other
things; and to be mad is simply, in spite of
Gods and men, to be indomitably free." For
others who find in these works an elevation
above temporal reality, there will be revealed
an asymptotic movement from the conditional to
the unconditional, from the finite to the
infinite. Our situation is only the
initiation of universal truth within us, but
in conceiving of it in its circumstantial
arbitrariness, in experiencing the fact of
experience; rather than in participating with
it directly the tie toward life and its
determinants becomes increasingly tenuous
until in its perfection it remains wholly
aloof and an end to itself. This emancipation
must remain ideal, because, however remote to
life, the thought remains incarnated within
159
the protagonist. Nevertheless it is that to
which he aspiresto depict life in its
eternal truth. Thus the artist becomes a
mirror of humanity: as he encompasses the
world in the sanity--no, no--in the vanity, in
the unity of his Being. He is as plastic and
malleable, almost chimerical in his catalyses,
as the creations of the universe.
September 1952, Herbert Vogel.
"The Poet s Premise"
Stern: My own preamble, titled "The Poet s Premise"--you understand, I
haven t seen or read this for many years. I m as amazed at
Herbert s ideas as I was in 1952, particularly as applied to early
poems. "The Poet s Premise":
Poetry, as any art, is necessarily
perfect, therefore inviolate. The Poet,
contradistinctly, remains subject to unlimited
question and criticism. His definition
provides delimitation, an afterthought
attempting that measure of analysis which
would approach full knowledge of the (poetic)
experience itself.
As Poet I demand meaning, the universal
relating terms of existence. I intend my
poetry attain the effect of reception, be
impression, neither description nor imperfect
facsimile. I posit that impression as
meaning; define content as active
manifestation of meaning. Form 1
becomes
inherent, being discretely the temporal
definition content assumes.
Belief I extend to knowledge, dogma,
tradition. These products of analyses bear
their beauty in structure. Dead, they exist
staticly; existing, enhance function.
Faith I place in my senses. Impressions
actual, fantastic, contrived, are intensely
alive beyond subject. Then create my poetry
in their excess
160
And it s dated New Paltz, 1952.
"Reflection, A Fragment"
Stern: The first poem in the book is a poem that I wrote that I deemed as
publishable. It was not the first poem, and I don t have any idea
what happened before this. It s gone, I m sure. It is not only
called "Reflection," but it is part of a series through the years
of reflections which are not titled "Reflections" but which have
some type of mirror image content . But this is called
"Reflection, A Fragment."
I fist the mirror.
Crashing, it spreads the cracked lines
Doubling and redoubling
The he s to she s, and him s to her s,
The I s to them, those me s that were.
I see in this poem- -of course, I ve been aware of its
existence but I haven t even looked at its physical reality for
many years, but I have known that this poem and the poem I wrote
about ten days ago in Buenos Aires, which is the last poem that I
have in typed form--I have probably since then a hundred scribbled
pages of notes for poems that I m still working on--is a direct
descendant of this "Reflection, A Fragment," and the experience
and the handling of sounds and words --which are sounds-- from then
to now is, as Herbert put it, inexorable [laughter]. Inexorable.
"PEAK Song"
Stern: The next poem in the book is called "PEAK Song." Interesting;
this is long before "The Peak Experience" fromwhat was his name?
We ll have to get that. This is an interesting story. When Reb
Zalman was doing his year of sabbatical from his post at the
University of Manitoba at Winnipeg, he was living on Broadway in
Cambridge in the apartment we later took over. This psychologist
came over, and I happened to be there at the time, and said to
Zalman, "I m Jewish, but I don t know very much about being
Jewish. What happened to me is a story which I will tell you: I
had a fairly ordinary academic career, and I wasn t getting very
much of any place when I had this idea. The idea became a
compulsion with me, and I said to my wife, If I follow this idea
out and publish, everyone will probably think that I m mad and
161
that I ve lost it completely, but I really need to do it; I want
to do it, and I must do it. 1
She said to me, Do it. So I went
ahead and did it and within a year I was published, and I was
becoming the president of the American Psychology Association, and
I was known throughout the world very soon thereafter; it
completely changed my life. Now I m not carrying so much of a
load, and I would like to go back and find out what it is to be a
Jew. So what I came to you, Rabbi Schachter, for- -because I ve
heard a lot about you- -is I would like you to give me a reading
list."
Now Zalman and I were, as usual, somewhat out of our heads.
After our distinguished peer had departed, we laughed like hell.
Why did we laugh like hell? Because we felt that this man had
taken the first steps on a spiritual path, and if we do the
reading list, it wasn t going to do him a damn bit of good. But
it was in his world a necessary key to a door which he doesn t
understand what it would unlock.
Then I realized sometime later that the "Peak Experience"--
I had written this poem called "PEAK Song":
infinitesimally faster
slower and faster and Faster
firster and laster my Faster
infinitesimally FASTER.
imperceptibly faster
firster then laster my Faster
slower then faster then Faster
imperceptibly FASTER.
Elaine Goldman & "Harvest 1"
Stern: Actually, I m wrong about what I said about that being the first
poem. The first poem is this poem; it s earlier than "I Fist the
Mirror," and it s dedicated to E.G. --Elaine Goldman- -who was the
first leading- to-mature relationship that I had with a woman. She
was a great lover. She was very motherly. She was a large, well-
endowed woman who was educated in literature beyond anyone that I
had ever met to that point and who opened a lot of doors for me.
I m sorry that somehow she disappeared out of the mainstream of my
existence. It s called "Harvest 1."
In my spring; when yellow fruits hung with green leaves
waiting,
162
I saw brown fruits fall, the brown leaves wither.
Brown in my season was that love s red colour,
as she, mine, lay on our dead bed.
Dead bed of our loves, red bed of our dreams...
I awoke in fall, walking the streets.
My pockets were full of viscous fluids.
Kissing the passerby; I became assassinated.
I guess you can tell the poem fell into place when our
relationship was over. The drawings in this book by Ivan, with
whom I had dinner last night and acquired another one of his
paintings for my collection of his works through the years
because--! immediately knew, and I wrote eight or nine lines about
his new paintings last night, I immediately knew when I looked at
his new paintings such a stream of pleasure and recognition and
understanding of the path that as an artist he has taken and the
reverberations of images through the years and of objects. It was
a transcendent experience. We are almost of an age- -he s a bit
older than I am, and we ve been together a long, long time. Last
night he thanked me for putting him into touch with people and
situations throughout his life which have been transformational
for him and which had actually effected his creative doings
strongly. I was very touched, although I have not had that
feeling that I had really done anything for him. The process of
working on a film together with him was one of the finest
collaborative temporalities that I ve experienced. The other one
was working with Michael Callahan particularly early on, and then
later too, when we were able to assemble tapes. The extraordinary
tape of that period, which was a tape that we used at "Who Are You
and What s Happening?" and which still exists, is called "Billie
Master." It s named after Billie Holiday, who appears on it along
with Franklin Roosevelt and Alice B. Toklas and others too
numerous to cite. It s a tape which must be placed in the
archive .
Byerly: Let me ask a question about the drawings. Are they representative
of the early fifties?
Stern: Representative in what way?
Byerly: Well, I ve looked at a couple of journals The Circle, The Ark--
and what struck me right off was the drawings they reminded me of,
the drawings in this particular--.
163
"He"
Stern: Yeah, well, you see the one on the wall right up there. Ivan came
out of the High School of Music and Art, a very sophisticated
institutionof course, we didn t realize at the time what we were
in- -and he later attended Cranbook in Michigan, which is a leading
modern art school- -he and Julia Pearl both, and others of our
friends. I visited there while they were going there, I think
twice. It s outside of Detroit in Bloomfield Hills. Actually,
there s "Harvest II," too, but I m not going to read it, and
there s a bunch of poet songs. This poem, "He," is interesting
because I refer to Hashem, and there s always been that vein with
God in one form or another in my poems. I think that when I was
younger, I thought I might be an atheist. But it didn t work. I
think I have an excessive faith; too excessive to become either an
atheist or an agnostic for sureeven at an early age. It goes:
He
Drew fish from that belaboured sea
and snared birds from one illicit heaven
Murdered the Carnivores
after his own fashioned
Became again from this punished limb
and feared shades from an open door
Doubted the Deity
after his own fashioned
Caught breath from his burning throat
and swallowed liquid from a barren vine
Assassinated the Chosen
after his own fashioned
Willed havoc
Fell victim
"Yin Chant"
Stern: I remember this "Yin Chant" as a poem that I fell in love with
while and after it was written. Again, I see it being the
ancestor of a concept of construction that I have worked on over
the years and which- -there have been a lot of modalities but they
all lead in the same direction. It always amazes me not only to
go back but to go on. "Yin Chant":
164
Stern:
ff
Penning scrawl to lie with mine
Cover down this blackened sheet
Name these letters a word to dye.
Give way we dozened lie with yours
Cry me in whose mouth you trap
Believe her bereaved, prick nether be whether.
Thinging together to childe will ball
Foundered on merry griffins roc
Flew on or stippled ocean bloc
Name these letters three words to dye.
Bespoken a token we married
He broken asked for a glass
his pain to wipe
There are touches in these poems which need both sound and vision
because "roc", for instance, without a k. And "dye"
is d-y-e.
[spells]
"L Autre 1"
Stern: This poem I wrote for Antonin Artaud. It doesn t mention his
name, but it s called "L Autre":
Je suis enchante
Suis que je suis
Suis un pauvrete infini
J ai 1 argent d auj ourd hui
Et 1 odeur d ici
Suis que je suis
It s very odd; I wrote these two poems in French, and I
don t know French. Remember, though, where I got the French.
"L Autre 2"
Stern: This is "L Autre 2";
165
Je suis 1
et abolie
"le rat et cheval est aussi animaux"
Le tigre et le negre
le poete et 1 autre joue
par le visage de Dieu
Sur son lit secret
un demon crie "Ci
git".
et tout le monde repondit "oui"
Sami Rubinstein
Stern:
Byerly:
Stern:
We were living on 101st Street and Columbus Avenue in a railroad
flat, and for a long time we had someone living with us whose name
was Sami Rubinstein- -no relation to that other Rubinstein. Sami
was from Belgium, and he was the son of a world-famous chess
player named Akiva Rubinstein. He also was a chess player. He
didn t have any money, but he would go down to the Marshall Chess
Club and play and come home with a few dollars all the time. He
was not his father s equal, but he was tops.
He was an artist; he drew like Rembrandt --and I don t mean
to put them on an equal level. By "like Rembrandt," I mean that
he drew in that style. He knew all Rembrandt s work, particularly
the drawings. He would draw portraits of you in that style, and
they were fantastic.
He was a crazy guy.
he went mad.
The white queen?
He got hung up on the white queen, and
On the chessboard. It reverberated through his mind. His father
had gone mad. What had driven his father mad is that he was on
his way to Russia to play the chief player of the world. I can t
remember if that was Capoblanco or Alekhine. I m not even sure
I m pronouncing them right. And the war broke out when he was on
his way, and he couldn t go. He went mad.
166
More Poetry
Marga Richter and "Relations (One)"
Stern: Some of these poems are very sad. Here there s a cantata libretto
which I wrote with Marga Richter. Marga was at Juilliard; she was
a composer. I think I mentioned early on that she had moved up to
New Paltz into one of my reconverted--! don t mean mine; they
belonged to Thorberg but I had reconverted themchicken coops.
And then it burned down, along with her grand piano. This was
previous to this. Marga and I also had an affair; short-lived,
but lived nonetheless. It [the cantata libretto] was later played
both at Juilliard and by a small symphony orchestra in New York
performed, that is. A lot of it is based on mystical or
kabbalistic texts but transformed to a different level of my own.
It was called Relations, and in parentheses it says One to
Infinity, but it s not the word infinity; it s the symbol. There
are quite a few parts to it: one to four are called "The
Concepts
of Realities"; five to eight, "A Relational Progression"; nine,
"The Catalyst"; zero, "The Destruction," and then infinite,
"Operating Function."
"Relations (One)" goes--of course, this is with lots of
music, somewhat atonal musicand chorus:
One Is enough
All Is
(All Is only everything (Is))
One and All Is One and All
Am I It Is
I Am Is Am It Is
Be ings (End and Beginning)
All Is and enough
All Is enough
Yesterday I was driving to the East Bay, and on the radio
station I was listening to a partial broadcast of Gertrude Stein s
Four Saints in however many acts. Three, I believe. But there
are more than four saints and more than three acts . It s a great
work, I think. It s a lovely work. This has nothing to do with
that work, although people have wondered whether I had used it as
a kind of a model, but to tell the truth, in 1952 I had never
heard Four Saints in Three Acts. Sadly.
167
The last part of it, "Relations (<*>)"
is:
Universe id est relation id est Universe
and being relation is
Universe and I am
Are Relations
It keeps on doing it in slightly different ways. There s a
little poem called "Dicotomie":
was only Is being Chaos
Still no-thing moved
Altogether
forbicause d it done Divided
up to down with plus fro minus
Yes and No
I used to even get some laughs when I read these poems .
How too and wherever was when
toward always possibly
perhaps returning then
forever without end
This one I really thought I was --it took me a long time to
write this one, and I kept changing it until it finally took this
form not long before the book came out. I think I was really
conscious of the fact that we were working on the book, and I was
finishing it. I was really pleased with this poem. It was the
longest poem--except for the cantata--that I had written at the
time. That seemed significant to me at the time, although it
doesn t any longer. I mean, I write short poems and longer poems
--I prefer short poems, really, maybe because it s nice when
something completes itself. I have a lot of incomplete poems and
a lot of fragments. I have what I call a line bank. Whenever I
start a piece of paper, and I have a few lines, I write "line
bank" and the date on it. None of those lines usually ever get
employed; it s hard to find jobs for words in this world, right?
I ve had a hell of a time to find jobs for lines that don t
fit into poems [laughter]. Then you try and make a poem out of
it, and it doesn t work. It never works. I get very frustrated
when I look back on some of those sheets, which I usually don t.
They are push-down storage; the worst kind of storage. I m
talking about archivism, and that s what I ve got: boxes of push
down storage. The problem with push-down storage is that you
can t retrieve what s on the bottom without going through the top,
168
Byerly:
Stern:
Byerly:
Stern:
Byerly:
And if you don t know where it is in the pile even if you know
what the pile represents, what are you going to do? You re going
to spend hours. Most of the time I don t even know what the pile
represents anymore. That s a poem, in case you didn t notice, but
it s never been written down. Now we have it, see? Now you
don t .
That s tape. I wonder about tape. It s much harder to deal
with than paper even, because retrieving something on tapeunless
you ve got some kind of digital control over the analog process-
is mind numbing.
For video they have SMPTE code. It s an acronym for Society
of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. You can take a piece
of equipment, and you don t have to do it when you re recording
the image, and you can subtract it out of the image; it isn t
inevitably there. You put a frame code so that time and identity
are established basically for each scan, for each raster image.
You can stop it, you can cut, you can edit, you can order the
editing equipment to make a fade or a dissolve or whatever you
prefer. And if you have the right equipment computer-wise, you
can just give that number after you ve jotted it down because you
saw it go by and you needed it. It will recover it for you fairly
quickly. The further move now is that it s now all on computer
rather than on a video tape, or it s on CD-ROM and the retrieval
of it is getting speedier all the time. Retrieval time is
history, right? Terrible. I mean, the more retrieval time you
get, the less reality is in whatever you re redoing, re
collecting. Why are we re-collecting when we could be collecting?
That was a long answer.
Oh, it was?
Yes. [laughter]
Well, we have time.
That could have been the response to expound on the philosophy of
history.
"Day after Year"
Stern: Could it? Okay, well, this is about that. It s called "Day after
Year" :
169
Hear on this sing song day
Here he me lay down
Sound on a sound at
of or if too
Why for to can with those will
there could do full as that no
nor way finding down done
found some did think these not gone
How if than piece did fair best
losing all more from last try
sure now been then and see too
lost you are lest when was so
Sex of a one and eleven
Pair quadrupled breaks seven
Numbers out letter is same
When would better be least
ever stay under cry which
whether near neither while none
being but always brought each
Where may since become still
might hardly sometimes just seem
could every either yet pray
rightly should pass leaving by
Sex of a pair in eleven
One quadrupled makes seven
Letter out numbers are same
What withal fallen together
chosen about beside nearly
dropped came apart through believing
fell without moving the matter
Ask any almost makes even
true taken next on the changing
gave a first bit until finished
wait itself end never really
Here on this sing song day
Heard he me lay down
Sound on a sound (at
of or if too)
170
"The Idea of Order at Key West"
Stern: One of my very favorite poems--if we have some time, maybe I ll
read it to you because it also reverberates through my lifeis
called "The Idea of Order at Key West" by Wallace Stevens. I
didn t know that poem at the time, but the whole "sound on a
sound, sing-song day," I now realize reverberates for me in that
poem. That poem was one of the poems that we worked on for the
Ford Foundation at KPFA to illustrate listening to poetry and
thinking about poetry Lew Hill s project, which I worked on with
him.
"Fragment; after W. B. Yeats"
Stern: At the time, my favorite poet was W.B. Yeats. He still definitely
is in my top ten of all time. This was called "Fragment; after
W.B. Yeats," and it was dedicated to Herbert Vogel:
Red Rose, new Rose, this Rose of all my days!
Come free me, as I find these finite ways:
Remembrance hoarding every loss to hide
The Past, lay full-knowing, ready- tried;
So seems false Future gone, and Present bold;
And your same Beauty, bearing blood grows old
While reaching Time; where Passion always free
Flees Search in Love of our Reality.
I finished with this poem which seems a little tough line to
go out on at this point:
Know that you as the forever sun
light brightly through my emptied shell
the ineffable breath of decayed virtue
and Find in this one consolate word
a memory of now and is
which lingering knew me as I am
Afterimage
Stern: Somewhat odd. There were a number of poems published in other
venues, but that was the bookuntil Afterimage was published.
171
That was dated 1965, the copyright. So we ve got thirteen years--
that was 65--and now we ve got thirty-one years, and I haven t
published another book. Not, by the way, for lack of having
enough poems, but I think of not having enough koiach--strength--
to go through the process and not wanting to publish it myself. I
did publish a set of eight poems with silkscreen lithographs by
David Weinrib called "Conch Tales." A conch is a shellfish that
lives in the Caribbean and various other places .
They were done
in Jamaica.
But Afterimage was printed and first published in England by
Villiers Publications, Ltd., London, N.W.5, for Maverick Books,
Woodstock, New York. This is when Judi and I and Michael were
living in Woodstock. The Maverick Press didn t exist. We had
these books printed and bound; there were two editions. One was
paperback and the other was hardcover. I had started, in the last
few years before that, in doing collages, and we had one of the
collages which I particularly did for the coverprinted black and
white. It doesn t have the textural quality of--. But these
collages are not just meant to look at or just pick out words
from, but you can read them if you have a mind to.
"Zum Gedachtnis "
Stern: "Zum Gedachtnis" is a German phrase for "to think"--no, this is
more like "memory," something you have or will have in memory,
[reading from collage]
Blow
Promise to you
In our tough
Liabilities
Om harvest
Age tubes
On the spot.
"Stern Airlines"
Stern: Then there s "Stern Airlines." That was a throwaway, obviously.
It goes:
Flexible
Hey, grow up
172
Byerly :
Stern:
Hundred million
Our apart
One of a kind
Body s squeezed in
All the way in
I mean, these are justthese last are all in a row, but
usually I don t do all in a row; I skip from one part of the
collage to the other as I m gluing. First I do rough cuts, and
then in order to fit things in I do fine cuts. The question is
whether there really is sense as I see here this little phrase:
"Contact is made." Contact, keep it coolit s not "keep it
cool," it s "keep in cool."
It s fascinating; it s more fascinating, I think, to do it
than to experience it. I really got off on it because these words
would bounce around in my head, and they got down on paper and
people bought them, what s more. Which is more than you can say
about written poems, usually.
Afterimage, the hardback edition, was meant as a limited
subscription edition, and I did get a number of subscriptions
which covered the printing costs, and then of course I had books
left over. I still have a few but not very many.
How many were printed?
It should say, but I m not sure that it does. No, it doesn t say.
I think there were 150 of the hardbacks and 500 of the--. I m not
sure. The dedicatory phrase in the book is from "The Last Sun" by
Theodore Roethke: "Snail, snail, glister me forward."
lovely poem. He was a great poet.
It s a
"Afterimage"
Stern: The first poem, as the first poem is in First Poems and Others, is
a mirror image poem. In fact, it s somehow very close even though
it s a completely different poem. And it s the title poem of the
book, Afterimage:
When I struck down
by rod
or my soft mummy mate
was laid in the mimic twitch of tick
and knock by all who would
173
who didn t find me wandering
when the stranger curves inside
were margins for my sibling pain
By last and always swore
when I struck down
to find by vein, the pool in rock,
the core; a cry, cry
for next and last again
when is a time
and where a place I can t go on
to find by name
is nothing but this same, dumb,
easy source of faith in glass
When I struck down my image
then the roots took fire
my years grew scattered
few and inbetween
I took the fast and hollow slide
down was it where I am
and count the broken glass
I know the mirror s fist
that struck me down.
Byerly: And when was this written?
Stern: Well, I don t think I know. It certainly was written late
fifties, early sixties.
Byerly: Do you know what part of your life the poem was written about?
"Bad to Believe"
Stern: My first book is very clear in terms of timing. It was published,
or it was madethat s a more correct expressionat the time I
was with Jane in New York, and the poems were all from then and
before then. From then on, you have the whole period of Jane and
I in California, then the Maya period, the Ann period, and now
here I am with Judi in Woodstock after having been with Barbara.
You see how I mark my periods. I don t really mean that to be
ironic; it sounds ironic, I guess. A lot of these poems past- -in
the first book and this bookare about those relationships. Talk
about relationships; this next poem is called "Bad to Believe":
174
Not as man in woman
tests against the rest
his tail of woe and prime
My ring in the box wife
goes breech tonight
High cards, sly laugh,
quick stakes for chance-a-beast
Ass, snake, owl
Toll round-eye home
Swing noose to knell
Peals layered back from back
Heart pipe is glut
with father s right
by child spent rage
A man he never was
splits limb and root
"Grounds"
Stern: The next one is called "Grounds";
that chick so far out
she got to fake
witch doctor route
mother waiting
along one track
when the real thing
comes go now
paying later
back she splits
here and where
her balling pawns
on broken wind
terrible cat
flushing my chain
take the ride
or bump your log
in a hole bottom
of the sea
175
You know that song, don t you? [sings] "There s a hole in
the bottom of the sea." We used to sing it at camp. "A
bump on
the log in the hole on the bottom of the sea." And that s where
that image came from. These images kind of fly in or they rocket
in; they just jump right out of your past into poems all the time.
I love them.
We used to sing this other song. When I was a counselor- -
you know, you had a bunk, and you all sat at the same table
together. Our group used to sing, "There are no flies on us,
there are no flies on us; we brush them off. There may be just a
few great big black flies on you. There are no flies on us; we
brush them off."
Byerly: Did that show up in any of your poems?
Stern: I don t know. Undoubtedly, but not as itself. This one is like
the other one.
"Eppes Epic"
Stern: Eppes is Yiddish for "something." "Eppes Epic":
for the father, Old Sol
and that other member
of the triple dick litany
who was no Jew
Man can you get strung out
on the cross begat
a holy spike of grace
His eye is on
birds
don t get high
they can t look down
and fly
up your
nailed not screwed
crucified seed
Who needs it
176
and all that jazz
like stained glass
"Christ, geometry
is an Almighty cope"
"Reflections Before Rising"
Stern: And this one is definitely when I was married to Ann, as a lot of
them are. It s called "Reflections before Rising," and it s a
dialogue:
She flipped the lid at him.
Man you got any want,
An overcoming desire like?
Baby don t wriggle me,
Can t we slip without touching?
I m done in, screwed; Stop!
The grotesque advantage you take;
Gimmeup, Cave, you hear, we don t want no struggle.
What kinda nadir every morning?
Quel bring down, Riiiing, Raaangng, Ho Had
Brother Murican attention 1 addition.
Itchygoo, fire up delink,
Break fast in a hurry cause it s a short day s biz
and someone s coming up fast.
Who s manic in their company?
That s le bull vraiment.
Friends there are few of us,
If you re under thirty,
This warm bit of everyday is for you.
So what arya gonna do with the little ones?
Why succor muthamia? She s gone daddy,
and you too could find yourself empty one of these.
Make it. Go to it already.
Believe me baby I m with you
and so long it s nothing he wanted ,
the least you could say is:
"We re up."
177
"Mirage"
Stern: These poems reflect what we were talking about yesterday. I m not
going to read a lot more of them, but this one was also written
with Ann on the barge, and it s called "Mirage":
All horrid noises in my throat
as life becomes this burning boat
where voices probe beneath my mind
to seek the me they dare to find
and leave the self pronounced by rote
with these same noises in my throat
Who cannot sense the low or high
of drift or wrack which passes by
and leaves your spindrift bottled note
in time to set these lines afloat
Be with me mine by burning boat
Her ashes over stern I reached to haul
there seemed no bottom rise or fall
of tide laid heavy by the moon
I wrote at night with friends
beside my burning boat
a heart of rime sick in my throat
For love and labor could not float
this foundered berthed and burning boat
That s too much; I shouldn t let myself get away with this
one--
You remember my tale about moving the barge. [laughter]
This was all about moving the barge and about Ann. "Her ashes
over stern I reached to haul"--that s too-- [laughter] I really
hadn t remembered that. That s funny.
178
"Mea
Culpa"
Stern: I m not going to read this poem. This is a strange poem called
"Mea Culpa," and I think I mentioned it previously. There was a
magazine published in Sausalito called Contact by Bill Ryan and
Herb Beckman. There was an issue that they were doing on
prisoners and justice and crime. I had obtained some of the
content for them, and I was supposed to be co-editor of that
issue. And if you ask me with whom, I won t be able to tell you.
I don t think it was with Philip. Anyway, I wrote this poem for
the issue specifically; they wouldn t publish it because it was
too abstract.
"Harvest Tale"
Stern: I wrote some things which at first I really thought were prose
poems. This is a very long harvest tale, but the first strophe or
stanza goesand it s called "Plow":
A probability of the sentence demanded paradox,
which eliminates any purpose that could dilute
the possible sequence of events,
or resolve these following improbabilities:
And it goes on from there. It has a lot of sexual images.
The next part is called "Furrow":
They had achieved this fusion in the past,
but now, with the maturity that follows success,
celebrated marriage as a matter of course,
and became inseparable.
The next portion is called "Seed". If I had had the choice
today, I probably wouldn t have published it.
Byerly: Why?
Stern: Oh, I don t know. It s lame. It s all right, but it s kind of
lame. I love a lot of the poems in this book very much. "After":
179
"After"
Stern: The color I give things
is mine remembered
shared when the familiar past
comes between us
To give you my joy
I wake you
Disturb and pain you
Take you by words and patience
stiff with the memory of laughter
and the young girls
ran after purple grapes
Was your dream only tonight
Or did wings burn
when I touched your name
and sang our breath
into my quick shadow
left by the turning light
Untitled Poem
Stern: I stand behind myself to see the same
To find this other world
where there could be
another me that was tomorrow
Today the difference never being new
You are myself
for I have found
the nothing that there is to do
"Oh You"
Stern: This is "Oh You":
meaningful
a word like interesting
Byerly:
Stern:
180
like
leaving your dirty panties
smelling of someone s sperm
near the telephone
for me
I was requested to leave that poem out of the book. Not by
Ann, but by it was real. It was real that I wanted to keep it.
Was it real? I don t know whether it was real or not.
It s how you were feeling, right?
Yeah, and that s what my image of it was. Were there really a
pair of panties by the telephone? I say there were. She s dead.
Who knows? Do I really know?
This is just a four-liner:
in bed
I try
against you
to laugh
[laughter] Same period.
And the other one I read to you the other day:
"Why Yes
Stern: a brief enthusiasm is hardly the thing to be
of someone else s
it s roses in the snow and of that genre
not quite so much of a surprise
but really shocking
if one s in love
After Ann.
Sidonie
Stern: I don t know if you can manage this story, but let s try it.
There was a madam and grand whore in San Francisco at the time
named Sidonie. Sidonie was a complete gasse. She was
181
sophisticated, she was bawdy, had an incredible body with skin of
alabaster, and she knew everyone. When I first met her, she was a
lady kept by Ben Swig in a grand apartment on Nob Hill- -all white,
white couches, white rugs, a view. She entertained Percy Heath
and me in this apartment unbeknownst to Ben. She was on the jazz
scene, she was on the arts scene. She was around. She had a
mouth like the proverbial velvet glove. She moved like the purple
sea described in Greek poems.
She did not come from some elevated station; she came from
Bakers field, the Valley. But she was fashionable. Her musical
and artistic tastes were high level. Still she could get right
down to it without any trouble at all, right? Many years later I
was having dinner in a restaurant in New York, and I met there a
friend of minean artist and photographer who also came from San
Francisco--and he was having dinner with a lady friend named
Carolyn Zacca. We started talking, and I began to realize who the
lady friend was. I said to her, "You know, I shared a mistress
with your grandfather." She started crying. She said to me, "You
know, that s the nicest thing I ever heard about Grandpa."
I love that. I felt so good, because it had come out
unbehested. I wasn t sure that I had said something that would
embarrass her about her grandfather. But she was a real swinger,
in any case. Her grandfather was one of the major powers-that-be
in the City by the Bay.
"
Difficulties in the Beginning
1
Stern: All these poems now sound to me that they re about the same thing,
you know? I m not sure whether I m getting the right take on it.
This is called "Difficulties in the Beginning":
Get her
Right out of King Arthur
and his Arabian Knights
No eyes for the cross
No ears for the magic fart
Big blame
Lots of reward
"Perseverance furthers"
In the I Ching
there is "No Blame"
182
Why peace
when there s hate
why not love
when we re together
why scream
why not
empty your head
Now
"About Us"
Stern: The practice of each word is its constraint
A line s four corners and the place
Where tension was a form
That held space round us
Now and then we stuck to fact
Tracing the pattern with a lack of method
Up to date in copied records
and the act of love
"That Y Am Matt ..."
Stern: And this one, the title and the last line are from the Sixty-first
Ballade of Charles D 1
Orleans. The line is: "That y am matt."
That s from the ballad; it s a chess poem. That one line is not
mine . It s not mine .
To have no body for the one you love . . .
Only two voices touching through the wire strung
night
seeking the tightness of each other s clasp
Asking themselves what substance lasts
when the opposing click chants dark
Ravens we are sparks of image
thinned by reluctance on our own stages.
183
Draw me no pittance bargain
waged in the fire of my middle days
sweet musician must I pay your scale
that I prevent myself from rut or sale
"without so be y make a lady newe".
And that last line, "Without so be I make a lady new," is
also from Charles D Orleans. Of course, it refers to getting a
new queen by taking the pawn all the way to the other side of the
board. This was long after Sami Rubinstein and going mad and
being taken away because of his hangup with the white queen.
Talking about reverberations.
"Go Man"
Stern: I m driven not driving
All I m allowed is to shift the gear
Or blow my horn
Where will they take me
Who s turning the key
You understand that these poems which I was writing, and
other poems which are not published, I felt that I was somewhere
in thewhatever you want to call it--the hierarchy or the world
of poetry and that it made sense. But I couldn t find very often,
practically never, could I find other poets to whom they made
sense to- -in the sense that they felt about each other often. For
many years that disturbed me a lot.
Hugh Hefner and "Hip Hip for Hef"
Stern: This is when I was really frustrated with Hugh Hefner at Playboy.
I wasn t really working closely with Hef because I was working
with Spectorsky, but Hef kept getting in my way. I think this was
when I offered to write a major story on marijuana, and I was
about ten years early or five years early, and Hef really blasted
me--how could I think of doing such a thing? Of course, later on
they got right into it . But I was by that time out of it . Not
out of pot but out of touch. Spectorsky had died, but he would
have done it. Hef was a prude, believe it or not. "Hip Hip for
Hef." It s a little thing from Wittgenstein which says, "It is a
184
Stern:
sign of an elementary proposition, that no elementary proposition
can contradict it." It goes:
Are the indefinite they?
Ennui is wee-wee with boredom,
On the rocks, or straight.
Who needs questions?
I go along with you--
We are not making Our life.
"Baby Blues"
This fits right into that jazz line which a lot of people were
writing. This one s called "Baby Blues":
Far out people
Whoever they are
Break me up
Like dig the cat
Blowing his ass off
Or the chick
Turning herself on
The end
Stern:
"Prejudiced or Something"
if the Son was a Jew
you know Jesus the carpenter
the Father must have been one too
Some of my best friends
are Holy Ghosts
"Strength of Inaccurate Convictions"
Stern: And here s one I told you about--Dr. D. Prest, the psychiatrist;
cock on a leash
walking the dog
throw ball
185
after tail
follow beast
or man
Untitled
Stern: Only time is kept
Who will for us
Put it away
Keepers never finders were
Necessarily
Plain clothed keepers
Out of our mind
In time
Byerly: I like that one.
"My
Joint is Out of Time"
Stern: There was a guy in the Village named Hube the Cube. What was his
name? Hubert? He wrote things, and he had a tattoo. The
subtitle for this is his tattoo, which was "Blessed blessed
oblivion--Hube the Cube s tattoo." And the name of the poem is
"My
Joint is Out of Time":
Old Golds are straights already
Soon bread will be so scarce
they ll be selling grass on the streets
I used to be a swinging head
now under stone
I m rolling my own shit
like a syllogism
"Paradiddles"
Stern: This thing I did on television with a famous bongo player named, I
think, Jack Costanza, on one of those, like, magazine shows that
they had at that time in San Francisco. It was written
186
specifically for that, so it needs that rhythm behind it. It s
called "Paradiddles" which is a form of drumbeat.
Them that wants
and those what get
if they re not the same
who s to blame
money is funny
when you don t have any
even things are fine
one at a time
many to go
bet the winner
much too slow
calling heads
flipping tails
is not success
with a capital
whatchamacallit
to fit the crime
Them that wants
and those what get
if they re not the same
who s to blame
thrown on water
count it like bread
authorities say
two heads are better
than one for what
Them that wants
and those what get
if they re not the same
who s to blame
187
sell for more buy for less
close your eyes take the rest
put it in a bank
laughing at the kill
if you can t count it
nobody will
Them that wants
and those what get
if they re not the same
who s to blame
you know what I mean
straight with the scene
if you have no eyes
don t want any
odds on a penny
are just as good
to try your luck
Them that wants
and those what get
if they re not the same
who s to blame
"The Cock Horse"
Stern: There are different sections to this book. This is called "The
Cock Horse":
What are you
I need a precise image
to look through
Who got into my merry-go-round
Was it a broomstick horse
or your toy soldier
Is it my glister on the trail
Bless you
Keep you
Hold me down Moses
Dig me back Pharaoh
188
It s fixed
Hands in their laps
they fly again
come hung
from a silver yoke
on doubled chains
swinging
The precise image is from Kenneth Rexroth. In a workshop I
think I mentioned this before when I wrote "bird" he fulminated
and exposited and said,
"
Bird is never enough. It s gotta be a
precise image; it s gotta be that bird, not just any bird."
"Enjoy Gravity"
Stern: This was in Life magazine, actually, with a dancer, a wonderful
black male dancer who I worked with. It s called "Enjoy Gravity,"
and it says, "This poem is an interlude for dancer and voice."
Enjoy gravity
Swing wild
moving with air
as you are
Swinging free
the child within
breaks the ground
leaping away
Move the world
with pushing air
swinging the wind
Enjoy gravity
The wind flies
where when it moves
does the air
stop swinging
Held from above
with each swing
the earth s pull
brings us down
189
Sparrows and apples
fall swinging
the harvest weight
takes us down
Our moon turns the sea
one swinging star
is light for the world
Come down where you are
the sky is swinging
your body in time
with love
Swing wild
moving with air
as you are
Enjoy gravity
We performed it quite a few times around San Francisco.
"Watch Out"
Stern: No peeking around corners
to see what is there
No looking behind
it just isn t fair
Lots could be said
for looking ahead
to find yourself
riding a tiger
in bed
"The Priestess Gagged"
Stern: She was really a Leo. Philip was living with a lady named Gogo
Nesbit. Gogo is still around; a very fine poet, as a matter of
fact. She had a line which was "The
priestess gagged." I really
got into that. The name of this poem is "The Priestess Gagged":
190
Night is curtains
woven by a friend in New York
falling three times
to mews i eke
the Tarot pasted on glass
hides her dishes from the room
She gave herself one at a time
to the black and strong
She had it coming when she went
further out of the continent
Take your journey to the East
with Leo from Morbio Inferiore
back to the Seilergraben
They say he s stolen the original manuscript
Doesn t dig the sacred document
"Poetry at the Paraclete"
Stern: The journey to the East, and Leo, that s from Hesse. This is
called "Poetry at the Paraclete." "The Paraclete, a New York
bookstore specializing in Catholic materials presents poets
reading from their own work." And I won t say who the poet was,
She will know because the line is from her poem--the title is
"Poetry at the Paraclete":
"The
poem ascends," she finishes
with her broken smile.
In the front row
a black f rocked father nods agreeably.
His svelte blonde consort
exclaims , "Marvelous !
"
The poem ascends . . .
weightless I wonder,
flies or floats gossamer,
exercising some mystic form?
The poem ascends . . .
out of reach,
explodes height,
to disappear,
one with the universe?
191
The poem ascends . . .
elliptically perhaps,
by virtue of named nature,
assuming familiar shapes,
down to earth?
One of Many"
Stern: Here s the one I told you about that Hayakawa objected to,
stone of god
easily laughed at
who needs an object
to know love
washed idol
cure me
with my power
to keep you on the shelf
or throw you out
"The Bomb Syndrome"
Stern: In New York I did a lot of demonstrating and meetings and thinking
of dramatic street theater and performance art type of public
actions. Some of these poems came out of that. "The Bomb
Syndrome" :
Poets are what
poetry is all about
ideographs and history
delirious serious
Making it is no
cure for constipation
Hair in the bath
Elephant tail
keep me quick
zipped from Africa
where they kill like lovers
192
(If you don t catch them
the words are gone
like money or an erection
falsie illusions
mountains cut by dozers
Blown pine don t drop
needle green sky frame
crissed lights dusty through
recollection of stretched sound:
Screaming like peacocks
Bamboo growing
You under me)
where they throw, shoot, push
hard like fuckers
into blood, shit, sperm
tear people for good
with their own screwing
quick on the point
of coming death
No person-to-person kill flash
for you mother suckers:
Truman, Ike, JFK and big red K.
Testing your hard ons: cream us
by panic button megatonmania
down-home ass-hole buddy style
a Nero capping sensational act
of total destruction and anonymity
"Now"
Stern: This sound of one hand clapping has always been something which
has gotten me into a silly frame of mind. It s taken a lot of
manifestations. This poem is called "Now":
driving is important
a way to get there
nails through the savior
one into another
193
if now is true
was something else
what will be
touching is important
through the always space
between hands words circles
you me they
if now is true
was something else
what will be
believing is important
only made like tree
flood miracle with fish
two by two to bombs
if now is true
was something else
what will be
nothing is important
when you know
the sound of one hand clapping
is nothing
"Public Hanging"
Stern: This is a strange poem because it was written in a car, a VW bus
driven by the sculptor John Chamberlain, and it was written in a
car when I was going to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I
was going through a block, and I couldn t go because cars were
stopped ahead of me. Over my head there was a crane--not too many
feet higher, but high enough to be extremely dangerous this big
steel beam. It was turning, and I could just see it out of the
windshield, and it s called "Public Hanging":
Sweet hanging steel
Bigger than thou
Smashed in blacktop
Like an Indian head
Before a crossing
Because a red light
This very now
Was here too
And stopped us dead
194
"A
Dirty Story"
Stern: This is one of those poems I was talking about regarding walking
on those endless resistance demonstrations of that time. It s
called "A
Dirty Story" and the subscript is "...nothing to fear
but fear itself," from FDR.
Told by three wise guys
to two far out strangers
you and me at the bar
had a few bucks in common
a degree and a couple of broads
living it up and down the hatch
sorry about not being safe
without faith to move molehills
scared of the bomb
the nothing to fear there is
one had jokes about new cereals
kikes wops niggers bitches
in case of fallout put it in again
civil war military logistics
prepared him for emergencies
said love was a cloud
to wipe his trembling blood
Him with you and all of us
living up wild high
down the hatch ma pa
afraid of the nothing bomb
the nothing to fear but fear
the other sat superior
peeling a sodden onion
free of skin seed roots
as if stripping cells
discarded layers
would get him to the bottom
not of this being
but becoming
said love was a cloud
mushroom to his music
He with you and all of us
living up kicks crazy
down the hatch to shelter womb
afraid of the nothing bomb
the nothing to fear but fear
195
took her kids to picket for peace
believing we would drop it or they could
unless you and I and all
find a way without end
the way of peace
said love was a cloud
her miracle of fish
She with you and all of us
living up nervous on
down the hatch to cave grave
afraid of the nothing bomb
the nothing to fear but fear
we puts arms around each other
you me brother
first time touching
not a bad get together
making up for lost time
live it up and down the hatch
afraid of the nothing
to fear
bomb
"Necessity is a Mother"
Stern: I read an essay byI m sure it was Hannah Arendt, and she said,
"Love, according to Augustine, was I want you to be. "
I used it
in a poem, couldn t find the quote out of Augustine, wrote her a
letter, didn t hear from her for a long time. Didn t know her, by
the way. Finally got a note saying, Sorry, couldn t remember
where she had picked it up, but it wasn t necessarily somebody
else. I read a book recently by one of the new California
novelists, Jim Dodge; he used the line. Now I wanted to write to
him, and I haven t; I will, I hope, if I get around to it. I
don t get around to everything. Do you? I want to ask him if he
read the essay by Hannah, if he took out of my poemhe s a friend
of Kesey, so Kesey would have had the book or did he actually get
it out of St. Augustine, right? [Laughter] The poem is called
"Necessity is a Mother":
I m going to tell you
I want you to be
love according to Augustine
196
we sat too close not to touch
I tried to fly
your brush got stuck
the bell was going to ring
I d had enough
break your neck
under the ice
my boot made a hole
kissed old luck
I want you to be
about the subway Priscilla
we didn t do it together
I m going to remind you
there about here /now about then
because that s who I am
"If You Can t Count Don t Blow"
Stern: "If
you can t count don t blow." It s a quote from a musician
named LaNoue Davenport- -originally a jazz musician who was in the
Pro Musica Antiqua. Playing baroque music, medieval music. But
the poem is "If You Can t Count Don t Blow":
it s the same fear
of falling from heights
when under me
you hold on
to yourself
Eat Eat Eat
flash on a coming beat
but won t explode
losing my poke
not spit, balm
always the receptacle
for bread
does a centipede
move every other leg
197
if you count
you don t let go
believing is not knowing
like Jake said
does she dig or complain
if you count to make sure
of only what was
record and possess
how many fractions
of whose law
"Take Five Jungle"
Stern: This one has something to do with writing a sonnet. It was
written it doesn t say that, but I know it was written for Bird,
for Charlie Parker, listening to his music. I ignored Kenneth s
axiom about precise images as far as "bird" was concerned, because
it goes:
if only some unbelievable turd
that falls keeping his eye
makes out to happen bird s
sound turn on out mothered sky
riffs blue flash given skin
wheels straight stone swinging night
blow bombed kicks too much in
nowhere scene screwed spade tight
like beard is mask a map for trap
counted down out of your head
split burn take loaded crap
score bang dig ball through bed
jump heavy hard push under sick
lay flip come crack up stick
"You Think You re So What"
Stern: This one is written for John Chamberlain, a close friend of many
years; haven t seen him for a long time. He s the sculptor who
sculpted mashed car parts. He had an incredible understanding of
polychrome, color, and form. Wild man, a terrible, terrible wild
198
man. At least he was; I don t know what he is. "You Think You re
So What" for John Chamberlain.
show me the top of the world
where everything is
you can be there
without knowing
where we are
put her on upside down
below BOMBED sand and white
stenciling LIKE above
in Slomon s glue
can you see
say show me
by early light
you said what?
two of them in a row
one a spade two a jew
were only trying to tell me
my left blinker was flashing
WORK AREA AHEAD
the leader
s got to go faster
than the man on his tail
got to make it coming
like a hill turning
morning all day
once was two bit broke
now am ten buck flat
now passing
The Museum of Natural History
-
driving my black Singer
1 read incised in stone
I think the face is Caslon
TRUTH VISION KNOWLEDGE
"Shock Strike Toggle"
Stern: Then here s a poem which has as the subscript "Goethe dying: Mehr
Licht .
"
199
tripped out
switch gone on
one pole
double throw
(bat handle
no balls)
your time
field base
here now
real
double pole
screens
perspective
in focus
the way coming
high through free safe
together distance
who knows you
time after time
is again
beat
against
sine
going the distance
base real
time
x and y
are either
way out
one hundred eighty degrees
block flowing
hard stop
not going anywhere
why know x
when one s vertical
the other s horizontal
input any ow
out of now
yours and mine
turns on the light
and i am here
turns off the light
and i am there
200
Other Poetry; Michael Callahan
Stern: And that s really the last poem in this book. These last poems,
we were already living in Woodstock, and Michael Callahan had come
to join us to do the engineering, the design of the equipment, all
the technical work, the sound editing, also visual editing. I was
beginning to get very metaphorically language- involved in the
names of the various electronic and electromechanical parts like
"double-throw single-pole switch." I was using a lot of that kind
of language in some poems .
More Poetry
Poppa-Wopper"
Stern: Then there are the poems since then. There are various kinds, and
some of them are quite long. I m not going to read them in
sequence. I want to read this one which is called "Poppa Wopper".
It was written for Radha. Was it? No, for Abram! Is this the
one? Well, I would like to read it anyway. It s December 94;
not that long ago. "Poppa Wopper":
for Abram the avid Aphid at eighteen
quest like do she care
if there nothing to lose
attention but what itself
except perhaps to come
Lenny s favorite preposition cum verb
humming sotto voce lonely as cloud
scored for and by itself
connection bridging ampersands
out of our limbo and into de light
Count signified, "don t know
whether to love you or hate you"
"I do," said, gave head
way to indian given go
window of blue-note oportunology
recognition over frequency modulated air
Bird s mantic lick rising
201
how rare to be right; left mostly behind
whatever eight-ball fancied her cue
that /then I and I introduced as
"manager and man" or "man and manager"
depending who you, heshemale, was to
badmouthering Maya, "no
ofay mothafuckah
gonna call me bitch"
all in the crossing, pass ahead
drives Dylan said, "my green age"
spun off impasto diffracted rainbows
heady pools of polychromatosoming compositions
Ted s dead line glistering us forward
featherweight birdbrain airhead
what did you think this was
an elegiac jeremiad on madness at St. Elizabeth
Ezraversity s unwobbling imagiste fascishtick
Rex Kenneth prescribing precise images
rules what and how many times when
to get every littlething accomplishcated
bedstead atilt on underlying bargain piles
when image makers /takers turn
turn, turning time for every season
evoke Electro s, "I Inc. representing USCO"
it ; whatever will be over soon
used to cut ice off Rockland Lake
to melt, cool, lower, change,
has-beens, would have-nots, tryers,
leftover unmarrieds without duration
can t even make love to each other s
frustrate incompetentialities
Paul suggests Kaddish cheese for funerals
plastic shopped holidays branches lit
pedesterasting crosstown scambams
"and on her hat that awful quill"
be lilly, tiptoe through tulips, try, try
again sweet hard home, soft core poem spin
anachronisting motionless type icons
Marshall s wit focussed for me equation
effect over content relation
controversial blackmailed scripscraps remembered
clambering up to not jump off Pi s anchor fenced
pushshove ping-pong score to wronged winner
leaking easter bunny s sperm
202
freaking nursekeepers into angerspace
genetwise turning me on, in, then out
poetknown eachself inbeat time
Allen corresponded, "I ll pay 10% for any good ideas"
twirling tongue bemused
rhymes with schmoozed
the night astray; what says the phrase
flew past forgotten
tripping through the pull
my love me, love me not daisies
out of Tim s faith, "you can be
anyone this time around"
pointillism behind the eyeballs
"dot s wot" short shrift Pissaro et al
blowing bone lows harder than highs
are all animals really sad afterwards
Michael roared, "GHRAAAAAAAAR"
if you re right, I m wrong
ambivalently verbalistic conundrums
why not take two how now
while noone s looklistening, picking
preset (mush) rooms in his honor at Mount Fuji
Uncle John bespeakspoke, "Silence"
hip-hop, hip enough
to get away calling the dog
a "great cat"
meaning no harm
losing no sleep over facing the music
Lord Buckley riffratified, "people
are the true flowers of life
and it has been my pleasure
to walk in the garden"
This is not the poem I thought I was going to read. This
was not the poem that was written for Radha. In a sense, this was
more written as a kind of mini-memoire for my now nineteen-year-
old Abram about some of the things that had happened to me in my
life.
"No Man Like to Dead"
Stern: This comes out of Jamaica. The title, I was having a conversation
with a man who at the time was approaching his [seventies?]
203
Stern: --Mr. Clark is the father of Jah Morris, an associate of mine in
Jamaica. Morris is a Rasta who lives on the land we have there.
He is a great carver and a very fine chef and a good friend. But
he comes from such a completely different culture that sometimes
needs a lot of adjustment to understand where he s coming from.
What his father said to me when we were talking about somebody
was, "No Man Like to Dead."
when any might be last
time, trip, tango, come again
my brethren searching for de light
dead said died for us ahead
now alive alive orgasmic
last could be least most
be more den more
already down drain against
the grain against all odds
again raise gain
matching impedimentiapedance
imamountcountmeasurable waves of currentcy
phasebeat overunder sinusoidal
scancrossed powers of zenthenten
infinitrying, immutable, glowriffied
in your namegame time after time domain
"Me without You"
Stern: This is also somewhat Jamaica-referential. It s called "Me
without You." I was trying to write a message which never got
through- -which I think is true of a lot of the poems I ve read
today. They re messages that were either too late, or not
properly in time or not properly in space delivered, or question
mark.
for Sara
Taken at hearsay my passed time
told second person past presence
particulating straight out of
beliefsys s mamemoried persistence
one on one after each other s
204
idea of order reified
ital bonnet peppa hit mouthquick
no too weak no too strong
pray stay each ev ry sweethot bite
time worthiest vegasensational
right in your face
ing the music riffrapped
numeralphabetistically
beyond bonding is bond age
retentious inward bound rearview
who else on the cutting table
but this begoner loner boner
keeping wrung hands off
"Caribella Poems for Sally"
Stern: Well, whatever. This is an intensely long poem called "Caribella
Poems for Sally." Many, many years ago when we were first going
to Jamaica I think I had better read it. And I ve got to read
"Poemthink," and then there are the two most recent poems, one for
my murdered grandson and the Buenos Aires poem. So maybe we ll--
[tape interruption]
Stern: "Caribella Poems for Sally." Caribella was the place where we
stayedsome cottages on the beach before we built our house.
Definitely
like honey
moon saga
raga
we tick
toke
suck
poke
love
to lose a little
memory
took; take
the holy must throws away
asks for more
"one draw"
205
Whatever
wave by form
mold; that is to cast
sea surface: slight motion
"Made constant cry," of...
Sonnens che in ;
fragments
of light net
or light scales; fish
could it abin HASHEM
had a thing about shells
that mustabeen
a latercomer
tick, tock:
blue sky says clouds
white wisps say sky
black clouds give rain
quicker, louder than
tock toke
(pepper rock
some seed however)
later is at last next
and at most never
when they say later
they mean next year
dick toke; take the digital
twofer convert analog
noisy, diverting, jiggling
fuzzing the NE-ON beam
rippling split
off sine
light net
sandscan
grain-on-grain
is on or off
black or white man
sun figure on shadow ground
HASHEM 1
s geometry
tick time
toke time
real time
in paradigm
zwei herzen
im drei-viertel takt
206
time out -then
for refufleeing
applying then to here
there to now
collasemblaging
ein denkmal
oder poem-think
take a word image
just before you
MT your mind
and put it up there
so HIGH
on the screen
for the whole set
when they say later
they mean when
tick bites clock
in the heart
of how many jewels
lies a crystal harp
vibracounting
like Hertz said
"the
consequence of the image
is the image of the consequence"
or could it habeen
oneightyout
tick
precise
tock
by one figure
plus or minus
in front
how many
do you want
on the head
of a chip
IRIE
you light it
says Coolbrown
passing the Chalice
challenge and honor
aliyah mit mishabaiachs
iashakeuach
und auch Gut Yontev
207
einz. tick, zwei, zwo. tock,
drei. vier. fiinf. sechs. sieben
in der schule wird geschrieben
in der schule wird gelacht
bis der Lehrer pitsch-patsch macht
tick pitsch. toke patsch.
corporeal information
constipation
Burlean war ihm zu gross
da scheist er in die hos
The Capital? No: the principle!
It was too big, so HE shit in HIS pants
Shat
tock
chick s blood
or cock s
Under the corner post
Keep the blessing
on the house
BARUCH HASHEM
du bist ausgespielt
between cycles
makes more sense
than when later was
"the circumference
of a circle
infinite in size
is a straight line"
discontinuous intensity
ie: perscriptive description
it s all downhill
the effective zenith noise temp
proving big bang cosmology
Pagelsaid or like shticknick s
"to is a preposition, come is a verb"
plus or minus one click tock
someoneelsewhere teetertots
over charged threshold capacity
triggervolting void
tail to mouth
what does (all) that mean
heterodoxy
take
nihilist
toke
208
have sheet music
will travel
but can t read
"if
you can t count
don t blow" tach
on the autobahn
von OSSIstrasse Koln
zum Diisseldorf Flughaft
the 230E sprung de speedreader
as we spritzed to the double line of trees
no tick
spring raang
no toke
flight instead
precise image
snow on the tube
fragments
project the net
each throughbetween
perturbation
expancontracting
golden tracegrid
surface rippled
bottom ridged
x wind, z tide
and y sky
by Yah s way
ARCO IRIS
within the rain s bow
as in the beginning
IRIE
netsfull cloudstuff
spreadnipplebirded
sooncomewave
topologless
tops toke to tick
GAM ZEH YAVOR
too shall pass: tock
fighting the waves
easier to ride
in the going direction
209
"trot trot to Boston
trot trot to Lynn
trot trot to Salem
and home home agin"
keine heimat
gibt auch heimweh
viele fraeen
ohne worter
out of focus
hocus -locus
tockless token
only one day right
the day before too early
the day after too late
the song of Reblochon
according to Entremont
64K: just a little memory
to hold a few transactions
in hard copy
original erased
magnetic memory only
pig poke
ticks
to the stretch
of momentum
drives pendulum
peg after peg
cog, bit, byte
like net
yet not line or dot
pattern or particle
BORUCH SHAIM KVOD
MALCHUSO L OLOM VOED
"He who dig the pit
gonna fall into it"
such hard work pit-diggin
too toke to tick
along ahead
SLAH LONU
Sometimes
reading, saying
the same words
every day
210
s too much
MHAL LONU
one boss enuf
between rat n pack
goose n egg
pit n fall
KAPER LONU
"what laid the golden egg
don t kill the goose"
who wants to think so fast
that it moves t
take it down
by half-step at a time
easier than riding the gains
tryin
1
to be good
plus or minus really
sick of tick already
ECHAD ECHAD
cool running
you don t even know
how to make the corners
share a bed
right forever
T AMID T AMID
ONE TICK, TWO TOCK
THREE TORE
FOREVER JAHOVAH
in your bowl
burning
fuckinsunsea
salty nip n 1
thrust
inertialcush
come to ocean bed
rocking
under the sea grape
over the fallen dreadnoughts
The Philosopher King
& The Rasta Dreadlocks
yook a yut
seed is for the next
generation
211
later shock
tock
Lovebird, Lilly, Pipe
"Never break the chain- -
pick up the pieces and go home-
yesterday s gone"
BORACHU ES ADONAI HAMVORACH
climbing backup
reverbeat
thout toke
laterhigh
on the going
to come stroke
cumulative
where would you be
tockcountick
through
from either end,
side, edge,
special rate
excuse me please
that s easy
Are you The Happy Apple?
inoutorwhatfer
"cat fur to make
kitten britches"
Esther, the Eureka
I found it
cake baker
first mother-in-law
silvertipped
dark roots of
extended lines
sphinctered
out of the way
they really push
muchacho
play by play
cheers and whistles
let highgones be
I feel up
to recongnizing it
but not investing, transforming
212
happenstance
"makes me feel
feelfeel. . ."
libidinous
a non- illuminating source
low-threshold hard-to-get
gated to the power of quarg
"your love is lifting me
higher"
when you can t fly
substitute don t satisfy
ADONAI ECHAD
/
Mucho me lor con salsa
with hot chops
sticks and gums
Condado Lotus Flower
picante; coionudo
sin cebbolos
Corona frio
headrising meniscusward
insert fortune cookie
"it is better to know
nothing than to know
what isn t so"
over to 756
cross the plastic bridge
where the Great Wallenda
fell off the wire
licking the knotless Corona
Alhambra florfino
"Hiio. Hi io"
Maduro seguro
the morning net
scurrying, oscillating, rebeating
sun-jewelled
and this only
approach
the surface to penetrate
edging closer
mounds revealing
threatening, promising
soreness after lust
213
into experience
the medium
too deep to glimpse bottom
fathomable, yes
but reflective
onyxive, mirrorable
JAH-MAKE-YAH
sun spliffed down
by Kaiser s: snapper, king or conch
"is the hat part of your worship"
the whole thing
good for the structure
overpowering intelligence
ADONAI MELECH
I & HIGH
seen; overstood
the days blow away
JAH blows
some trip
lots of shit
to spread
pure blossom
like cotton
red pepparock
after Good Hope,
after Mount Airy,
after Orange Hill,
JAH said way
up to all levels
ADONAI MOLOCH
Many are called but few are
(I thought these were
to pass around)
chosen to be
or to act
und auch meer licht
bei mir bist du
ADONAI ECHAD
Goethe s last look
when it falls
into your head
you gotta catch it
das meer ist blau NOW
214
earth rain and sunshine
hits pain frame
Alice Dee Tokeless
almost a square
as a rollin 1
stone
zig-zaggin
wider tick easy
weiter tock
noch einmal
broaden thy
mindware
somehere
to get there
straightaway
throughput line
anywhere
highfree
safety or
salvation
ENUF TICK
NOT ENUF TOCK
hertz ing from
the pulse toke
MORE OR NO MORE
pollutref solution
ADONAI YIMLOCK
L OLOM VOED
like Borges
I & I saw a number
nor beast nor bird
"between ten and one
but not nine, eight, seven, six, five etc."
or like Ezekiel s
wheel in the middle
of the air
IRIE
dump who and what
I & I & I THREE
a company of us
indefinite; no count
Hanschen klein
geht alein
auf die weite welt hinein
ELOHAINU. VAILOHAI. AVOSAINU
215
Down is just a point
of view along the beam
converging, pre-discrete
post-impact prismatic
regenbogen like
Torahtext fragmented
eachevery fragparticle
mit message intact
when MESH1ACH shoots his load
OVINU MALKAINU
hieroglyphic
dervishcap
moirespiral
like top
spinabsorbing
web keeper of secrets
where is falling
off my horse
in the Koran
I hear you
it s all there
you are only responsible
for what you understand
can be forgiven
for what you have
forgotten
AL HAIT SCHECHOTONU L PHONECHU
"rolling your own shit
like a syllogism"
when both have one
they don t do it
drop it, blow it,
tickless TACHLIS
speak in the language
they understand
how could you know
what I discovered
a broken reflection
I & I am G-D
and you are G-D
the difference being
I KNOW I AM
SHMAH YISROAEL
ADONAI ELOHAINU
ADONAI ECHAD
216
Byerly: So Jamaica inspired your German or Hebrew?
Stern: Oh, I don t know. The whole nine yards. That was a long time
ago; that was over ten years ago. It grew, grew, grew, and it
didn t all get written at once. One doesn t even necessarily
remember all the poems. I love this title "Hy(and dry)perbole.
"
[Laughter] I m not going to read it.
I m looking for one which I m not sure is in here. I talked
about "Poemthink" during the tape--. As I said, it s a poem that
I thought of when I was in bed one day, and I thought about not
writing down poetry, but then I wrote it down. I delivered it as
my contribution to the Reality Club. It was published in the
issue of Cybernetics which I gave you a copy of. It s still meant
as an idea of not writing things down. I do still think that s an
interesting practice.
"Conspire": A Poem for Radha
Stern: Oh, here s the poem for Radha, which was from 83, wow. It s
called "Conspire," which means "breathing together," right?
synchronize
to the present
personal particular
synchronized to
cumulative eventuality
but stuck in the middle
right here now
stuck is always
some point
in the middle
not before before
like before first
or in the beginning
hysteria
to breathe with
con spire
the great unstuck
nuthin to worry about
relaxed behind
waiting, not breathing stress
217
pounding, accelerating
double time or whatever
next week, ninety days, always
blow out your drum
take it down deep
swallowing love,
gold n 1
stuff
criss n 1
cross
wheels n 1
world
to eight-sided dying
is not exactly STOP
but conspiring
breathing together s
out; one two three
forever
"Poemthink"
Stern: There s a lot of poems here, but I just am not going to read them
all. There is one that I wanted to read, but I can t find it. So
I will get myself on to "Poemthink":
POEMTHINK
is a process
I can describe
but not demonstrate
for you: describe
but not demonstrate
first about think
do you know much
how you think?
how other people
thank, thunked, thoughted
how conscious thought?
your thoughts?
can you hear yourself
thinking? you can?
one way of thinking?
an only way?
218
if you can hear it
is it in words thinking
I don t know
if I think
that most thinking
is in words
or can be heard
but the think
poemthink
I m describing
not demonstrating
is in words
and when I poemthink
I can hear it
inside hear it
if that s hearing
sometimes
I even catch myself
moving my mouth
though I m not speaking
out; not out loud speaking
there s not a large literature
on the mechanics of think
as something to learn
there s lots on thought
of all kinds
but how to think
to use the generators,
switches, crossings...
pardon the metaphors,
semaphores, phospors...
just how to think
have you conversation,
communication, learning
on think process?
the next jump
( . .with care. .
in the presence..)
personal history
recollection
in re: collection
ever since before thenwhen
it s been necessary
for me to write (down?)
words, phrases, poemparts, wholes
219
once up on that time
I thought, felt, heard
near that threshold
where there s just so much
you can remember
and you write
to not let it spill
into forgotten
as I in bed lying
about to get up and grab
for extensions
paper and lead
overstood that this moment
with these words
moment with words all mine
connected me-circuit
around the positive
amplifying looped feedback
to me-circuit
contact was and is
contact is the only
love circuit
in bed then
with my unnamed
poemthink riff
vanished, disappeared
but recognized
evanescent artifact
trace element
flashing imagination scan
follow or not to be
motion enormous scale
off the balancing act
between now and then
sometimes you can keep it
to yourself
one to three forever
life
this time around
provides plenty
more or less
alone time: frinstance
driving, waiting, being
and a lot of time
around others
220
not with them
enuf moment inertia
language compatible
with your head
for poemthink mindware
you: programmer, artificer,
wordstringer
however many
you can fit, squeeze, allow
in this /that moment
of poemthink consciousness
along a thread
through your maze head
on stretched, condensed line
jump-rope words
for each point
in figure
nude, of speech, geometric
catch it
when it falls
into your head
wrap or trap it and gofer it
reach high over
one follows another
piggyback
jump brother
in the presence
of a word care
center as in potwheel
or scatterseed
you a muthahword grabber
only if you do
poemthink poem think
poemthink
stuck on a noun
in your deck
pin-stripes
and single-breasteds
a little tight-assed
like the Troppian cow
by the stream
plop it go
loosen word-rein
or chop em into alpha bet
221
any foreign language
especially those you
don t know well
a poemthink fountain
why?
if you don t like it
you don t have to do it
not like drugs
something you can
make up your mind about
without trying
poemthink
a totally different head
than poemwrite, speak, read
having described
not demonstrated
poemthink
others have tried it
liked it and not
changed, added, used
it replicates
there s that how many question
of holding like a bowl
how many letters, words, lines
can you maintain, juggle
transform and back out of
momentum to loop
the moebius strip, klein bottle,
ryan tube topology
are you coming along
or copping
are you in poemthink
let s take 5
first poem thinks
for everyone
Then I waited a few minutes. Then I went on:
take whatever you had
weigh it as experience
could this become something
truly meaningful in your life
get into it
222
off on it
rubadub poemthink
not a blanket or a towel
tell the truth
there s no weight
when you re carrying
poemthink
because the only rule
is let go
when you re through
don t hold, write, store
memory is both a virtue
and a vice
as the Roshi bakes
and the Rebbe comes
years ago I quoted
"if
you can t count don t blow"
for poemthinking mindware
counting is slowing
bubbles is more like
the kind of blowing it is
in your mouth like pebbles
in your head like
poemthink words
a few rattling
reassembling
daisychaining
huggable
untouchable
WORD esses
but there s a limit
interruptus
poemthink no regrets
for lost nuggets, shards
a word for each eye
behind the retina
with fists against closed eyeballs
phosphoring in the Rodinpose
the Poemthinker at it
if you re remembering
you re doing it
--you re not doing it
if you remember
you can do it
do it
223
jump cut or fast fade
why not try a hexagram
barnstorming was also
a popular pastime
like mah-jong
still on your first poemthink
have another quickie
on the house NOW
take the no out of now/NOW
(I had another space in there, and then:)
"Do words and thoughts
follow normal rules or do they not"
Stern: Is poemthink that question?
or maybe according to Hofstadter
poemthink is an "isomorphism"
"an information preserving transformation"
more likely Ovidian metamorphosis
now tell me the difference
which is one of the connections
between words
actually
its not the poemthinking words
that really get to you
give you the juicy joy
of insight breathing together
but the web; connective tissue
intervals, silences, voids
poemthink: how to
just keep it going inside
for your my self
not really enuf play
to get your bearings
not enuf happening
for keepsake
insufficient nutrition
for the spirit in media res
according to William James
"much of our thinking
consists of trains of images
suggested one by another
of a sort of spontaneous revery...
224
(which) leads nevertheless to
rational conclusions both practical and theoretical."
Jung has thinking divided:
"active; an act of will...
passive; a mere occurrence..."
and writes, "thinking...
brings the content of ideation
into conceptual connection. . .
linking up ideas . . .
to an act of judgment...
whether intentional or not..."
,
he quotes Baldwin,
"The individual must use his old thoughts
his established knowledge
his grounded judgments
for the embodiment
of his new inventive constructions.
He erects his thought...
in logical terms, problematically,
conditionally, disjunctively
--projecting into the world
an opinion still personal...
Thus all discovery proceeds ..."
and Wundt
"a further important consequence
of the interaction of sound and hearing
is that many words come to lose
their original concrete significance
altogether and turn into signs
for general ideas...
In this way abstract thought develops..."
and Anatole France
"What is thinking
we think with words . . .
the perfected cries of monkeys and dogs . . .
onomatopoeic cries of hunger, fear and love..
to which have become attached
meanings that are believed to be abstract..."
high headstart
drawing away from: abstract
coasting between the edges
in formation
out of formation words fly
try poemthink
225
as re-creation, sport, pursuit
of words, stepping-stones
poem think way
time-passing, concentrating climatic
aware magnetic practice
words to and from
poemthink
edutain, elevate con
sciousness
expandcontract
blessed aha syndrome
down and out with it
take full count
instant word
pattern recognition
poemthink
no end of wordtences
meaning sound
on the going to come
triggerstroke
description not demonstration
aren t you ecstatic
you have the rest of your life
to poemthink
no iwouldn t call it
a kind of meditation
true i do think
just about anyone can do it
maybe it is something like
whateverthename s ideas about
yes open to questions, advice,
insight, love, peace
it is possible
that it is possible
it is possible
that it is possible
it is possible
that it is poemthink
So that was a lot of fun at the time, and it was well
receivedwhich in a sense was surprising to me, but welcome
nevertheless.
226
"Checkin 1
the Set"
Stern: This is a poem which was written in March of 96 for my grandson,
Christopher, who was murdered that week. It s titled "Checkin
1
the Set." The kids around here go up to Bolinas Ridge on Mount
Tamalpais to check out the sunset. "Checkin
1
the Set." For
Christopher:
there was nothing to forgive
then murder impossible to forget
drove your express spirit beyond
this back beat of no time
like no-ow-now presence gone
remembering your cramped tears
homesick ready for return
stone buddy cool dude games
Gofer Topher an 1
Rasta Grandpa twogather
inhaled our drug o choice
voicing synched to Stop The Violence
snorkeling over Poetreef coral heads
life s thick if it s not
where is it there you re gone
to be scattered ashes
on Tamalpaian peak
highbeam grin turned to us
from twenty one years of photolit
token keepsake images portending
immediate fatal finality
that shot too unexpected
to be so true
I read it last night to Ivan and his wife, Ruth, but I broke
down in the middle of it. But I managed it this time. It s
still, I guess, very recent. He and I were quite close, but
simply in an emotional bond. He and I were very far apart in what
our intentions and motivations in going through life were. I was
hoping [chuckles] that we would get closer on those points, too.
Cut off in a horrible way.
227
"Against the Main Gain Game"
Stern: This is the last poem I put into type. I always carry my little
portable Canon Typestar number 10 typewriter with me, either on
batteries--. It s the most wondrous little extensionas Marshall
referred to toolsthat I ve ever found because I need to see
things in print. I write in longhand to start with, but it isn t
until I see it in print that I know how the meter of the words
really works against the meaning and against the sound or for the
sound. That s a heaven-sent instrument to me, to be able to have
somethingeverybody says, "Why don t you have a laptop?" Then I
have to bring a printer, right? Or I have to go find one. But
this little thing, for a little over a hundred bucks, I get
hardcopy, and I can retype, and it has a little bit of seventeen-
letter memory, and I find it the most useful thing for me. This
poem which I did in Buenos Aires a couple of weeks ago- -right
after the death, actually, but nothing to do with that, I don t
think. It s called "Against the Main Gain Game."
out of whose mind are you
when you re out of your mind
hard to find original audiofactotem
sound bit by byte gebissen
iiber gewissenschaftereisen
made em up as you go along did ya
astral travelers already waiting for whatever
comes and goes against their gain scale
sounds of many hands ; one being all or more
as clapstick cuts take in and out to fin
the end of . . .
changing lanes as if you were jellyroll
fill full passed the convexed meniscus
& he that has no time to long for succor
overstood up for the record gap
down, back and forth, round and round
that sound of no; no hand is raised to thee
resuwrecked speakers cone ripped beatific highglows
took it; left it begatting obscure memoria
disappointments of expectation
happenings to be or not
even that it is possible
to be possible repetetition
history being still now
Baruch Sholomain
228
I tend to make up words, especially in recent years. I have
a lot of made-up words in my poem. I mean, the German is a made-
up word, and this is the first time I ve ever made up a word in
Hebrew. It s made up of shalom, which is "peace," and omain,
which is "amen." I think it works.
"The Idea of Order at Key West"
Stern: Last, I wanted to read this poem of Wallace Stevens .
Why would I
want to read somebody s else s poem? Number one, as a kind of an
homage and as a reverb. This poem has driven me through the
yearsas I said before, it was the subject of a radio poetry
series that the Ford Foundation sponsored when we were at KPFA,
and I believeand I don t mean this immodestly--that because I
read it for so long and for so many years that I understand this
poem at least as well as the poet. And we had him reading it, and
I remember his faltering that tape exists in the archive at KPFA
--and we have a tape of Lew reading it, who understood it very
well. But I feel I ve reached a higher stage of this poem. This
is a poem which I think has more levels on it and is more
perfectly created or wrought than anything that I know of in the
world of poetry, and it s called Wallace Stevens "The Idea of
Order at Key West."
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
229
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striving there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon
The maker s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Gerd Stern, Raymond Stern, and Otto Stern, circa 1985,
Rene Di Rosa, Gerd Stern, Zalman Stern, and Abram Stern at the Di Rosa
Preserve, Winery Lake, Old Sonoma Road, circa 1990.
Tikki Arria, Gerd Stern, and President Carolos Andres Perez of Venezuela
inside 360 projection dome, "Caracas Para Todos".
Gerd Stern and Radha,
Gerd Stern and Randolph Hodgson, owner of Neal s Yard Dairy, London,
circa 1995.
230
IX CONTEMPLATIONS ON BOHEMIAN LIFESTYLE
[Interview 7: July 2, 1996] ##
Chronology with Leaving Home
Stern: The chronology is something that tends to evade me in any case,
and I have a feeling that during our first taping sessions at
least, I got confused about the dates of my own escapades during
those years. What stability there was, I think, was in where I
lived, the sequence when I left home first to move into a
furnished room, and when I moved on to the Village. Then the
apartment that I shared that I described with Dick Winard who was
born Winansky. That s just kind of a New York or East Coast
thing, it s on the West Coast too, the Jews changed their names,
right? Winansky becomes Winard, Rubenstein becomes Douglas,
Zimmerman becomes Dylan.
Migrating to the East Side
Stern: Anyway, so I moved down to the Village, and then from there I
migrated all the way over to the Eastside, Stanton Street off the
Bowery. And each place had a different effect on me. You know,
my first acquaintance with sex and drugs. I don t think I ever
had had even a notion that there was such a thing as narcotics or
drugs, sequestered in Washington Heights, known as "Frankfurt on
the Hudson." The whole idea of consciousness expanding was later.
The use of drugs wasn t really thought of as that then, it was
just thought of as getting high. Whatever that meant to whoever
said it. Certainly it meant different things to different people
that I knew.
231
Moving to a Coal Bin
Stern: And from there, I moved to a coal bin, an actual coal bin in the
Village on the corner of Fourth Street. It was really cheap. I
had to clean it out and it kind of suited my Germanic-Jewish anal
temperament, probably, cleaning out things and painting them and
reconstructing them. But I did enjoy all that stuff. It was
later on, as I told you, when I tried to make it as a journeyman
carpenter that I felt out of sync with people who could hang
doors, especially old ancient doors with coming apart frames,
thrown on a pile. I was a good carpenter, I really was, but you
know when people don t like whiskers and they don t like Jews,
they get rid of them one way or the other.
Getting Back to California
Stern: Then it was from coal bin to David Raucher s, up in Chelsea. He s
mentioned in the first interviews. And then from there to Elaine
Goldman s. To Black Mountain, back to New York, back to Elaine s
out to California. And I m still doubting that I ve got it right.
Somehow, there are so many circumstances and so many relationships
compressed into what seems to me now to have been an extremely
short period of time altogether that I can t weave them into what
I view as the actual design of that time, you know like there s a
thread there which is obviously escaping some part of the fabric.
But that s how it is. Now, certainly there are--Ellis Kramer,
okay. Ever since we started I ve been trying to remember the name
of the translator from the U.N. and it was Ellis, was his first
name, Kramer his family name.
Pivotal Occasions
Stern: You know the pivotal occasions. I remember meeting both Virginia,
Ginny, through Isaac Rosenfeld, and Elaine at Ellis s and how that
fits in to where I was living. Sometimes it makes perfect sense,
then at other times when I try and go back I hit time s stumbling
blocks, out of sync with each other. I find it a rather
fascinating experience to go back and do some research about
things that have real locuses, like when one went to a hospital or
when one published something, things you can use as points of
reference. I m trying to do that, and I will over time,
232
particularly if we get to deal with all the artifacts in my attic,
I think we will come up with a fairly well constructed timeline.
Richard Wirtz Emerson s Archives
Stern: There are some people that need to be relocated. For instance, I
do not seem to own a tape of the puppet play that I wrote with
Jack Gilbert called "Don t Flee the Scene Salty". That was
recorded by Richard Wirtz Emerson who at that time lived in
Sausalito. He probably had the largest archive of San Francisco
and Northern California poet recordings, and he started recording
when recording was still in its earliest stages. I ve never
managed to recontact him and he may not be alive, I don t know,
but if he is--I mean he s got things which the Bancroft would
probably be strongly interested in. And then the puppet play was
one of them. He has recordings of all the people that were around
the San Francisco Poetry Center and all of the poets that came to
visit. There were a lot of people in the Bay Area at that time,
Spicer and his group. Well, we know the groups and the groupies.
There s nothing that I ve said which is tangible. I mean I
haven t given you any examples except for the places I lived, but
it seems vague to me. For instance, I left Black Mountainhow do
I characterize that event? It was some kind of a disillusionment.
Disillusionment in Life
Stern: I have periodic disillusionments with situations or personas in my
life. I note that those are critical points, like leaving Black
Mountain. Okay, so I thought that Albers was like my father and I
didn t want to study with the person who came to replace M. C.
Richards. What does that have to do with the fact that when I was
working in Venezuela and we were performing all these idealistic
social action courses with ministers and potentateswhen that all
fell apart, I experienced the same sort of disillusionment, and I
described it when Lew Hill committed suicide.
Lew Hill and KPFA
Stern: I described that that was the central event in the creative
community in the Bay Area, I believe. KPFA was a major input into
235
Stern: Recall. And I was trying to recall a lady English poet, I
couldn t remember who it was. And yesterday on the plane I
remembered it was Edith Sitwell. Why not? I was comparing the
kind of voice quality that Jacqueline Onslow Ford had to Sitwell.
I think it s legitimate. The threads, you know, of Ivan and my
interaction. I mean, Julia did the lettering for my first book of
poems, which is hand lettered and lithographed, and Ivan did the
drawings. Ivan and I made the first film we ever made together
with Michael Callahan s help on sound. He worked on our
multimedia pieces with us here. He s the person really in my life
except for my sister and brother and stepmother who I ve known
longest.
The Post Office
Stern: The post office is a kind of subculture, at least it was at the
time that I worked there as a young man. It affected my
experiences profoundly because I hadn t grown up in anything that
resembled these kind of large, darkish rooms with fairly frantic
activity going on with people handling hundreds and thousands of
mail and sorting them manually into bags, which I guess is no
longer the way it s done. At that time I worked both at our local
Washington Heights post office delivering mail, which- -heavy bags
you know, very heavy bags on your back, leather, trudging through
snow. The temps are hired especially during Christmas season.
Anyhow, later I worked in the general post office downtown, and it
was I mean they were factories, they didn t make anything, they
just transferred pieces from one place to the other.
**
Stern: And people stole from the mail, I mean I was amazed.
Byerly: From the mail?
Stern: From the mail. I worked with this guy who had a specialty. Every
time a little bag which had a dental laboratory s name on it would
come by, he would snag it and stash it somewhere, and later in the
day he d somehow get it into the John and he d look into it and if
it had gold crowns, he would take the gold crowns out. Now, you
know, I suspected something. We were fairly friendly and he was
an older guy than me. I asked him what was going on, and he
freaked out, but he finally told me, and I found it impossible to
believe that this guy had been doing this for years and nobody had
ever caught on, I mean how many dental laboratories can there be,
you know? Losing crowns every time. Of course he didn t catch
236
Byerly :
Stern:
Byerly:
all of them, but he caught quite a lot of them, it was like
fishing. Every day s a fishing day but not every day s a catching
day, they say in Jamaica.
The post office was an unsettling experience, a lot of
hierarchy and a lot of bosses and a lot of resentment between the
workers and the supervisors, and I began to understand things that
I hadn t understood, like Marx for instance, right? I mean, how
can the middle class really understand what was going on in labor
environments? I had a series of working experiences which have
put me into contact with very different worlds . The mines and
refinery in Nevada which I talked about, the Puerto Rican electric
wire factory, carpentry, the difference between working with an
old ship s carpenter, Ivar, who was Jane s mother s last love, and
working, putting nails in endless tract roofs, these are
completely different worlds. I experienced all of them.
Okay.
Okay, should we go on?
Yes.
More on Early Reminiscences
Radio
Stern: Moving out into the hall from my bedroom had a number of
consequences because I had a habit of reading under the covers or
at least in the dark, the more or less dark in my original room.
There was a door with glass panes which were covered, but I had
managed to get a little corner out of the bottom of one and let
some light in. I could put the book on the floor, I had to get
out of bed to do that, and I would read for some hours after I was
supposedly asleep. I was always upset with my schedule. My
Germanic father s idea of when one had to go to bed if one was my
age had the effect of my never being up to listen to what I wanted
to listen to on the radio. The radio was a major experience in
those days.
Byerly: When was this?
Stern: This was when I was nine, ten, twelve, thirteen. It opened up
whole worlds which, you know, I didn t read the New York Times, we
didn t have television. President Roosevelt was a major hero in
237
my extended family, and he spoke very often. Whether it was
serials or variety shows, the breadth of life that radio
demonstrated was very exciting.
Museum of Modern Art
Stern: Finding the Museum of Modern Art s film archive and being able as
a student to get in without having to pay at all in those days was
completely out of my experience and I immediately understood
that s where I belonged.
Interesting thing is that even though I had all this visual
input at that time, I never considered becoming a visual artist
until much later when I returned to New York from California and
started turning my poems into objects, or simulacrums of objects.
All this from reading under the covers. Well here I got
moved out to the hall, and the hall was out in the open. I
couldn t do nothing right. I had to get my grandmother to buy me
a flashlight and batteries so I could really--! remember reading
The Fountainhead under the covers. The Fountainhead was published
a long, long time ago.
Byerly: Was it really? Ayn Rand?
Stern: Yes, I believe so. Well, let s check that one.
Byerly: Yes, she became very popular in the early sixties, right, but she
could have been around then, and that was her classic.
Stern: Maybe that s just a figment of my fertile imagination, you know.
If it wasn t Ayn Rand, what was it?
Almay Cosmetics
Stern: Since Almay Cosmetics was a part of Schefflin, we had an
extraordinary supply of liquor which somehow wound up in our
office through various, not necessarily straight maneuvers. And I
became very popular over in the Village because I was able to
bring bottles of scotch, I think it was--I can t remember what the
brand was, I think it was Black and White or something like that,
but it was really good stuff which most of my friends could never
238
afford. Anyway, I didn t keep that job very long. That s the end
of that one.
Mona Carmel and the Ideational
Stern: The people from Music and Art High School just kind of spread out
all over the place. Mona Carmel, a fine painter from there,
followed me down to the Village. She had I guess what you d call
a crush on me. She used to bring me food. Each painter s visual
sensibility kind of took me in a different conceptual direction.
I related very strongly, I think, in the late forties to the
potent possibilities of visual images. I read a lot of, you know,
Arnheim. Of course that also involved a lot of the people who
were down in Black Mountain, thinking or writing or painting along
those lines. Ideational--you know, the interface between the
image and the idea. Remy de Gourmont wrote that the image was
just a worn out idea. I can t remember the exact quote. "The
idea is merely a worn out image" is probably the exact quote.
That s the reverse of what I was saying, see. You got to figure
ground reverse rightly. What does that do to time when you get
that? It doesn t make sense, doesn t make sequence. If you think
sense is sequence, you re in trouble anyway.
Byerly: It s a philosophical question.
Stern: Mona was in Philadelphia at the Temple School of Art with Fran
Deitsch. Fran was the daughter of a rather cultivated, wealthy
Jewish family that lived up on Central Park West. Had a lot of
interesting art, and had an actual room which had been removed
from some manor in England and reconstituted, but not totally
museum- like. You could actually, if you were permitted, sit in
the chairs. She had been involved with a jazz trumpet player and
junkie, Frankie Newton. We were pretty close for a while.
She later married a Landesmann who came from a St. Louis
antique furniture family, and he had the magazine Neurotica in the
Village which published Allen and Carl Solomon and various people
in that period right after I got out of the hospital. I was on
the men s side, and I needed somebody to take me out for weekends.
Elsie Peterson would come in and sign me out. Various other
people would sign me out. But from signing me out once or twice,
Elsie became aware of the hospital, and before I was whisked out
when I was finked on by Allen and Carl, she was on the women s
side. I mean, here was somebody that I d known outside, and all
of a sudden we re in a Friday night hospital event, which is the
only time when men and women are together, we re dancing.
239
Byerly: You mean she had been admitted?
Stern: Yes, she had been admitted.
Byerly: From taking you out?
Stern: Well, that s how she found out about the place, but--
Byerly: Oh, and so she decided she needed to be here too?
Stern: Right, right. I mean, she was crazier than I was, for sure. Like
I said, she wound up as a real bag lady. Terrible. But I saw
the Landesmanns a couple of years ago in London where they ve been
living for many, many years. Fran wrote a lot of popular song
lyrics. I saw them after like, what, thirty years of not having
seen them, or just about. It was kind of reminiscing. But I
couldn t quite match the periods, I couldn t get a good sync going
with my now and their now. We didn t have that much trouble
syncing the past. With some people, it s like you see them twenty
years later, it s just like you had been with them all that time
and others, you know, there s that hiatus gap.
Music As Ma lor Influence
Stern: But you know, jazz has been a major input all through my life, and
then music in general. Always, I ve woven a blend of ethnic and
classical and jazz. Of course, in the last fifteen years, reggae
and ska and all of the Caribbean modalities.
Ska
Byerly: Explain ska.
Stern: Ska is very poetic in nature because the Caribbeans tend to rap
and chant and go into rhythmic, verbal convolutions, which I can t
follow. It s a backbeat. I understand what a backbeat is, but I
can t, you know, verbalize to it. Although I m fascinated by the
conventions of those forms, they re not forms that I want to
experiment with, really. I do like to speak my own poetry. I
prefer to do that than to print it really, but one gets limited
exposure that way, I mean only when one chooses to read to
whomever one s with.
240
Black Mountain and M.C. Richards ##
Stern: --the question of exactly when it was will have to be settled, but
I went there with great expectations of being able to study with
M. C. Richards, whose work I was not really that familiar with,
but with whom I had met when I went down for the interview, and
she was really inspiring. Isaac had told me about her, also,
ahead of time. It seemed like that would be an experience in
poetry that I could really get into. But the Germanic influence
of Albers combined with the advent of Edward Dahlberg--who was
definitely from another camp altogether and whose mannerisms were
not appealing to mecaused me to split. And I must say that
splitting has been a--
Byerly: Recurring theme?
Recurring Themes /Targets of Opportunity
Stern: Recurring themes in my transit through the world. Splitting back
to New York wasn t exactly a successful strategy. The idea of
California first came from Elaine because she had gone to the
University and she knew the literary climate and she thought that
it would suit my temperament. And then when Bard came along and
invited me, it just seemed like a natural need to go west, and I
did.
Seemed to be what I was saying is that the call of somebody
who says, "Come," is another repeated thread in my life. There s
a call, I m in San Francisco, and Mac calls his ex-wife and me who
are there together. I m still looking for a job, and he says,
"Come on up, work in a mine." Okay, work in a mine. So I come
up.
It was the same thing with Jane. Jane sends me a letter and
basically says come on. "Come on," and I come on, right. There
is a strategy that they teach in the business school at Harvard
called targets of opportunity. I mean, you could interpret your
whole life as response to targets of opportunity, right? It s one
of those rather horrible phrases that is so inclusive. It s kind
of like Arnold Toynbee s theories, right, that you can just kind
of do anything and his ideas will somehow reinterpret themselves
in that particular modality. So, now, here we re interpreting all
these things as targets of opportunity when some other people
would call them coincidences, and what does that mean? What does
being at the same place in some space-time continuum infer, aside
241
from that it is coincidental? So this is like a whole web of
coincidentals, and where theit s called in Hebrew kavana--
intention comes in, is to me very questionable as I tell all these
tales about heads and other people. But a lot of them are about
heads, and you know the head world is a peculiar and particular
world, and, like so many in-groups, it has all kinds of supposed
moralities which are not necessarily actuality.
Byerly: You mean consistent with the mainstream, or actual moralities that
they claim to have and that they don t live out?
Stern: That s right, just like in the mainstream. Loyalty. The same old
virtues .
Byerly: When you mean the head world, you mean heads as in people who
smoked marijuana like from the seventies?
Stern: Yes, yes. And before the seventies. I mean, it was supposedly a
fraternity, right, certain different rules. They weren t
different and they weren t rules, just like you said. Just like
in the mainstream, they were just as opportunistic as anybody
else, and they were just as unable to perform those virtues of
loyalty or whatever they happened to be. But there is the
different bond of doing something which is extracurricular or
illegal or frowned upon. It does put one apart. The apartness is
not as cohesive as people would want you to think it is, in the
same sense that any society or any group has those kind of
behaviors, even our American Cheese Society. You have the same
kind of behavior. It s not really a cohesive in-group. Certainly
we had the Reality Club for many years, boy, I mean people going
in all directions and--
Byerly: Who was we? The Reality Club?
cheese thing?
Was this a seventies thing or a
John Brockman and The Reality Club
Stern: No, the Reality Club is a post-sixties/seventies/eighties thing
which was founded by John Brockman. John comes in later. You
want me to go through it now?
Byerly: Yes, this is relevant to what we are talking about.
Stern: John Brockman came out of Chelsea, Massachusetts. I think I
talked about John and his father toward the end of the tape. Did
I? Yes.
242
He became a leading literary agent in the eighties or maybe
earlier. He formed a club at the time that his literary agency
was really blooming, a club with founding members of which I was
one, The Reality Club. It was simply a convening of a group of
people, one of whom would speak to the rest about something that
he was doing in his field which was current or fairly current
before it became necessarily full-blown or public: maybe parts of
a book or--it dependedscientists, artists, movie people,
whatever. Interesting group of fairly recognizable names.
The protocol was that you couldn t become a member unless
you had addressed the club. Now, that wasn t true. The founding
members, although they eventually all wound up addressing the
club--my address, which came--I think I told you about itafter
Rollo May was "Poemthink", one of the poems that I read to you.
I think what John was doing, and I m very sad that it no
longer exists, was providing a real charge of inspiration through
these convenings. I got a lot out of them. It wasn t necessarily
a matter of who the principal speaker was. Also, it had a lot to
do with who the people were who were sitting around the table or
in the room, what they had to say, and their reactions, because
there was always time for comment, and sometimes it could be very
criticalnegative critical. Scientists, physicists not agreeing
with their con-freres or people in judgement on other people and
even on the literary scene. But it went on for years.
I just spoke today to Paul Ryan, who s a video philosopher
whom I met through working with Marshall McLuhan. He was a
member, and he also misses it quite a bit. There aren t so many
opportunities for people who are in multidisciplinary fields to
get together and just kind of gab.
For John, it was a source of clients because his specialty
was basically non-fiction books which needed to be presented to
the publishing world. Stewart Brand, who as I told you was part
of our early multi-media work and who did the Whole-Earth catalog,
was a client or is a client of John s and John has gotten him
tremendous advance monies .
Jimmy the Greek of Greenwich Village
Stern: Yes, there were in the Village, as is classically sensed in the
stories of the Village, a lot of characters, and they were very
broadly drawn. Jimmy the Greek (his family name was Panagakos)
was basically what we would call at this point homeless. He sat
243
in the cafeteria all day long and he drew. He didn t know that he
was an artist, but he sold his work. He drew straight lines. He
had an incredible ability to draw these straight lines with a very
thin ink pen, and they would go on and on on the one page, they
would cross each other, and then they d become very dense. It
would be some cheap pad that he was working on, and he would sell
them.
it
Stern: The piece would be finished either when somebody would buy it for
maybe a cup of coffee or maybe even something to eat, or when the
paper was covered with so much ink that you couldn t get anymore
on it, right?
His ability to rap while he was doing this was intense. He
had endless stories, and they were entertaining. And he was a
pusher; he would sell you little toothpicks of grass. I don t
know how we ever got high then. We were probably
hyperventilating .
Anyhow, he was one of a whole cast that sat in the
cafeterias in New York. There was one on Sixth Avenue, the
Waldorf, just below Eighth Street. There was another on the East
Side. It wasn t like you didn t know who was going to be there
when you got there; there were people who were always there unless
there were some real mishap. And many of them didn t have places
to live. And others of them lived alone in little rooms or
whatever. It was both men and women, and a lot of the
conversation had to do either with the arts or with politics. The
literary groupsthere were definitely divisions nowa lot of
these people were bi-coastal people. Very few of them had any
relationships with anywhere else in the country, but from New York
to San Francisco and from New York to Los Angeles there were
steady exchanges of people, and I think that s continued to this
time.
Ellis Kramer was a translator for the United Nations, and
somehow, I don t he used to come to the Waldorf because he found
the characters to be extremely entertaining, a lot of them were
old friends of his. People from uptown would come down to relate.
There was Joe Gould who was writing the oral history of the world.
When he died there were many volumes supposedly. I think some of
it was published eventually, or maybe his manuscript never
existed. He had a long beard, kind of like Father Time.
Byerly: Do you have a timeline, anything up here? What s the timeline on
this? It s the forties, fifties?
244
Stern: Oh, this is like the forties, because the late forties, I believe,
was when I was back and forth from the west coast, when I went on
the ship to South America with John, when I lived around the
Village both in the east and the west. I think that s enough from
here.
Nature
Stern: I ve always had this rather pervasive interest in nature,
particularly in fish, amphibians, and reptiles. At one point we
used to--I thought I had told this, but I don t remember it in the
transcription. We used to go at a certain point, I think late
high school, a friend and I, hunting rattlesnakes and copperheads.
It was during the war when you could sell them to the Bronx Zoo
and they used them for anti-venom, even in the Pacific. We did
this, I guess, two years in a row, just when the snakes were about
to stop hibernating. They re very comatose then, and they lie out
on these rocky ledges in the pine barrens in the southern part of
New Jersey. They were fairly easy to catch. We would just throw
them in these canvas bags, heave them into our knapsacks, and then
we would hitchhike home. We used to laugh like hell in the back
of the cars, and the people would wonder why we were laughing. It
was because of the image of what people would think if they knew
that there were all these poisonous snakes in our knapsacks. Once
in a while they would move around and it would just get us totally
hysterical. I think we got seven dollars a piece for them, which
at that time was a lot of money. And we were aiding the war
effort.
But I really had it in my head that I wanted to be an
ichthyologist, which came from having worked with Dr. Myron T.
Gordon of the Museum of Natural History. He was my English
instructor s brother. It s funny, I really thought I talked all
this out .
The Sternist Movement
Stern: The group revolved around a family called the Kisburgs who lived
at that time in the West Village. Later on when I lived with
them, they lived way over on West Street, you know the final
street before the Hudson River. Next to them lived a cellist
named Seymour Barab. He was an extremely talented musician,
instrumentalist, and I enjoyed listening to him practice. I mean,
245
there are these opportunities one has in one s life which-- How
do you get to be in the room when somebody who s a great musician
practices? That s an interesting experience.
But the Kisburgs--he was in the labor field, he was a labor
organizer, and he later became rather well-known, but at the time
he was organizing this group around the principles of a poet in
Israel named Stern. And I became involved in that. My political
leanings at the time were fairly leftish, although it was social
causes that attracted me, as it did I think most of the people at
that time.
Byerly: Social movements you mean?
Stern: Yes, and the problems of people caught in minority or critical
situations. The refugees who were trapped in Europe after the war
weren t really refugees; they were survivors who couldn t get out.
I wasn t that much into Israel as a nation-state or as a military
presence, as it later turned out, but I was really into these
people who had survived what I survived. But I survived in such a
luxurious state really, compared to them, so the opportunity to
try to raise money to buy ships to get them out of Europe seemed a
rather logical extension of what I believed in. Because I wasn t
up to raising money when it came right down to it, but I was up to
sealing envelopes.
It was interesting. One was conscious at the time of the
kind of combination of ideology and the potential of violence that
existed there. And, of course, the guys who got on the ship by
luck, which I think I talked about, spent some time in Acre
Prison, which was no pleasant environment by any means. In fact,
not a month ago I passed Acre Prison and it s still on display,
obviously a horrible place where the British kept their enemies.
My family s interest in Judaism was so peripheral and so
robotimous really. It wasn t until, I think, through Yeats
really--! early became practically addicted to Yeats and his
writing about McGregor Mathers and the Kabbalists--that I became
interested in the Kabbalah. I wentthis is somewhat later but
not muchup to the Seminary which is near Columbia, because they
had all those works and you could read them therelike the Sefer
Yetzirah, which is one of the concise mystical texts of Kabbalah.
The spiritual side of Judaism has surfaced in me periodically, and
later I told you about meeting Rabbi Zalman Schachter, but this
was in this group of Sternists, which was really the first
organized Jewish based activity that I became involved in.
Although it was actually after I had been the counselor at Camp
Kinderwelt which was the group that your anarchist San Francisco
friends came out of in New York originally or their parents--
246
Byerly: From Italy?
Stern: From Eastern Europe, from anywhere.
Byerly: Oh, the Jewish side.
Stern: Yes, the International Workers, the Worker s Circle. Workman s
Circle. This was the Workman s Circle camp. The other person who
came into my life in the Village, the East Village, around that
time was Ethel, now Ethel Hultberg, at the time Ethel Slutsky.
Ethel came out of that world also, and she and a lot of her
friends had been at a farm experience which is supposed to prepare
people to make Aliyah--you know, to go to Israel and become
agricultural on the kibbutzim. She never went, but she had
another vast circle of friends from John Cage, and later on she
and her husband Paul were at Rockland County when I went up there
from California. And we re still very close friends, even now.
Actually her son Lawrence has a gallery on Hayes Street and he s
going to do a show in October. And he s invited me to show some
of my early pieces there.
More on Mining
Stern: On page twenty-six, I pointed out that they had tales of losing
people in the mines. Actually we lost one guy while I was working
there. You had to clean out these many-storied-high tanks. They
were full of fine ore, and if you slipped when you were in there,
you had the safety belt on, but-
Stern: You could slide down the hole, which is at the bottom, where it
went into the next stage of milling, which is a ball mill.
This was the second ball mill in my life. The first one had
been this tiny one at Almay Cosmetics which used little porcelain
or ceramic balls . This ball mill at the Concollar Gould and
Savage Mining Corporation was like a huge tank which rolled around
and used hard steel balls which were about six inches in diameter,
five or six inches, to further grind the ore into finer particles.
There were four different stages of different processes to get the
ore down to the point where you could separate it out with
basically a chemical process.
There were silver and gold ingots. You weren t about to
steal them because they had to be carried out, they were really
247
heavy, but when we cleaned out the ball mill, which we had to do
every once in a while, you would get these little flat pieces
which would be all that was left of a five or six inch steel ball.
And they might have traces of gold and silver on them.
It was interesting, because you couldn t see it in the ore.
The ore was called Andersonite, it was blue with kind of quartz
veins running through it, little rusty places along the veins.
Truly, this one guy I think he didn t have his safety belt on
properly- -he was gone in this tank. He must have fallen into the
ball mill and gotten- -nobody knew. It was a very noisy
environment and you couldn t see very far because of all the dust
and- -goodbye. An employee, and then no trace right?
Early Marijuana Smoking
Stern: I mentioned that when I was in a hospital for supposed kidney
problems. After the hospital, my family made me go to a friend of
my uncle s who was a psychiatrist, but in between there I d like
to add something. They really thought I had a problem with my
kidneys. What the doctor told me--not my uncle whom I hadn t
confessed it to, but the doctor at the hospital whom I had told
that I had smoked dope- -was that after doing all these tests and
worrying that I had to have a kidney operation, he told me it
wasn t anything but the traces of the marijuana in my system that
had caused the warning signs. Now, I ve never really known after
that whether that was some kind of a ploy or whether it was
actually the truth, but I know that he told my uncle about it, my
uncle was very forbidding. Thank God he didn t tell my father,
for whom it would have been even more of an issue, not that I had
easy issues with my father anytime in his life.
Maya Angelou
[Interview 8: July 4, 1996]
Stern: As you know, Maya has written quite a few books, among them some
books of poetry and kind of inspirational stuff, but also her
multi-volume autobiography. After I read the first volume which I
truly enjoyed, she s a good writer, I was somewhat apprehensive
because the relationships that she had had with men with which I
was familiar, because she had told me those stories, were in this
248
Byerly:
Stern:
Byerly:
book and I was due to come soon thereafter. But when the next
volumes came out she had done me the enormous-
Honor.
Honor of leaving me out, which I considered a real boon on her
part. Actually, I mentioned it to her when I saw her, and she
smiled at me and she said, you know, how that wasn t a
relationship that she wanted to write about. She was very angry
about some of her other relationships, both in her family and
outside of her family, and I think in a sense the autobiographical
experience managed to kind of dissipate her anger into this kind
of a- -what do you call that? Would that be sublimation? No, not
exactly. And despite the fact that we had a bad scene at the end,
I don t think our relationship had caused her or me very much
grief. We both got some creative energy out of each other, and,
also, the time we spent together was usefully occupied, both in
working and in social events .
I have a question. Did she consider herself a part of the Beat
scene at that time?
Stern: Hey, none of us did. We thought that the concept of Beat was a
media creation. We used to joke about it, and we used the word
beatific, you know, off-beat, on-beat, out of beat. It s
interesting because the connotations are so broad: there s the
musical connotation, there s the exhausted connotation, there s
the beatific, I can t characterize at the moment connotation. But
nobody that I knew of considered themselves as Beat.
Byerly: Right.
Stern: So to ask if Maya considered herself part of that world, the
answer is yes. But I m sure she never would have thought of
herself as--
Byerly: A Beat poet? That makes sense.
Stern: As Beat. And she s certainly not a Beat. Her poetry is very far
from the beat tradition. It s more in, I would say, maybe even
the spiritual tradition, and she is a great verbalist. She can
capture an audience with her charisma in a way that very few
people can. She s a really great performer in that sense, and she
has a set piece where she speaks and sings of her experience in
the United States. It s just incredible. I mean, it makes you
laugh, it makes you cry. Brings out all the emotions. That
wasn t at the time when I knew her; at that time she was a cafe
singer, but I recently heard her at a university in New Jersey and
I was extremely impressed.
249
I think unfortunately she s suffering from a lot of
arthritis. She s gotten very heavy. And all of us do
inconsistent work. I thought the Clinton poem was a rather
inconsistent piece of work.
Byerly: What did she sing when she was a cafe singer, what kind of
Stern: She did songs like I think I sang part of it to earlier: "Don t
let the sun catch you crying /cry ing at my front door" etcetera,
etcetera. She did pieces in which the emotions were very vivid,
where the message was very clear, and she moved that enormous
skinny body with very little clothing in a way which was so
evocative that the audiences just went mad. As I said in the
previous paragraphs here, with a bill which included Phyllis
Diller and the Kingston Trio, it was really a great evening s
entertainment. Those kinds of clubs--that was at the Purple
Onion--! don t know that they exist anymore, that genre of talent.
Byerly: Well the Kingston Trio and Phyllis Diller are playing here in San
Francisco.
Stern: Really?
Byerly: Yes, I saw it in the paper.
Stern: Right now?
Byerly: Yes.
Stern: Where?
Byerly: I saw it in the paper, I didn t see where.
LSD
Stern: When I talk about acid, what I was talking about is that after my
initial experiences with acid, I got less hysterical, which was a
revelation to me. Most of the people in the acid world, like
Timothy and Richard and Ralph, etcetera, were people who d been
fairly straight and for whom acid turned them into whatever you
want to call it--freaks or liberated consciousness or fanatics. I
had not been straight; I d been fairly far out, more or less crazy
in some sense of the word, which didn t bother me. I didn t feel
bad when people said I was crazy, I felt that it was true, that I
wanted to be there. But after acid, I got a lot straighter. So I
think one of the things it does is that it takes you where you
250
haven t been, or it gives you the possibilities of taking you
where you haven t been. It certainly did that for me.
It was a brief experience. I wasn t one of those people who
kept taking it forever. I never did it often enough to have the
experience wear off completely during the year, year and a half,
two years that I tripped. I had some very good experiences which
reinforced my visions and my ability to deal with the outside
world, strangely enough. Then, at the end, I had a couple of
death trips which caused me to stop using it. I figured I d had
enough.
Byerly: What kind of trips?
Stern: Death.
Byerly: Death?
Stern: Yes, you know, feeling like you were going to die.
Byerly: Oh yes. Very familiar with it.
Stern: Yes. Anyhow, I actually have recordings of one of those trips.
Byerly: You could ask The Bancroft if they would like to have that one (ha
ha).
Stern: They re welcome to it.
Byerly: "Gerd Stern on acid."
Stern: Well it s not only me, it s a few other people too. Hey, those
are, I think, recordings of that time which--
Byerly: Yes, historical artifacts of the seventies.
Stern: This was in Paul Williams s A-frame at Wellfleet on Cape Cod. We
used it, actually, at the psychedelic theater performances in the
New York. Anyway. Okay, I think that finishes that part.
After the Mental Hospital: Life with Father
Stern: After I had gotten out of the hospital in 1948 and Dr. Hambidge
had pointed out to me that I had to choose whether to live my own
life or the life that my father was trying to impress upon me, I
chose my own way. I basically abandoned the relationship with my
251
parents except for very desultory contact, and I didn t feel it
necessary to relate to my father and my stepmother.
So, now, here Gerd gets divorced from his society wife and
he s back being the old reprobate again, and, in fact, my next
experience in which I met my parents was with Judi.
When we got together, I persuaded my parents to receive us
and I came to the house, the apartment building in Washington
Heights right, and I m wearing this buffalo coat. It s like the
shaggiest furriest, big and ancient, not something I bought, it s
something we found right. My hair is like incredible.
The doorman says to me, "Who
might you be visiting in this
building?"
And I said, "Otto Stern."
He said, "You re not visiting Otto Stern."
I said, "He
happens to be my father."
The doorman called him up, he says, "Mr. Stern, there s this
guy down here who says he s your son."
My father comes down in the elevator, he reads out the
doorman--! mean, first of all, the doorman is standing over there
and my father s standing over there and the doorman says
something. My father says, "If
you want to talk to me, come over
here." Yucky scene, and then he tells him, "Who are you to
question whether this is my son or not?"
Okay, then we get in the elevator and then I really get
hell, right? I m there, I walk into this house looking like this,
all right. So, you know, my relationship with my father is
wrecked again.
On top of this, it s just before Passover and they take the
bit in their mouths and invite Judi and me to Passover. I said,
"Well, I would like to bring along Michael Callahan," who they
don t know. Why would anybody named Callahan want to come to a
seder? No!
I walked out the door and told my father, you know--I don t
know if you know the custom, but you put a cup for Elijah the
Messiah or the messianic messenger on the table, and you open the
door and then you say, "Let all who want to come in here, come in
here." It s part of the seder because it used to be held
basically close to the street and poor people who didn t have
252
enough food could come to any seder. I said to my father, "If
Elijah was to knock on your door, you wouldn t let him in." So
that ended another chapter with my family.
Anyway, eventually toward the latter part of my father s
life, and as I got older, we got back together and I felt that I
was doing something which was very necessary in helping him. It
was gratifying, I must say, although it took me away from my own
preferred path. But I ve done that a number of times in my life.
Kinetic Art
Stern: Pieces in the show in New York which Paul Williams and I had
worked on together were basically technology of various kinds of
switching. I was trying to deal with matrices of words and having
the words fit so that they could go in any sequence, and to do
that with lights and mechanical devices seemed to me a very
interesting and exciting way of expressing the relationship
between words which couldn t be done on a page. And Paul, who had
a certain style as a craftsman, developed the boxes and the way it
worked .
Later, on the west coast, I showed those pieces and other
pieces. The collage period was secondary to this initial kinetic
period. There weren t any real collages in the show in New York.
The collages started happening about the time that I went to
California, right after the opening of the New York show. The
principles of combining word and words and small worlds and
universes and matrices rather than in either grammatical sequence
or non- grammatical sequence on a page was an enormous liberation
for me. When I stopped doing the collages and the kinetics and
the audio-visual and started writing pages of poems again, the
poems were of a more developed matrix style. In other words they
more resembled the things that I had been doing in collage and the
audio-visual, so it was a process of visualizing and then the
visualization was kind of a liberation of my ability to put words
together.
I m still involved in that, although restrained by time and
by not being close geographically to Michael Callahan who did all
the audio engineering and the building of the technology which we
used in audio-visuals. Being away from him, I haven t done any
sound work, and I m beginning to feel now that I need to return to
using words and sound and voices.
253
As a Marginalized Poet
Stern: I lived in so many periods in worlds which were full of poets and
painters and dancers and other people involved in the arts, and
they were very different worlds, different cliques and coteries
somehow, except for very short periods of time like the Seven
Stray Cats where there were seven of us poets kind of working
together, but each person s poems were very different.
I ve never felt accepted by fellow poets. In fact I have
felt a certain rejection or disdain for the kind of techniques I
work in. That hasn t bothered me particularly, because I really
like my work. The acceptance that I received in the visual world
was so unexpected and so gratifying that, for years, I didn t even
think of involving myself in the literary circles or of submitting
poetry. I mean, what is the equivalent of showing at the Whitney
and the Museum of Modern Art here and in New York and being asked
to exhibit and do performances in Europe? I mean, this was all
ferment. And then to submit poems to the little magazines even of
smaller reputation or of larger reputations, or even the New
Yorker or Poetry magazine, and you get instantly and repeatedly
rejected, and you think, hey, what kind of a world is this?
it
Byerly: And many poets of your era in the end self published, like
Ferlinghetti.
Stern: Well, you see, when Ferlinghetti first came here, he didn t think
of himself as a poet.
Byerly: He didn t?
Stern: No, not at all, he was just out of the navy, and he had written a
navy novel. He was a prose writer and then he got involved in the
bookstore. Wasn t until after he was involved in owning the
bookstore that he started writing poetry.
Byerly: Oh, okay. Well, he had a Ph.D. in English though.
Stern: Oh absolutely. Oh yes, he s a first class intellect and he s a
great writer. I thought that his new work and poetry was way
beyond anything he d done before, and when I heard his reading at
The Bancroft recently, I was really impressed and also gratified.
It s nice to know peopleso many people sink beneath the waves
through the years . To see Larry with such a great audience and to
know how many copies his books sell, I think it s really
wonderful. He writes in a vein which the public really
254
understands and I don t, and I don t expect that kind of level of
understanding .
__
Art as Preoccupation with Technology
Stern: Well you see, my art spans the historical era of the Beats to the
preoccupation in art with technology, which was a major influence
on me, art and technology, to the psychedelic era, which was also
a technology. There s really not very much difference between
psychological technology, chemical technology and electronic
technology. They re all in the world of vibration and feedback
and the principles obtained through them all.
As far as I m concerned, LSD is frequency modulation. A lot
of people don t agree with me, but I see that very clearly. And
you know, the 60 cycle or multiple scan lines on the television
don t appeal to me. I don t even like very heavy electric
presence around the house. I mean, 60 cycles disturbs me when it
gets too pervasive, but maybe that s simply because I have a lot
of consciousness of it, having worked with technology and having
thought about it and the effects of it. But the era of
technological innovation, let s not even talk about computers, I m
talking about silicon controlled rectifiers, talking about chips
in which you can contain information, audio-visual techniques in
the arts, the back and forth between commercialization and
advertising and media and the arts is what the context of my years
in art have been all about. The speed from which an artistic
movement, let s say, or an artistic style is pictured and
multiplied and sent out can be very deteriorating to the process
of art. Instead of developing a long term approach to your work,
a lot of my colleagues and peers chose very easy solutions which
seemed like that they would be profitable in the art world, and I
always felt that that was not what I was into. I wasn t
interested in exploitation of style as a way of making a living
for instance.
Byerly: So you re saying that your art is a reaction to this kind of
electronic media?
Stern: Not really, because I probably understood more about what the
electronic media was all about through my work with McLuhan and
through the work that we did in multimedia, overload work, and
meditation environments than a lot of other people did. We used
it, but, for instance, from the days of USCO to the days of
Intermedia Systems, when our work was taken out of the context of
255
art and into the context of commerce, I very quickly lost interest
in it.
Byerly: What is this guitar that I m looking at with the collage on it?
What is that about? That s a little bit of what I m hearing you
say that you are resisting.
Stern: Could you give it to me? Well, no, I m not resisting that at all.
That s what I consider the possibilities of poetry not being
necessarily a poem on a page. In other words, there s no real
sequence in this work. However, these are little associations
that make sense. "How to get everything" --"how to get" is one
line. "How to get everything from", on top of it is "spend".
"And you can, what you said, leading nowhere / Yes people make for
talent to receive your important, fixed assets it works with
business, focus, up to the world...." I mean, you can read into
it things which aren t necessarily any property of any of the
individual pieces , but they are connectable if you want to connect
them. The work on the surface can be viewed simply as materials
that are used to cover a form. What does the guitar mean? And
this guitar, which is a wooden guitar form for electric guitars,
resembles for me the guitar formsthis guitar form to me
represents the same guitar form that you see so often in Braque
and Picasso and the art of that time as a kind of a symbol of
muse, you know, of music, of the ability to express. And in
Wallace Stevens s famous poem "The Blue Guitar", I mean, the
symbol of the guitar is powerful. I found four of these which
were being dumped, so I grabbed them. I ve used a lot of
dimensional forms to collage words on, but it seems to me this is
the tune that you played on the guitar, Wallace Stevens on the
blue guitar, but I don t care if it s blue. There s a lot of blue
in this one as a matter of fact.
Byerly:
Stern:
When was it done? When was that piece done?
process always, right?
It s a work in
This particular one was done in February of 1982. Radha knew this
period of my work because she was around when I was doing it and
there wasn t another piece that I wanted to give her. I wanted to
make one especially for her as my daughter, so I chose the words
for what I felt would be an attention focus that had to do with
her world.
Byerly: What you just described to me sounds like lots of ideas that
haven t been categorized. You can associate, you can read into
things, you can see what you want to see in some you know, and you
can connect things . Do you think the symbol of the whole Beat
generation and the seventies was an opening up, of getting away
256
from the staid, repressive fifties and kind of an opening up of
new categories of kind of free thinking, free spirit, openness?
Stern: Well, that s one way of looking at it. I mean, I think the other
way of looking at thatand it s really the same principleis
that what you re dealing with is not product, you re dealing with
process. And I m saying that very purposely. I think I brought
it up beforethe question of understanding that process is
effect, rather than being product, which is content. This is what
we re getting at.
These are words that I used all the time, and when I was
asked with John Brockman and Michael Callahan to consult for
General Electric s Lighting Institute, I went down there and their
motto is "Progress is our most important product." I changed it
on what we made for them, and I said, "Process is our most
important product," and the guy who had hired us freaked out. I
was talking, he got up on stage and he said, "But Mr. Stern,
that s not our motto, our motto is progress."
I can t remember his name, but I said, "I m quite well aware
of that. What I m trying to tell you is that Progress is our
most important product thirty years ago may have been a motto
which led you to where you are today, but you asked us to come
here and tell you what you could do to further yourself in this
particular era and what I m saying to you is think process.
Particularly when you re talking about illuminating the world.
Don t just think about light bulbs, think about illumination."
It was definitely above their heads .
They hired freaks
because they thought it was interesting and exciting and they
might get insight, but then they blocked themselves from our
insights. The problem with the Lighting Institute was that they
were teaching detail product production and they were not dealing
with the issues which people deal with when they decide what sort
of illumination they need in their lives from light, and I m not
even talking about mystical illumination.
I love to work with light. I particularly like to work with
white light, and with intense white light. You go to a restaurant
and the illumination is supposed to be intimate; it s very low,
and you can t see what you re eating, but it s supposed to create
an ambience which fosters the relationship that you and your
fellow diners want . I think that is appropriate for certain kinds
of nightclubs or bars even, but, for instance, in a restaurant
where you are eating preparations which your chef has spent time
creating, the illumination needs to illuminate the food. I ve
made that comment to a number of restauranteers and they re
incredulous: "It s to eat, it s not to look at," which is baloney.
257
Presentation these days is what chefs are so involved in as a
parallel to what the recipe and what the preparation is; the
presentation is as equally important as the preparation, so you ve
got to illuminate it. And that s true in so many fields. I mean,
in the museums there are principles which have to do with how you
perceive an object, and a lot of those principles have to do with
how you illuminate it.
Byerly: Literarily?
Stern: Yes, literarily. And that s true in works of art. For instance,
if I m not careful about the balance of black and white and color
in a piece like this, it starts to get a surface that no longers
involves you in the words. You just look at it as an image. But
if it had enough vibrancy here and a lack of consistency there,
then the words pop out at you, it s not just one little surface.
So in all those things you think about it and then you do, and
maybe they work and maybe they don t.
Relationship between Poetry and Artwork
Byerly: Is there any relationship between your poem, "Poemthink" , and that
piece of art?
Stern: No, not really, I mean--
Byerly: None whatsoever?
Stern: Well, sure, it relates, but the idea of poemthink, and I can
relate it to this, I think I can probably relate any two things
that you ask me to relate.
Byerly: Well that s what I m asking.
Stern: I don t know if it s specious or not. In other words, the idea of
Poemthink came to me one night when I was sleepless and thinking
up poems. I thought to myself, "Now, do I really have the energy
to get out of bed?" I had left my notebook and my pencil
somewhere. Usually I ve got one at the head of my bed because I d
write day and night sometimes. So I thought, do I have the energy
to get up or should I just play around with these lines and not
write them down, I mean why do I have to write everything down,
it s fun to just make them up and hold onto them andthen I was
immediately struck, this was a concept which turned into
"Poemthink". I started writing it. When it was my turn to talk
to the Reality Club here in San Francisco, I got on the plane and
258
was going to do something else entirely as my presentation, but by
the time I got off the plane I had finished the poem.
Byerly: But Gerd, to me your poetry seems like collage. This art work is
collage, and I see a lot of similarity in your poems.
Stern: Well, I should hope so.
Byerly: But you re saying that there s not, it s not of the same-
Stern: Well, it s not connected, but sure they re related. This, in a
way, you could think of as poemthinking , you take these words and
you paste them down together.
Byerly: Yes, it s an action. What you re saying is that there are all
these thoughts running around in the brain, and there s ways of
connecting and associating and putting them together, and you
think this is product of that and poemthink is a product of that.
Stern: If what you re asking is are my poems collages, the answer is yes,
yes, yes. I started a poem yesterday and what am I collaging, you
might ask. Very often what I m collaging are words out of
peoples mouths, or off the radio or anywhere that I find them,
and the associations are originally mine. Whether those
associations are powerful enough or have the energy to convey my
association to the reader is always a question mark. But, then
what else you have is what s called the a-ha syndrome. You drop
enough different information into any matrix and there s some a-ha
for somebody to pick up. That s what we were dealing with in
multi-media. When you ve got one channel going in the literary
continuum, like even an old-style movie plot, rightif a person
isn t into it, they re not into it. There s no way you can
persuade them that that s something-- Well, when you got forty or
fifty channels going, number one, if one or two of them gets lost,
big deal, there s plenty there. There s bound to be something for
every person there to make a weave for themselves of some kind of
informational and emotional content which is meaningful, and if
you superimpose on that a level of meaning which is what your
intention is, then you have an audience, and you have them in your
hands, in your power.
Our major show for many years was called "We Are All One."
Before that, the name was "Hubbub." Hubbub was from Martin
Luther, but We Are All One was ours. The content of We Are All
One is beside the point. We were trying to deal with effect, and
sure, it came out of the psychedelic movement, it came out of the
peace movement, it came out of the Beat movement. We Are All One
is very obvious, right? How to make people feel that in their
minds and hearts is what we did is we presented this matrix of
259
images and we built it up to the point of critical overload and
then we came down off the overload. Originally, we would stop
there and it would leave audiences really fucking jangled, you
know, in an impossible state of mind. It wasn t our intention,
but we were experimenting; we didn t know what we were doing that
well. But then we would come down into chanting and images which
were much more conducive to mandalas and things and people would
leave ecstatic. You know, oscilloscope images, waving infinity
signs.
Byerly: So people liked that, people responded well to it.
Stern: Very well at that time, particularly. That was the time when
people wanted to be reassured that we are all one. I don t think
that s a reassuring concept in the 1990s.
Byerly: We are all one. Well, I don t think people relate to it.
Stern: Not at all.
Byerly: Now, you said that there was a reaction to your poetry that was
not as affirmative as to your art, to your multimedia work. So,
why do you think that was?
Stern: Well because, first of all, the visual arts is a more friendly
community, or was then at least. They were more receptive to
innovation and to experimentation, and wewhen I say we 1 mean
USCO--were ahead of the game. We were really pioneers, and we
were playing with stuff which nobody else was playing with, and it
was very timely and we knew the inputs and outputs relationships
very well, and we had the venues. In other words, the
universities and the museums were receptive. They didn t
necessarily reward us very well for our efforts, schlepping tons
of equipment around the world, but they wanted to see it and they
wanted to expose their audiences to it. These days are very
different. We couldn t do it in the nineties.
Byerly: Right, right.
Stern: And California was the epicenter.
Byerly: Say more about how that world was closed off to you.
Stern: Well we ve talked about the homosexual coteries, we ve talked
about the rejection of women. The academic scene was another
level of removal in terms of poetry. Even to this day, the
American Poetry Society, which is the national poetry forum- -where
Allen Ginsberg is a big shot, a number of people I ve known well
through the past are people who were on the boardthey will not
260
accept me as a poet member. I m supposed to pay a subscription as
a, like, I don t mean this badly, but like you would, like a lay
person, because I don t have the status as a poet. That pisses me
off. I wrote a letter to Stanley Kunitz who s another board
member I ve known. I don t know if he ever got it because I sent
it to the society and not to him. I don t have his home address
at this point in my life, and he never answered me. Of course
he s a man in his eighties, he has that prerogative. But what do
you have to do to prove that you re a poet in this culture?
Byerly: To the Literati?
Stern: Yes, what do you have to do to prove to the academy that you are a
poet?
Byerly: What do you have to do?
Stern: I don t know. You have to have a certain amount of poetry
published, and it s got to be published by real presses, and
you ve got to have awards and grants and things. Now the truth is
that the ferment in poetry today way exceeds what existed in the
sixties or the seventies. I mean there are literally hundreds of
little magazines being published today rather than dozens.
Byerly: It s still really tough, I understand.
Stern: You can get published all you want if you don t care where you get
published. I publish in a little magazine called Ozone which, I
think the stands for orgasm, and it s got kind of dimly offset
black and white pictures of naked women in it. Why do I publish
in it, I don t know, because they like my poetry, right? It s not
that I don t submit poems to other places, but it s just like
sending signals out into the storm with nobody to see them. And
I ve done enough work to do another publication, but I m damned if
I m going to publish it myself. I think if nothing happens I may
just put them all on the Internet. I m not intending to make
money on it anyway, so what s the difference.
You know my answer to the dichotomy of media technology and
book culture is kind of a sentence which goes: in a world of
simultaneous operations, you don t have to be first to be on top,
and if you apply that to looking at the guitar collage, you can
see the level of meaning that you can achieve by simultaneity.
Simultaneity does not necessarily imply equality of each input, in
other words if you re dealing with x inputs, some of them may be
foreground, some of them may be background, some of them may have
inter-relationships and some of them may just serve as carriers,
there s a lot of possible relationships involved, but if you re
conscious of the fact that you ve been dealing with a simultaneity
261
rather than a sequence, I think it gives you a lot more liberty to
express yourself in that type of form. I m not saying it s
necessarily a better form by the way. It s a very different form,
it s a very different intention, and it s a very different
communication. It happens to be something that I am very
interested in.
Michael Callahan and Video Technology ##
Stern: Michael Callahan was of the first generation to be exposed to
solid state electronics and to technological theory which was
behind the communications media that we were all using, whether
that was audio tape technology or video technology or switching
technology, telephonic, whatever it was. Michael was fascinated
by it and he studied it and he worked with it. He was seventeen
at the time that he and I locked into each other immediately and
into new worlds. I don t even remember, you can ask him tomorrow
how he got to what we were doing to develop into the tape center,
which is an interesting California artifact. He not only knew how
to do it, but he knew how to talk about it, I mean, I did not
understand what a capacitor was all about before Michael. I mean
that not on a physical practical basis, but on a philosophical
basis, on a metaphorical basis. If you think of a capacitor as a
device which charges up to a certain level, and then when that
level is reached, the threshold becomes apparent, and the device
discharges, then, as a metaphor, communications-wise, you can
understand how it has a lot of reverberations.
He and I shared that type of universe, verbally, and he
could talk endlessly on that level, and I would write it down and
feel like I was getting a degree of some amazing kind and I felt
privileged. We started collaging audio material, which at that
time meant cutting them because there was no real electronic
editing then. And it was a delight to work with him because he
understood music, he had rhythm. He understood poetry even though
he had no acquaintance with it. We worked together the rest of
the time I was in California. Before I left for the east and when
I returned to the east coast and kept on working, I felt like I
was lost without Michael. Steve and I by this time had achieved a
working relationship and I explained it to Steve and he said,
"Well, I don t understand. Why don t you just call him up and
tell him to get on a plane?" So I did and he did. For the next
many many years we worked together.
Byerly: This was in
262
Stern: This was first in California, then in Woodstock and Garnerville
and then in Cambridge.
Again, we come to a personal problem here. Michael, which
we may want to excise from this. Should I just not talk about it?
I don t know. I ll talk about it and you make the decision. He
comes from a home where his father abandoned them when he was very
young, and his father was an alcoholic, and indeed Michael became
or was an alcoholic, and it was very difficult to work with him.
He would start drinking, and it would get to the point where he
was totally incoherent. Eventually it was our little public
company, Intermedia Systems. And one dayI m cutting this all
short, these problems kept on really--he was crawling up the
stairs and down the hall and I fired him. It was hard, it was
harder than divorcing my several wives, you know. It really was,
but I had to do it.
And it took about two years and he finally got on antibuse
and corrected the situation, and he came to me and told me that it
was the best thing that I had ever done for him. That really made
me feel good, because I had felt very guilty about doing it. And
he hasn t had a drink since, and this is maybe a decade and a half
ago. And he s now very successful in building communication
controlling devices. He has a business called Museum Technology,
I wouldn t be surprised if the library or at least the university
used their CD controllers somewhere. Most museums and educational
institutions, commercial institutions use the stuff.
The relationship has continued on that level, if I have a
question that relates to technology, I call Michael and he
explains it to me not on the level of solder wires A and B
together because I couldn t care less, I don t do that. But on
the level of trying to understand for my poetry what the
principles that flow through the currents. I think those are the
rare kinds of minds that can impart these things to one another.
I think I told you about the incident when I was teaching in
UC Santa Cruz, when Norman 0. Brown got very upset with me because
I had the technician from the media center come and talk to my
students about electricity. He said, "This is not a trade
school." I said, "You can t live in the twentieth century without
understanding electricity." And he of course didn t have a ghost.
Couldn t tell a volt from a watt. How can you understand what s
going on in the world like that?
263
Steve Durkee and Stewart Brand
Stern: At the time I first met Steve Durkee and we started working
together on various projects, a friend of his was Stewart Brand,
who at that time was a lieutenant photographer in the U.S. Army.
He had been promoted to lieutenant because they had gotten him
involved in photographing a lot of generals and officers and
enlisted men weren t supposed to associate with the officers in
that kind of situations where he was needed so they made him a
lieutenant, even though he had been a noncommissioned officer, and
he was a very, very good photographer. He had also done quite a
bit of parachuting in the army and we knew him in the transition
period when he was getting out of the army, and he started being
very interested in the work we were doing in multimedia and got
involved in photographing for us.
After he d been involved a while, he moved to the west, he s
from the midwest and actually he lived on my barge. Stewart loved
heights. He would climb high tension towers and trees and
anything that he could. So now, Stewart developed this multimedia
show with his at-the-time wife called America Needs Indians,
whichand Lois was a Native American, or is a Native American.
And it kind of catapulted us into a relationship with Native
Americans. I had previously had some association in the peyote
times up in Nevada, and Stewart became very heavily involved in
the peyote cult. He actually acted as a road man in the ceremony
and he led several of them. He had a big tepee which wound up
being a very strong kind of a bonding experience for a lot of
people that we worked together with.
See, as I said before, the relationship between the chemical
technology and the electronic technology is a parallel and
integrative kind of experience and psychedelics and the borders of
such technological theories as chaos and even deconstructionism
are examples of how this kind of experience opens you up to
understanding what can happen in the physical and emotional
universe. That s the subject of poetry and it s the subject that
we were dealing with in multimedia.
At USCO and our multimedia or environmental arts group, our
high point was the show at the Riverside Museum in New York, and
then we moved this tabernacle into the church and we opened it to
the public. We became a kind of a focus for groups of young
people who were involved in these streams of consciousness and
yes, most of them were using drugs of one sort or another but also
most of them were studying and working and became, you know,
influential thinkers and doers. When they recycle back into my
264
life, I m always quite impressed. The beat, you know as they say
the beat goes on.
All right, beatniks--how can you recognize a beatnik, by the
hair or the thinking process. The people who were attached to us
were not the same kind of people for instance that were attached
to Allen [Ginsberg] and Jack [Kerouac] . It was a whole different
world, it was a world which was much more interested in the
developments in technology, I mean, in a sense the Beat world
looked backwards, they looked with sentimentality on alcohol and
drugs . The psychedelic world looked forwards into a world of
mystical experience and a world of peace and the use of technology
for mankind s good. The political agendas of the beats were
basically rebellion. I think the political agendas of the--
Byerly: Hippies-
Stern: Was raising consciousness and the peace symbol was the major
symbolic element of the era.
265
X ART
[Interview 9: July 5, 1996]
Michael Callahan
Stern: Michael, a bred Californian, if you will, came into my life at
a time when I needed a lot of help, and what I d like to do
today is review the relationship in the context of the work and
the play and the love and the life that we shared together for
many years and we are sharing now, though with less an
intensive day to day schedule, but that s our loss not our
gain.
Callahan: Right.
Stern: You want to go over, Michael, what you were doing when I met
you and some of the characters that were involved?
Callahan: Well, I guess that I first heard about you, I don t remember if
it was the Life magazine article or Herb Caen or whatever.
Yours was a name I certainly recognized or was familiar with.
I guess I first heard about you in 56 or 57. I don t
specifically remember the context, but certainly as a Beat.
Then, around 60 or 61, always having been involved in
electronics, I heard about Ramon Sender and Pauline Oliveros
and Morton Subotnik doing electronic music, at that point, at
the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. So I attended a
concert there one evening when I was in high school, I d say
probably around "61. And then the tape center, or that group
outstayed their welcome at the Conservatory and set up
operations in a quite nice house on Nob Hill, on Jones Street
which was lent to the group. It was at the tape center that I
started to meet the people I d heard about, the poets.
Interview with both Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan.
266
Michael McClure was a neighbor of Morton Subotnik s, which I
believe was the direct connection Gerd and I had.
Stern: Right, McClure told me to call Morton, and I came down and you
were there .
Callahan: Yes.
Stern: On Divisadero.
Callahan: Yes, and then I got involved with the tape music center as a
technician. I had no idea really what I was doing but I
enjoyed audio.
.
Stern: He says technician but he was really technical director.
The Tape Center
Callahan: Yes, I was technical coordinator or whatever, but the tape
center was only temporarily on Nob Hill. That wasn t a good
place for it because the neighbors were not too cool I
remember. There was one great eveningI m trying to remember
who was reading--! think it might have been Gregory Corso who
was reading at the tape center on Jones Street, and this is
just a couple of blocks down from the Mark Hopkins, a fairly
genteel neighborhood. I forgot what the aesthetic dispute was
about, but it was being picketed by other poets carrying signs
and saying "Fuck Gregory Corso." This didn t go over terribly
well with the neighbors. That and the noise.
So, the tape center found space at 321 Divisadero Street, a
lovely large old building which had formerly been the
California Labor School, but I think the California Labor
School might have packed up when the House Un-American
Activities Committee came to town. We moved from Jones street
over to Divisadero Street, I m trying to remember maybe late
"62, early "63. At that point I was just out of high school
and going to City College, but basically I was virtually living
at the tape center, wiring things up. We had a concert
schedule. There were two studios there on the first floor, one
of which we sublet to Ann Halperin s dancer s workshop. The
other studio we sublet to KPFA. So this was a real sort of
magnet, I mean between the dancer s workshop and KPFA and the
tape center, it certainly made for some interesting times, and
we had a performance schedule and KPFA had events and the
dancer s workshop had events.
267
Stern: The performance space held- -do you remember how many people,
quite a few--
Callahan: Yes, at least a hundred.
Stern: About a hundred, right there on Divisadero Street. It was a
nice performance space because if there were only forty people
or if it was filled, the sound still worked. The acoustics
were good, I remember a piece by Ramon Sender in which he gets
naked in an old bathtub. There s a little bit of water in the
bathtub, and with his elbows and his arms and with his knees
and his legs, he makes all these incredible noises. Really a
forward-looking definition of music. It took me years to
persuade Ramon to find that tape and to make me a copy, what
was it, twenty years, twenty-five years, but finally he did. I
think we should have a copy of that. So what happened was
endless milieu. I needed help with performance which was
cooking, it was definitely not yet done. [laughter] Half
baked.
Stern: So Michael called, I talked to someone I think he said come
down.
Callahan: Michael McClure.
Stern: Yes, and there I met three of them, Ramon, Morton, and Michael.
I don t think Pauline was there.
Callahan: She wasn t.
Stern: Which was just as well. Pauline was the, what would you say--
the anal influence, because tape generates mess. Lots of
things generate mess but tape generates a lot of mess and
Pauline was one of those people who was able to be like my
father and try to manageabsolutely everything had to be here
and there. She wrote, how long was the memo that she wrote?
Callahan: That was fairly long. Was it Pauline who wrote it, or was that
the PR woman she hired?
Stern: I don t know, it had her name on it.
Callahan: Okay, yes, right, yes.
Stern: It was like five or six pages of instructions on how to keep
the tape center clean. We had a marvelous time deconstructing
it.
268
Callahan: I don t know if that tape exists but Gerd deconstructed this
five or six page memo and read it as a poem.
Stern: I read it rather ironically. So I met Michael, I met the three
of them, and I laid out this idea that I had and what I needed
was a very complex audio system and Mort just took a look at
Michael and said, we d love to help. It s Michael s project
right. Delegation. And the truth is neither Ramon or Morton
had anything to do with it thereafter.
Callahan: They were there, at least Ramon was there.
Stern: They left the whole thing for Michael, this was like, why don t
you describe the system and the process?
The San Francisco Museum Show: "Contact Is the Only Love"
Callahan: Oh boy. It was called "Who R U and What s Happening?" because
Gerd had a show at the San Francisco Museum, downtown, you
know, now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In the show
was the epic piece, "Contact Is the Only Love", this eight-foot
octagon with sound, neon. Gerd was very much into exploring
the authority syndrome of the highway upon, as I recall, the
contemporary sexual dynamics of America.
Both: Freeway, highway, safeway.
Callahan: Freeway, highway, safeway, throughway.
Stern: Throughway.
Callahan: You know, you know, you know what I mean, but that came later.
Stern: So did I. [laughter]
Callahan: And George Culler, who was the director of the museum at the
time, was asked to help raise funds to assist in the
construction of "Contact Is the Only Love" and some other
pieces in the show. Gerd was living on Hayes Street around
Gough, Buchanan. The 600 block of Hayes Street. That was
pretty bohemian, definitely. So George offered Gerd the use of
the auditorium, probably thinking it would be a poetry reading.
At about this point, who was it that gave you the manuscript of
McLuhan s ?
Stern: M.C. Richards, before I left the East Coast
269
Callahan: Yes, M.C. Richards.
Stern: --agreed to stall John Cage about my returning it. I mean this
was before today s technology.
Callahan: You couldn t xerox anything. I mean, just totally incredible
to think, you know, just fax out another one right now. But
Gerd, I m trying to- -which one was that, that was Gutenberg- -
Stern: No, no. Understanding Media.
Callahan: I m sorry, yes of course, as a manuscript of Understanding
Media.
Stern: It was the report that Marshall had written for the National
Association of Educational Broadcasters on a grant when he was
still in Canada. He then turned it into Understanding Media
with very little, if any, editing. The sound for "Contact Is
the Only Love" is something that Michael and I put together.
"The Verbal American Landscape"
Callahan: That was the first sound project, sound- -it was a collage of
highway themes --it actually was a prototype of what we did for
the following number of years. The octagon which was what,
eight feet?
Stern: Seven.
Callahan: Seven feet and had a speaker on each side and we had an endless
loop tape machine so it would just play over and over and there
were motor- driven cam switches which would cause the sound to
move around from speaker to speaker. That was "The Verbal
American Landscape". It called VAL.
Stern: Yes, I had conceptualized the VAL actually when I was at
Barbara s as part of the transformer concept. I don t remember
really whether it was a phrase of mine or whether Steve and I
in conversation came up with it. Cause I remember that Steve
was very into the term. It was such a concise description of
what you could do, I mean I could certainly use it today. For
instance, when we talked yesterday about the collage, that s
"The Verbal American Landscape". It s all out of the scape.
Do you remember, I had a feeling that Stewart did some of the
original--
270
Callahan:
Stern:
Photography? Yes .
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Byerly:
Callahan:
Stern:
Stewart and Ivan and I went out in the streets of San Francisco
and I would point to a sign or some word, but I wouldn t just
want the whole thing, I would want a slide of some part. You
can t crop afterwards, or you can but it s complicated even
now. It was even more impossible back then.
Beyond our technology, then.
So I would want one word close up out of the sign or out of the
manhole cover and those slides exist, and should be part of the
archive. We spent days running around the whole Bay Area
photographing words . That was actually Stewart Brand s , you
know the Whole Earth Catalog s first exposure to media,
multimedia let s say and he and Lois doing "America Needs
Indians" and a lot of other things before he did the catalog.
But let s get back to how we managed.
I think you might describe a little the technology that you
had available. Michael was able to put into reality ideas
which had floated around in my head of how you can deal with
words on tape. My only tape background had been with a little
wire recorder and so forth of my own, and, at KPFA, I had
produced and been involved in editing. But fairly doctrinaire
stuff, notation really, not artistic efforts, poetry, things
that I told you about that we did. Anyway, this was a long way
from that, although Michael was quite familiar with the KPFA
setup .
Well, I guess just briefly touching on the technology, this
little cassette machine here is recording in stereo with
several multiple microphones. In 1963 that weighed a couple
hundred pounds, literally, and big Ampex tape recorder with the
separate mixer and the microphone, I mean it was a schlep.
Was it reel to reel?
Yes, ten inch reels of tape. Technology like tape recorders
was around, but decent ones were hard to come by and expensive.
Everything was expensive because nobody had any money. So
everything was expensive and it was just early in the
technology and things were more expensive, so basically we just
had some loudspeakers, three or four stereo tape recorders
roughly, a mixing panel, some microphones, not really a great
deal.
You had built the whole system,
switching bay.
You had some kind of a
271
Callahan: Yes, we had switching bays to make it useful. And we did have
a three-track, which was very state of the art then, to start
doing some mixdown. I d briefly like to acknowledge the
generous donations of Hewlett-Packard, who gave us three audio
oscillators which we used. And also to JBL that gave the tape
center a pair of really fine speakers. This was just great, no
strings generosity, and those are both California companies.
Stern: JBL s still in business?
Callahan: Yes. Harmon owns them.
Stern: No kidding. [laughter]
Callahan: Sid owns the entire professional audio business. He bought
Studor, he bought AKG, I mean he just- -yes, but that s another
story. The main thing I remember about the auditorium at the
San Francisco Museum is that it was reverberant. The other
things, well, I was like eighteen or nineteen years old at the
time. Even with the ensuing thirty-odd years of experience I
don t think that it would have turned out much different, I
mean that was a difficult hall to deal with. The idea was to
have two performances, two evenings, is that right? On stage
we had a pile of TV sets and some closed circuit cameras which
were--I mean television hadn t been around that long, you know
so-
Stern: I don t know how we managed to borrow those, but we did.
Callahan: Yes, from Sylvania or somebody, somebody big. And the phone
company, they didn t quite know what they were getting into,
loaning us a bunch of telephones. You see, you just couldn t
go out to the hardware store and buy a telephone, because the
telephone company owned all the telephones so the only way you
could get a telephone was to steal it.
Stern: We had the imprimatur of the San Francisco Museum of Art and we
used it. George was a paragon of help to artists who had no
reputation, and San Francisco was famous for them. You
couldn t get in New York in those years, and there was no
parochialism out here when George Culler was the director.
Anyway .
Callahan: I don t quite know where to begin so I ll just start with the
panel of sociologists, okay.
Byerly: Panel of sociologists?
272
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Yes. This is as good a place to start as any. So there s a
table up toward the front of the auditorium that included Howie
Becker, he was at Stanford, right?
Yes, and then he went back north
To Chicago. He wrote the book on marijuana use called The
Outsiders. His daughter Allison who was twelve or thirteen at
the time was one of the greeters, if you will, and she was
wearing a stop sign or yield sign.
Yield and merge, we have the photographs, we have beautiful
photographs taken by Fred Lyon.
Yes, and Barbara Somers, wife or ex-wife of Roger Somers who--
At that time wife.
Wife of--
Soon after, his ex.
For "Contact Is the Only Love," the octagon was built at
Roger s place in Marin. And Barbara- -bubblepacking had just
come outBarbara was wearing a bubblepack dress and nothing
else. So there were four sociologists I believe at a table,
each one with a phone. Then there were four groups.
And there were four transparent kiosks on stage.
Around the periphery, weren t they? And each one, there were
sixty- four people altogether I think who took part in the
booths, Allen Ginsberg, who else?
Herb.
Herb Caen.
Lots of people.
Lots of people.
They were in groups of four.
Yes, and each one was the responsibility of a sociologist who
had the telephone. There was a microphone in each one of these
four, and there were microphones all over. There were slide
projectors showing "Verbal American Landscape," and speaking of
273
technology, these were the lovely slide projectors where you
put a slide in one side, slide it in. [laughter]
Stern: So we had four operators.
Callahan: Yes, I can t remember. You know.
Byerly: God, I m starting to feel really old. [laughter]
Stern: You know, the intention was that this was a phrase. In other
words there were four slides next to each other each with a
word or maybe even two words on it from the landscape. These
were supposed to make context as they went across the screen
and as they didn t all change at once either, so that the
associative matrix that I was talking about which is at the
heart of the possibilities of the logic here, that was like a
breakthrough for me to be able to put up words on the screen.
Callahan: It was beautiful, it was really beautiful.
Byerly: Words like--
Callahan: UNO, off a candy bar, U-N-0.
Stern: Little types of different text and it would be distracting. So
you can imagine the complexity of the audio because we wanted
to hear the sociologists.
Callahan: The sociologists could monitor what was going on, and if they
thought that things were stalling out, then the sociologist
could ring up a booth and get things moving.
Stern: Intervene.
Callahan: Yes, intervene.
Byerly: With?
Stern: With the conversation. But we had four conversations going on.
Callahan: With four people.
Stern: At the same time, and we were feeding them into various
speakers or Michael was.
Callahan: Yes, we were mixing all these conversations, and we also had a
number of tapes playing.
Stern: And we were trying to tape it at the same time.
274
Callahan: Yes, and we were also mixing in tapes, like we had the time
signal, we just recorded the time off the telephone. The time
is--and then we had a lost dog, and all kinds of information.
Stern: It was definitely a high level of input channels, the highest I
had ever experienced. We had two levels of actuality
happening, because we had the intention that we were trying to
put together this system [for effect?]. And then we had the
environmental reality of the whole, the people and the
different space systems that we had set up, and when they all
interacted, they kind of blew their top.
Callahan: And howled.
Stern: And howled. Howl, this was before [Ginsberg s] Howl, was it?
Byerly: After.
Callahan: No, this was after Howl.
Stern: And then we d howl.
Callahan: Howled, I mean you know because this marble room with all these
speakers, with all these microphones and all the--
Stern: Feedback.
Callahan: Its feedback was lovely.
The Reviews; "Landmark of a Flop"
Stern: It was really nice but it overcame everything and at that point
in time feedback was not exactly an appreciated phenomenon. As
you will see if you read, which I gave you Mr. Frankenstein s
review.
Callahan: "Landmark of a Flop."
Byerly: What?
Callahan: "Landmark of a Flop." Page one.
Stern: It s rare to get an art review of a flop.
275
The Technology; Then and Now ##
Stern: Michael conceptualized the system so that it would work and if
indeed we hadn t done the environmental situation, it was a
very clean system theoretically.
Callahan: I think given the same equipment and the same space I m pleased
and I don t think it would be much different today, you know
unless one threw 1990s technology and a lot of money in it.
Just a quick aside on that, there was a retrospective concert
of the tape music center in 1990 in a theater in the Mission.
That was performances or at least playbacks of compositions
which had been done with the tape music center from say 62 to
66. And listening to those pieces by Ramon Sender, Morton
[Subotnik], Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, hey,
the technology never got in our way really. I mean, this was
all done on equipment which would be laughably primitive, but
it was great work, and it struck me that people made damn good
use out of the technology as it came along. There was
technology coming along which had been developed for other
applications. Magnetic tape was certainly for radio and
phonograph records, but then people started using it to collage
poems and to compose music. We could have sometimes used some
better speakers, but we did alright with what we had.
Stern: Michael, until a year or so ago, was in charge of technology at
the Carpenter Center at Harvard for many years and there he had
to cope with a completely different generation of equipment, so
he has the perspective of over thirty years on equipment for
audio and visual imagery. By the way, we should mention that
some pieces of equipment which Michael designed were built at the
time of USCO at the Garnerville church which we haven t gotten to
talk about yet, but we will. We thought about giving them to the
Smithsonian, but if the archive were interested in them we could
give them to The Bancroft. They re physical, they re not huge
but they re not small either. They definitely have historic
importance. In terms of "Contact Is the Only Love." Michael
helped put that together also, basically electro-mechanical in
nature, and for many, the first years we had use of electro
mechanical switches, what do you call those things?
Callahan: Cams, stepper switches.
Stern: Stepper switches.
Callahan: Basically a stepper switch was a telephone device, an
electrically controlled switch which could make a number of
contacts. It was huge, they had hundreds and hundreds of
276
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
contacts on them, and we used those to do all sorts of things,
like we semi- automated the slide projector routine. Three or
four people out of work. [laughter]
And also the audio channel.
Yes , and the audio channels . I totally respect Alfred
Frankenstein, I mean he was a person whom I grew up reading,
and he wrote a good review. As I recall, the headline read
"Landmark of a Flop," and he says, "Some horrendous eggs have
been laid in the public hall of San Francisco in my time but
none so horrendous as to score a kind of success." I mean
that s a good review.
Yes, exactly.
"Who Are You and What s Happening?"
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Oh, okay. Yes, "Some colossal flops have taken place in the
public halls of San Francisco in my time, but Gerd Stern s show
called Who Are You and What s Happening?
1
is the only one I
can recall that laid so vast and horrendous an egg as to score
a kind of success." [laughter] Yes, and there s Allison with
her traffic sign. But you know, we kept going. One thing I d
like to mention too, my dear late mother from the south but she
had come to California in the thirties, was supportive of this
sort of work. I think a lot of parents would have wigged out,
but mother, and my Aunt Edith but particularly my mother, were
supportive.
Oh yes, they became very friendly,
it.
Yes, they really moved into
Yes, they caught on to what it was about.
In general I think at that period in time, our audiences after
this time were very mixed. A lot of them were in universities
and museums, but I would say we had quite a contingent of older
people and we usually did very well. And then the next step
was that we got invited and we had to move this whole system up
to Vancouver.
Right, in a Volkswagen Bug.
[laughter] Three people and all of it in a Bug.
remember the name of the guy there?
Do you
277
Callahan: It s not Alan. I remember what he looks like.
Stern: Me too. It was like Alan or Albert or, Alvin?
Callahan: Alvin!
Stern: Alvin, right. Can t think of his last name.
Callahan: Horn-rimmed glasses. Alvin yes. And he had a companion,
didn t he?
Stern: Yes, they were a bunch who were into early male bonding.
Billie Master
Callahan: That was in January, okay, so "Who are You and What s
Happening" opened like a week before Kennedy was assassinated.
Then Gerd and I basically went back to work and started on what
was to become the "Billie Master" collage tape, which you
should get a copy of if you haven t already. The idea was that
we were going to make up, which we did, four tapes to be played
simultaneously and mixed and switched. I think we had to have
a proto, I guess today it would be called a beta. A beta
"Billie Master." There was another tape track which was music.
I mean it was the Beatles , "I Want to Hold Your Hand" radio
collage. And I guess we also recycled some of the museum tapes
like Time, the time is
Stern: And I think we actually used some of the news tapes too.
Callahan: Yes, and we had some of our own voices because all our
conversations had been recorded.
Stern: And that was for Vancouver.
Callahan: For Vancouver, yes.
Stern: I mean you can imagine how we felt, having immersed ourselves
in Marshall s ideas, and then to have this guy Alvin,
happenstance, to be at the performance in San Francisco and say
that we ve got to come up to Vancouver and he s going to get
Marshall to come and speak from the other end of the country.
He obviously had a little money. But it just seemed prophetic.
Turned out to be .
278
We just kept on working together. In the meantime, I had a
commission, right? What was that next from the
Callahan: From the nuns, from Mary Corita and Mary Magdalene.
"Resurrection"
Stern: From the sisters. They run, do you know Mary Corita s work?
Silkscreen, very inspirational stuff, I mean very avant-garde
inspirational. Kind of the next step from Gerard Manley
Hopkins. They were two nuns who taught at the--
Callahan: Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles.
Stern: And I had a good friend from the Bauhaus days who, he and his
wife, he taught art there also.
Callahan: Paul LaPorte.
Stern: Paul LaPorte. A submerged talent. I mean a critic of the
highest ability, and he had gotten me to come one day to do
collage poetry with the students at Immaculate Heart, they were
all young ladies. It was not a co-ed institution. I still
have some of the poems that they put together. I met Magdalene
and Corita at that time because it was their program, and we
started talking. They had a collection of--
Callahan: Automatea.
Stern: Some of them very old from the French- -
Byerly: Automatea?
Callahan: Yes, music boxes, hurdy gurdies, mechanical toys.
Stern: Things that moved.
Callahan: Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful collection.
Stern: Some things that were wound up. And they had a few
contemporary pieces, I think they had a Tinquely. And I
described to them some of the things I was doing and they said
they would like to buy a piece. At the same time we were doing
another little commission for that jukebox company. We had a
friend there--
279
Callahan: It s the same name as everybody--Geor--
Stern: George Walker s friend.
Callahan: Associated Coin Amusement.
Stern: He was a consultant or something for them. And he got us a
comission to build a little piece for their headquarters, which
was in L.A.
Callahan: No, this was a pinball and cigarette and jukebox exhibit,
[laughter]
Stern: They gave us a whole bunch of old pinball machines, right? I
mean, quite a bunch.
Callahan: Which promptly got moved over to Hayes Street. 619 Hayes? I
can t remember.
Stern: Michael took them apart, and that s where we first got into
stepping switches, right? Out of those pinball machines. And
we built a "Resurrection." A really amazing piece out of these
pinball machines, and we delivered too.
Callahan: On Easter. Or Good Friday or something.
Stern: And they were so thrilled, and it had a coin thing that you had
to start it with and we had inactivated it.
Callahan: It took a nickel to stop it, you could start it for free,
[laughter]
Stern: Magdalene cut out a little diagram. We had left it so the
coins would roll on the floor but she attached a little bag to
catch them.
Callahan: On the backboard, the display board on the pinball machine
where normally the scores are kept, we put a piece of--is there
a picture in here? We have a film of it in action somewhere.
But in this white plexiglass which could be lit up, Gerd wrote
a poem so like one corner said "high", "free", "safe" and
"through" were in the corners, and the middle was a big "way".
It was also written to the sound of all these hundreds of
relays, because these were all electromechanical and they were
noisy. But the thing I really remember about it was we had
UNO, U-N-0, and then "What I mean," but there was this
wonderful- -"UNO, UNO, UNO what I mean, UNO, UNO, UNO what I
mean. "
280
Stern: I m sure that piece exists. I don t know, they left the
convent afterwards, so I wonder what happened to those pieces.
They also bought a new one, right?
Callahan: Yes, that was a few months later. I d forgotten about that
picture. Except it s named in Drama Review.
Byerly: You have this picture here? This picture, do you have this
picture?
Stern: The actual photograph, you mean?
Byerly: Yes.
Stern: Probably.
Callahan: Yes, I think there s a film on it, an old Bolex film maybe.
Byerly: Is this Yvonne Rainer? No. This is your friend Ivan right.
Callahan: Does he go by Ivan or Yvonne?
Stern: Ivan.
Callahan: Yvonne Rainer was later. At this point I was pretty clear to
me what I was going to be doing. So I left City College which
was boring anyway. And then I sort started doing the tape
center and then working with Gerd. We would tend to do the
collage work at night, start when the studios were free, go
until morning, and then over to the tape center during the day.
Schlepping out to City College wasn t worth it. Something had
to give.
Stern: It was fairly sleepless.
Callahan: So were you.
Stern: Sometimes he was in a real comatose state. That is not the
kind of state that you want to be in when you re cutting tape
and trying to get it to beat, I mean the problem was that when
you had to cut it instead of electronically edit, you didn t
really have a precise enough plus or minus point of reference.
You had to be very intuitive, certain, even the inches weren t
that easy to do, because each machine stops at a different
pace, right? And as the days go on, the machine gets a little
tired even the pace changed, in those days.
281
Callahan: You know, when you cut the tape, you had to be careful. You
always made another copy of the tape, a backup copy before you
start cutting. But then that would get messy.
Stern: Yes, you could lose quality very easy, and there was no way of
regaining it .
Callahan: Yes, I mean quality--! mean pre-Dolby, pre-everything. Hey but
that was part of the dynamic, I mean that was it, that was the
process. Process was our most important product.
.
The Billie Master and NO OW NOW
Stern: The "Billie Master," as far as I m concerned, I think Michael
agrees with me, still stands up. We wouldn t want to make it
any better or worse. It s a beautiful piece. A lot of it is
thanks to KPFA. How did we, what did we do, we raided them?
Callahan: No. Went over one Saturday, went over there and Irwin
Goldsmith
Stern: Okay, you remember I worked at KPFA right? I mean Irwin who
had been--
Callahan: He was the chief engineer.
Stern: We talked him into letting us come over and do some work there.
I don t think he was aware that we wanted to use a lot of
material, which I had really been responsible for a lot of it.
It wasn t exactly policy to let independent artists use up all
the tape archive. We copied a piece out of that and we copied
pieces out of a lot of things, and that made the "Billie
Master" possible.
Who was the architect? Anyway
Callahan: Yes, the guy at Berkeley. Maybeck, yes.
Byerly: Maybeck?
Stern: So, but you ll get the whole list.
Callahan: "NO OW NOW" was the first thing in Woodstock, but that was a
few months later.
282
Stern: And we actually did it for them in Woodstock. We built three
of them, right?
On the Road Performances and Noteworthy Meetings
Salt Lake City Performance
Stern: Eventually, Judi and I took off across the country. We did
some performances along the way, including a disastrous one at
Salt Lake City, Utah, which I did not arrange. A friend of
Ivan s taught there but I guess he neglected to tell the friend
about the subject of the film which he, Ivan and I made and
which Michael did the sound for. That was another project we
did all in just a few short months. The soundtrack executes
entirely the intention we had with mixing the highway signs
with the travel across a nude body. When that hit the screen
in Salt Lake City, Utah they turned off the electricity, packed
me up without much ado and sent me packing.
Callahan: Didn t they issue arrest warrants or something for all of us?
Stern: That was Eugene, Oregon. Same film, I think I already told
that story.
Callahan: I ve never been able to get over that. I had this dream a
dozen years ago when my children were little. We were flying
out to San Francisco and the back door of this big plane blew
open and my son was sucked out but I grabbed him and was
holding him by his legs and he s hanging on. A flight crew
says, "Oh, we ll be landing right away," and I look down and I
see it s Utah and I call back, "No, I m okay, keep going."
[laughter]
Stern: Anyway, so when we got there, Michael had met Steve and Barbara
by this time because they came out when?
Callahan: Yes.
283
Charles Campbell s Gallery, California State University at
Hayward, California College of Arts and Crafts
Stern: Or was that afterwards, no it was before. We did that one
piece at the gallery at the architects . Was that Charles
Campbell s gallery? I don t remember.
Callahan: We also did a thing over at California College of Arts and
Crafts.
Stern: We were doing all these performances and the essential thing
for the performances was of course electricity. So we had to
cement relationships with, never mind the professors and the
administrators, janitors were the important scene.
Callahan: Janitors are the true flowers of life. We were always blowing
fuses .
Stern: Never had enough juice.
Callahan: We had never seen such old slide projectors, basically from the
gas age.
Stern: That was true with California, it s still is we blew lots of
fuses.
Callahan: Yes, we also blew Hayward in 66. And the panels were locked,
circuit breaker panels.
Stern: We committed mayhem at various institutions through the years
just trying to get the show on the road, or in the street. We
usually managed to deliver despite the obstacles.
Callahan: I remember coming back from CCAC, Gerd and I were driving back
to San Francisco. Ken Kesey was over there, first time I met
him. I remember we were stuck in traffic, Gerd rolls down the
window of the Volkswagen, hollers to no one in particular, "I m
Gerd Stern and I ve got to get through." [laughter]
Stern: I don t remember those years. That was on the way to the
performance.
Callahan: Yes, I can t remember, yes, I remember I was over in Oakland.
Stern: We were often late.
Callahan: No, not that often.
284
Stern: Not that often. I mean it took forever to set up these things.
Callahan: You never knew what the reaction was going to be, because there
could be some hostility but some people would get it. It would
be like there s this guy in Rochester, an English professor who
sponsored us. He said, "You know, I never could stand the
supermarket, I always hated the supermarket." That after
seeing "The Verbal American Landscape" he could see, because a
lot of the collage, both Gerd s collage and the collage that we
were doing on the screen with multiple projectors, a lot came
from the marketplace. From commercials. But, at the same
time, this other English professor came staggering up, this was
after performance, came staggering up, the same evening, the
same reception and said, "You know, you re nothing but a
middle-class bourgeois apologist." So we had those responses,
and now Rochester was fairly tame, New York. I m skipping
ahead, that is the second time we did a joint thing with
McLuhan, later that year.
Stern: We had a lot of negative reactions from people.
Byerly: Steve [Durkee] had hired the band?
Stern: The band which was local to that school, RISD, actually Steve
had heard them rehearsing somewhere. While we were setting up
he wandered about so he asked them if they would play during
our show. That enraged this professor. The next day--oh I
don t know, you know, it was so noisy- -he was literate, you
know. Nineteenth century literature professor--
Callahan: There was enough going on without the band. We had three or
four movie projectors or a half dozen slide projectors, and the
audio mix.
Stern: Anyway, the next morning he invited us to a seminar of his, and
he absolutely took us apart in front of his students.
Callahan: Oh yes, it was vicious. For the RISD student paper, there were
some students there with the long lens getting our faces .
They
took a picture of me rubbing my temples under the headline
"Visual Rape". [laughter]
Stern: We had a good time, and they had a good time.
Callahan: Just one more thing on that. A couple of years ago, a very
talented media producer in Boston, Fred Brink, and I were at
some Christmas party or something, and I asked him what he
285
Stern:
thought about a particular new technology and he says oh, no,
that s just a rehash of the old stuff. I mean, there really
have been only two good things. One was the Czech pavilion at
the 1967 Montreal Expo, and he said the other, when he was a
student at RISD, these people showed up in this old limousine
with a trailer full of slide projectors and they had dancers
and they had strobe lights, and they had slide projectors, and
they had a rock band, and they had film, and they had a big
oscilloscope that some guy was sitting on. [laughter] And I
said, "Oh
yes, that would have been around December 6, 1965,
wouldn t it?" And he said, "Well yes, how do you know?" "Well
I was sitting in the orchestra pit at the control panel."
I think maybe Fred s case is extreme but seventies
psychedelic art really catalyzed his career for him. He got
it, and he knew exactly what was going on.
There was a lot of that, we attracted a lot of people who were
coming out and hadn t quite understood the possibilities. That
was very gratifying.
IBM Meeting
Callahan: In the summer of 66, we went to see IBM to straighten them
out. I think also to get grant money from them.
Stern: We went to where?
Callahan: IBM on Madison Avenue.
Stern: Oh, right.
Callahan: Sounds egotistical because the technology was not really there
to implement it, but basically we tried to explain our work to
this guy who had this like ten foot wide desk. You and Steve
and Stewart and I were there and this was IBM white shirt
Madison Avenue. But we laid out the whole damn multimedia
world to them, and boy, did they blow us off. We were out of
there in a hurry. It would have been interesting if the guy
had paid a little more attention.
Stern: So, Michael arrived in New York. Steve and I were very anxious
even to have him come and eventually it happened. We were
actually commuting because I was still living at the Maverick
house in Woodstock, Judi s house really. Now there were three
of us in a fairly confined space. It was so confined that
286
Michael used to pile up everything under his bed, and after a
while the bed arose from the floor, and was ensconced on top of
piles of other things. But it was a lovely little house with
electricity but no plumbing, and an outhouse. We did a lot of
concentrated work there, but we commuted back and forth from
the church in Garneville and eventually we moved down there,
but that was some time later. What was the first thing we did
Michael when you came back?
University of Rochester
Callahan: I left San Francisco, let s see August 18th 64. Then got to
New York and went to the church, then we went up to Woodstock,
you all greeted me at six o clock in the morning at Kennedy. I
think that at that point, was getting ready for the October
event at University of Rochester with Marshall McLuhan. They
basically gave us like a month or a month and a half or
whatever to build whatever. And also there was a, what was the
name of the box with mattress ticking?
Woodstock Artists Association
Stern: Oh, I don t know. This was a piece that we built for the
Woodstock Artists Association annual show, I think I was at
that time vice chairman of the association which is a very old
artists association in the center of Woodstock, New York. It
played a fairly large role in our work during a couple of years
there, because a lot of the younger artists in Woodstock became
involved with and worked on our pieces .
Callahan: Yes, I think that I worked on that piece and showed it in New
York, someplace on Fifth [Avenue]. Wasn t really a museum.
Stern: Architectural Forum or something?
Callahan: Yes, something. Architectural Forum or whatever. Oh yes, and
the Byron Gallery.
Stern: The Byron Gallery Box Show is what we were fixing "NO OW NOW"
for. It was interesting
The Box Show
287
Callahan: The box show.
Stern: The box show, we had built some pieces which were basically
boxes and we were solicited for this box show and the guy
looked at our work and he said, no, no, no, no, no I can t
manage. They were all very funky pieces, and he was a kind of
a glitzy gallery, so--
Callahan: Upper Madison Avenue.
Stern: We had to repackage the "NO OW NOW". "NO OW NOW" comes out of
a mantra which somehow came to me while we were high at the
church, it goes, "Take the NO out of NOW, then take the OW out
of NOW, then take the then out of NOW-NO-OW-NOW-NO-OW-NOW."
And Michael found these pieces, you tell about them.
Callahan: Getting back to the available electromechanical technology,
there s this wonderful place in Kingston, New York called P and
D Surplus, Phil and Don. And Kingston, at that point, was home
base for a very large IBM mainframe computer factory where they
would make big computers. In 1964, IBM had just brought out
the 360 series of computers, which was designed to replace
everything they made. IBM, at that point, was leasing
computers, so they were able to call in all their older vacuum
tube and early computers on lease and basically get people to
upgrade to 360s . So P and D was where all these old computers
would go, and so this was a great source of parts, I mean like
the stash of pinball parts we had here, this was even better.
So we found these little tiny light bulb matrices which we
wired the bulbs in to form the letters N, 0, W. And then had a
stepper switch which made a resounding clunk, which would go
and turn on the lights in the order that Gerd just described.
And it had a remote control for your convenience at the end of
a twenty foot cord so you could vary the rate at which it
stepped through, or it could be single stepped, you had push
buttons. It had a manual and auto switch on it, so it would
either run by itself or you could flip it to manual.
Prayer Wheel
Stern: If you want to know what kind of the prototype or the, you
might even say, inspiration for this kind of a piece was, I
don t know, maybe you could guess, but it was prayer wheels.
288
had been exposed to ghost traps and prayer wheels at some
lectures here years ago. Also, one of those influences that I
haven t talked enough about was Grace Clements. She and I
produced a series of talks on Jung at KPFA, and she got me
involved in helping her garden for money because I was really
strapped at the time. We worked in her terraced, succulent
gardens in Richmond, developing this idea of a symbology that
we were going to produce together which we never could find any
funding for. But, the prayer wheel is a fascinating kind of
exercise, taking prayer outside of the mouth and "NO OW NOW"
was simply an extension of that kind of idea.
Remsen and Rosie Woods, Process for Making Diffraction
Gratings
Callahan: So we worked on "NO OW NOW", and we also had a commission from
Remsen Wood who founded the Diffraction Company in Riderwood,
Maryland. Rem had invented a process for making diffraction
gratings, and that was the first time that it was possible to
produce a really brilliant spectrum, because with this
technique, they were just stamped out like miniature phonograph
records, rather than being produced by an extremely expensive
laboratory process. And the diffraction gratings are certainly
around today and they re all made using Rem s process. So we
were working on various diffraction grating. We had some
diffraction gratings imprinted with "NO OW NOW" around the
periphery.
Stern: Talk about the piece that we built the technology for that you
figured out for the triple diffraction hex and the seven
diffraction hex. The one that was sold to Malcolm Forbes.
Callahan: Right. That was, go down to P and D Surplus, Kingston is only
fifteen miles from Woodstock. Make these frequent trips down
to P and D and Phil and Don are both very sweet and gave us a
charge account, which was very helpful, not that the stuff was
all that expensive. We got some motors and Judi made up these
elaborate diffraction grating wheels about six inches in
diameter. We were also starting to work with strobe lights.
We were interested in time, time and motion. So we had this
box with these three spinning diffraction wheels and again
controlled by a stepper switch with its thunk. The wheels
would spin in different directions at different speeds and
incandescent lights would come on at different angles to bring
out the color, and then there would be a strobe light to stop
the motion. We still have that, Gerd s triple diffraction hex,
289
and that was shown quite widely. Yes, and then there was a
larger piece that Malcolm Forbes wound up buying, which was
seven. In the USCO retrospective book, that s "Our Time Base
Real." It s called "Our Time Base Real". And that was sort of
a "NO OW NOW" as it went together, dots there are the
lightbulbs. And that s the circuit that drove it.
Stern: Yes, tell her about the circuits, it s a fascinating circuit.
It depended on something which had just come in, right?
Callahan: Yes it was in the early sixties, about that time in the sixties
certain types of transistors and semiconductors were just
coming on the market, I mean which allowed things to be done
which just really either couldn t have been done before or just
not practical like things we take for granted today like little
light dimmers built into walls is no big deal, but up until the
invention of the triac and the silicon controlled rectifier, it
was just not easy to dim lights up and down. We were trying to
get away from motors. "Contact Is the Only Love" was basically
driven by a motor. A motor would turn around and there would
be these cams and there would be switches, riding on the cams,
sort of like a music box. It wasn t very versatile in terms of
being able to change the program. So this point we were taking
surplus IBM, old computers. We weren t really using them as
computers, but we were taking these computer parts, trying to
advance our own state of the art if you will.
Our Time Base Is Real
Stern: This, "Our Time Base Is Real" is a timing circuit, right? And
what does it depend on? It s a triac or--
Callahan: A Unijunction transistor. And that was the basic circuit that
we used for years, because as it turns out we could control
lights in it, we could control when slide projectors changed,
we could control how bright the slide projectors were, so that
was a very useful circuit. I think that s probably why it s
included in that book as "Our Time Base Real" , or as Durkee
would say, "Is Real".
Stern: But, having a foundation like that, a technological foundation
of a circuit which Michael developed just made all kinds of
things possible and the shows that hadn t been possible before.
And it was possible to do them as a control function rather
than as a manual function. We didn t have to go actually
manually trip the slide projectors, they tripped themselves and
290
we could decide when they tripped either beforehand or during
the show itself, so there were dynamic possibilities that were
opened up for such a performance. It was really the basis for
us eventually going up to Boston and putting together a little
business, because it was Michael s circuits that made the
hardware. There were no hardware control units at that time
available, now there are what, twenty companies making things
like that?
Callahan: Now at least. Countless.
Stern: Michael himself has more lately developed control units which
of course are what, two or three generations ahead of where we
were then at least.
Callahan: Yes, so far ahead because everything has a little microcomputer
in them. You know what we ought to do in our retirement is go
back and apply nineties technology to our sixties aesthetic and
see what we could come up with. What do you say about that Mr.
Stern?
Stern: I m all for it, 100 percent. IBM went right ahead and did
exactly what we suggested to them was the next step, except it
took them about five or ten years. They put together a very
elaborate audiovisual, multimedia remote communication center,
and it was I would say nonfunctional at the end because it was
so highly designed that they designed the people right out of
it.
Callahan: Just jumping back a little bit, when the tape was off I just
wanted to go over what seems to be incredible how much we did
between October of 63 here in California and Easter of "64,
you know the six-month phase included "Where Are You and What s
Happening," "Contact Is the Only Love," and "Resurrection," for
Magdalene Mary and Mary Corita. I mean there was just
something happening constantly, "Billie Master," we pretty well
finished the "Billie Master" here, the tape.
Visual Gallery Shows
Stern: Two or three different visual gallery shows and another couple
or three, didn t we go to San Jose too?
Callahan: Yes.
291
Stern: I remember I did a poem about pop art with slides at San Jose
State which I think I found the other daythe poem, I don t
know that I have the slides. It was quite an interesting
history, I ve got to get that for the Bancroft Archives.
Callahan: And also during this time in March of 64 approximately, the
tape music center had the Tudor Fest. And David Tudor and John
Cage came out in a week long concert series. That certainly
attracted a crowd, and a very interesting crowd, those who
would come for John and David. That was a major event.
Counter Influences in New York
Stern: Absolutely, David, I knew him from New York because he lived
with M.C. Richards in the community, at "The Land" and John
also, he had an apartment in New York but mostly he lived up at
"The Land." There were a lot of the counter- influences, in
other words M.C. and David were very involved in anthroposophy.
We were doing multimedia and the rock world was very receptive,
then the psychedelic world intruded and these liquid light
shows became very popular, we never got very involved with them
because we were dealing with actual images more but a lot of
our associates and friends were involved, Tony Martin for one.
I had originally met Tony because he was David Stone Martin s
son. David was a famous cover artist and kind of political
painter who afterwards settled in California from the east.
Tony was his son and he was probably the best of the light show
artists. When Subotnik went to NYU he went with him or shortly
afterward and I think he s still there.
Callahan: Yes, Tony s in Brooklyn. Tony did some light shows at the tape
music center which were the first ones that I had seen, also a
fellow who I ve never heard of since, Elias Romero.
Stern: [laughter] That s right, I forgot about him.
Callahan: Did a wet show at the--
Stern: And we called them wetshows.
Callahan: At the tape music center, and then Tony was doing light shows
at the Fillmore in 66.
Stern: That s right.
292
Bill Graham
Callahan: I remember I went to visit him there and Bill Graham chased me
out of the booth.
Stern: [laughter] Bill, he was an interesting type, you know? He was
a refugee, that wasn t his name at all. When I first knew him,
he was doing the management of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
He had a lot of ideological tension in those days, and of
course he kind of kept them on a super level, even later on but
he got very greedy. Very greedy. Greed has transformed a lot
of people in our worlds into kind of monsters.
The Wet shows
Stern: The wetshows, that has a slightly pejorative flavor for us, but
I don t think we initially meant it that way, do you?
Callahan: No.
Stern: It s very easy to do a lousy wetshow. It is not quite that
easy to do a lousy show with images, because they speak for
themselves. We took later on a huge wetshow down to Venezuela,
probably at that time the best in the business, the Pablo Light
Show. That was an immense success, they had never seen
anything like that, it was on an immense screen. Anyway, that
was much later. What are we up to Michael?
Ronny Davis and the Mime Troupe
Callahan: I was just doing a quick rehash of the period of fall 63,
spring 64, the Tudor Fest. Ronny Davis and the Mime Troupe
were also in and out of the tape music center at 321
Divisidero. Everybody was in and out, as I started off by
saying, between KPFA, the dancers workshop and the tape music
center.
Stern: Ann Halprin.
293
Ann Halprin
Stern: Ann Halprin was one of the most respected artistic
personalities at that time in the Bay Area. We had bumped into
her through Harry Partch and she was a good friend of the
Onslow Fords, et cetera, et cetera and Ann- -I tried very hard
to get Ann to commission a piece for Harry Partch and you know
how some peoples egos were. She felt that--
Harry Partch s Morals ##
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
--the power of the visuality of the instruments of the music
would overpower the dance. So she wanted him to write a piece
for normal, as she called them, instruments. Well, I mean this
was total anathema, right? Harry had spent his whole life
developing a theory and a practice of music and here she was
supposed to be one of his fans and she was asking him this, I
mean it was war. It was often war with Harry, Harry was no
compromise, I mean we had an opportunity to do a science
fiction movie in Hollywood with his music and he just
absolutely wouldn t hear of it. You got to remember he was the
child of missionaries in China, had a strong moral sense. And
Michael became involved with Harry also. I dragged Michael
into every situation that-
Needed recording,
[laughter]
And here I am still holding the microphone.
You want to say something about Harry?
Well, in 64 Harry was living in a chicken coop in Petaluma and
had just I believe finished, I don t know if it was his last
but certainly one of his later compositions, "And on the
Seventh Day, Petals Fell in Petaluma." And we recorded it in
this chicken coop, he had all his instruments there, beautiful.
And Gerd had helped build- -what all instruments had you worked
on, I mean the marimba, or the Eroica.
Quite a few of them. The Kithara, the Marimba Eroica, and then
a lot of variations of other instrument. But Harry, I think
I ve said this before, Harry s main phrase was if you want it
done right, do it yourself. And then he would get together
works which took twenty or fifty people and yet, everyone of
those fifty tasks, he believed wholeheartedly that he could do
it better himself. Not an easy guy to work with.
294
Callahan: We had a number of recording sessions in this chicken coop, and
among the other technical difficulties, one was the wavelength
of the sound of the Marimba or Eroica, which was just too big
for the room so it was difficult to record. That was putting
out sixteen hertz or something close, so it posed a number of
problems there, and not the least of which was that the chicken
coop was being demolished around him. I guess in 64 real
estate values were going up in Petaluma so this chicken coop in
Petaluma had more value to the owners than renting it to Harry
Partch for probably not much money. That was quite an
experience.
Stern: What were you recording on at that time?
Callahan: Ampex and some Altec microphones. .
Stern: Now where did you get, is it Grandpa?
Callahan: Cramps, yes.
Stern: Cramps, right.
Cramps; A Classic Big Ampex Tape Recorder
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Cramps was actually a classic big Ampex tape recorder,
that out of Alexis .
Ah hah, right! I forgot all about that.
I got
One of the things that delayed my departure to Woodstock was,
Gerd used to do public relations for Alexis Merab, of Alexis
Tangier Restaurant.
This was in a previous incarnation, right, when I was married
to Ann, but I kept up old associations, like a free dinner at
Alexis was not something that you passed off very easily. So
Alexis wanted a sound system?
Yes, I think he was getting on in years a little bit and he had
the idea of having a discotheque in a converted banquet room at
1001 California Street, Nob Hill, diagonally across from the
Fairmont and the apartment building where the Hearsts had their
San Francisco place. It was quite a scene. So we put in a
sound system, discotheque sound system, July and August of 64
and that s what delayed my getting back to Woodstock. But that
was a funny scene.
295
Stern: But how did you abstract Cramps from that scene, I mean this
was at the time a valuable, valuable piece of equipment.
Callahan: Well, he had a background music system and they had this big
tape recorder there andyou know, it d use big ten inch reels
of tape but even on ten inch reels of tape in those days,
you ve only got an hour. And then you d have to rewind it and
put on another reel of tape every hour. This task was assigned
to either a waiter or Andre, the maitre d 1
, who was fearful of
it because you d have these 2400 foot reels of tape that would
rewind in sixty seconds, you know, start torquing out and he
was terrified that it would put an eye out.
Stern: A prototypical Frenchman.
Callahan: So, I replaced that with a background music machine which
played at a slower speed and would automatically reverse. So
part of my compensation with Alexis was that I got this tape
recorder.
Stern: That tape recorder served us for--you still have it right?
Callahan: Still have it. Used it just the other day.
Stern: It s a classic, it s what KPFA was built on and what all the
early music recording studios were built on. I mean, then when
we got our music studio in Boston, we got the first of the
sixteen track models of that same machine really, not
descendants, two or three generations up from that. And it
wasn t very different really, except that it was bigger, and it
used two- inch tape instead of quarter inch tape.
Maenetic Tape. 1963
Callahan: Basically, the one enabling technology was magnetic tape,
because collage performances were all made possible by magnetic
tape. Speaking in 1996, that sounds a little strange, but in
1963 magnetic tape had only been a practical-
Stern: Medium.
Callahan: Medium really for about ten years. I mean certainly the
earliest was 1948, 1949, but it didn t really get out there.
Stern: Where did it come from, Michael?
296
Callahan: Well, largely from Germany. Ampex, Jack Mullin who lived in
San Francisco brought back two German magnetophones and Ampex
was casting about for products. People at Ampex improved it
and brought the magnetic tape recorder into production.
Refugee Syndrome
Stern: I felt kind of funny at first, because I was aware that it was
German war technology. I mean the refugee syndrome is
definitely a paranoid syndrome which has to be repressed often.
And it s pursued me all through my life. I haven t allowed it
to get the best of me yet I don t think, but it affects your
whole thought process, having to flee from what?
Byerly: Marriages?
Stern: [laughter] That too.
Callahan: Utah.
Stern: Utah, Germany, I mean having to flee for your life. So I m
fleeing from, I m continually fleeing from my life, right? And
she s right, marriages. "Cave canum" , you know, right? Beware
of the dog.
Callahan: You know there s one thing too which I don t think in any of
the earlier times we ve gone on record thatin USCO okay we
triumphed for weirdo, beardo and electro. One thing.
Byerly: Weirdo, Beardo and Electro?
Callahan: Yes, I didn t have a beard then, but all of us had lost a
parent at an early age. I mean Gerd his mother, Steve his
mother, and me my father. I don t know how that affected us,
it s hard to say exactly how that affected the dynamic of us
working together but I m quite sure it did, in many ways, some
subtle, some not so subtle. I don t really know what to say
about that but I did just want to work that into the record,
that that was something that has not really been addressed in
any previous historyis that right Gerd?
Stern: Yes, absolutely. In each case there was a feeling of
abandonment. I don t think I ve expressed it too much in my
work, it certainly influenced my work. Steve expressed it very
literally on a number of occasions. Michael--
297
Callahan: Yes, my father was an electrician and I think at age four I
picked up his wirecutters, soldering iron and just continued
his work. So the loss of my father basically determined my
career. I had his tools and my mother, bless her, didn t freak
when I started plugging things in at an early age.
Stern: Unlike my father, who when I fixed the lamp took it back to the
hardware store and said, "fix it" and they said it s fixed. He
said "I want you to check it out." He didn t believe any son
of his could fix or even unplug an electric wire.
Anyhow we went on to Rochester. Yes. We had this
relationship going with the people across the river at--what do
they call themselves?
International Federation for Internal Freedom
Callahan:
Stern:
International Federation for Internal Freedom.
Foundation.
AKA Castalia
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Byerly:
Callahan:
Stern:
Castalia Foundation, Millbrook the center, the epicenter of the
psychedelic movement with an enormous house belonging to the
Hitchcock clan which were kind of Mellon-connected and also the
father, Tommy Hitchcock, had been a famous playboy in American
annals .
Polo playing.
Yes. And his two sons and his daughter were completely
involved in the movement and extended the hospitality of their
humongous estate- -
A hundred rooms .
All filled with freaks. Unbelievable, including us. You never
knew who would be there when you got there, you know?
G. Gordon Liddy.
G. Gordon Liddy?
Well he busted the place, you know.
All kinds of music people and jazz and rock, and artists and
academes from all over the place, religious figures, and just
kind of hangers-on. And a lot of nubile twits, who were
298
constantly taken advantage of, as if they didn t like it,
right? It wasn t nice, it was not a nice environment. It was
an environment where a lot of people were using, a lot of
people were manipulating, and a lot of people were hanging on
because they didn t have any other place to go. On the other
hand, politically and in terms of a movement towards
consciousness and toward liberation, was definitely the major
sense of what was going on there. And we became involved
because we believed what they were doing was akin to what we
were doing. On the other hand, I believe that they were simply
fascinated by the surface of what we were doing and felt that
it was something that they could use to further their ends.
When they kind of ran out of money and got badly into debt, a
friend of theirs in New York extended a theater, what was it
called the New Theater.
The Timothy Leary Lectures
Callahan: The New Theater. Midtown.
Stern: And, what are we going to do that evening, I mean their natural
impulse was to call us up and say, you do the media show and
we ll do the lecture. Lecture, mind you.
Callahan: Oh yes, Tim would lecture.
Stern: And we were bored.
Callahan: As I recall, ostensibly Tim and Dick saying, well we re looking
for some way to give people a taste without actually ingesting
anything, which I never totally bought.
Stern: I mean simulation.
Callahan: Yes, they were using us for simulation. But on the other hand
we got some bread out of it, we split the gate or something.
You know, we didn t have any money. And it was interesting,
but it was also quite a schlep into New York every week from
Woodstock to set this thing up and tear it down.
Stern: Was that where we had the fucking perforated screen?
Callahan: Yes.
Stern: Ay yai, this was the brilliant idea executed in a dangerous and
essentially--! mean this is what you get into in technology,
299
right? What we wanted was to be able to strobe images from the
rear.
Callahan: Yes, strobe lights.
Stern: So we needed either transparency of some kind or a perforation,
well we selected perforating and the easiest thing to buy that
was preperforated were masonite panels you know which had--
Callahan: Pegboard.
Stern: Pegboard.
Callahan: The thing that did us all in.
Stern: At one point it crashed onto the stage, I mean it was heavy,
and we were flying it, in theater terms. We were very lucky
not to have any dead bodies under it.
Byerly: Not to have killed anybody.
Stern: Under that. It worked fine, but it was impossible to
transport, we gave it up pretty soon thereafter. They were
very successful performances and we had also gave the
opportunity to a number of other light artists to participate.
Callahan: Oh yes, that s true.
Stern: Jackie Cassen.
Callahan: Richard Aldcroft.
Stern: I can t remember, Jim- -light machine people. And there was a
real sense of camaraderie among the media people . As I told
you before, we didn t get along too well with the purposes and
theatrical ambitions of Dr. Timothy Leary. We remain close
friends, but he wanted something that we weren t interested in
delivering, and he bored the shit out of us with his--I mean he
thought that the crowd that was coming to see this, which was a
very hip crowd, wanted to be told on an academic level about
psychedelics. I don t think there was a person in the audience
who hadn t taken a few trips themselves. And then when we
played part of our death trip and part of Antonin Artaud s
screaming in the middle of his lecture, we got severely
reprimanded.
Callahan: Tim had announced the week before that next week he would be
talking about God. So back in Woodstock, setting up the trusty
300
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Byerly:
Stern:
Ampex around the table, we--just all of us were sitting around
going "Oh, God."
But it was an acid trip.
Yes, we had about a dozen people on acid going, "Oh God, God."
Then we mixed in a little Artaud screaming and a few other
things, and I was up in the catwalk above the thing with our
trusty Ampex from Alexis restaurant, having hoisted the thing
up there. That was also the Public Address system which Tim
was using, so it was easy to mix the Ampex sound. About
halfway through his lecture I just hit the start button and the
the theater fills up with this "Oh, God." And then it stopped,
a few minutes later, give them another little taste.
At first he thought it was an error, you know, that we had just
hit the button at the wrong time, then the second or third
round he got the message. [laughter] He sent Ralph back to
tell us we had violated our agreement.
Yes, he was suspecting Harry Smith,
charging up, "Is
Harry Smith here?"
Ralph Metzner came
Nope, just us.
We had a contract that nobody would get in free. At that time,
everything was supposed to be free, you know. But, this was
raising money, we needed to sell tickets so we couldn t let
everybody in free, and everybody had some reason to get in
free. But Harry Smith was an artist from here, very special
person. He certainly didn t have any money and he was a raving
drunk, and there was only one way to take care of him, which
was to let him in free so Timothy and I had a big argument and
finally Timothy gave up and Harry Smith got in free. But he
started screaming from the audience too, right? It was a very
public event, and it was very successful and how many weeks did
we do?
I think eight, six or eight anyway.
Full every time, and I mean a big theater too.
Was it all for Leary?
Well part of it was for deficit financing for Castalia
Foundation but we were doing probably 90 percent of the work
and we split the gate for our efforts, so it worked well for
us, and from then, we went on to do the first expanded cinema
festival performances.
301
Mekas Brothers and the Avant Garde Film Scene
Stern: The avant-garde film scene was the property at that time of the
Mekas Brothers. Jonas and Adolfus Mekas. Their understanding
and their advocacy and their involvement in the film scene made
avant-garde film production in this country, even other parts
of the world, not only possible but viable and fundable. Jonas
decided he wanted to do a kind of extended cinema festival
because people were starting to work in other techniques using
not just single film projection. At the same time he came from
Latvia, and he needed to go back home. He was in the middle of
planning this festival and he turned it over to a guy who had
just graduated from Business School at Columbia and who was
working as a china buyer at Bloomingdale s . He wanted to be
involved in the arts and somehow had met Jonas . That was John
Brockman. Well John got terribly confused by all these
unreliable characters in the movement, and we became his
bedrock, because he considered us comparatively reliable.
Callahan: Yes, we showed up. we were highly reliable.
Stern: And that was the Carolee Schneeman thing, right?
Carolee Schneeman
Byerly: Carolee?
Callahan: Schneeman.
Stern: A quite well-known performing artist and filmmaker and sexual
liberationist. Lot of nude pieces, beautiful, beautiful
performance artist.
Callahan: Dancer.
Stern: Yes, I don t care for all her films. Kind of endless Warhol-
style films.
Callahan: I think that was where we were using the perf- screen. Well,
Gerd had written a poem.
Stern: They were to go with Ghost Rev.
302
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Oh yes, right, to go with the film. These words would project
on the screen and Carolee was there wearing a painter s
coveralls--
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Stern:
White.
And with a bucket of paint and a brush, she would paint the
words as they appeared on the screen.
We had hung several layers of no seam photographers background
paper over the perforated screen so she and her two dancers,
also in overalls could paint wherever they liked and when the
screen got full of paint they could tear it down, and there
would be another layer that they could paint on. Eventually it
exposed the perforated screen. She did that with us on a
number of occasions. Evenat MIT Kresge?
I don t think so.
There was somebody doing it though. Maybe we found somebody
else.
I think it might have been somebody else.
Steve maybe. Because Steve was no longer sitting on top of the
oscillator, we had--
Norman Berg.
Norm Berg, yes, I talked to him just two weeks ago.
No kidding.
He s still on the same trip. Anyway, there were always people
who wanted to be in the shows, right, or be--
H
in the company and we were willing to include other peoples
work as long as they put their egos to rest when they became
involved. Norm Berg wanted to be in the show very badly, so we
created a platform for him. His job in the meditation section
of the performance was to sit in the zen position on top of the
oscilloscope, which was a large display oscilloscope, and not
to move. He was centered. We should talk about Ghost Rev.
Callahan: Ghost Rev was made in the fall of 65.
303
Ghost Rev
Byerly: Ghost Rev?
Callahan: Ghost Rev, Rev. The name comes from this particular motorcycle
called the Ghost.
Stern: Racing bike. Fast and loud! It belonged to--
Callahan: Jonathan Ayres.
Stern: Another person who became very involved in our activities.
Ayres. He runs a mule packing trip up in the Sierras now.
Callahan: But- -Jonathan drove this motorcycle in the countryside around
Woodstock at high speed, and Jud Yalkut who was sitting behind
him--
Byerly: Who?
Callahan: Jud Yalkut.
Jud Yalkut
Stern: No, just one t.
Callahan: Jud had been working at what was it, Sam Goody s?
Stern: Yes, he was still working at Sam Goody s as a stock clerk in
the record basement. He had this ambition to be a filmmaker.
He was a friend of Bob Dacey s, who was another person who
worked very closely with us, and is still around, in Woodstock.
We had been doing these performances and gallery shows at the
Woodstock Artists Association, and one of the members sons had
died and he had left behind a Bolex 16 millimeter camera.
Callahan: And some film.
Stern: And some blank film, and his mother got a hold of me.
Callahan: She was a nice woman.
Stern: Really lovely woman. She got a hold of me and said.
Callahan: Not Brown, not Brown, what was her name?
304
Stern: I can t remember. But she got a hold of me and she said I know
you re doing all this work, would you have use for a movie
camera and some blank film, I said sure. It was another one of
these great happenstances where at the same time the camera
came around and Jud wanted to make films, and we had Jonathan
Ayres . What Michael and I were playing with is taking things
out of real time. This seemed a very opportune image. We put
Jud behind Jonathan with the Bolex tied to him.
Callahan: And a tape recorder.
Stern: And a tape recorder, and they zipped around these roads and the
camera was pointed straight ahead. But then you could see the
helmet, and we had three of these, we edited it, and we had
three of these- -
Callahan: Copies of the same film.
Stern: Then projected them simultaneously on the screen, next to each
other.
Callahan: Three projectors.
Byerly: All on the same wall?
Stern: Yes. And the sound tracks were--
Callahan: Three tapes, we had three tapes and we would vary the speed of
the projectors slightly so things would phase in and out and do
the same on the tape. It was really beautiful.
It was, the image was on the screen in front. Our classic
thing was we would put a speaker in each corner and have a
control box where we could mix and match the speakers.
Generally we always had four available soundtracks at least to
switch under the four speakers as the spirit moved us. But
Ghost Rev was really lovely.
MIT s Harold Edgerton
Stern:
Callahan:
We used it at quite a number of performances, and it became the
overload vehicle. It s how we met Harold Edgerton. Harold
developed the strobe.
Very famous professor of electrical engineering at MIT.
photography of course.
And
305
Stern: He was the one who did the famous milk drop photograph and he
was the one who worked with Cousteau on underwater photography
and he was a founder of a major I guess you would call it
military complex company.
Callahan: Well, it s still around multi-billion dollar. EG&G Inc.
Edgerton, Germerhauser and Greer.
Stern: Harold was already, what?
Callahan: Well into his sixties, yes, he was sixty something.
Stern: At the time.
Callahan: Yes, in the sixties.
Stern: And he came across from the EE building to Kresge Auditorium
which was the grandest and the most famous and interesting
auditorium we ever blew in. It was like, who designed it?
Saarinen?
Byerly: Who?
Saarinen
Stern: Saarinen. Anyway he came and he was a little put off, he was a
motorcycle rider it turned out. He was a little put off by the
way we did the engine sound- -he thought it was too much
overload as I remember. But he was also very disappointed in
our strobe and he wrote us a note and asked us to come see him
in his laboratory. Now the other thing we had as we did this,
we superimposed as Michael said, slides of words on the screen.
Callahan: See, we could fade the images up, fade these words up using the
time-based circuit.
Michael s Kick-ass Controller
Stern: By this time Michael had built a really kick-ass controller,
which looks like a piece of magic sorcery type of equipment.
It was very funky, but it controlled everything for us for some
years. Before we got into totally electronic. So we went to
see him at his laboratory the next day.
306
Callahan: Well he had some constructive criticism on the strobe lights we
had been building and invited us back, so we made a number of
pilgrimages up to Cambridge. He had been concerned I wasn t
using a large enough flash tube. EG&G made flash tubes.
Several months later, came back to Cambridge and I remember him
taking a look, smiling approvingly and saying, "Glad to see
you re using a man s tube to do a man s job." [laughter]
Stern: He s a sweetheart. He lent us equipment actually.
Callahan: For the performance.
Stern: And he gave us circuit diagrams that he thought we could use,
and he showed us his giant strobes. He had strobes, where was
it that he had the strobes installed? Big building.
Callahan: The Prudential.
Stern: The Prudential Center in Boston, I mean for aircraft warning,
right?
Callahan: Very bright.
Byerly: I ve seen them. Is it the one that s there now?
Stern: Yes. Well, descendant of it probably. Is Harold still with
us?
Callahan: No, he passed on about five years ago.
Paul Lee
Stern:
Byerly:
Stern:
Callahan:
He used to come visit us when we were at Intermedia, and he was
really interested in the arts and in encouraging efforts, which
is unusual in that community, believe me. We had a lot of
support people around the country who understood what we were
doing and wanted to help us, a lot of them came out of the
psychedelic world. Brandeis and MIT for instance were the
product of Paul Lee.
MIT.
And Paul was a Tillich s assistant at
Tillich?
Yes, famous religious philosopher.
Paul also became the Protestant chaplain at Brandeis.
307
Stern: And he was part of the religious group that Timothy and Richard
had turned on to LSD. When they were conducting, quote,
"experiments", at Harvard. And Paul got us these performance.
He later moved to Santa Cruz, teaching there, and he was the
one who got me positions there when I taught there later on.
At every place we went, there was somebody who had heard about
us or seen something and then invited us. RISD was the
sculptor who had seen one of our performances in New York.
Byerly: Who?
Callahan: Rhode Island School of Design. RISD. The RISD performance.
Rhode Island School of Design
Stern: Italo Scanga.
Callahan: I think also at this point we were starting to get a fair
amount of publicity, which I think we were ambivalent about.
Stern: And we got more ambivalent about it as time went on.
Callahan: We were reviewed in Newsweek and Life.
Richard Kostelanetz
Stern: Richard Kostelanetz 1
s first article, and then books, and all of
a sudden we were the object of a lot of attention, most of it
wanting to get involved by people who really had no business
being involved, thinking that we were rich and famous, which we
weren t. You know, all that kind of syndrome, and really--we
enjoyed a little bit of it, but mostly it kind of pissed us
off. But we were asking for it in a way, because we were
putting ourselves out in public a lot and we did more and more
of it.
Ken Dewev and Terry Riley
Stern: The next thing, John Brockman--! mean I won t go through the
turmoil of the experimental cinema festivals. You know there
308
were problems with real druggies, hard drug artists and there
were problems with people who just didn t show up and people
who were totally boring, and yet there was some of the most
beautiful media events, among them Ken Dewey and Terry Riley s
piece called "Brides", which we later recreated after Ken s
death at the Gugenheim Museum. Ken was a remarkable artist,
unfortunately tormented. He had a thing called Action Theater,
and he got me involved through the New York State Council on
the Arts and a national organization that he founded called
Planning Corporation for the Arts which unfortunately fell
apart after he passed on.
Michael Myerberg
Stern: So, really next John Brockman, who had business school
background and a kind of commercial outlook, got involved
somehow with a producer named Michael Myerberg. Myerberg was
ancient by this time, he had been the person who had put on
"Waiting for Godot" on Broadway. And he had been involved with
Walt Disney on Fantasia and he was--how would you characterize
him?
Callahan: Irascible?
Stern: Irascible, weird in a kind of a Charles Dickens way.
Callahan: Exactly what I was going to say.
Stern: A Charles Dickens kind of character. I mean he was so old and
infirm that they would bring him in on a stretcher to
rehearsals, right? But he was a control freak, total control
freak. So he had gotten this lease on the airplane hangar
which Charles Lindbergh had taken off from at Roosevelt Field
in Long Island with the intention of making an East Coast based
movie studio out of it, you know, that he could rent to movie
production people. And for some reason the zoning didn t come
through .
Callahan: He outfitted his studios, I think there was some commercial
shot there, but it just didn t fly.
309
Kublai Khan Styled Pleasure Dome
Stern: There was some use permit problem there I remember. Anyway, he
decided he wanted to create a pleasure dome, you know, Kublai
Khan style. But he didn t know how, so John Brockman,
entrepreneur, goes to work for Myerberg and he recommends three
groups to put this place together: Andy, Ken, and us. Now,
Andy, had he started the club on St. Mark s Place, or was he
about to?
Callahan: The Electric Circus? Just about to.
Stern: He wanted it and Ken wasn t that interested in it. Of course
Ken didn t need the money, Ken came from a rich family, very
wealthy family.
Callahan: Admiral Dewey.
Lily Ente
Stern: And also on the other side even more money. And we saw it as
an opportunity to fund the show was coming up, and another
sculptor in Woodstock. We had been involved in this
cooperative gallery with a lot of artists, and one of the
people was Lily Ente, who was a sculptress living in Woodstock,
friend of Grace Wapner s who was another friend and sculptor
who was involved in the gallery. And she d seen a lot of our
work and she was involved teaching at the Riverside Museum in
New York, which was a little museum on the west side that had
an extraordinary Tibetan collection and that fielded
contemporary shows on the other side of the museum, and also at
an art school in a building which had been originally connected
to an artist called Nicholas Roerich. Anyway, she arranged for
us to have this huge space. I mean there were like what, six
rooms, something like that? And we were like overcome by this
opportunity to really put our work in a space where people
could experience it for, what was it, weeks?
Callahan: Opened on Mother s Day, closed on Father s Day 1966, it was
like six weeks or whatever.
310
Murray Kaufman and the Multimedia Theatre Discotheque
Stern: And we didn t have the bread to get the scene together and they
gave us a little bit at the museum. Hey, all of a sudden comes
along this opportunity to do this discotheque and we were told
that money wasn t a real object, and they went for us. We did
presentations what we would do and so did Andy and Ken. And we
got the go ahead and then we asked Andy if he d like to
cooperate with us, and Andy was not into cooperation except
with his own coterie which, you know, I m sure you ve read
enough about so you understand what they were into. And Ken
really backed away from it. So here we were designing a really
multimedia theater discotheque and the surprise after a while
was that Myerberg had hired a famous at the time disc jockey,
Murray Kaufman, otherwise known as Murray the K--he called the
whole thing Murray the K s world. Anyway, Michael can talk
about the technology there, which was at the time, way ahead of
what they were even expecting.
Callahan: We had twenty-one slide projectors mounted- -well it was an
aircraft hangar, this building must ve been like a 150 feet by
70 feet or whatever. And there was a steel beam running around
and we had twenty-one slide projectors and twenty-one screens.
On one end we also have two large, beautiful sixteen millimeter
movie projectors which were surplus from the world s fair. And
also we had a television projector which was quite rare at that
point, again surplus from the world s fair, an Idofor A.
The Incredible Idofor 4
Stern: Idofor A, incredible machine, tell how it works.
Callahan: Yes, well--it was really a bizarre lovely machine. It had a
pot of hot oil--it was built in Switzerland so you know this is
all done with Swiss precision. But there was a pot of hot oil
so it would take an hour to warm up, and there was this glass
disk which would rotate fairly fast and the bottom half of the
disk was in this oil, and this disk was spinning, and this was
all done in a vacuum, and it took a while to pump it to a high
vacuum because there was an electron gun, not unlike that in a
TV set, but rather than the electron gun hitting the screen,
the electron gun would hit this hot oil, which would form an
image, and then a very high powered xenon movie projector light
would refract off this image into a complex optical system that
would give television pictures bright as the brightest movie
311
theater. And we had like three or four TV cameras with these
straight union projectionists operating them. They would track
the kids dancing.
Stern: There would be like 1,000, 1,500 kids on the floor, going like
mad and we had lenses that you could see a girl s behind at
forty foot wiggling on the screen. First the camera men were
so straight. They wore ties, you know, they were real old
style union guys . After a while we got them to move their zoom
lenses in time to the music, then they stopped wearing ties and
came in T-shirts, it got real comfy. And Michael had to go run
this thing all the time because the slide projectors were
controlled by a new controlling unit that Michael had built
especially for it. And they had some great groups there: The
Rascals, the Isley Brothers.
Callahan: Del Shannon.
Stern: It was a gas. We had a great time, and we made money.
Callahan: One reason I had to run it was that Myerberg ran out of cash
and we had an agreement where I d go out there and work the
weekends. Friday and Saturday night, drive out to Long Island,
I got paid for doing that but then also he d work off whatever
amount he owed us at three hundred a week, and I d get a
hundred or two hundred bucks for what he owed us. You know,
that s five hundred bucks a week in cash, which is, in today s
money, two or three thou. Not bad money. And so that helped
support the Riverside show, and also that got us out to
California for the acid conference.
The LSD Conference
Stern: The LSD Conference which was put together by Richard Baker
before he became Roshi Baker was probably the peak of our media
grandiloquent expressions because of just the amount of
materials we threw out at the audience. But we also returned
to California, so it was euphoric. But before we get into
that, at the Riverside show, we involved a lot of artists whose
work we promoted and got exposed. Dion Wright was one of the
painters. He did a creation painting which was enormous.
Incredible painting. Paul Williams built a light garden and
there were a number of other devices such as Bob Dacey s tie-
dye cave. The rest of it was really our own work, which by
this time had filled up the church and the tabernacle, which
was a wooden hexagon.
312
Callahan: The wooden cover for the tabernacle was built later when it was
at the church.
Stern: We later put the tabernacle in the church and we had to rebuild
it for that, but it was originally the major installation piece
at the show, I can t remember what we called it there. But it
was a total experience where you sat down and saw paintings and
projections and heard multi-channel sound. It was kind of a
place where hip druggies would gather for six weeks, you
couldn t barely get in because they would all be lying on the
carpeted floor watching the strobed fountain in the center.
Michael outdid himself at that show, I mean it was very hard
work and he was also working at the World. Now Murray the K
left very soon, so it was just called the World. Murray and
Myerberg didn t get along, for various reasons. The Riverside
show got us into a very, very heavy publicity trip. We
couldn t quite figure out how to include it in our lifestyle.
Would you say that s right?
Callahan: That s true, because we were reviewed on the Today show, on NBC
nightly news. There was newspapers, Time, Newsweek, Life.
Stern: We were deluged. Every hippie and every psychedelic hanger-on
in the country was drawn to Garneville New York, after the
show.
On the Cover of Life Magazine
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
It was something we weren t prepared for. It was on the cover
of Life, and an article was written by Murray Kempton s
daughter, Sally. Sally flew out to New York to follow us
around .
She followed us around and I followed her around.
Yes, we followed her around. And that s thirty years ago, just
about, almost to the day. But then the Life article came out
later in the summer, at which point the show had already
closed. But a lot of people all of a sudden were coming to see
it and not seeing it there, came up to Garneville. So things
were starting to get a little out of hand.
Was this the time we started thinking about another locale?
Yes.
313
Stern: And- -we have a marvelous film of the building of the tabernacle
in the church. It s a documentary.
USCO and Jud Yalkut s Film ##
Stern: Like happens in so many creative enterprises, here we were,
USCO, nobody s name you know. Now Jud was beginning to feel
ambitious on his own and wanting to be a filmmaker and not to
be part of USCO. And as Michael referred to it--
Callahan: USCO, represented by I Inc.
Stern: That was the first time Jud put his name on a film, unbeknownst
to us and when it hit the screen we were--
Callahan: Less than pleased. Yes, I mean it was like- -something like a
film by Jud Yalkut for USCO.
Stern: Exactly. It s called Turn, Turn, Turn. And we had provided- -
Callahan: Everything.
Stern: All the access, all the images. It is still a beautiful film,
and it s been shown a lot because Jud has kept his work going
through various periods .
Llama Foundation
Stern: Steve started working on a graphic image of what he considered
another extension of USCO would be at first. He felt that we
had this high energy place near New York and we needed a low
energy place somewhere else. What did he call the drawings?
Callahan: Solux?
Stern: They re also in thatsome of them are in that folder.
Byerly: Solux?
Stern: Yes. Here s the first representation of it, and it was later
built in New Mexico, not exactly like that, but in that spirit.
It turned into what s still known as the Llama Foundation. Did
you know they had a big fire there?
314
Callahan: Yes.
The Confidet Commercial
Stern: All right. So this was a breaking point where Steve and
Barbara left and we were left at the church. John Brockman was
representing us and he wanted us to do more commercial work,
because he was interested in making money and he was supposedly
putting us in the way of making money. We did a few projects,
one of which Ken Dewey really worked with us on which was for
Scott paper, an introduction of a tampon actually, or was it a
tampon or a sanitary napkin?
Callahan: Sanitary napkin.
Stern: A sanitary napkin called what?
Callahan: Confidets.
Stern: Confidets. It was kind of a--
Callahan: I mean you can see the sphincter, starting to get a little--
[ laughter]
Stern: It was at the same time a low point and a kind of a high point
because it confronted us with people that we weren t used to
dealing with.
Callahan: Yes, like marketing men, shirts or suits.
Stern: And it was a comedy of errors.
Callahan: Yes, I mean like when we did the gig in Boston or something,
they wouldn t let us stay in the hotel--! mean we were totally
behind the scenes, right? They wouldn t let us eat in the
restaurant.
Byerly: They wouldn t let you eat in the restaurant?
Stern: With them, you know. We were like slavies.
Callahan: We were the roadies.
Stern: The hired help. But in addition they didn t listen to us.
Byerly: What were you doing for the sanitary napkins?
315
Stern: We were introducing a very difficult product to the sales
staff.
Byerly: And you were coming up with the--
Stern: It was a multimedia show.
Callahan: Yes, it was probably one of the first travelling multimedia
sales booths because the problem was, the Scott paper salesman
could go into a supermarket representing the entire Scott line
and they could walk out with an order for toilet paper and
paper towels and that was easy. I mean it was difficult to get
them to go ahead and convince the supermarket to carry
Conf idets.
Stern: We had a beautiful Confidets girl, girlfriend of John
Brockman s. Michelle, right?
Callahan: Yes.
Stern: And she also appeared live at the presentations as well as on
the films and in the slides. And we had them wearing the kind
of uniforms that people wear at the plant when they made the
Confidets, the salespeople, which got us into trouble because
when the President came, they looked at us his assistant
looked at us--"He s not wearing one of those." I said to him,
"I
thought he wanted to be one of the boys." And he said to
his assistant, "Never mind, I ll wear it." So there were a lot
of interesting byplays there, but it wasn t our thing and John
wasn t really happy at our attitude so, there were no more of
that order of projects.
On the Front Page of the Wall Street Journal
Callahan:
Stern:
Callahan:
Yes, however, all of a sudden we re on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal because Confidets sales went up 40 percent,
[laughter]
And all of a sudden multimedia became a tool, which we didn t
want much to do with. Was the big thing in Washington next?
We did a big show for the National Endowment on the Arts, or
that was later?
That was later,
later.
We did General Electric, but that was a year
316
More on LSD Conference
Stern: And then we went out to the coast to do the LSD conference.
Now the LSD conference was very odd. I mean what was the
University of California doing putting on an LSD conference,
right, at a time when the drug enforcement people were freaking
out completely and busting people right and left. And here we
were, a conference which Richard Baker, not with complete
consciousness I think, had not realized what he was getting
himself into. He had invited all the major figures to speak
and us to do a performance, and it was what, a three or four
day conference. The headline speech was by Richard Alpert. It
was at the time when Metier Baba had sent his messenger who had
been inspired to see Meher Baba by us, Bob Dreyfuss, to come
back and tell us to stop using drugs. And Richard demurred.
Steve stopped using, because he was into Baba.
But Richard said nobody who has not experienced LSD can
tell me what to do. But later he gave acid to his guru, an
Indian. He says the guru was not at all affected, so then he
took a different attitude about that. Richard is a snake oil
salesman, no doubt about it. He was the most popular
psychology lecturer ever at Harvard and he could get people to
try LSD who you would think would never have assented to
anything that radical in their life. And then he sold himself
as Baba Ram Dass. And I m not saying that totally pejoratively
although he and I did not get along at any time because he was
very attracted to Steven. The major reason he was so attracted
to Steven was because Steve and I were so close although we
certainly didn t have any sexual relationship. Steve wasn t
into homosexuality. But, you know, those lives are dangerous
lives anyway. Tell about the psychedelic show we did there.
It was a different type of show, wasn t it?
Callahan: Yes, because it was in this auditorium built onto a--
Stern: Gymnasium.
Callahan: Yes, it was in a gymnasium, yes. And so we just papered the
walls with photographic paper so we were projecting on many
more surfaces.
Stern: We had a huge scaffold in the middle of the gymnasium. This
was at the San Francisco campus .
Callahan: Yes, at Haight. You know Page and Market, down there.
Byerly: So next to the medical school?
317
Callahan: Extension. Extension school.
Byerly: Oh, Extension.
Callahan: Yes, down on Page and Market.
Byerly: Right, Page and Market.
Callahan: Yes, we had the scaffolds. That worked really well,
construction scaffold with planks and we just piled the
projectors.
Stern: We had so much material by that time and so much audio and so
much visual that it was a transcending experience, and of
course a lot of the people were on LSD, we weren t, but they
were. So they were totally into it. Did we use balloons at
that show? I think we did.
Callahan: Might have. Weather balloons.
Stern: Yes, the first place we did that was in Antioch I think.
Wasn t it? In the chapel?
Callahan: Antioch was later.
The Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston
Stern: We had a ten, twelve foot diameter weather balloon being pushed
around by the audience up and down and back and forth, and
turning projectors on it at the same time. We did that a
number of times, and then actually we installed a piece at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston, which we also got
into trouble with because Dion and Margaret were nude in the
Shiva/Shakti posture. Beautiful film with beautiful slides,
rotating, and they were projected on these balloons. When we
got up to see the show in Boston, it was abstract color images.
I went to see the director and she said to me well, we had some
problems because Boston is not the most permissive climate, so
I just defocused the images.
Callahan: Yes, Sue, yes, she also at one point thought one of these
weather balloons was too big. And so to take some air out of
it, she stuck it with a pin. Weather balloon like any good
balloon pops when you puncture it.
318
Stern: You know, and we re coming to the transition between USCO and
Intermedia, which is an interesting set of affairs. Andre
Ruedi was a doctoral candidate from Harvard Business School who
wrote case studies on various industries. And he was a skier
and an avid smoker if you know what I mean, which I know you
do. He saw one of our performances and he became rather
addicted. He used to spend time at the church with us. He
helped us schlep, and he was sure that this was something which
could be of use and would be of interest at the business
school. So he talked his friend and erstwhile professor George
Litwin into inviting us up there. And all these people were
also connected to Paul Lee and to Gunther Weil and to Timothy
Leary and the whole gang.
Callahan: Yes. It s very circular here because Litwin, George Litwin and
Gunther had shared a house with Tim at Harvard. So it was all
very circular in a way.
Stern: They invited us up there and the initial idea which Michael and
I accepted was we would do the creative work and they would do
the business. It turned out that they weren t any more, maybe
even less business minded than we were.
Maverick Systems Company
Callahan: Yes, I mean the irony of it was that USCO had set up this
separate company Maverick Systems which made strobe lights and
media control equipment actually. I don t know how much we
took in, and this is 1967 dollars, it was sixty, seventy
thousand. So basically we were operating toward the end, in
1996 dollars, maybe a third of a million dollar business down
there. Actually these people at the business school weren t
running anything, basically. In retrospect, we had more
business experience than they did, running a small business.
Stern: And it was kind of a long term disaster with a lot of great
things happening because we got a lot of interesting projects.
It was not successful as a business, but Michael got an
opportunity to develop new generations of equipment. On the
other hand, he was overworked and underpaid and not necessarily
well massaged in terms of the business climate. I got kind of
co-opted into doing things I never wanted to do.
Callahan: Like being president.
319
Stern: Yes. But, vanity is a dangerous thing and having an
appointment at Harvard and going publicHey, even when we
needed money, we had to find the guy in New York who took us
public. All they had at Harvard Business School were big deals
and big connections which meant they knew how to spend money
but didn t know how to make it. They really knew how to spend
money, I ll say that for George Litwin.
Callahan: Dropped a quarter million pre-inflationary dollars on redoing
the office.
Michael Callahan Becomes Technical Director at the Carpenter
Arts Center, Harvard University
Stern: Anyway, eventually we got out of that and Michael went to
Harvard to become the technical director at the Carpenter
Center where he stayed for many many years and I kind of wound
the company down into chapter 1 1 and went to work for my
family s company in the cheese business. And we have
continued. We haven t done much actual work together but we ve
talked about it a lot and I think one of these days , maybe not
too far away, we will do another nineties project before we get
to 2000.
Callahan: Yes.
Byerly: Better hurry up.
Stern: Well, you know, one millennium ain t so much different from
another. [laughter]
Byerly: Is that it?
Callahan: Okay, I think it s been very interesting. My experience
certainly would not have happened anywhere but in California,
or at any other time. So I am grateful to the people who made
it possible including the beats, the bohemians, the poets. So,
it s been fun.
Byerly: Great.
.
,0
:
:
.
Gerd Stern s Turn Ahead.
Photo by Vano-Wells-Fagliano.
Over by Gerd Stern, circa 1962. A flashing light kinetic poem four feet
high and eight feet long with circuitry by Michael Callahan.
From the collection of Judith (McBean) Cosper. Donated to the Oakland
Museum.
Contact is the Only Love, 1963.
Busted Head Monument collage column with votive light,
circa 1963.
From the collection of the artist.
Gerd Stern working on NO-OW-NOW, 1963-64,
Take the X out of Crossing collage on wooden pipe casting form.
From Gerd Stern Collection of Judith Cosper, circa 1965.
The Six Minute Day underground exhibit center, Bear Swamp Pumped Storage
Facility, Intermedia Systems, circa 1974.
320
XI CONTEMPLATIONS ON WEST COAST BOHEMIAN CULTURE
[Interview 10: July 9, 1996] ##
Influences of Spiritual Content on or Not on Intention
Stern: There s a question of foundation and information and influences on
the spiritual content or spiritual intention involved in this
exercise of oral history. A lot of our interview is somewhat
inchoate and non-defined, or non-descriptive because it s an in
toto, it s not a fragmented kind of principle that one is talking
about when one describes decades of one s own life. However, the
recognition of where it comes from and where it comes around to is
certainly something that is a considered element. I know that
from certain points of view and certain happenstances in my life,
the reverberations still resound.
Obviously the initial leaving of Europe, of Germany because
of Hitler and his cohorts, the fact that my mother died at a very
early age, the adaptation to a new language and to the culture of
New York, the city. The exposure I had to the refugee mentality
of my parents and theirour relatives and their associates who
were mostly from that same group. Washington Heights where we
wound up living was a refugee colony as I think I ve said before,
it was called Frankfurt on the Hudson, for good reason. That
community has been documented, by the way, by a number of
sociologists and filmmakers. Then, in New York, my exposure to
radical politics, to communism, to the ideas and the actualities
and the kind of interest but then reaction to the excesses of
political climate and not just in the United States but elsewhere.
321
Life Below the Skin of Society
Stern: The translation I think of those kinds of radical impulses from a
political arena to an artistic arena, the life so to speak under
the skin of the society, below the acceptable surface and the
realizations that most of these people who were living below the
surface represented very different strata. You had the
preponderance of people who dove into a subterranean lifestyle
coming out of the upper-middle classes, and then you had certain
representation from the poorer segments of society, but everybody
knew who everybody was and where they came from. It was obvious
by their language, by their clothing, by what they drank and how
they related to each other, their manners or their rejection of
manners. That includes a lot of the pre-beat scene because I knew
Allen and Jack, and Hunky, and Solomon, and I could name another
dozen people of that group or people that I knew and associated
with first in New York.
San Francisco s Openness to the Arts
Stern: The fact that the eventual locus of the so-called beat scene
turned out to be San Francisco is important. The reasons behind
it I think have not been exposed that much. It s just been
accepted that this was the place where it happened. It happened
basically because people were attracted here not by each other but
I think at that point San Francisco was a fairly inexpensive place
to be. It was a place where deviation of all sorts was accepted,
it was still the post-goldrush era in a sense.
With due deference to the talents of my ex-father-in-law and
mother-in-law, it would have been impossible for a couple to come
out of the backwaters of Montana and the state of Washington and
to arrive in New York City and become the President of the
Metropolitan Opera and the head of the Chamber of Commerce s
golden fleet, and you know, being two of the most important people
in the city s society world. But it was possible here for Mrs.
London to become president of the San Francisco Opera and for Dan
to be that persona who welcomed the Shah and Eisenhower and all of
the VIPs of the time. This was an open city in that sense, and it
was open on a social level, it was open on the artistic level, it
was wealthy enough to support people, there was not a tradition of
workaholicism as there already was in the east. There was a lot
of leisure, a lot of the people who had the leisure were also
supporters of the arts. And it didn t matter whether they were
interested in painting, poetry, the theater, whatever.
322
The Country Coming to San Francisco
Stern: It was an exciting place. Things like the Mime Troupe, the Poetry
Center were San Francisco phenomena. But, and it s a big but,
they were fed by an influx of people from other parts of the
country. And I m not just meaning the East Coast. The Midwest,
the Northwest, the Southwest. San Francisco was the real hub.
It was Baghdad by the Bay and Herb Caen was the person who
understood this energy that existed, and, on one hand, documented
it, and, on the other hand, exploited it for his column. And if
you think that these deviants and weirdos and hippies and beatniks
didn t enjoy being mentioned, you re wrong. They thrived on it.
Publicity and public relations were not practiced as a discipline,
but they were very much appreciated and they were heavily
cultivated in those days by the people who we have referred to.
The word of mouth that spread so easily was encouraged. You
couldn t have an event without it being full or more than full.
In New York, if you have a poetry reading you catch flies, right.
In San Francisco you have a poetry reading and there wouldn t be
standing room. I mean airfares were inexpensive, gasoline was
inexpensive, old cars were inexpensive. Buses, Ken Kesey s trip,
everything seemed possible, and it was possible without a great
deal of expenditure of either time or money.
I believe that the influences of that kind of ambient on
myself and other characters in this tale are self-evident. The
lack of discipline, the inconsistent values of the work that was
produced are also very indicative of that time, and they exploded
even more in the subsequent periods, the bohemian era, the Beat
era, the psychedelic era, and ever since then, which is a period
that I can t think of a characterizing phrase for at this point.
Perhaps you can or perhaps someone will.
Byerly: Post-modern.
Media s Impact on Style
Stern: Post-modern. Post-now. Now was then, right? Butthis
phenomenon for instance of style, and of the quick passing of
style because of an extreme exposure in the media, of a painter or
a sculptor or an environmental artist puts out a small body of
work and it s pictured and imaged and reimaged and broadcast all
over the place, well, by the time this has happened, and this can
happen within weeks, it doesn t take months or years anymore. Is
323
that artist going to spend the next decade working out the
problems of that period or that style, the answer is usually no.
When that artist is more or less insulated somewhere and only a
few people understand what he or she is doing, the developmental
characteristics of a style become very different.
Ivan Majdrakoff , who worked with me on our first film, why,
I think he has more of that story than I have delivered. I ve
known his work for over fifty years, really. Since we were in our
teens and he was already producing. And the work is consistent
all the way through, I mean you can see the development. He s
taught at the Art Institute in San Francisco for decade after
decade. He s basically on the verge of being emeritus at this
point. The influence that he has had has been low-key and below
the surface, and he shows his own work all the time but not in any
kind of grandiloquent or heavily publicized way. His art one
would figure then had the opportunity to develop over years in a
slow and distinct way.
Taking Advantage of the Historical Era
Stern: The development pattern now is get it out there and become famous
and hopefully rich and disappear, because the next period doesn t
coalesce or become publicable or publishable. I think in my own
case, I became very disinterested in being out in public when
Michael, Steve, and I experienced the problems which came with
life in that lane, and really all of us withdrew from it. In a
sense we ve all pursued our work and our career paths away from
that kind of attention, because we didn t enjoy it.
Bob Rauschenberg
Stern: That s been a choice that a lot of people have made. At one time
we were going up to a birthday party for Jill Johnston who was a
really well known writer, documenter of the art scene in New York
for the Village Voice, et cetera. We were going up the stairs and
Bob Rauschenberg was coming down. Bob looked at us and said, "Hey
John, how s business?" And John looked back at him and he says,
"Bob, how s art?" If anybody was an art businessman it was Bob.
I mean he businessed his way through art in a very successful
fashion, and it was because his work fit the image, his work and
his persona fit the image of what the media and what the
communication potential thought that an artist could be. He was
324
presentable in that sense, he enjoyed that light and that lane and
it benefitted him in a lot of ways. But there are other
approaches .
-
Herb Caen and the "Beats"
Stern: The factor of this resurgence of interest in a period which we
call beat and the very resonance of the word beat explores the
kind of limits and the kind of nonsignificance of the term. I
think what you will see about it is that first of all, when you
think of beat in the musical sense, you have the whole arena of
rhythmics and time period which is so important in all of the art
forms then. You have the interpretation given by the dharma bum
school of beatific and beatitude. Then you have the other side of
it and beat being defeated or tired or exhausted or, you see now
what are we talking about when we say beat? Does the beat go on
or does it go off? Is it really an expression of beatitude or are
we so tired and exhausted and is everybody so entranced by that
state, and how did we get to that state that it s kind of relaxing
and reassuring that you can share those kind of vibes with the
people who are the apogee of the beat image.
You take Allen [Ginsberg] and you see the photographs of him
and his kind of rapturous ecstatic state when he delivered poetry
and that s the beatitude or the beat goes on part. When you
realize in a poem like Yage the Ginsberg struggle toward
understanding and toward linking himself with his own past and his
basic inability to manage that to his own satisfaction, then you
understand the other side of beat.
You realize that where did it come from- -I really think you
ought to talk to Herb [Caen] and ask him where did he draw that
from, what part of beat--how did he get that beatnik image? In
fact, we believe that he created the word. In the beginning was
the word and the word was question mark. It wasn t question mark,
we start in the Hebrew scripture with "in the beginning." I think
I m, as always, more interested in the process than the product,
and what I m talking about in myself is the process of that
ongoing experience. I was there, okay. In one sense I was there
and I was not particularly present in the hierarchy of the time.
The reasons for that I think are evident in this chronicle.
It always puzzles me that when I look back and I remember
that I was there, I mean who was where? I was there when they
crucified our lord, I didn t want to be there, you know. I was
there at the Howl trial, why? Why was I present when all, as
325
McLuhan said, all these crossings, who knows what you get when the
crossing takes place. But I was. So it s a question of
acceptance, it really isn t anything that you question in your
life and I m not interested in the gossip level, but the process
of getting to this place and writing poetry for the last fifty
years in my life has been a very satisfying process. Whether it
satisfies anybody else in the world, either in the academic or in
the relational world seems to be beside the point. One manages to
relate to one s work and to be either despairing or appreciative
and satisfied and I ve always somehow managed to be satisfied with
what I have done, and what I m doing.
The Restrictions of Contemporary Technology in Process
Stern: That s a little different than exposing oneself to the judgment of
one s peers or one s critics, which I ve done also. The USCO
period was very exciting because the appreciation and the critique
of what we were doing was so immediate and I think again that s
what gave me some of the insight into what happens in the world of
contemporary technology when you can just go out there and do it
and you get instant replay and instant criticism and instant
response and you can play with it all in the same way that a
football or basketball game is played. It s not a waiting game.
After a while, the stress and the inability to give real long term
consideration on a conceptual level to what you re doing and what
the process is I think restricts you. You don t want to do
anything that fast. The response time is not necessarily
something that gratifies you in the end. You realize that the
work you re doing is progressing at such a rapid rate that you
don t have the responsibility factor involved that you would
prefer.
But, here we are in 1996 talking about the years mainly from
1948 to 1978, and I think we pretty well covered the high and the
low points.
Byerly: Thank you.
326
The Cheese Industry
Cheese and Its Metaphors
Stern: The whole involvement with cheese, and my family is really a
matter of some four generations in Europe and here in America, is
something which I didn t understand in my youth. I never thought
of cheese as either a process or--it didn t occur to me that it
was the turning of a liquid perishable nutrient, an important
ability of nomads and primitive people to keep themselves alive,
and the discovery that this very perishable liquid could be turned
through fermentation into a keepable product which would nourish
you on a journey or at home and months to come. And of course,
there s the whole metaphor of fermentation, whether it s bread or
wine or cheese or processing in the human organism. Those kind of
metaphors I think escaped me for decades until I kind of
inevitably sank back into the arms of my ancestral generations and
rejoined the cheese business in order to make what we call in
Hebrew parnosa, which is you know, a living.
A Profession May Not Be an Occupation
Stern: In other words a living isn t necessarily what you do, and that s
why I say by profession I m a poet and by occupation I m a cheese
monger. Because it s a question of parnosa, making a living, it s
not what I choose to profess. On the other hand, compared to some
of the other things I ve done to make a living in my life, it s a
relatively noble pursuit because despite all the people who will
tell you about no fat and no cholesterol, cheese is a notably
beneficial food.
Becoming President of The American Cheese Society ////
Stern: Cheese does have a lot of health values. In addition, the entire
ethnic domain of cheese is fascinating. You take California as an
example, and you have a lot of counterinfluences here, the major
one is Italian. I m a cheese importer really, but my interest in
cheese goes beyond that which is why I became the President of the
American Cheese Society, which is an organization that promotes
the making of farmstead and specialist cheese making in America.
327
Cheese in California
Stern: Cheese in the United States, small production cheeses are a medium
of production, not commodity factory type cheeses. Two, I think,
to my mind, best cheesestwo of the ten best cheeses in the
United States are produced here in California. One of those is
Ignacio Vella s; he calls it Dry Jack. We were just up there in
Sonoma the other day and I had a very pleasant conversation with
him and I certainly enjoyed his cheese. I mean here s a man who
can age cheese for up to two years and by that time you get a
structure which is certainly equal to, maybe not similar and
certainly not identical to a two-year-old Parmesan from Italy, and
it s a cheese which is less than ten pounds where the parmesan is
eighty pounds. So it matures quite differently but it is of the
highest order of perfection that you can find in the world of
cheese. And then he s developed this way of rubbing it with an
oil and with cocoa powder and it has this lovely brown sheen of a
rind. To me rinds are edible, some people don t like to eat them.
The fact that he chooses to call it dry jack, I think, happens to
be a problem, because people think of Jack as kind of a fresh and
a commodity type cheese, which this is the very opposite of is
beside the point.
European Cheeses
Stern: It s a pinnacle in the idea of being able to produce cheese. The
other one is Franklin Paluso s Telleme, which is a cheese that
probably came as an attempt to produce something like an Italian
Tellegio or some other fairly fresh ripening cheese. It s a
cheese which when it is dead ripe, which can take a few months
actually, is totally ambrosial. If you like a pungent tasty
cheese, that s a square cheese. What we do, we wait until it
really totally softens up, and we then inscribe a line on the top
of the square, we peel back most of the skin and we actually spoon
the cheese out, and eat it. It s the kind of eating experience
which is hard to compass, hard to experience, and I m glad I m in
this little world where I can have that experience a few times a
year. And I feel the same way about a cheese that s made in
County Cork in Ireland named Gubbeen, which is a washed rind
cheese in which, probably, again is a simulacrum of cheese that
comes from France, the Reblochon, what we call croute lavee, or
washed rind cheeses but it s made by a woman named Giana Ferguson
and she is a cheese angel. I mean this woman treats each cheese
as if it was a living product of her own breast. She has that
poetic quality that the Irish are so special about. They live in
328
an enchanted place and as a result, from the cow to the mouth of
the person who eats the cheeses, there occurs a remarkable
experience .
Migrating People Replicating Ethnic Foods
Stern: The migration of people whether Italians, Russians, or
mideasterners--who are used to eating certain cheeses have these
two choices. You ve either got to pay a lot, go out and make a
lot of money and pay a lot of money for what you want from the
place where you came from, or you ve got to replicate it. And I
think you take a look throughout the United States and you will
see that people have done that, whether they re Swiss who came to
Wisconsin and made Swiss cheese there, maybe not exactly the same
but basically close to the original, or whether you make English
type cheddar on the Oregon Coast or Dutch style cheese here and
there, it s a remarkable kind of identity with the homeland. And
it s not the same thing as for instance teaching your children to
dance the dance or sing the song, because it involves a lot of
real dedication and expertise and business savvy to survive in
that world, and it s also true for a lot of other foods that are
replicated here by ethnic peoples.
Computers and Technology Affecting Cheese
Stern: But the products of fermentation and the involvement in producing
them are a unique experience in life. It s a feel, and a see, and
a smell, it involves the senses. These days people will tell you
that computers and technology can control the making of cheese,
and it can. But it tends to wind up for the consumer with a
product which is always the same, always rather mediocre and
always part of a production and packaging culture which I find
rather ludicrous . When you compare it to a person who milks their
own animals , makes the cheese themselves and everyday that that
cheese is made, the cheese is a little bit different. It s a
little bit different because of the temperature and the climate,
it s a little different because the cows are eating different food
or the goats or the sheep. It s different because the cheese
maker isn t feeling well one day, and the time, the temperature
makes the cheese different. That s the nature of organic
products, it s not the nature of organic products to be identical
all the time but that s the attempt of a lot of our culture, is to
make things the same all the time and to package them for optimum
329
length of shelf-life, which usually kills the product in one way
or the other.
Preventing or Promoting Illness
Stern: These two tendencies are coexistent and in our industry there s a
lot of aggression and bad feeling between the camps. The bad
feeling comes mostly not from the cheese makers for each other for
instance but from the government which attempts to regulate the
industry in what they consider rationales of sanitation and
consumer protection. Often due to naivete and due to bureaucratic
misunderstandings. They obviously do the very opposite of what
they are attempting to do. Instead of preventing illness they
promote illness. Instead of protecting the consumer they endanger
the consumer as far as I m concerned. But there are a lot of sane
people around who have made progress.
Being Creative, Responsible, and Ethical in the World
Stern: I think it doesn t matter whether you re working in the arts or in
a pursuit like cheese mongering, the principles of being creative
and being responsible and ethical are more or less the same, and
as long as you are able to operate on that level and to understand
what you re doing on that level, you can survive and feel that you
are living for the world, not just in it.
Byerly: Okay, good.
Transcribed by Gary Varney and George Chen
Final Typed by Caroline Sears and Shannon Page
330
TAPE GUIDE- -Gerd Stern
Interview 1: April 14, 1996
Tape 1, Side A
Tape 1, Side B
Tape 2, Side A
Tape 2, Side B
Tape 3, Side A
Tape 3, Side B
Tape 4, Side A
Tape 4, Side B not recorded
Interview 2 :
Tape 5,
Tape 5,
Tape 6,
April 15,
Side A
Side B
Side A
1996
Tape 6, Side B
Interview 3: April 16, 1996
Tape 7,
Tape 7,
Tape 8,
Tape 8,
Tape 9,
Side A
Side B
Side A
Side B
Side A
Tape 9, Side B not recorded
Interview 4: April 17, 1996
Tape 10, Side A
Tape 10, Side B
Tape 11, Side A
Tape 11, Side B
Tape 12, Side A
Tape 12, Side B
Interview 5: April 18, 1996
Tape 13, Side A
Tape 13, Side B
Interview 6: April 19, 1998
Tape 14, Side A
Tape 14, Side B
Tape 15,
Tape 15,
Side A
Side B
Tape 16, Side A
Tape 16, Side B
1
12
13
21
27
34
42
49
56
62
68
75
80
86
92
98
105
111
118
125
131
137
143
149
154
161
171
184
200
215
331
Interview 7: July 2, 1996
Tape 17,
Tape 17,
Tape 18,
Tape
Tape
18,
19,
Side A
Side B
Side A
Side B
Side A
Tape 19, Side B not recorded
Interview 8: July 4, 1996
Tape 20, Side A
Tape 20, Side B
Tape 21, Side A
Tape 21, Side B not recorded
Interview 9: July 5, 1996
Tape 22, Side A
Tape 22, Side B
Tape 23, Side A
Tape 23, Side B
Tape 24, Side A
Tape 24, Side B
Interview 10: July 9, 1996
Tape 25, Side A
Tape 25, Side B
222
227
232
235
238
239
246
254
258
268
277
286
295
306
313
319
332
APPENDIX
A USCO pamphlet 333
B Flier, "Don t Flee the Scene Salty" 385
C Flier, "Twice a Man" 386
D Letter from Department of Art, University of Utah, 1964 387
E Flier, "The Beard," 1967 388
F Flier, "Murray the K s World" 389
f
IN i
PRESENTS
333
usco
.*>--- * . >*- -i-*- .-
-
-
-
OPENING SUNDAY, SEPT- 9
2-5 EM.
CONTINUING FRL, SAT, SUN. THROUGH OCT. 14
OTHER TIMES BY APPOINTMENT
ASSEMBLED BY
MICHAEL CALLAHAN
GERD STERN
ZALMAN STERN
LINDA VON HELWIG
914^-359-6400
ROUTE 34O
SPARKILL, NEW YORK
FUNDED IN PART BY THE. NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL ON THE ARTS
.
Thorpe.
Intermedia
Gallery
\JJ<*
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Koulr 140 SlWMklll. ^J
from USCO through INTERMEDIA 1962-1 7
Contact:
Gerd Stern 201-569-3373 (office)
569-9428 (home)
Adele Myers914-359-6400 Ext. 233
f
Multi-media, film, video, collage, painting, and kinetic sculp
ture will be shown at the Thorpe Intermedia Gallery, Route 340,
Sparkill (Rockland County), New York, opening Sunday, September 9,
from 2 to 5 p.m. .
The retrospective exhibition titled, from USCO through INTERMEDIA
1962-1979, highlights the work of USCO and INTERMEDIA, two groups
active in the 1960s and 70s. The first group consisted of poets,
engineers, painters and sculptors, who used the acronym USCO and
worked out of an old church in Garnerville, New York during the 1960s.
INTERMEDIA Systems Corporation is a small public company, founded
in the late 60s, engaged in media design and production, operating
out of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This exhibition is conceived as the reprise and documentation
of well over a dacade and a half of work, and as a statement of past,
present, and perhaps future, artistic purpose. The work shown ranges
from collage and kinetic pieces to multi-media performance materials.
Sounds and images first shown in San Francisco in 1962 as "Who R U
and What s Happening and in combination with lectures by Marshall
McLuhan at the University of British Columbia as, "The Verbal American
Landscape" are supplemented by more recent audio-visual production
fragments, out of 360 degree panoramic shows for the Venezuelan
government and a piece on Lincoln and the Law produced with funding
from the National Endowment on the Humanities .
The works are from the archives of USCO and INTERMEDIA, lent
by the artists and by private collectors. The efforts of over a
hundred talents are represented. Two publications, one a booklet,
the other an audio cassette, will provide the factual and conceptual
background for the exhibition.
Thorpe Intermedia Gallery is locatedon Route 340, Sparkill, New
York. The gallery, under the durection of Adele Myers, works in coop
eration with Intermedia Foundation, an arts organization directed by
David Weinrib and operating out of the old USCO church in Garnerville.
-more-
335
from USCO through INTERMEDIA 1962-1979
The exhibition has been assembled by Michael Callahan, Linda
von Helwig, Gerd Stern and Zalman Stern, all of whom were associated
either with USCO, with INTERMEDIA or with both groups.
LIST OF WORKS
A.
Stereo sound chair with cut paper poem collage and continuous loop
audio collage. The tape is, "Billie Master", first made in 1963
and used as part of the San Francisco Museum of Art presentation,
"?WHO R U AND WHAT S HAPPENING?".
B.
Collage wall of graphic and dimensional materials. First on the
office wall at USCO church this assembled collection grew at the
first INTERMEDIA studios, then in a long hall of an aparment on
Broadway in Cambridge, a house in Medford and now in the gallery.
At present, the accumulation amounts to about 400 square feet of
assemblage. 1965-1979
C.
One of the Steve Durkee paintings out of the Tabernacle, installed
at the USCO church in Garnerville from 1967-1972. The "Tabernacle"
environment was first shown at the "Down By The Riverside" exhbit,
Riverside Museum, New York, in 1966.
D.
Collages and Kinetic Sculptures and Programmers
1. NO OW NOW - a contraction of an USCO mantra -take the no out of
now - then - take the ow out of now - then - take the then out of
now - then - ... an electro mechanical mantric device , with
manual and automatic modes, utilizing the basic, Our Time Base
Is Real, USCO timing circuit. A limited edition of three pieces
out of IBM surplus. One in the collection of Immaculate Heart
College, Los Angeles, one in the collection of Judi Stern, one
in the USCO archives. 1965
2. TRIPLE DIFFRACTION HEX: a three wheel, programmed array of mosaics
constructed of diffraction materials. Geometry revealed in
rotation by stroboscopic light. Shown in U.S. and Europe 1965.
A larger relative, SEVEN DIFFRACTION HEX, 1967, was shown at the
Howard Wise Gallery, N.Y. and sold to Malcolm Forbes, who later
donated the piece to the Princeton University Museum.
3. MONOLOG TO DIGITAL: (if you can t count don t blow) A voice
operated assemblage of first-generation solid-state counting
modules and other selected IBM surplus. 1966. Collection of
John Brockman.
4. BUSTED HEADS MONUMENT: Collage column with candle. 1963
336
3. from USCO through INTERMEDIA 1962-1979
.
5. BOGGLE THE TOGGLE: Surplus switches from IBM tape tester plus
collage. Good featured as immanent, bad as a temporary system.
1964. Collection of Grace and Jerry Wapner.
6. D slide programmer; first piece of USCO programming equipment
1965. D-10 punched paper tape programmer, INTERMEDIA 1968. IBM
hand wired stepping switch, 1964.
E. Video cassette works, "Teleportraits" and "Artists, Babies,
Bodies" made under grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and
the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, at the WGBH Experimental
Television Laboratory in 1976-1977, and shown at the Museum of
Modern Art, N.Y. and over public television.
F. Strobe and mylar environment with rotating sounder: a recreation
somewhat akin to USCO strobe pieces of the 60s.
G. Documentation of, "from USCO through INTERMEDIA 1962-1979".
Panels created for this exhibition, tracing the time/space
lines with original and copied materials.
H. Willie s Piece: an electro- luminescent traffic sculpture by
Paul Williams.
I. USCO AT THE CHURCH (mostly) : an assemblage of 60s footage
filmed by Jud Yalkut.
Projection Environments: featuring materials from "Verbal
American Landscape", "We Are All One" and other USCO shows.
Also partial panoramas from INTERMEDIA 360 degree projection
surrounds and a single image slide show, "Lincoln and the Law"
produced by INTERMEDIA for Sangamon State University with
funds from NEH and installed at the Lincoln Law offices in
Springfield Illinois. Also a group of USCO and Intermedia
documentation slides.
We are interested to know your reactions to this exhibition and
will try to answer any queries or comments.
A number of the pieces in this exhibition are for sale. We are
also prepared to consider selected commissions and design/production
projects.
A limited edition of 25 reel-to-reel (7^1. p. s. Jjtrack stereo) and
cassette copies of the "Billie Master" tape in individually collaged
boxes, numbered and signed are available at $50. A one-hour edited
conversational audio cassette on the history of USCO is available
at $15. Additional copies of this booklet are available at $3.00.
All postpaid from Intermedia, 5 Cresskill Ave. , Cresskill.N. J. 07626.
++-H-+-H-++-H-
337
Biographies
Michael Callahan, a native of San Francisco, was the San Francisco
Tape Music Center s first technical director. He was president of
Maverick Systems, Inc. of Woodstock, N.Y. As a founding member of
USCO he was responsible for the design, construction, operation, and
maintencance of the group s electronic and electro-mechanical tech
nology. He traveled for the group to exhibitions and performances
throughout the United States and Europe.
From 1969 through 1975 Callahan became technical director for
Intermedia Systems Corporation in Cambridge, Mass. During the past
several years he heas held an appointment as Supervisor of Film
Services, Harvard University. He is also engaged in consulting and
in the design of audio visual systems technology.
Linda von Helwig, is Vice-President and was Art Director of Inter
media Systems Corporation, Cambridge, Mass. She has specialized in
the design and creation of graphic materials for multi-media, laser
projection, and other audio visual formats. Her work has been
utilized in production for government, education, the arts, and
business. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting
from Syracuse University.
Gerd Stern, poet and media artist, was one of the founders of the
USCO group. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, First Poems
and Others, and Afterimage . He has been an Associate in Education
at Harvard University and a visiting lecturer in the History of
Consciousness program at the University of California in Santa Cruz.
His work has been shown at museums and galleries throughout the
States and abroad. For the past eight years he has been President
of Intermedia Systems Corporation in Cambridge, and is now associated
with his family s import business.
Zalman Stern, attends Vail School in Tucson, Arizona. His interests
lie in computer language, photography, and music.
USCO was a group of artists, poets, engineers, who worked out of an
old church in Garnerville, New York during the nineteen sixties.
Their work included images, sound, and technology executed by a
community of participants, some living at the church, and others
in various parts of the country and world. The performances and
exhibitions were sponsored by universities, museums, galleries,
theaters, etc. and became the subject of a considerable body of
journalism and critique.
During the late sixties some members of the group initiated the
Lama Foundation in New Mexico. A number of others helped found
the Intermedia Systems Corporation in Cambridge, Mass.
Intermedia Systems Corporation is a small public company which,
since 1969, has been engaged in the production of multi-media, film,
video, and laser graphics for business, government, and the art
and education fields.
Intermedia Foundation, which was formed during the latter days of
the USCO group, now operates out of the church in Garnerville,
New York, under the directorship of David Weinrib, sculptor, film
maker, and educator. The Foundation supports various artistic
projects, sponsors workshops and seminars, presents performances,
and is involved in the operation of the Thorpe Intermedia Gallery.
338
FLASH - DOT - DOT: from Doubt and Certainty in
Science as quoted in The Gutenberg Galaxy by
Marshall McLuhan.
"The effect of stimulations, ex
ternal or internal, is to break up the unison of
action of some part of the whole of the brain. A
speculative suggestion is that the disturbance in
some way breaks the unity of the actual pattern
that has been previously built up in the brain.
The brain then selects those features from the in
put that tend to repair the model and to return
the calls to their regular synchronous beating. I
cannot pretend to be able to develop this idea of
models in our brain in detail, but it has great
possibilities in showing how we tend to fit our
selves to the world and the world to ourselves.
In some way the brain initiates sequences of ac
tions that tend to return it to its rhythmic pattern,
this return being the act of consummation of comple
tion. If the first action performed fails to do
this, fails that is to stop the original disturbance,
then other sequences may be tried. The brain runs
through its rules one after another, matching the
input with its various models until somehow unison
is achieved. This may perhaps only be after strenuous,
varied and prolonged searching. During this random
activity further connexions and action patterns are
formed and they in turn will determine future se
quences .
"
LOV
4O CO 4-o a
DE5RUCT
a4 41*.
BELLA UNION THERTRE:
PRIOR* -DECEMBER 27
qp.M-3R.M- c.oH4i*KS
[.SO dJkicsuh a44U
>FPORTUN fTY KMOCKS
urv\p a pi-e.ce
BRING YfiLUfl8LS
DO) SITKK, th. local poK, ta x
Ufl, TOUt KKJHT, STOP. YIELD" H tfc*
tbe "eootroUed tup-
of Art audUortum
HMR H for tack tatter
of Art
-Mn- wttb flMhin(
to th. Uy JOT..- . tan*
HOP. TOLD tut OO an to tk*
M tor M. Mr. SUn
341
tnnn
LAJ
D)
Ai
TWO PERFORMANCES
TAPE - TELEPHONE - TELEVISION
.tivOu C i i^D Xi*lA jiliO
STARRING LIVE PUBLIC FIGURES
out of
THE VERBAL AMERICAN LANDSCAPE
conceived .arid produced
iv
by poet G&rd Stern, In association
with painte^ Tvan Majdrakoff , sociologist Howard Becker
and the San Francisco Tape Music Cente~.
Starting at 8:00 p.m. sharp
Tuesday, Nov. 12 - Thursday, Nov. 14
in the auditor-ium of
THE SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF ART
McAllister St. at Van Ness Ave.
Tickets: $2.00 general public - $1.50 Museum menders
available at the Museum Book Shop, by sending your
check to the S. F. MUseum Education Department or at the
door. Student tickets $1.00 with student cards at the
Museum Book Shop or at the doo~. GET YOUR TICKETS NOW.
<;sM
<3
e-j 1?
*
342
- fflOGRAM -
1CSLP..E?
Intermission
WHAT S HAPPEKTHCV?
"... in the electronic age whose madia substitute
all-at-onceness for one-thing-at-e-tiaeness. The
movement of information at approximately the speed
of light baa became by far the largest industry in
the world . . . Patterns of human association based
on slower media have become overnight not only Ir
relevant and obsolete, but a threat to continued
existence and sanity."
- H. Marshall McLuhan
*
These performances are studies toward a larger multi-media presentation,
The Ver^l VT !?* Landscape. In my Guggenheim Foundation proposal for
this work, I wrote "The audience nay be regarded and valued, from a
viewpoint of effect, as still another recording apparatus capable of
aulti-llval operations." - Gerd Stern.
Sociologists on the control panel are Howard Becker, Sheldon Heasinger,
David Sudnov and Paul Verden. Intermission inquiries by Paul Verden.
Word-images for the slide poem were chosen by Ivan Majdrakoff and Gerd
Stern and photographed by Ivan Uajdrakoff who is also in charge of
projection.
mo R n?
WHAT S HA?PEHIKG?
Conceived and pro4uc<>i by poet Gerd Stern in associa
tion with painter Ivan Majdrakoff, sociologist Howard
Becker and the San Francisco Tape Music-Center . Judy
McBean, eo-crdinator .
Starring Live Public Figures, Tape, Telephone,
vision, Projected laagea . . .
Tele-
Projectionists
Simon Perkoff. .
for Tuesday are "at
Finstein, Jacques Overhoff and
Projectionists for Thursday are Ron W. Davis, Carl Glicko and Joe White.
The performance photographer is Fred Lyon.
Audio engineering is by Michael Callahan and -MM^-HW by Michael
Callahan, Ranon Sender and Morton Subotnlck - all of the San Francisco
Tape Music Center. Moot of the audio equipment is by courtesy of the
San Francisco Tape Music Center.
Telephones courtesy of Pacific Telephone.
Closed circuit television earners and monitors courtesy of Sylvania Elec
tric Products and Boulters courtesy of Airtronics, S.F. - specialists
in closed circuit television.
THE VERBAL AMERICAN LAHDSCAFE Television receiver* courtesy of the Women s Board, S.F. Museum of Art,
Victor dl Suvero and George Walker.
On Tuesday, November 12, 1963
& Thursday, November 14., 1963
at The San Francisco Museum of Art
Publicity by Lorrle Bunker of Consultants Inc.
Much thanks Is due the entire museum staff, Julius Uasseratein and the
ln<+/l.l
encouragement of the museum s director, George Culler.
These performances are experiments in the effects of simultaneous
c i mi I cations. We would be grateful for any observations, impressions
and critique. Please address such to Gerd Stem, In care of The San
Francisco Museum of Art, McAllister St. at Van Ness Ave., San Francisco,
California.
PAfit FHE*
y. Nov. 13, 1963
A Landmark of a Flop
t eoloaaal flopa have
taken place In the public
balk of San Fraadsco in
my time, but Gerd Stem s
snow called "Who R UT"
and "What
1
! Happening
k the only one I can recall
that hid so vast and bor-
AMndo/sir"^**
At least
ed ttt Oat pr.it Button laat
alfht at tha Sea Fnacfceo
Bfaaeanof Art en set like
ly to forget Una hurry. It
k annnumud. Gad enc i
to be doea again tamem
Bjfnt-at thy aama place.
tan aever provided a
dear ilisiinl ef hk UU
Hess sad it k dUfkatt ta de-
acribe what want ee. Aa oaa
arrtveda lorar/ child
Jn keepiBg wttfa thai phO-
aaaphy. aame aena talevk-
iamasti wan placed aa tha
stage of tha araan
rt sad they raa
all Illlllllj on
aUeany. Three
encted for th*
vDablai aad many wan COD-
Tha idea, It would
i was te nOact tba bom
bardsiant with wordi that
A vait tamou of elactrOD*
ic r"*
llM
f equiprorat wu on a
table, and expertf from the
Saa Fnaeiaeo Tkpt Oaater
d ever m aU enamg ai
if it waaat working ptufiailji,
which wat probably true: the
bow started 45
Fear gnepi ef people mi
of ninubly tba eaovenatioa of
the paopla around the table*
waa part ef thk. but not i
Two of tease gnapi vere
(apparaaUr) ia eeverad
ethar twa wen la flw ka|*
aa either rid* of UM
ef started. Tha Uftata wen lew.
at a law. They wan
hetncnnhed by haa Mad-
MnC( and mur ef then
quit. bMBUfuL Thar
luahnaat sad ehaaiata. butitraffic slcnak, tradu,
a threat ta eoatmaad exkt- almttar thingj
Mast ef them wan mono-
TV
thla warkad, for a time. But
K began to be a bora,
aaaattan tha tape w
oaimaf a eoBOBoow. nerva-
IB the faoaral apraar.
Thu west on lor 40 Bin.
mtiiwihwinii AfUr-tha Inter-
ton the ame thine (tart-
ad aU over afain. with lone
ef the saaa aUdaa aad the
aad waMlinc. A
i went to the piano
played -Choparlrti."
both straight aad to ton*
as If to mj tha
343
we arc all one on and off in and oat a switch 1m thrown contact
1 the only love open up your hearts floshlnr along the through
-
free safe high way baby baby can t you hear -r heart beat .l.ctron.
ilailpate enerxy In realatanee o do urrender aaatary through
servitude they re In the MM place we are herenow don t neglect
our builn.i. advortlaa for there la one light eallehtena the
orld hlgheat of the w>et high 1 lorn you god la great turn on
he lutheran layaana league final eolation to thla age old problem
right of nay why not hold on one. you ham taken aw Into your
heart let go It doean t aatter iihoae are am like antlMtter
ayncroacali tine shirting phaae 1 never let Myaelf to out at the
new eanaan barrier rock la haf nappenlmc atop and flow ekataala
aavage arn we croaa ouraelTea terrltorlec field* lendaeapea
discipline, down aaroaa to the holy ghoat aprlng we eee the
unlveraal Joint our own god luge atay clear at all tlawa when
container la off ground keep aaarloa beautiful
we are all ua at aahwart*. hall brandela unlveralty aprll C 1965
344
JUST
345
usco 21 church street garnerville n.y. 10923 phone ^ 14-947-?5 4 9
Hubbub
at MIT
Something called "Hubbub" was present
ed in the Kresge Auditorium at the Massa
chusetts Institute of Technology last night.
Employing an "audio-visual collage" tech
nique. Usco. a group of some 20 experi
menters utilized an oscilloscope, rapid-
elide projector, movie projector, multichan
nel speaker system, and assorted stage
devices, to create a ahow which strove for
strange new effect*.
Six episodes, or "movements. com
prised this "meiSia mix." The Brat featured
a bare-chested youth straddling a TV set
whose screen showed the waving lines of
an oscilloscope. Slides and film clips at
subliminal brevity were projected on the
wall behind him while gongs, sirenlike
wails, country music, and unidentiDable
sounds were played over the apeaken. ,
-
Fria.r. December U. IMS
346
THE QmsriAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Flirkrrinn
In the second section, the same fellow
painted cryptically reUgiexu messages on
backdrop while lifhts and partially dis-
tinfuishable images nickered around him.
Most qf the remainini episodes reflected
this pattern :
flashing slide or movie frames,
dazzling light effects, blanng. undecipher
able electronic sounds, and other unfa
miliar impressions.
While arresting at times, the presenta
tion often seemed peculiarly repetitious and
tedious. Ideas with an initial impact often
became self-defeating through interminable
extension, even though . a cumulative effect
was being sought And preoccupation with
gimmickry tended to distort or destroy
whatever was being communicated.
But the whole concept is a relatively new
one. Through refinement -it may eventually
evolve into an accepted means of artistic .
expression. .
A. N. B.
Review
Stand By ARCHER
WINSTEN
FILM-MAKERS CINEMATHEQUE 125 W.41at St.,New York..Y. Tal. 564-3818
NOTES ON THE JANUARY 18-23 PROGRAM (CSCO SHOW) Shows at 830 dally
Oaring the last few months we have heard much about "expanded" cinema (the
term used by Jonas Mekas for the "Expanded Cinema Survey" at the Cinematheque
last November); "psychedelic"
theater (the term used by Timothy Leary group);
"media -mix" (the term used by USCO) ; "combine-cinema" (the term uaed by Stan
Vanderbeek); etc. The writings of Marshall McLuhan have provided a aocio-philo-
ophical basis for this new audio-visual "movement
1
artists such as Stan Vander
beek, Angus McLise, Gerd Stern, Nam June Faik, Jerry Joffen, Robert Whitman.
Barbara Rubin, Ed Emshwiller have provided the practical examples of such worksu
Painters, dancers and composers such as Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg,
Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Elaine Summers, LaMonte Young have used or
contributed to such shows. Timothy Leary, the LSD scientist, employed it as part
of the Psychedelic Theater last summer. And since last Christmas, when Stan Van-
derbeek took half a dozen projectors into the Berliner Stadthaus for his "Feedback
No. I"
Europe has been talking about it.
The Film-Makers Cinematheque has been supporting these experiments since
its inception. Last year, the Cinematheque held an extensive survey of the whole
development with more than 3O artists participating. Now we feel that tkis work ha
reached proportions important enough for wider audiences, to come and see what it
la all about.
We have singled out one program which we think is well suited to serve as an
Introduction to this new, multiple cinema experience. FOR ONE WEEK, BEGDOiSif
TUESDAY, JANUARY 18th. EVERY NIGHT AT 8 JO, the Film-Makers* -Clnemath.
eque-wffljrooeut HUBBUB, prepared arai-performed-byHhe-CSCO group.
NOTE-ONTHrlB SPEClFKTPBOGRAMr KUBBtmjmulli-chaiinel media-mix -rf
films, t^tj>omillo*cap^Mtxi>bo*cap^Jai>eat>+ai1tre-iaage*. Effects, from one
fixilvn ctinnnrl mlr. .
x Cinematheque s Hubbub
~\ When it was all over and Hubbub" had been expe-
rienced quite loudly. Jonas Mekas. Cinematheque s High i
o Priest, apologized. The "multi-channel, media-mix of films I
8} tape, oscilloscope, stroboscope, kinetic and live images"!
g had been .deprived of its stroboscopic element due to the
;
defection of certain electrician.7
>
-This reviewer had not mlssril
,_- it. or could he. In conscience
this* that the lull -effect would
have em belter
tenths of It.
than nine,
Mr. Mekas has suggested that
P this- picture, aptly named "Hub
bub. showing each evening- at
$8JO at the US W. (1st SL
!S basement theater through this
Sunday, will serve well as a*
ana.- Ike avant-garde s latest
audiovisual creation. Let
think about It
one moment of blessed silence.
It is an extremely noisy pie-
tare. A* many as live Images
ahnuhaneously fill the screen.
OB either aloe of the screen two
man boxes reflect a repetl
tiolisly changing Image of col
ored lights. In front of the
ereen an oscilloscope seems to
represent the sound, large,
small, shrill ar loud, that yon
re hearing. The seated figure
at a man who does nothing.
says nothing, u It
Meanwhile the pictures, either
still or live, continue on the
screen. frequently flashed so
fast that the effect is sub
liminal. If any. In one section
of the movie devoted to road
and traffic signs, a speedin-!
camera, and sounds of Inerras-
Ing ecstasy ("One-Way." "Icy."
"Elevation SOOO." ~1 Lanes.-
"Oear Road." -Summit") there!
were subliminal glimpses of the I
body. Including a belly-button
which was more highly defined.
In another section there was
a heartbeat magnified to huge
Tfce Crete Sawi
la another aectlon the roar
of motorcycles look over and
we careened along parallel.
roads looking from behind the
helmet of the two cyclists. This i
roar was amplified until you i
felt It in your bones. II was at i
this point that Willard Van
Dyke, the new movie curator
at the Museum of Modern Art, .
after an hour of experiencing.
1
departed saying. In character-
Islic gentle understatement.
"Enough Is enough."
Almost Immediately the scene .
changed. Water was heard bub- ,
bUng. Yea. It was water on the
screen. Then sounds of a jungle
ook over, with all those dls
cavaant piercing sounda one as-
|
aodales with Tarzan
of media. Thaae-are-titled tlfcTHODE RAX. fllGHTHEETHBUSAFE-
W>Y. Y. GHOST REV, DIFFRACTION FILM, and OMIX.
THJLAimSTS-INVOLVED IN THE PROGHAMi.USCO is a group rrf peoplejrho work
together - posts, film-makers, engineers, composers - but they prefer to remain
nameless. "We are all one," saya an USCO spokesman."In a world of simultaneous
opermtlMuu you do not have to be . first to be on top. The material IB contributed
by many people woridiis^*alrT*taally-orHja_grwip-all over the country and is assem
bled at our church in GamervOle, New York. As has always been the case with
artisans la traditional societies, the work remains anonymous."
MEDU-MIXE8 by USCO have been performed at the San Francisco Museum of
Art, The University of British Columbia s Vancouver Arts Festival. Univ. of
WUooMln, Univ. of Hnnhestnr. .Psychedelic Theater, M.LT. , and the Flint-Makers
Cmematheque.
ales with Tarzan movie
pound-tracks. As dlmax there;
%saa an enormous croak of a .
monstrous, unseen bullfrog, the,
wlggest and best I ever heard.
You could almost see him swim
ming magnificently down the:
Hudson, the size and sound of a
super-liner. i
This was one of the few who* \
ly satisfying moments of -Hub
bub." I am not prepared to say .
that there cannot have been oth- .
an. The motorcycle sound. lor,
instance, was overwhelming. It
ha* a Masting, masculine g
gresaiveneas that might some-!
iday be used for a worthy artis-
Be purpose.
I-auppose that the sounds at
OK female do have a message
Ohat can be grasped by most;
adults and some adolescents.;
-though this has been used most ,
effectively In a sen-avant-garde,
story telling dim (~Repuuuon")
II "Hubbub" Intends to under
line the obliterating, multiple
nd pressures of
life, giving you some-
irag you d as soon avoid, per
lhacw It make, a point. My mis-
gMng with this picture, as so
iaany others of the group and
(pavement. Is mat It has the tor-
tan effect of rapetlUousness
amrratd on too lone far comfort.
anas la oot-emphaais. If. Pavlov
dudngalsep In dogs by means
Vl boredom. The creators of this
kacp themselves
l by means at the machines
which hav* to be watched for
Malfunction, but those of us who
amply erne to waun will re-
-MJJ, to ana, gr n. in-listed
enough to go out Into the sud-
4Mey peaceful, bucolic streets of
Ibumattaa where all la peace
wad quiet
TURN TURN TURN TURN
i^gi - i^ai IJL : i>iai IJL iMai i-i. |
DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE
OPENING MOTHERS DA/:M/SY8 1966
REFRESHMENTS SERVED! X 3-6 PM
MA/S-JUNE19:TUES-SUN; X 1-5 PM
RIVERSIDE DRIVE AT 1O3RD STREET;
f PUBLIC SERVICE FOR ENLIGHTENMENT PREPARED BY US
348
usco
May 8 -June 19. 1966
Riverside Museum
310 Riverside Dr. ( 103 St.)
30
aa
tM 4-
30 30
VERSIDE MUSEUM
R.verside Drive at 1 03rd St.. N. Y. C. 1 0025
FOR RELEASE
UNnHy 4-I700
l<u>o Mow 7 1 <Jfifi
Be-In
An environment by Usco
May 8 -June 19.1966
From Sunday May 8 through June 19 the Riverside Museum {310 River id Drive at
103 St.) will present a four room "be-in* by Usco. This MMt will include
paintings, sculpture, weaving poetry, kinetic*, electronics, light, and sound.
Usco is a group of people at work together on the new electronic environment, making
waves: analogs of bead and heart for love and peace. "We are all one,* says a
member,
"
in a world of simultaneous operations you don t nave to be first to be on
top. Our center is an old church at Garnervllle. New York, but much of the work comes
from individuals and groups in the city and all over the country. As with artisans in
traditional societies, the work is essentially anonymous. The Usco show is con
ceived as a "be-in" to get out of the art gallery "walk-through" world. Comfortable
furniture combined with the pieces will make it possible to spsad tine living with the
work. In one case visitors will sit In a fourteen-foot rotating cave .
Most of the nieces in this exhibition will be shown for the first time. An early Uaco
work, "Contact Is The Only Love" (1963) has been brought from the San Francisco
Museum of Art. It is a seven-foot octagon. Interlocking rhythms of sound as wall as
neon, fluorescent, and incandescent lights. The paintings are ehakras. totems,
waveforms, scriptural messages, tie-dyes, caves, mandates, premises, portraits
rf*=tlons. The sculptures turn, turn and turn. There will be several works in a
newly developed diffraction medium. "Ideas of Order." mads of IBM surplus, plays
random game-e-minute of tlc-tac-toe .
1 Sun
2 Mandate
2A Mandate
3 Tiger
4 Black Cross Weave
5 Vision of the Mystic
6 Buddha Lite Thru
7 Quetscoatl
8 Indian Spirits
9 Slva/Shakti
10 Shakti
11 Siva
12 Earth Song
13 Siva-Shaktl Fire
H Spheres
15 Thousand Petal Lotus
ISA Om Sine
16 Garden
17 49 Bulbs
18 Weather
19 Projection Door
20 Contact is the Only Love
21 Blue/Gold Cube
22 Ram Around the Rosle
23 Ideas of Order
24 U-2
25 Psalms
26 Diffraction Mosaic
27 Making Waves
28 Cave
29 Cave Paintings and Tie Dyes
30 Mandalic Drawings
31 Babe Box
32 My Father and I Are One
33 Zoo
i for this show will be
Much of the light and sound environ
of the variables, including stroboeeopic light and oscilloscope images, will be
- *** by those who come.
349
d
-
V
1
*
\i -
w"
-1 *
L!
re r
,
I
a !,!
PLAST/C
1
t
351
m 1 O 3T <"
MM Oj
- r
400
W=
,.. _!.. cv. .. < ,
4r
-
-.,... _i. ;-.V4r.
c^^^ SBiiijjj^jB !>
"""
"
"
"^"t* :
^*s
<%
354
Light: Obiect and image
Whitney Museum ot American An
New York
USCO Inirrmrd.a ikrlck for ImnK.mniion igM |The work inrll n in ll>
nhibilion.l
usco
Founded 1964. ai Garnerville. New York. The
US Company represents a merger of talents,
pamlcr. poet and engineer, and media, light,
motion, sound and object. Devoted to producing
situations of intense sensory and psychic
stimulus. Unites the cults of mysticism and
technology as a basis for introspection and
communication. Presentations based on the
thifiry that "illumination is a way. yoga,
discipline, search, discovery, the making of each
thins in light. Light on/the mirror, light
ihruuRh/the window, reflection, projection or
whatever method we find to fulfill our desires or
In rrvisii the inner vision."
Exhibition, and Performances
Onr-man: "Who R U." San Francisco Museum
uf Art. San Francisco. 1963: University of
California at Los Angeles. 1963:
"
V.A.L.."
I
Inivnrsity of British Columbia. Vancouver.
British Columbia. 1964: "V.A.L.."
University of
Oregon. Eugene. Oregon. 1964: "Immaculate
Heart Mosaic." Hollywood. California. 1964:
"
V A.L.." University of Rochester. Rochester.
New York. 1964: California College of Arts and
Crafts. Oakland. California. 1964: "V.A.L.."
Carleton College. Carlelon. Minnesota. 1964:
V A.L.." University of Wisconsin. Madison.
Wisconsin. 1964: "Yield." "We R All One."
Brandeis University. Wallham. Massachusetts.
1965: Woodstock Artists Association.
Woodstock. New York. I960: Rutgers University.
New Brunswick. New (ersey. 196S: "Hubbub."
Mansachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cambridge. 1965: "We R All One."
Berkeley.
California. 1066: "We R All One: a Be-In."
Riverside Museum. New York. 1966:
"Knvironmenl II." The Architectural League of
New York. 1967. Croup: "Kunst Lichl Kunsl."
Stedelijk van Abbemuseum. Eindhoven. The
Netherlands. 1966: "The Projected Image."
Institute of Contemporary Art. Boston. 1967:
"Shiva/Sakti, Sine/Pulse." Riverside Museum.
New York. 1967; "Lights
in Orbit." Howard Wise
Gallery. New York. 1967; "Lighl/Motion/Space."
Walker Art Center. Minneapolis. & Milwaukee
Art Center. Milwaukee. 1967: "Light and
Movement." Flint Institute of Art. Flint.
Michigan. 1967: "Festival of Lights." Howard
Wise Gallery. New York. 1967: "Fanflashlic."
Intermedia 68. N>w York Stale Council on the
Arts and The National Council on the Arts.
New York and tour. 1968.
Bibliography
Feigelson. Naomi. "We Are All One. Who R U."
Cheetah. 1 :30-35. 74-76. May 1966.
Houston, lean, and others. Psychedelic Art.
New York. Grove Press. Inc.. 1968.
Kostelanetz. Richard. "Scene and Not Herd
USCO." Horper s Bazaar. No. 3073:52. 71. 75. 84.
December 1967.
Kostelanetz. Richard. The Theatre of Mixed
Means. New York. The Dial Press. Inc.. 1966.
Lester. Elenore. "Intermedia: Tune in. Turn On
And Walk Out?" The New York Times Magazine.
30-31. 66-76. May 12. 1966.
Tulane Drama Review. 11. Fall 1966.
Public Collection.
Immaculate Heart College. Los Angeles:
Oakland Art Museum. Oakland. California:
San Francisco Museum of Art. San Francisco.
355
Drcfftiher
SCKN.K AND
NOT HERD-
(Continued from page 71)
judges, "you
can become pretty
much ommattentive."
From McLuhan. along with the
Indian aesthetician Ananda K
Coomaraswamy. they took the
theme that the contemporary artist
should be as anonymous as the
medieval artist: but interpretations
of "anonymity" create a constant
argument within the USCO house.
Their work is clearly anonymous in
the sense that it contains neither
an individual signature nor ear
marks o( personalized expression.
However, to Stem, their impersonal
result does not deny
;
nJividual ar
tistic contributions.
USCO has done so many things
in its short life that future histori
ans will have difficulty collecting
all the data; what I list below is
merely a rough summary of their
produce:
1.) Psychedelic posters and other
graphics.
2.) Various kinds of machines and
electronic devices, such as strobe
lights and programming units.
3.) Electronic audio-visual aids,
such as a counting unit for the
New York production of Norman
Mailer s The Oeer Park.
4.) Mixed-means presentations for
corporation sales conferences.
5.) The setting up and operation
of a mixed-media discotheque.
6.) Kinetic artistic -informational
displays, such as a much-appre
ciated media-mix about the Lower
East Side for New York s Jewish
Museum and. this autumn, the
Smithsonian Institution in Wash
ington.
7.) Miscellaneous sound and light
effects for all kinds of hippy and
pacifist benefits.
8.) Theatrical performances in doz
ens of museums and universities.
9 ) An elegant kinetic, medrtational
tabernacle in their own house.
10.) The construction of a com
munal village in the New Mexican
desert.
11.) Consultation in environment
creation, including hyped-up roams
intended for psychiatric purposes.
The more USCO does, the fur
ther from convention it goes: the
more imitators they have, the
stronger is their, desire to. mo /e be
.
yond even media mixes. They will
.probably move out of quasi-art ob
jects and even theatrical displays
into larger and more comprehen-
sive creations. "If we are con-
cerned environmentally." Stern
says, "we might as well plan our
own environment." The New Mexi-
SCENE AND
-.,-.
1NU1
. (Continued from page 75)
co project will be their first attempt ,
at building a human community j
he met both Allen Ginsberg and
from scratch
Home base for USCO is still the
Carl Solomon in a psychiatric hos
pital in the late forties. Born in
one-time church in Garnerville. A! 1928 in the Saarbasin. and a few
rather large building, it has one I
years later a refugee from Hitler s
huge room which was formerly a
workshop but now houses "The
Tabernacle" (1966). a kinetic en
vironment that USCO opens to the
public every Sunday afternoon. A
hexagon, about twelve feet in di
ameter. "The Tabernacle" has such
a rich gallery of sensory effects that
the experience of sitting in it con
firms Stern s promise that.
"
The
Tabernacle stimulates people,
shows them things they haven t
seen before, makes them contem
plative."
All receipts from USCO activities
go into maintaining the establish
ment, purchasing new supplies for
pieces, and transportation. The
telephone rings a lot. and a collec
tive passion for long-distance con-
versat ions earns Mother Bell several
hundred dollars each month.
USCO s annual income runs about
thirty thousand dollars per year,
mostly from Maverick Systems.
Inc.. a subsidiary in electronic
manufacturing. As expenses in
variably run more than income,
donations fill the deficit. "We
have all the same administrative
problems of a small business."
Stern judges, "and none of the!
conventional incentives no fringe
benefits and time off." The
Germany. Stem came with his fam
ily to New York City in 1936 and
later attended the Bronx High
School of Science. He has worked
as a carpenter, a mucker in a gold
mine, a public relations executive
and a travel writer for Playboy; to
the USCO division of labor, he
brings competencies developed in
all these experiences. He is the
poet and the carpenter, as well as
the coordinator and the publicist.
It is Stern who usually deals with
the outside world; and perhaps be
cause he is considerably older
than his partners, he usually as
sumes the mediator s role in in-
tra-USCO squabbles. Medium in
height and build, he has an im
posingly long, untrimmed and un
furling reddish-brown beard, thick
unkempt black hair and thick eye
glasses, which have a small re
flecting disc at the zenith of their
bridge. His appearance conveys a
faintly Hassidic image which Stern
sometimes cultivates; usually in
demeanor he is disciplined and re
sponsive, generous and practical.
Steve Ourkee is so different
from Stem that their relationship
strikes some outsiders as an in
explicable puzzle. Born in 1938 in
Warwick. New York, about fifteen
building itself has a legal identity miles from Garnerville. he grew up
1
in New York State as "The Church
of the Tabernacle, Inc.." whose
"ministers" are USCO. To earn a
tax-exempt "free church" sta.us.
USCO must keep the Church s
pews, which is to say "The Taber
nacle." open free to the public one
day every week. Within the shell of
an ok) church thrives a new kind
of religion, as a new Church.
in New York City, quit high school
at. fifteen and soon embarked on a
career as a painter. Some of his
early work incorporated English
words into an abstract field: and
perhaps because he also lived near
Robert Indiana. Robert Rauschen-
berg and Jim Rosenquist. the crit
ic G. R. Swenson included Durfcee
in his pioneering survey of Pop
The core members of USCO are Art, Art News (Sept-Oct.. 1963).
hardly anonymous and amenable Objecting to this premature class!-
types who could facilely blend into fication. Ourkee abandoned that
an organization, let alone a crowd: I; way of painting to concentrate on
yet their diversified talen.s and j
large, cleanly executed pattern
personalities make everyone. Stem
insists, "mutually supportive."
About a dozen years ago. Stern had
a reputation as an undistinguished
poet on the fringe of the Beat
Movement- He went to Black
paintings in general, objective
creations designed to induce sub
jective responses. In 1962 soon
after their marriage, the Durkees
purchased the abandoned church
from a patriotic organization. He
Mountain College for a spell, and considers himself a follower of the
(Continued on page 84)
Hjrorr s B.IZUI
mute Indian prophet Metier Baba,
whom he calls "The Avatar of the
Age:" and it was a personal di
rective from Baba himself that per
suaded Ourkee to terminate his use
of psychedelic drugs. In USCO s
work, he is not only the painter but
the ideologue and visionary: state
ments of principle and ideals are
almost his specialty. His appetite
for mystical literature is almost
scholarly. When presenting his
ideas, he speaks with the surly in
tensity and commanding presence
of an incipient prophet.
Michael Callahan is consider
ably younger than his partners, as
well as possessed of distinctly dif
ferent habits and competencies.
Born in San Francisco in 1944. he
joined Ourkee and Stem at Garner
ville just before his twentieth birth
day. Prior to that, he had attended
San Francisco City College for
nearly two years, intending to ma
jor in psychology: and he also
helped design and construct the
Bay City s first tape music center,
eventually becoming its vice-presi
dent. The son of an electrician, he
learned precociously the languages
of switches and circuits: as he puts
it. "Although I don t have a de
gree. I ve always known people
who have needed something elec
tronic done." As chief maker of
the strobe lights and other bread-
fetching equipment. Callahan is
officially president of Maverick
Systems: and electronic manufac
turers and distributors occasion
ally give or lend him instruments
that USCO cannot yet afford. The
machines and devices he realizes
for mixed-media displays are often
more intricate than his limited
budget would allow a lesser talent.
The young producer-consultant
John Brockman does so much work
with USCO that he is an asso
ciate in all but name, and along
with Gerd Stern and Michael Calla
han, Brockman is co-authoring an
introductory textbook on inter
media. At one time anyone was wel
come to join USCO. and strangers
who can contribute to the current
activity win cordial hospitality.
Nonetheless by now USCO seems
more of an example of what can be
done a recognized avant-garde
revolutionary elite; and just as
their innovations in the arts of me
dia-mix have influenced scores of
other artists and groups of artists,
so USCQ itself has become a model
for other new American tribes m
sync with the electronic age. *
356
NO OW NOW
the electronic mantra
under construction
with basic timing circuit
357
SCENE AND
NOT HERD
usco
.
BY RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
USCO. USCO those mysterious initials that
magisterially appear in various places and con
texts signify US Company (or company of us),
a collective of artists who operate out of a for
saken church in Garnerville. New York, about
an hour north of New York City. USCO func
tions as a frame, as well as a signature, for
indi -<ual artists who move in and out. con
tributing to the collective effort and yet pre
serving their personal identities. The quickest
measure of USCO s impact is the relation
between its age and achievement; for in less
than four years, it has completed a multiplicity
of projects and established an international
reputation.
The core members of USCO are its founders
a painter in his late twenties named Steve
Ourkee; a younger man with a considerable
aptitude for electronics. Michael Callahan; and
a thirty-eight year old poet who had occasion
ally plied conventional trades. Gerd Stem.
Their paths crossed in the early sixties, as
they "helped each other with their respective
works. "Gerd was living near here." Ourkee
remembers, "and he was just turning his poet
ry into on-the-wall objects. As I had been
making objects on the wall for a long time. I
helped him. Since I understood that very
thoroughly, he was able to say X. Y and A.
and I was able to say A. B and 1. That was
how the relationship started." A short while
later. Stern, then in San Francisco, needed
some technical help in making a tape col
lage, and Michael Callahan. as a technician
at the local tape music center, became his
collaborator. Not until 1964. however, did they
all gather in Ourkee s studio-home, the Gar
nerville church, to combine their collaborative
instincts into USCO.
As each moved out of his respective art
into collective work, the results of their coilabo-
ration became inter-media works that strad
dled the walls which traditionally divided one
art from another. USCO has produced ob
jects of all sorts posters as well as machines
but their primary medium has been the-
theatrical event. Some have been conventional
performances, where (Continued on page 71)
1967
SCENE AND
NOT HERD
(Continued from page 52)
an -audience arrived at a certain
time, paid an admission price and
4thefl took their seats, but USCO
prefers to work in what Stern calls
"trie environmental circumstance."
where "you
take a space and an
open-ended piece of time, and you
see what you can make it do to
people." In producing an environ
ment USCO metaphorically creates
a world of activity just as. Our-
fcM adds. "God created the uni-
The best USCO theatrical pieces
qsfftain a plethora of communica-
thfc stimuli slides, films (some-
takes looped), colored and/ or puts-
ief lights, sounds, objects and even
odors all of which usually func
tion to evoke archetypal themes;
.a particularly successful piece
they characterize as "a beautiful
mix." The four-room environment
USCO constructed at the Riverside
Museum in May, 1966, was prob
ably their most elaborate and bril
liant exhibition.
USCO designed this "system"
to be a "meditation room." full of
basic symbols- and materials
Tnale and female, heartbeats, and
Above, seven spheres representing
the seven planets. "We also had
five elements." Durkee remembers.
"We had sand in the box in the
middle: fire in the candles: we had
air: we had water in the fountain
around the periphery of the col
umn, which was also the lingnam
inside the yoni a psycho-sexual
situation. There was an om tape
playing on a stereo tape recorder.
Have you heard of em"? Dome,
home. womb. tomb, bomb: the
onV is in a lot of important
things. Om was the original
sound of the universe. What we
had in that room, in short, was ev
erything that is." Most of USCO s
oldest admirers consider the Riv
erside Museum display its greatest
single work, and the exhibition has
been memorialized in. Jud Yal-
kut s color film. Down by fne Riv
erside (1966).
The effect of an USCO environ
ment is somewhat similar to the
psychedelic experience, for in both
an awareness of sensory overload
disrupts all attempts at concen
trated focus- and also initiates a
gamut of emotional and psycholog
ical changes. An intrinsic purpose
of such an environment is the
challenging of linear habits of or
ganization. "We re dealing with the
question of now you can gel into
the mind with information and im
ages and whether literary, sequen
tial ordering is really the only de
cent, rational and reasonable in
put." Stern remarks. Therefore,
the connection with psychedelic*.
while valid, does not explain every
thing: although Ourkee once ex
tensively iectured on the new drugs
(which he has since given up),
USCO s pieces are designed to
turn people on. not to themselves
but each other. Their principal
theme, Ourkee says, "is that we
are all one. Once we have the un
derstanding that you re not threat
ening to me and I m not threaten
ing to you in other words, that
you are myself outside of myself,
then we can begin to work to
gether." USCO s environments pre
sent a field of elemental images
precisely to make everyone under
go a common reception and then
experience a shared awareness. In
deed their conception of art s pos
sible purposefulness evokes echoes
of the American Thirties, but the
content of USCO s message is
more ecumenical than parochial.
The close connection between
electronic media and shared aware
ness has McLuhanish overtones,
and sure enough McLuhan s ideas
are conspicuously among USCO s
influences. Back in 1960 Gerd
Stern read an early draft of Under
standing Media (1964) in the form
of a report McLuhan submitted to
the National Association of Educa
tional Broadcasters in 1959. and
that experience persuaded Stern
to consider the artistic potential of
the new media. Soon after, his own
poetic impulses took off from the
problems of black words on white
paper and were channeled into
tape collage. McLuhan himself has
joined USCO for two performances,
speaking after and sometimes be
fore a mixed-media presentation.
USCO concurs with his prophecy
that today s cities win soon disin
tegrate into small communities,
electronically interconnected; and
from him. they also recognized
how sensory overload in their home
environment could recircuit their
own sensibilities. "When you live
in a twenty-four channel system,
day in and day out es we did
when we were doing our things at
home, running them for twenty-
four hours a day, almost" Ourkee
Continued on peg* 75)
THEATABERNACLE
SPEAKERS
POEM CANOifS
FIRE
15 A
FOOMTAI*) SET l A
COVERED 0/4
U>AU- I
- UUlFICO riEU>/66fl/*"-)
maui- x * -
3- UHICR SOC&E 14
THE
15
COLUPON
OF COH|CH A LITE BURNS-
THS
OORO CXClFPr UAU.I
MICrt COWTKlW
BQBA i FACE
RCTOTE3 |
ATOP THE COUJMlG
AS A HEMI9MEKE
TO TfctE
THft FiCOK 1$ *>AA
ro*>peo
THE oome
THE
TOPS
THE OOTSlOE OF THE
. sPHsar is A
WHICH AUSO peorecrs
THC OOfAE. TME a STftAlT
VAULT fioor OFTME MMcttwrr
UNDER COPST.
AM MO VR
t>SCO
CMORCW
flu. rtOI/EMCWT lAITNIDt THE
is
ceioTrc of TH* A*e> or
OomE HAI>* 0V A THftCAO
A
359
360
WE ARE ALL ONE.
W1H
M1LJ?
With light, color, motion, sound
and a little McLuhanist theory,
USCO tunes us in
on the real vibrational universe.
by Naomi Feigelson
A continuous flow of images projected on the the
ater s cave-like walls assaults the audience. Flowers, larger
than life, open and close, zooming in and out. The eyes,
lips, face and shoulder of Jean Harlow; penguins, eagles,
birds of prey. A volcano erupting. On the screen up front,
a lion licks her cub. Over all this is a mixture of sound
animals roaring, Eleanor Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson,
music from Bach, Tristan, and Cone With the Wind. In
the semi-darkness, three musicians walk up to the stage
with yahrzeit candles, sit a while in the light of the
remembered dead, and sing about energy and love. They
leave and the play, Michael McClure s The Beard, begins.
The prologue and theater design are by USCO (for US
Company), a group of artists who live as a family and
work in intermedia and environmental art. Combining
lights, colors, moving images, sounds, and often human
actors, intermedia is the end product of half a century
of under and above-ground art. It shows the influence
of psychedelic drugs, pop art, op art, junk art, kinetic
sculpture, light sculpture, electronic music, and happen
ings. It has absorbed the perfumes of Oriental mysticism
and the precepts of Buckminster Fuller, who emphasizes
man s relation to environment, and Marshall McLuhan,
30 CHEETAH MAY
who describes technology as man s extension in time and
space.
The prologue for The Beard, which lasted a full 35
minutes, excited responses ranging from delight and re
ceptivity to boredom and even outrage. This was not too
different from the effect of the play itself. During the pre-
opcning previews, producer Jim Walsh reported some
anger in the audience during the prologue and occasional
walkouts. At least one viewer asked if there was really
going to be a play. She was afraid the prologue was "the
whole thing."
USCO frequently does just part of the thing. For Nor
man Mailer s Deer Park. USCO devised an elaborate elec
tronic toteboard which marked the passage of time and
divided acts and scenes with a bell to suggest a boxing
ring. As consultants to John Brockman Associates, the
group has worked on mixed media sales meetings for
Scott Paper Company, a Christmas lighting environment
for Henri Bendel s and the East Coast s first psychedelic
discotheque. The World, in Garden City, Long Island.
These ventures have provided USCO with a living and
the chance to develop and acquire new equipment.
But collaborations have drawbacks. The effect of an
USCO production depends to a great extent on the audi
ence s willingness to be drawn in. Ideally USCO should
control the space, the program, and the viewer s state of
mind. When it does the effect is spectacular, as it was at
USCO s Riverside Museum show, which attracted so much
attention that even Life mentioned it in a cover story
about psychedelic art. USCO called it a Human Be-In, a
coinage popularized by the organizers of the famed San
Francisco Gathering of the Tribes, which took place
several months later.
The Riverside Be-In was an environment where lights,
music, painting, sculpture, all the elements invited the
viewer to participate, to come in and meditate. USCO
361
wanted lo get away from the usual museum experience of
walking from one object to another. As spokesman Gerd
Sicrn describes it, "We wanted a place where people
could communicate more with themselves than with any
one else and in which there was a period of, in John
Cage s terms, silence."
USCO turned one room of the museum into a light
garden, where visitors could activate flowers made of
lights by walking on floor switches. Inside a second room
was a circular enclosure of painted cloth, called a cave
because "that s where we re all from. We wanted to turn
people back to their subconscious." Viewers came into the
cave, lay down on a rotating couch, and contemplated
the pictures of demons, gods, and humans painted on the
ceiling and the walls all around them.
A third room was subsequently dubbed the Creation,
because it sought to encompass the basics of life. It too
was for meditation. In it were five nine-foot high paint
ings representing the planets in their orbits, the seven
ipheres, the Tree of Life, a male figure of Shiva, Hindu
!iod of energy. His outflowing energy was symbolized by a
icntral, pulsating light from which painted lines radiated.
V dancing female, the Hindu Sakti. represented woman,
vith the light lines- radiating out. In the center of the
limly lit room was a sandbox with a rotating light column,
t
passed the light to the paintings, illuminating them. A
immcr circuit lowered the lights every second minute,
"he other lights all flashed, pulsed. Over all was a tape of
ic original sound of the universe: "Om."
In McLuhan s terms, the spectators in that room
ere having a low definition experience: when individual
etails are not clearly delineated, the viewer becomes a
articipant, feeding himself back and forth into what he
.es. In Stern s terms, the "input"
was from spectator to
cperience, from person to painting. "I doubt if one out
:
100 people who came to the exhibit saw the dancing
ikti in that painting," says Stern. "That doesn t matter
(cause it worked. That Sakti was out there vibrating in
fe painting. Who cares if they re arms or legs? They re
,rt of the vibrational universe."
The staff at the Riverside Museum was stunned at the
sow s reception. A small gallery far off the circuit, its
ehibitions were generally more sedate, and counted five
o six visitors a day usually school children and
tuchers or middle-aged ladies a crowd. Suddenly,
UCO was bringing in teenagers and people in their early
twenties, and bringing them in by the hundreds. Many
brought their lunch, settled down, and stayed for the day.
Gerd Stern believes that circuitry explains a large part
of the show s effect. The key concepts are the computer
terms "digital"
and "analog." Digital experience involves
a succession of discrete steps: analog experience refers to
a continuous process. Flashing lights, going on and off,
are digital phenomena. Pulsing lights are analogs. Stem
credits Mike Callahan, another member of USCO, with
turning the group on to the analog experience, which is
more like what happens in the real vibrational universe.
Before USCO. when Stern was working by himself, he
used flashing lights. "It wasn t until Michael came along
that I understood the whole contemporary preoccupation
with whether a phenomenon was digital or analog, whether
you had this organic process going or were always chop
ping things on and off. In electrical terms, the difference
between digital and analog is a relationship basic to the
last decade."
It is also part of the religious nature of the exhibit. If
the viewer starts by forgetting the content, says USCO,
and looks at what s happening as experience, he begins to
see the religious reality that exists in the vibrational uni
verse and in the nature of light. The reality is the
metaphor.
Stern, who looks a bit like Allen Ginsberg, is USCO s
bearded, bespectacled, long-haired guru. At 38 he has
been in, around, and of most of the underground art move
ments of the last 20 years. He made the beat scene. He
was a hippie long before Haight-Ashbury. A founder of
Pacifica s first listener-sponsored radio station KPFA in
Berkeley, he is a poet (two published volumes), a car
penter (he has a union card), a gold-mucker, film-maker,
and kinetic sculptor.
Stern was just switching from written to concrete
poetry when a friend gave him Marshall McLuhan s "Re
port to the National Association of Broadcasters," later
expanded into Understanding Media. McLuhan s stress
on the effect of the medium itself rather than its content
influenced him enormously. "It took me on a long jump
from poetry, to lights, sound, and film." he says.
At about this time Stern met Michael Callahan, USCO s
22 year-old hardware head. Mike, who had been experi
menting with electronic music in high school, was then
president of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, where
he had designed their control (continued on page 74)
MAY CHEETAH 35
usco
(continuedfrom page 35)
362
system. Along with Stern, Callahan
made the jump from his groove into
mixed media. Stern claims that the idea
of hybridizing various media was made
possible for them by the invention of
Michael s circuitry, which allowed them
to control, randomize, and program
multi-channel operations.
The third founding member of USCO
is Steve Durkee, whom Stern calls the
visionary, architect, painter of the
group. Durkee and Stern had been
working together in New York since the
early sixties. Durkee was responsible for
most of the paintings in the Riverside
show.
USCO s first performance, given in
California, was called Who R U? It in
volved 64 people, one of whom was
Michael McClure, and was an attempt
to explore the mysteries of communi
cation, both electronic and interperson
al. McClure and a number of other
participants were placed in booths
around a central auditorium. Their con
versation was fed by loudspeakers into
the various other booths, and into the
auditorium as well, along with 18 chan
nels of mixed media sounds, films,
and images.
In the beginning, claims Stern, they
weren t too sure what they were doing.
He adds that they were more strongly
influenced by ideas at first "in terms of
motivation for the performances. The
materials have grabbed us more strongly
as we ve gone along."
Later group productions, like Hub
bub, which USCO did for the 1965 Lin
coln Center underground film festival,
were less chaotic. Hubbub, which Stern s
wife Judy, herself a weaver and graphics
designer, describes as "a
hard-driving
performance all the way through," was
a kind of programmed pandemonium.
Using slides, films, sounds, etc., the
emphasis was on frenzy high decibel
noises and frantic images. It was de
scribed by one critic as "an accumula
tion, not only of the senses that create
the present, but also the past, all to be
Experienced simultaneously. One s life
is accumulated and experienced in the
same way." Another critic claimed the
total effect was "stunning, almost to the
point of physical impact upon the
audience."
There are good reasons why USCO
has made it as a communal art family
while so many other groups with simi
lar pretensions have failed. For one
thing, USCO started out as a group of
artists and ended up a family, not the
other way around. For another, the kind
of work they do demands certain skills
used in combination in metalwork,
electronics, electricity, kinetics. The na
ture of the mix requires that a group
produce it. Finally, while they have
as little patience with the hypocrisies of
straight society as any other "hippie"
group, they have an artistic point of
view, a critical, philosophical approach
to life, and a goal beyond today. They
are a group of individuals and artists,
each disciplined in his own craft, and
all together they are on a work trip.
Stern, in fact, likes to define USCO
as "a lot of us working together. It
isn t trying to get out of names or re
sponsibilities. It s not we who are anony
mous, but our work. We re trying to get
out of that pictures on the wall thing,
that museum thing where peope are like
chickens, peering down to the left-hand
corner to see who the artist is."
Their belief in anonymous art and
group living as a social mode is con
scious and deliberate. Stem rarely talks
ahout it without reference to Marshall
McLuhan or Amando Coomerswarmi,
former curator of the Boston Museum.
They agree with McLuhan that with
television and "electronic trihalization."
the world has shrunk to the dimensions
of a global village. "We re going back
to the more traditional society, where
the craftsman does his work and never
mind what his name is. If you went to
Chartres when they were building the
Cailiedriil." says Stem, "you
wouldn t
he likely to look up and say, Hey, that s
Charlie who did that gargoyle on the
left.
"
On the other hand, he adds, "We
don t go around saying No names. No
names. No names.
"
USCO s headquarters are an old
church and connecting house in Gar-
nersville, New York. The church por
tion has been converted to a tabernacle,
incorporated by the State of New York
as a non-denominational church. It is
open on Sunday and usually attracts a
crowd, mostly teenagers. Inside, USCO
has created a new environment from the
rotating light column and around it five
paintings from the Riverside Museum
show. Also from the show is a piece of
kinetic sculpture exhibited in California
in 1963, a large yellow octagon, using
the highway for a metaphor. It is called
"Contact Is the Only Love." "Contact"
363
has sound circulating through eight
speakers, neon lights, and flashing lights
ranging
1
- from 480 flashes per minute to
one. All the sounds and lights are putting
across the messages "GO ON. GO ON,
GO ON! TURN AHEAD. TURN
AHEAD."
Some people never did get the mes
sage. The television reporter who inter
viewed Stern in front of the octagon in
sisted on calling it a Stop sign. Stem
still marvels at it. "You ve been im
printed for so many years with a small
red Stop sign that a seven-foot yellow
octagon which says Turn Ahead, Go
On, Go On," and is called "Contact is
the Only Love" is perceived as saying
Stop.
1 "
Anywhere from six to 30 members
of the USCO family drift between Gar-
nerville and Woodstock, New York, and
Taos, New Mexico. Woodstock is the
site of Maverick Systems, a company
which Michael Callahan runs for manu
facturing USCO s hardware. At the mo
ment. USCO is working out another
corporation scheme with a group of
Harvard Business School students and
professors, who want to market some
of USCO s equipment.
Steve Durkee is in New Mexico with
his wife and family, supervising the
building of an USCO retreat Although
original plans for the retreat are quite
grand, so far only one large adobe dome
on 150 acres has been completed.
In a rather lengthy description of this
community, USCO calls it
... a spiritual center planned for con
struction in a remote area of the
Southwest, US free from the in
tense psychic vibrations of large ener
gy centers. [It] is meant to accelerate/
facilitate reintegration processes by
tuning into elemental realities. . . .
Solux [a name since discarded] antici
pates a radical change in current
social structures, envisioning a co
operative, self-supportive multi-tribal
union created for the release of love
by spiritual awakening . . . The com
munity will base some part of its
economic structure on ... the hard
ware and software of current technol
ogy . . . It is not a matter of forms,
rituals and ceremonies, but of acquir
ing discipline, developing a sense of
perspective, and focusing awareness
in real time. To find God is to come
to one s own self.
Collectively and individually USCO is
hung up on light and its symbolic mean-
ings, on the Kaballah and mysticism, on
the divine geometry of living things and
electrical phenomena. But as their flier
on the retreat suggests, they are not
seeking God or themselves through
drugs. Some of them have made that
scene and left it, choosing, as one put
it, "other ways to get perspective on a
mundane existence." Mike Callahan
has never taken LSD, prefers liquor,
and gets his vibrations from oscil
loscopes. And Gerd Stern says: "I ve
been involved in the general world
of drugs for about 20 years. People
seeking revelation . . . can find it there.
But for relief and escape, hallucinations
are unsatisfactory. The product is very
low-grade and the claims made for it
are not supported. I m an old friend of
Tim Leary s, but I- don t see his life as
being that beautiful or his being as that
radiant. The chemical way is the most
sophisticated way to get certain places,
but there are simpler ways in art, for
instance, and science." Though the
group does not condemn drugs, they are
prohibited in the sanctuary.
While USCO is developing a group
style and point of view, in matters of
individual style, including dress, there
seems to be no pressure to conform,
even to each other. Gerd Stern, for ex
ample, is just as likely to show up in a
yellow corduroy vest and pants with
flowered shirt as in a $200 Brooks
Brothers suit, boots, and tennis socks.
The latter outfit (minus footgear) was
laid on him by John Brockman, the 26-
year-old incorporates of Brockman As
sociates. John, who organized the Film
Makers Cinematheque, where he met
Stern, is a short-haired, button down,
conventionally turned-out whiz kid of
the new technology.
One night, according to Brockman, he
convinced Stern that anyone who lived
in as many worlds as Stern did might
find more than one way to dress. (Gerd
had just returned from Montreal, where
he was talking to Expo 67 people from
Philadelphia, where USCO is designing
an overstimulation chamber for the Al
bert Einstein Hospital, and from Minne
apolis, where they are setting up a mu
seum guide for the Walker Art Gallery.)
The next morning, according to Brock
man, Stern walked out of Brockman s
Central Park West apartment "with
about $1000 worth of my clothes, most
ly on him. He had his beard trimmed
and hair cut and went home to Gamers-
ville. When he got there, his wife Judy
was busy mopping the floor. It took
about ten minutes before she recognized
him."
Although Mike Callahan grew up in
Haight-Ashbury, he is no flower child.
While Stern tends toward the flamboy
ant, Callahan is deceptively quiet He
dresses in a blue shirt and dark pants,
wears ordinary plastic-rimmed glasses,
and looks as straight as anyone from
Middletown. According to Brockman,
"Mike is in love with electronics." The
romance started in* childhood. His
father, who is an electrician, remembers
him dragging around an electric cord
much as Linus drags around his blanket
Mike lives by himself, somewhere be
tween Woodstock and Garnersville.
As a group, USCO has gone from
the "you"
of Who R V to the "we" of
We Are All One. We Are All One, a
line from the mystic Meher Baba, is
the title of another USCO performance.
Using slides, films, strobes, oscillo
scopes, music, and a dancer, its theme
is "the
journey of being."
It presents
a series of visual and aural images,
among them details from Bosch and
Breughel, goblins, monsters, grotesques.
The audience often sings along sway
ing to the music of Turn, Turn, Turn."
The performance ends with 10 minutes
of total darkness, during which an
"Om"
tape is played.
Gerd Stern believes that the title ex
presses what USCO is all about. "It is
very hard to sense at any one moment
to what extent the message "We Are All
One applies. At any moment the two of
us or the 13 of us that-live hi the church
may not be capable of that idea, in either
living or working. But that is what we
aim for. It becomes a question of hu
man beings sharing time, of making the
material productions of this world hi
an environment where community is
possible."
364
"Intermedia is the breeding ground of everything that will
replace it." Above: Periscope sequence from Black Zero by
Aldo Tambellini. Straboscope, light machines, hand-painted
slides. Photo by George Erlich. Below: Strobe Room at En
vironment II: Prisms, lens, water, light. Collaboration between
USCO and sculptor Charles Ross. Architectural League, N. Y.
Understand
ing Inter
media
Passage Beyond
Definitions
JUD YALKUT
Everything grows out of everything else.
Op an is the crystalization of formal inves
tigations into divine geometry, a continuous
force in man s history of visualization.
Kinetic art is an active step towards Inter
media, recalling motions in time to man s
collective consciousness. Anything presented
as a work of art that inspires the mind,
emotions and senses with even a glimpse
of the total awareness of conscious being
could be termed Psychedelic art. These
manifestations, together with Happenings
and Events, have become the grass roots
of an entirely new phenomenon, variously
called Expanded Cinema (a term originat
ing with film-makers ), Mixed Media (not
to be confused with traditional painting
techniques) and Intermedia.
What is Intermedia? A glance at the
myriad facets of expanding performing
arts in the Film Culture Expanded Arts
issue would give halt to any lexicographer.
The very sense of the interpenetration of
many forms of expression implies passage-
beyond definition. Film Culture Ex-
pantlcd /Ir. .i includes "Happenings, neo-
Baroquc and neo-haiku theaters, expanded
cinema, kincsthetic and acoustic theaters,
events, readymades, puzzles, games, gags,
jokes, etc." The etcetera indicates the
growing dimensions of an experiential
experimentation requiring the greatest
organic play. Approaches to Intermedia
have been made from the avenues of musi
cal composition, an area expanded by
avant-garde composers like Nam June Paik.
Takehisa Kosugi. Dick Higgins, Joe Jones.
Ben Patterson, Yoko Ono, Tony Gix and
La Monte Young, by the composition of
pieces incorporating the other senses as
well as the auditory. Dancers Carolee
Schneemann, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne
Rainer, Beverly Schmidt and Mary McKay
have composed and participated in Inter
media-related events. Painters have pre
sented pieces incorporating live action,
slide and film projections t Robert Whit
man, Aldo Tambellini, Brion Gysin, Al
Hanscn and Claes Oldenburg) as have
slide-makers and photographers like Don
Snydcr, Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern. In
termedia work has included Happening
people from theatrical backgrounds ( Ken
Dewey), painting (Allan Kaprow and
Robert Watts) and poets (Jackson Mac-
Low, Gerd Stern, Emmett Williams and
The Black Thumb and Something Else
Presses;. The use of multiple projection
techniques, with or without live interfer
ence patterns, is characteristic of not only
the film-makers approach to Intermedia
(Ed Emshwiller, Takahiko limura. Jerry
Joffen, Ben Van Meter, etc.), but also in
dicates the importance of the filmed image
to our contemporary language. Most re
vealing of all the manifestations of this
cross-pollinization of the arts is the con
tinuing emergence of groups of collabora-
ARTS MAGAZINE/*).?
tivc rtiits and engineers like Experiment!
in Art and Technology utili in the state
of coalescing), the Once group. Multi
media, and USCO. Such a compendium of
diversified artists cannot avoid the confu
sion of the individual classifications and
presupposes the emergence of a species of
mixed-media renaissance man. Many of
the artists mentioned, and others, have
already transcended the boundaries of their
original choices of expression.
The Total Theater concept embodied in
the Intermedia trend1
is not new. It threads
the fabric of art. Early experimenters who
approached the superimposirion of occur-
anccs entered from the avenue of theater
to find a reinforcing focus for their
dramatic continuums. Walter Gropius
wrote of his Total Theater design for
Erwin Piscator in 1926, "... by using a
system of spot-lights and film projectors.
transforming wills and ceiling into mov
ing picture scenes, the whole house would
he animated by three-dimensional means
instead of by the flat picture effect of die
customary stage. ... If it is true that the
mind can transform the body, it is equally
true that structure can transform the mind."
Moholy-Nagy postulated a new theater
(Theatergestalter*) operating with "simul
taneous, synoptical and synacoustical repro
duction of thought (with motion pictures,
phonographs, loudspeakers)." The Ikuhaus
experiment, embracing the entire range of
visual arts, is
archetypal,
related to die
artist group communities of today. Their
commitment to "seeking a new synthesis
of an and modern technology" is con-
commitant with the present need for
beautiful natural functioning between man
and his environment. Collaborative efforts
by engineers and artists, nurtured by mu
tual understanding, are required for the
integration of man s total vision.
Intermedia is the breeding ground of
everything that will replace it. Out of tech
nological and aesthetic interaction will
come die transforming devices of our
cognitive tools. The sheer hulkincss of
unity s equipment (film projectors, light
machines, electronic equipments dictates
the format of present intermedia perform
ances. The difficulties of transportation,
the vast soft-ware of image-retaining cel
luloid, the shape and nature of any given
theater environment, may all be changed
with growing technology. Later Holo
graphy, now in its Daguerreotype-like
primitive states, makes possible the dream
of creating in three dimensions with light.
The holographic plate, with its ability
to retain and recreate countless images,
may well replace the strips of frames in
motion picture film. An entire projected
presentation may be contained within a
small rectangle of material. The develop
ment of laser projection devices with in
finite scanning positions would move
forms in space for long durations from
this single photographic plate.
~
The environmental aspects of Inter
media stress its integnuiveneu with human
life patterns. Each individual will be able
to program by his own sequence of simul
taneities, to spend as much time as he
likes in one situation or another at any
time he chooses. Man s home may become
his own programmable vibratory environ
ment. Bedrooms programmed to produce
sound sleep, living-entertaining areas and
playrooms, complete communication chan
nels with die outside world, and ecstatic
meditation rooms are within the realm of
realization. Timothy Leary has said, "We
are gods; let us live in die surroundings
of gods." We are like die children in Ray
Bradbury s Tat Vtldt, in a nursery which
brings to full realization our wildest
imaginings. The programming of beneficial
vibratory food to man s nervous system is
hence of vital importance. As Gerd Stern
says, "... in terms of understanding
humanity and understanding die possible
relationships with God, die way is not
either by looking in a mirror or by look
ing through a window, but by being able
to see in die window die mirror and in
the mirror die window. Then die reality
becomes possible."
Thrndfty. January 8.
WTO:
Intermedia Systems:
Cinderella Sweeping Up on Desolation Row
Goethe died with two worth on
M< Up.: "More Light." That
comes closer lo defining the es
sence of Intermedia Symtemt Cor
poration thin a librmry. In tbe
arty Sixties, environmental, mul-
n-unage art was an embryonic
urge In the minds of a few crea
tors. Revitalize the dead museums
when works hone like signed
sausages to be displayed and not
eaten. An art form more attuned
to this culture and Its electronic
nervous system.
The media people began lo Dome
together: poets, painters and tech
nicians with chlldlikr interest In
machines and gadgets Kinetic
Art. Not since the Social Realism
of the Thirties was there a trust
which promised so much lor art
In Its relation 10 the culture. Sbel-
Iry: "Poets are the unacknowl
edged legislators of the world."
Psychedelic art. Hind expansion.
Shows were held In the San Fran
cisco Art Museum and at the
Riverside in New York. Tbe cut-
tare zapped from both flanks.
The man media began to pick
up on it. Because the artists could
not sign their live, ongoing per.
tormancec and had no Interest in
persona! notoriety, they called
themselves: USCO Company of
Us. The art world was exploding
with pop and op and now kinetic.
environmental art: the media
called them a "TRIBE" and they
were famous and rorlrtail party
due. Imagine. Virginia, all moat
massive machines, slides, visual.
audio, happenings, kinetic theater,
all lor Art. how marvy.
But they moved on. The media
freaks turned lo tbe art farm that
lives best In a total environment
wtth Its audience Rock music.
Par sample, they created en
vironments lor New York s
Cbseuh and Murray tbe K s
WorkL The World was located in
Roosevelt Field, the same spot
Lindbergh had taken off tram far
Orly Airport in 190. Lindbergh
Inaugurated the first step In global
consciousness. USCO was involved
la spiritual ntpanslon within the
global village.
USCO crossed .radUional boun
daries In Its anomalous art For
example, they combined painting,
theater, sculpture, slides, movies,
computers and a galaxy of seem
ingly contradictory torras of ex
pression. Similarly. Iron-dad duv
tlnctVni about art and its rela
tionship to Its audience were also
erased. When they felt they had
completed a good snow or a food
envirumiiviit. they characterized it
as a "food mix"
Cerd Stem, originally an old
Mme buck poet North Beach beat.
then media poet: college dropout
years later ;
Creative Director of Intermedia
and an Associate In Education at
the Harvard Graduate school.
USOO presented Its energy
charged art form in Museums,
institutions and discoteques. Every
time we walk down the street,
our senses are bombarded by mil
lions of inputs, but our minds dis
criminate and dose out much of
our environment. The same thing
is true of our relations with others.
USOO provided a simple switch
function, they turned people on.
They overloaded senses by creat
ing multi-leveled experiences and
made people realize me extent to
which they were censoring the In
formation that was flooding their
hearts and minds daily.
Sign on media poet Michael
Callahan s wastebasket: Data Re
duction System.
These early USCO projects dem.
onstrate an important facet of
Intermedia Systems. Every child
lives in a universe of wonder and
discovery that is gradually dimin
ished as be grows older. USOO
attempted to give people back the
childhood grace of their senses.
This relationship to the universe
is one of the most natural of
man s riches. To give this primi
tive gift back to mankind. USCO
utilized the most, sophisticated
techniques civilization could pro
duce The same is true of Inter
media Systems, only on a larger
scale.
Intermedia s "family" still
maintains their original country
home, an abandoned church in
Garnerville. N.Y.
In the museums and discoteques
they turned people on ... momen
tarily. What happened after the
audience left the kinetic environ
ment? Would the ok) blindness
gradually set" in? The art form
was still in a developmental stage.
but USCO knew instinctively that
other modes were needed lo open,
up people s heads. They had a
road show. "WE ARE ALL ONE."
and toured the country. Then they
grew, making their biggest tran
sition, they became Intermedia
Systems Corp.
George Litwin became the Cor
poration president. Or. Litwin.
Assistant Professor of Organiza
tional Behavior at the Harvard
School of Business. Faculty Re
search Associate at the School of
Education and prolific author, was
interested primarily in organiza
tional climates. Under his direc
torship Intermedia became inter
ested in the problems of Corporate
America. One of the problems was
to help people inhabit their
"organizational climates" more
easily. Intermedia developed the
concept of the Media Report."
first used at a Scott Paper Com
pany sales meeting. Executives
see their interaction on film, sales
men learn how they are relating
to people, not "clients." not ob
jects described in a book or
statistics, .j a chart. Each com
pany is treated as an organism
with its own ecological system.
The concept permits an in-
progress picture that provides an
emotional learning experience,
not just a summary at the end of
the Quarter. Overreactions to In
termedia as a Corporate Hippo
crates come in basically two ex
tremes. Some "liberal" executives
greet them as White Knights who
can solve all of their company s
problems with the waving of an
electronic wand, while more tra
ditional types view their procedure
as tripe and ding to methods more
apt to be found in Dickens than
McLuhaiL The actuality resides
in the simple fact of moving a
very rigid part of our culture, lot
petrified bureaucracies, more
dose to the second half of tbe
Twentieth Century.
.Intermedia Systems is also con
cerned with another anachronistic
part of our culture, our educa
tional system. Whether they are
dealing with America s corpora
tions, or its educational structure.
Intermedia is ultimately con
cerned with giving people easier
access lo their full inheritance.
Formal education often deputes
more of a child s imagination
than any other force Learning.
Ideally, should be part of a total
environmental experience, not a
fragmented part of a child s world.
Intermedia is developing ways to
create and Integrate such environ
ments within our present educa
tional structure. Intermedia peo
ple have been invited to partic
ipate in this year s National
Educational Association meeting
on audio-visual techniques. They
are the pioneers who will enable
my children and my children s
children to have their full Inherit,
ance as human beings, not Just
dogs in a technetrontc society.
Intermedia is also currently en
gaged in developing an uninhabited
West Indian island. East Calcos.
part of the British West Indies,
will be the site of the implementa
tion of a centuries old dream.
Man and his technology will at
tempt to construct a perfect
environment. The natives who will
move to East Cakns Island from
neighboring islands will have tech
nology, according to Intermedia,
without disruption of their folk
ways. The plans, obviously, are
exceedingly ambitious. Surveys of
the Island s nsources have been
conducted. A viable economic base
aimed at supporting the life styles
of the inhabitants, not the enrich
ment of a foreign imperialistic
power or individual plutocrat, is
being mapped out Fishing, farm
ing and other activities are being
planned, the concept at Inter
media is that In maintaining Itself,
the island community will learn
annul itself. Land at "Monastery
Point" has been set aside a* a
sanctuary, a spiritual retreat for
individuals or troop*. A Qty.
"Harbour Town." a place tor re
plenishing physical and emotional
resources, is also being planned.
The only buildings on the island
at prejtnt are the rutting remains
f colonialism s guano boom. The
ecology of the island Is being care
fully considered. Nature s gifts
win be utilized and enhanced, not
exploited and destroyed. The
island community win have
variety and vitality, growing out
of its recognition and accommoda
tion of a host of different life
styles.
The Caicos Islands share other
distinctions. Columbus made land
fall there in 1492 and John Glenn
splashed down utaiUy In 1962.
Coincidence?
Intermedia Systems, then, a a
new type of corporation, a living
UNItrAQicuon in our present vo-
cabulary. A corporation born hi
art, aiming at expanding horizons
in business and education. When
the Navy approached Intermedia
with the problem of making the
euviiuiuiieiit on Atomic sob-
marines more livable, Intermedia
replied that some eBvlruume&ts
needed to remain nkjfctmartati
and turned the Job down. Doing
the Sixties, they (few enormously
from tbe original "tribe" within
IMd that Is KoO being bom.
Their potential IB future decade*
aaons to be *-^" Some
grey tunneled MacNamara wffl
shudder at the sacrilege of using
computers IB holy work, while
others will realize that Intermedia
moat be the pattern tor Corporate
America. If the nation la to return
to it* natural
One-stroke Bodhidharma :
Sly spirit
367
Media in the Market
Seven years ago Gerd Stern, one of
the founders of USCO the "Us Com
pany," pioneers in mixed media staged
an extravaganza at the San Francisco
Museum of Art that plugged 64 live per
formers plus spectators into a barrage of
simultaneous electronic messages sent
to the eye and the ear through televi
sion, telephone, audio tape, slide pro
jections and more. On the seventh an
niversary of that spectacular day, Stern
recently performed in another way, be
fore conservatively dressed stockholders
in a company he partly owns, Intermedia
Systems of Cambridge, Mass.
It was probably the world s first multi
media stockholders meeting but, com
pared with USCO s previous electronic
free-for-alls, it was tame stuff: three
screens, slides and gentle rock music-
nothing more. Stem himself, once ad
dicted to denims and sandals, is natty and
neat "I didn t wear a tie for fifteen years
before Intermedia," he says. When it
came time to talk, he did not shout the
old USCO message, WE ARE ALL ONE; be
talked about new products, expanding
markets, invested capital
The fact is that USCO has gone public.
Its core members Stern, engineer Mi
chael Callahan, artist Robert Daceyand
psychologist Gunther Weil are now at
tempting to market on a broad scale -the
multimedia avant-garde techniques that
once blitzed esoteric lofts, galleries and
museums. In this sense, they are pioneer
ing again, making a move with wide so
ciological implications. USCO s associates
in Intermedia are all solid businessmen.
One of them is Ruben Gorewitz, a wizard
at the financial organization of the avant-
garde, who specializes in saving the fiscal
lives of preoccupied geniuses such as
Martha Graham, John Cage and Merce
Cunningham. Another, Dr. George Lit-
win, left a full-time post at the Harvard
Business School shortly after he met
Stern. "I could tell right away that USCO
had a fantastic ability to create intense
experiences through multimedia," he
says, "and I was sure we could market
those insights to both education and
industry."
Award: After a year of haggling with
the Securities and Exchange Commission
in Washington (over the precise meaning
of a term like "multimedia experience"),
Intersystems went over-the-counter in
November 1969 and sold $600,000 worth
of stock. Installed in an old theater build
ing hi the heart of Cambridge, Intersys
tems is now selling both its products (a
line of low-cost, audio-visual programing
units) and itself. "For a thousand dol
lars," Stern tells his investors, "we will
make a media survey of a plant or a
school or a church and recommend what
to program as well as how."
The investors are cautiously optimistic.
They share Litwin s belief that the fu
ture belongs to communication and edu
cation that hits the senses as well as the
mind. They are encouraged by the award
Newsweek
of an important contract to Intermedia by
the New England Power Co.-to consult
on a multimedia showcase for the public
at its new power plant near Beaver Dam,
in Massachusetts. Only the USCO group
has reservations. There was less hassle
in the art world," one of them says, "or
even in building discotheques."
Stern himself has no regrets. The gal
leries and museums never supported us
the way New England Power does.
That s the major project of my life. I m
going to visualize the country s electric-
network in that display, showing how it
brings us all together, which is what I ve
been trying to do from the start." Stern
.is attempting to realize one of the strong
est directions in contemporary art away
from the cloistered gallery and the pre
cious object toward strategies that direct
ly affect the world. "I don t care whether
I m called an artist or not," he says. "All
I care about is the work, creating an
experiential flow of information, making
a physical impact."
November 30, 1970
368
P.9.S-2
TIM Heights Tunodcy, April 29. 1969
Arkitel
beyond. U tk. da* dBTKal to ten |oeko m^ cole* thk
l Itbyt it <mr
b. drib drte or any. The tarc bank. of bjktt o>
pSL ttit to rto W wiD PW t.t ta .D pmtabiity . dte
the 0. whk* directly ahead. p
rt
0aooeof tfc.pale.tker.Bi h. appeared it tkc Alt.
*. Tk. poto to ea*k tato tke frenunibly, MIR .mbitiou. u.
Ta* comer of two of tke tochucel fceBttke to aha
Thorn k watte tattermi on e then. U e way. tke ana of <
dcik beckeround. U tbe only and audio nnul technoloiy ktke
Sr?rtde.r
ta
tfc.
>"
color of tk. iTT place. The Alk k definitely
the mo.i tccknoloticclly
competent multne4l. emporium
_)
tat It be bee*. The Mtorial
Awn*.- The
concrete of tke nWenlk to Tke old perkiai
CUnpltd end roufk to tb. touch, been niccfmmed by
M Ik* mjht Tke ccne of the (.
"
k follow, to tkc Ml Ike
ed paper tape proanm. hot
aai>cn.lilo
*-- I t
tt to
me any
_ follow, to the Ml Ik* -wcrtotlM* of fleer turn,
of a* nod. Tke eua acy* .ed e.rtitioeiai io n
Street." Than k a
kemcturetotkencht. Hit. (to Ik* fkoMktc wear), taw
ntiHr- but tkt keeoc k hiHtt far We tkt Aik. Fraedom ad
(rom *e- by . tarn. W.IL To the IteUbty. U tk. A*, aa can
Ml k . whu. ucco weB. Mow Mdcr around, *-d on* of
there k a door la the w.U on the annl different
__*> *MM it oOt tTpp* at *
Tk* Alk k hxnted el li nctljnetr room who*
ticcniieai Street, in Boeton,
rejfc. It k a throughout. Not only en there
now kBcad by alffi
Aru. Inc. ad
by laeermi.lt, Inc. of kmceonlad in the dccton. The
. Tkt ant between tk* "teat" ana k
Alk ad lattoatdk k rti
axe*. <lhoue not flcancklly). IHed wtth projection* and oot of
.mo. Gerd Sm. one of the .* of the enae. Ton toaMtknr
fiioeilcri of USOO, k both room lighted oaly hy
ontfceboerdoftheforaeer.USCO othti. Tkto k tkt mom when
k tkc pioneer communll art * "body painting- Ocean (head.
techneleey poop wkkk aiiiniit and face*, dayfjo paint).
Tkc World." nm of tk* A rafinhoal outar k
DUlti-flVMl U diaOOtlWlUM. . ttmitfil far- *t Oat Mid of tbC
I would Ike to aa Tk* Ark * \ Mil g and pact the "tent.- Tkc
ditcotkeqM. tclub..inurUmedi. eon of Ike ea*e k at ant
"
ilka main room, wtth it.
lo_
nl of tkt erograav To -...
heeaan the Ark k not compkud,
the fun nnety of egectt eoeeok
an. not been nttlaed; to fact, tkc
CBMC tk* Imiinay nptBicg: the
Bit k Ik* *w>dneaT eetnll of
thenhlww.
The Ark , pound cycoB w)
nathim avt of ned*k I Tim
watt, wtth W* dktortioo, amennc
frequ.ncr nepoBic. Sack a
eyntem can eke unntnly freak
eipenence of beenna . record one
akeady one. Let me
Ark contribute, erectly to it.
ctawMcocn of freedom, na t
policy k naty jot the
>
of the on
"
otb Aik
. Tbey <R <
e.liikt..d im n<*rd
to
icUu. I k*** lredy
mtmttmmmt tkr ptao to cm Upot
to a Ik* budi ttat pUy Ikm.
Bud* on ko oMom**i to a
*ooM tkre^h krip with mttimt
kotel room ad by bBB*
pneidol mth knt pcmt*
room ud lota of b*or
oo. IB m of boti
Rktic Mploration
ad fnaoa. tk. bet tb*l tk.
Alk to
<
a*k*d. m -cy! *o
Mkod. fnmtam k oMMy
Umted, k) ottar votdt. At fir M
.of
I ru tcraoL Stu
Vldaekkr. of latonMdi*. k kit o>
wkk wktl k to) tkt afctw
ad kaw ocVcrat pkxom to
taoctkcr to "BMek" (ud atcrtaia
too. ccrakdy). Tkk OMtol
I*
tt caablt to
iicjiikiylm
tkc
mm mmu mm* 10 noeton, eo tee
Ark ncBt hint Ike money, and k*
ekaear ecroe. kaat the nooBOy to
Ike Alk. Once hen to. Bocton.
btfton helped him bo* up piece
- ntay. He played a couple of
ii _. ,k* at tk* Ark.
Or a
Prcclccly kcccci* it
mulii-mndi.. tt k a notenticl Theee wmB. ka ont wjchtly; at
lanae ciim nttkBr a won* or a buttock a.khl then k a todnc for
mouth. Tkc weeknem of tbe rwa*s watry knnw. Tkc atone.
echuenet k that it k to onkl under crdtonry orcumeuncei.
tail Ha nJCantarkn potential k face* Ike kccnt port of the room.
not pioed I hi- been to The aad behind , tke dneter of raked
Alk three time, aad w nonr dance floor, and hiuncmt
CBCBtfcd mout hlie; forcefuUy. IB *Bndl*i." nMtly okcBtar in
terror, lion often, I ratpnei1.il aa ch.pt, kohl inywken from fin to
a fna. And one., -when tkt tWrty-fm people. At tkt extreme
OimtofBl Dead wan on, tka toft nar eoner of tkt
to -fcoot of 4kc eta*.
ntmi, tt k puaili. witk tea
Alk .
cncafk lh "tr.ffic pit." u yot
KOtote, wkjch k ibaia uo
tbe floor ct tkrt
m tbe muoc. butilpouiiioultbe
Mtilr-Hrc omHty of tkt Ark .
cd let fact tkM.
i ejiicill to at a toer for BBB.
mm old urat JM dJdct wren
of cccdiBf tan ont tokr. kc
MwMy Wiun. Fkmly. Katm
I foBCd lomeooc who due.
tt-jr-keer-ccd tkk acect teat
Otto to EacjaBd for u SRO
concert. Aad before ke d beea
oktiBB jci Ckjeacp witkoet e job.
But **ea tke lecal bccdt fare
well. Tkt poop.
ftpotopewM of
wowld ect between ecu tad pay ic
"
cot paid at tkt Alk. U
l owe nd to*
k profited free to local arocp*.
Tkn.nitude aed procnai oqr
weJJ do more for BOcton at a
oty tkaa .nytbmi Dkk
reOeitinn of iBtcnBeak t heck
IncoNtBiiBl IB enveation. Jack
tmtmmmm. tdimlklct director of
tbe Alk. bet ako a teduucal aw
witb .o MIT keckiroaBd.
reprei.nt. tke "pkynlolocy"
trannl. or tbe -form" toaooL In
tkk one. tb. form of tkt Ujkt
effect* it calcalated on
pkraMaBical propntltot of tke
poumtiet of Ike ow-lkk k tk*
totilitarian multi-medi.
eenvonnent tkM I eiealtcin.il
earlier: tbe -content" directed
enrkoBBBBtt ntulti *ener.ny, 1
thick. IB tbe type of low-key
chow that tka Aik now aroducei.
Tke nkyaolQckal procrtm. on tke
,
k BOB-onmmerckl in
It could only be
for tk* fear people who
want it and who wonM be
fatty (were of what they would be
nboaar
pukUctty nacht kaply.
beetuet the Ark u .
flntlklltty to the keynote of.ttt
operation. Tk* inltiil
rapetitrtelinn of I300.0OO ku
oca mmt up aad cow tkt Ark k
oe tti own. It hu to ante money
r k med prkeiiaT on
iaclMti*t,Kkto
i tkM lit Aik k onoted oc
week en.. Bet cum* the net of
the weak. CBMC "artktic" enntf
** kc pianntid. bee tk* San
Vroeka Mune Troupt, at
LIiB| Tkeeter. ead tke
hBwBMttua Cocean, at of wkeck
. (eaten ** tka flexibility denm irom M.
cstraordinarUy complex
euajokual hcidenic. Ran off
Intermedi. i ekkorate DC-9
control eyetem, at kaet fn"ty vtonal
toune*. both dide and film
into the house lyetea. Attkoofh
they etui tc tkcir own eound
leeated oo the etacc.
t cu in tome way* be
I
better crick Ike Unhl
nhlftto. OOBMC of kfht. color, and
Imir The DC-9 cee, control eeihl
OB Ike Aik t
it. Tba it i pUn ttat ku
cot yet beee effected; eentecly
*Mry group tact pieyt at tke Art
wffl be tm*. a recordiag of tt*
perionwju Ctwn tke teckcicel
ofecd
A few weeks aca.
benefit" wu beld to kelp oat
recently for drae.
. Keeewtyt often noCM
krip-ot acy koor. Tk*
-DevTt Dnciplie.- tkc >kjiit
New Eacknd cyde cnramune. are
eepecial fritndi of tkc Ark. Tkcy
net a* Ike entity force; to tome
decree, tkc "traffic pit" erati for
tkcir cdalcatioo, and la then
eonor Woe* I wat Ikon to~eae
Ike Grateful Deed, ewn tke
k eldfll reel tke Alk k not
fkiiiktit. It opened in January,
tenral month, akead of tcbtdule;
to tkk date. Ike ouad tyttem k
noi complete. Ike kwil mctrix k
not IB ton ocenlioa. and tkt
"tratric nit" bu not keen
fniwnil It k. therefore, really
trnpoosbk to jaKlyindce tbe Aik.
With ill drawback!, the Aik k
ttill Ike Biott ambitiont
atertainment epol hi Boatoa.
rtmieilim. it k oommercM. and
tt k alarttlnment; dont be
Baled! Bui with tt. poKey of
under end >
Ihe i at nuicb
torwexd. i a. Met. mom. aad dart;
on, off. dba and eartohto rime
beet attemttei. aeaoma. and
patoaa. team pane*, can be aaput
on an or recorded ewac. Tke
DC* k ordinaray run by a i
offect wak on witk a eo bit
There k am to tkt Aik then
Ike equipment A Boat k not a
home. etc. While tbe denan of tke
at aayone-iuet Uke Eric Butdoe
1!) mid. Of aoune, etpecmOy on
witk led., eipecieuy if croup
hat cattce a tot of AM proaMku.
a kM of Bp4hjht barbaa.Ma ead
neks nhow up. But they en
Ike week and iu flexible udunal
bcHttk*. tktn k a mat deal of
369
FEBRUARY 7, 1971
The
ii u1 1 i-iiiccl ia thing
By Deckle McLean
Photos by Gilbert Friedberg
a blurring of the lines
between psychology.
business, art
and some other things
9
cultural communi-
x is a basic industry.
is baste- as oil. steel and
rasportation. in its way.
,<eeloping along with it.
aborting it. and suhservi-
vto it is an organized net-
i*k of functions that are
ratine, administrative.
: rpagan di stic .ed ucation-
. recreative, political, ar-
is,c. economic and cultur-
: . aken as a whole this en-
t-rrixe involves what <C.
V riht) Mills called the cult-
iri apparatus. Only the
>itrf cannot see that whoev-
i ontrols.the cultural ap-
ntits . . also controls the
ciiny of the United States
everything in it."
Harold Cruse 1967.
1 s trying to tell her about
ie ntermedia Systems Cor-
Gerd Stern, president of Intermedia
her, I really wanted to ex
plain it - a tactile thing I
wanted to touch her with in
formation, any information
But I was up against my old
ambivalence about practi
tioners of media conscious
ness, and so I sidestepped
back and forth over that line
of boredom and interest; fail
ing to get the message across
and wishing I d chosen some
other subject. The land of the
disciples of Marshall McLu-
han can alternately seem
preposterous and essential;
but the terrain is so soft and
currently so verbally inac
cessible, that it is difficult to
determine who is talking
nonsense in it. and who is
not.
So I said to her it s a corpo
ration formed by some old
multi-media artists, with
some businessmen, to sell
some things. Like what?
Well, audiovisual equipment
for example, for schools and
thf >!/* a Int
of gadgets themselves. They
also sell techniques and skills
to people who want to do pre
sentations for advertising or
publicity, or for theater. And
they have a recording studio.
At this point I could see I
was getting nowhere, so I
dropped a few electro-
technological terms that the
Intermedia people had
dropped on me dissolve
units. 16 track, multi-channel
equipment. She just looked at
me. And what could I do but
just look at her. Then, deter
mined to jar loose the conver
sation, I fashioned one of
those foul nuggets of pop
journalism; I said. "Let s say
it s the post-psychedelic
nitty-gritty." Quickly adding,
to impress, "the people in the
corporation are pretty inter
esting; one of them was
studying with Leary and Al-
pert in the early 60s during
the first drug experiments,
and another guy introduced
Mcl.uh.in to his publisher
"
After a bit. we left the
subject.
"No society has ever
known enough about its ac
tions to have developed im
munity to its new exten
sions or technologies. Today
we have begun to sense that
art may be able to help pro
vide tuch immunity . . .The
artist picks up the message
of cultural and technologi
cal challenge decades before
its transforming impact oc
curs. He then builds models
or Noah s arks for facing the
change that is at hand . . .
In the electric age there is
no longer any sense in talk
ing about the artist s being
ahead of his time. Our tech
nology is also ahead of its
time, ifwe reckon by the abi
lity to recognize it for what
it is. To prevent undue
wreckage in society, the art
ist tends now to move from
the ivory tower to the con
trol tower of society."
Mnr*.hnll Mr I nhurt Qfi S
"Somebody said, nothing
artists are doing can be
shown in galleries." Michael
Callahan. technical director.
Intermedia Systems Corpo
ration.
a
1 EN years ago Gerd Stern
was a poet. He still is but
when he spoke of poetry a
few weeks ago it was in
terms of a mixed media de
sign for the New England
Power Company. The electric
company wanted a display to
help tourists at its new Bear
Swamp power reservoir near
North Adams understand
what was going on. Inter
media won the contract from
a field that included some
"very professional conven
tional companies." "That
says a lot about the climate
today." remarked Stem. The
display, called "the six min
ute day" because it con
denses 24 hours of the reser
voir s activity into six min
utes of flickering and simul
taneity, is. said Stern, "a
kind of a poem." It is also,
one might add. an example of
Intermedia s software servi
ces.
"Software" is one of the
things Intermedia does, or
sells. Software is techniques,
or really, total conceptualiza
tions to handle or solve prac
tical problems, in this case,
the problems of coordinating
images, sound and architec
ture to convey information.
"Hardware" is another of In
termedia s enterprises. That
is electronic hardware, the
equipment you use and cre
ate in applying the software.
The Bear Swamp project re
quires both software and
hardware from Intermedia.
When WGBH requested a
rear screen projection device
to point its cameras at, it was
asking for hardware. But
when Arthur D. Little sent its
audio-visual people to the In
termedia Institute for train
ing, it was requesting soft
ware. One of the characteris
tics that marks Intermedia as
unique is that it is probably
the only hardware producer
staffed by people from the
arts. There are some other
roughly comparable software
370
Gunther Weil, recording director
outfits, like Raindance in
New York.
STERN, 40 years old and
now president of the corpora
tion it went public in No
vember 1969 has spent the
past decade developing
multi-media art. Most of the
time with an art-technology
cooperative he helped form,
USCO, which for many years
worked out of a church base
ment in Garnerville, New
York, on the Hudson. Long
ago. Stem worked for an ad
agency. He dropped advertis
ing for poetry, and then, after
encountering McLuhan be
fore most of us did (in 1960
John Cage, the clang-clang
composer, gave him an early
mimeographed draft of what
became Understanding Me
dia) took to the so-called ar
tistic application ofelectronic
technology.
"When we were begin
ning." he says, "art was the
only place where we could
get a good reception. The rest
of society was frozen for a
long time. But now that it s
thawed, the place to be is
outside art. There is some
land of sad romantic thing
about the art world. It s re
moved; and after you pro
duce something, it s dead.
But in business and educa
tion, what you do is absorbed
and recycled and keeps mov
ing."
THOUGH he is relatively
unheard of. Stem can be as
sessed as a substantial influ
ence on the past decade.
USCO was probably the first
group to put the principle of
sensory bombardment to
work. In 1962, 3 and 4 it took
"total environment" shows
on tour, joined some of them
to lectures by McLuhan; and
at least to some observers,
thereby instigated that wave
of be-ins, hippies and rock
shows that has moved steadi
ly toward the social middle. It
is safe to say that USCO got
in on the ground floor. The
first multi-media disco
theque. The World, in New
York, was its work; and
served notice in the mid-
sixties, that the media artist
was not far from commerce,
entertainment and money, or
rather, that from the media
standpoint, such categoriza
tion is pointless.
"The existence of the hie
archy of power has bee
largely neglected by htimai
istic thinkers because
does not conform to the
ideal of man. But an order*
society can only admit tk
equality of all men in fiei
other than those which d
termine the hierarchy i
power at any particuli
time. The establishment
religious equality was ont
possible at the Reformatit
because political power ha
displaced religious poin
and the various sections
the community had a
cepted their places in th
new political hierarch
Similarly political equalii
could be realized during th
nineteenth century in con
munities where financl
and economic elements a
ready effectively dete
mined the hierarchy i
power. The overthrowing
an old social system /
within is only possible I
those who can call to the
aid a new principle for t
organization of power."
L.L. Whyte, The Next
velopment in Man, writte
1941-1943.
m
ine
JTOR the sake of sport, v
can paraphrase and ask i^
question here: what equali l?
is being realized during tl
^
late 20th Century in comm .^
nities where media elemeniy
already effectively determii;
^
the hierarchy of power? Ar, ,
to see where it takes us, le
consider:
It s not that Marx w ^
wrong, only that the w<"
,e(j
used him for its own purpos .
and then didn t wait for
to prove himself; in the
he served as a device for sta
capitalization while in th
|(g
West he was eclipsed by th
fc(j
unforeseen; the Marxian re-^
,
olution has already been a
complished by technology?
-,
<*
"0
Yfe
IfR Gunther Weil says 1
.y
got involved in USCO, whic tt
,
became, or is. Intermedia, b .,
,
cause he was interested ,
psychological tolerances ^
multi-media stimulation .
Now he lives in an environ^
ment of constant amplific
tion he manages the corp
ration s recording studio on
Newbury Street. The studio
itself means something, the
first big league recording fa
cility in Boston, signalling
again what has already be
come a quiet migration, the
filtering northeast of creative
people who find New York
uninhabitable. The motion
became noticeable among
film makers several years
ago.
Weil is still a psychologist
and insists that he "can t af
ford to. lock himself in the
basement of the studio over
here." He says. "It s just that
I ve got to get this thing off
the ground." He has taught at
Harvard and Brandeis- he s
the one who was with Leary
and Alpert at Harvard and
now teaches part time at Bos
ton College, appropriately a
:ourse earmarked "psycholo
gy of media".
MN the different toler-
nces to stimulation." he
uggests, "one factor that
omes to mind is the age fac-
or, but that s not the only
ne. Older generations, now,
re less tolerant to increased
ound levels: and multi-
nedia presentations with
iree images are enough for
lem. Any more images and
pey
start to get confused and
on t enjoy it But generally
;;ople are more open to si-
hultaneous information and
resentations of material in a
in-linear way. Take the
unger people working in
e studio. They ve grown up
th a tremendous amount of
edia stimulation. Their
iole lives have been built
ound the television set and
e record player. Their expe-
Jnce has propelled them
.o the technical end of it.
d they re acutely sensitive
tisound and to what can be
ine with it."
One reason Intermedia
sbuld be accepted by the
pblic is that a large part of
tfe population is geared to
tls land of experience, many
snsory inputs. Another rea-
sh is that very few people in
A country understand the
-rpact of media, and the var-
ic s different impacts of the
v.ious medias, and when
tl y need to know they have
Tresei
at a
Stern
BEAR SWA
to come to
consultant:
tants. Of c
look like b
though I m
committed I
tie. But if i
in here; let i
for five mini
in the eye ;
catch on ti
honest and
tive Actual
away from tl
is some way
supposed to 1
I asked i
about the bi
that linked
goings-on ii
society. Hi;
was to McLi
the word "i
"People pr
work in sra
flexible g:
there s a dio
sensualiza
7
CAM
/MEDIA WAS
HE PROGRAM
OF VIDEO IN
. THE PRE-
TATION WGBH
SACHUSETTS .
Media" and produced by
Barzyk. Noted enter-
Max Morath served as
itor for the event, which
died upon the many uses
which video has already
put by artists through-
it the country, as well as
ospects for the future. The
eduction, supported by the
itional Endowment for the
. was conceived as a
Jot for a possible 90-minute
special an the same topic.
Among Vho*- at the ses-
>n were such arts and we
ft notables as Fred Wise-
an. Eudora Welty. Rise
evens, Giancarlo Menotti,
chard Leacock. Gyorgy
tpes, Lawrence Halprin,
Ida Fichandler. Merce Cun-
njrham. and J. Carter Brown.
2, 1972
BEAR SWAMP PUMPED STORAGE PROJECT VISITOR CENTER
NEW ENGLAND ELECTRIC SYSTEM
372
373
AT THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AUDITORIUM, ARTS/MEDIA WAS
PRESENTED TO THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS. THE PROGRAM
INCLUDED A MULTI-MEDIA PROGRAM DEALING WITH THE USE OF VIDEO IN
THE ARTS, DANCE, THEATER, MUSEUMS AND NEW TECHNOLOGY. THE PRE
SENTATION WAS COPRODUCED BY EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION STATION WGBH
AND INTERMEDIA SYSTEMS CORPORATION OF CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS.
4
Arts/Media * Aum M
"magic" color concert
* was performed on a vi-
synthesizer, computer-
crated poetry, an
Jerground" television
azine. laser art, holo-
ns, infra-red photogra-
and liquid-crystal im-
/ were some of the won-
on display at the "Arts/
a"
symposium yester-
at the National Acad-
of Sciences auditorium,
ree large movie
ns, banks of giant elec-
consoles and televi-
monitors dispersed
gh the hall were in
ant service for the au-
tual portion of the prc-
which also included
and demonstrations.
The two-day conference,
under the auspices of the
Xational Endowment for the
Arts, is intended to generate
creative ideas and projects
involving the new communi
cations technology and the
arts. The first day s session
was presented to a specially
invited audience of artists,
media specialists, govern
ment officials, and repre
sentatives of public, private
and educational organiza
tions.
President Nixon sent a
message of welcome to the
members of the National
Council on the Arts, who
are attending the "Arts/Me
dia" conference both as
guests and participants.
In addition, the White
House was represented by
guest speaker Clay T. White-
head, director of the presi
dent s Office of TelecmnniL
meat-ions Policy.
Among the highlights of
the day was a "per
formance" by video art-
tct Ron Hays, the first ever
done for a live public, on
the Paik-Abe Video Synthes
izer, an electronic apparatus
that can produce endlessly
varied abstract or realistic
imagery on a television
screen.
The synthesizer demon
stration came at the end oi
an hour long audiovisual
presentation by WGBH-TV oi
Boston, entitled "Arts, Ac
cess, Media" and produced by
Ffced Barzyk. Noted enter
tainer Max Morath served as
narrator for the event, which
touched upon the many uses
to which video has already
been put by artists through
out the country, as well as
prospects for the future. The
production, supported by the
National Endowment for the
Arts, was conceived as a
pilot for a possible 90-minute
TV special on the same topic.
Among Vio*e at the ses
sion were such arts and me
dia notables as Fred Wise
man. Eudora Welty. Rise
Stevens, Giancarlo Menotti,
Richard Leacock. Gyoray
Kepes, Lawrence Halprin,
Zelda Fichandler. Merce Cun
ningham, and J. Carter Brown.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1972
374
A PHILOSOPHY OF MULTI-MEDIA
-collaged bouquet of quotes and, to serve as signal for the noise of my
remarks at the Systems Council, National Audio Visual Association
Convention, July 18, 1971, Cincinnati: - Gerd Stern
Where by the love of wisdom do we go from there
as Heinrich Hertz, he who made waves, said:
"The Consequence of the Image s
will be the Image of the Consequence.
"
a pre -video scan in the same sense
as the pointilists
1
, "Dot s what!"
Remember - turn tools into toys: Zoom,
don t pay no never mind to,
"that narrow place where three roads meet"
Focus, the real-time clock, to floating point zero
and believe Yoko Ono - "The Past that I remember
is the Past that I create Now because of the necessity
of the Present" - which is by no means the
for everything there is a season
and a time for every purpose under heaven
message.
"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his
circumambient universe at this living moment.
"
according to D. H.
Lawrence. If that is the business of art, is the art of our business
"-The image library, newsreel of dreams, culture intercom,
"
which
Stan Vanderbeek proposed in a 1965 manifesto? He suggested, "that
immediate research begin on the possibility of an international picture
language based on motion pictures. . .that we combine audio-visual
devices into an educational tool: an experience machine. . . ", echoing
my own 1961 Transformer proposal, ..." a Verbal American Landscape
poem -instrument, played from a keyboard or pre-punched score
projecting images and sounds in a multi-sense performance arranged
so that each audible, visible image associatively develops the possibilities
of its own expanding universe.
"
375
page 2
I read that Campanella in his Utopian, City of the Sun, dreamed
about a universal knowledge depicted on central walls in powerful
images. In the sixties we had Eames and Expo, VanDerBeek s
Movie -Drome, USCO s Tabernacle and multiplicated environments,
industrials and light shows. In these early seventies we have Dr.
~
Henry Ray s heuristic Special Experience Room at the Comprehen
sive Elementary School, Warminster, Pennsylvania and Miss
Dorothy Bennett s Educational Programming of Cultural Heritage
in Berkeley, California, both environmental learning surrounds,
practicing the preach. And preaching the prophesy, VanDerBeek has
it again, "Unconsciously we re developing memory storage and trans
fer systems that deal with millions of thoughts simultaneously. Sooner
than we think we ll be communicating on very high levels of neurological
referencing."
-
R. L. Gregory perceives, "The
seeing of objects involves many sources
of information beyond those meeting the eye when we look at an object.
It generally involves knowledge of the object derived from previous
experience, and this experience is not limited to vision but may include
the other senses; touch, taste, smell, hearing and perhaps also tempera
ture or pain.
"
In his introduction to Gene Youngblood s "Expanded
Cinema", R. Buckminster Fuller data-links "The human brain is like a
major television studio -station. Not only does the brain monitor all the
.
incoming, live, visible, audible, smellable and touchable 3D shows, it
also makes videotapes of the incoming news, in order swiftly to design
new scenarios of further actions. . .
"
William Blake had it, "Systems struggling with systems to overcome
systems.
"
Now Lennard and Bernstein write, "Though different kinds
of systems may vary as to the specific amount of intrasystem input
required to maintain the system, most systems cannot continue to exist
without specifiable minimum inputs from participants. "These inputs
are the same cognitive and affective behaviors which the U. S. Office
of Education is attempting to systematize for media specialists. Re
cently, introducing The Educational Technology Act of 1971, Senator
Eagleton remarked, "It should be made clear that when we refer to
376
page 3
educational technology, we are not talking about hardware, nor even
software. What we are talking about is a systemized approach to
education. . . a tool to be used to enrich the teaching experience through
a proper blend of planning, training and implementation.
"
.
Papers have appeared entitled. Botanical Lights or The Light Show
as a Teaching Technique and Learning Archaeology: The Use of
Multi-Media in a Lower Division Course. In parallel, Bryant Pillion
advises in The English Journal, "Although we must not make of media
study the overly-cognitive dull pedantry we have made of literary
criticism in the schools, neither can we simply show movies or con
duct multi-media happenings. We should encourage students to
examine such matters as image intensity, juxtaposition, sequence,
and proportion, to ask what goes with what to create a rhetorical impact.
((Why all these quotes? For the love of wisdom, philosophy!
A Hallelujah chorus.))
According to Youngblood, ". . .the intermedia network of cinema,
television, radio, magazines, books and newspapers is_ our environ
ment, a service environment that carries the messages of the social
organism. It establishes meaning in life, creates mediating channels
between man and man, man and society.
"
He quotes our Intermedia
Systems definition, "Intermedia refers to the simultaneous use of
various media to create a total environmental experience for the
audience. Meaning is communicated not by coding ideas into abstract
literary language but by creating an emotionally real experience through
the use of audio-visual technology. Originally conceived in the realm
of art rather than in science or engineering, the principles on which
intermedia is based are grounded in the fields of psychology, information
theory, and communications engineering."
.
In point, from (pre-1948) Norbert Wiener, "In the case of communication
engineering, however, the significance of the statistical element is
immediately apparent. The transmission of information is impossible
377
page 4
.
except as a transmission of alternatives. If only one contingency
is to be transmitted, then it may be sent most efficiently and with
the least trouble by sending no message at all. . .
"
and John Pierce,
"in communication theory, information can perhaps best be explained
as choice or uncertainty. . . All are merely choices or decisions
between alternatives, and one can be represented by any other. By
means of a sequence of such elementary choices one can enlarge the
number of choices.
"
Information overloading is one of the easiest output possibilities
in multi -media, a recognition by quantum jump from Luther s
doctrine, "The whole world is God s masquerade, in which he
hides himself while he rules the world so strangely by making
a Hubbub.
"
and McLuhan s voice, "The ecumenical movement,
the liturgical movement, in the Catholic Church is entirely along
the lines that you saw on the screen tonight. That is, teaching
people how to yield and how to involve themselves in other people s
lives. But it can, you see, in terms of programming, it can have
strangely different contexts . Now let us suppose for a moment and
I m not trying to promote such a notion, just let us suppose for the
moment, that the Western world has been hugely fragmented and
splintered in its consciousness and its individualism for many
centuries. And that under electric conditions it is being integrated
and merged together again at a very fast clip. The question for us
is, alright, if this is happening, what is a valid human strategy for
conduct. Should we resist it, should we recognize it and detach
ourselves, should we involve ourselves? There has been exactly
no attempt at clarifying the issues. In as far as the artist can
clarify issues in this way, he s doing a very important work.
"
Assembled by Gerd Stern, Intermedia Systems Corporation
711 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139
868-9880
378
References
Brian M. Fagan, "Learning Archaeology: The Use of Multi-Media
in a Lower Division Course", Experiment and Innovation: New
Directions in Education at the University of California, Vol IV,
No. 1, May 1971.
Bryant Pillion, "Turning On: The Selling of the Present, 1970",
English Journal , Vol 60, March 1971.
R. L. Gregory, Eye and Brain: the Psychology of Seeing, McGraw-
Hill Book Company, New York, 1966.
Wm. A. Jensen, "Botanical Lights or The Light Show as a Teaching
Technique", Bio Science , Vol 20, #23.
Henry L. Lennard and Arnold Bernstein, Patterns in Human Interaction,
Jossey -
Bass, Inc. , San Francisco, 1970.
Marshall McLuhan, taped question and answer period, USCO performance,
University of Rochester, 1963.
John R. Pierce, Waves &. Messages , Science Study Series, Anchor
Books, Doubleday & Co. , Garden City, New York, 1956.
Stan Vanderbeek, Culture: Intercom 1
and Expanded Cinema",
Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 11, fl, 1966.
Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the
Animal and the Machine , M. I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass.,
1948 and 1961.
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, E. P. Dutton & Co. , Inc.,
New York, 1970T"
.
;
379
Design and
Production
Maine Yankee
Visitors Center
Government of
Venezuela
Multimedia Monument
Battlefield of
Carabobo
Feature
Wall for The
Manchester
Bank
. Where to
,
Get Off in Boston"
for Public Television
*
WGBH Boston
.- -.- -> -^ ->* ***>.!.,,.. o^e*** ? ***- -al* f I.
*;
I* -.
- - ~ * >
Intermedia Systems Corporation 711 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, Massachusetts 02 139 617868-9880
-
-**>**** ******
Economic
Development on
*
Indian Reservations,
Economic Development
Adminstration, U.S.
^
Government
annual report
through February 28,
Multimedia
and Film for
Expo Zulia
Venezuela
._...*
LEEWARD MJLNKTFJN
I.-NA.%SlJUa> (JUKSTKWT
. .... Leonard Bernstein
"".ZJll.
at Harvard University
-~irr""
Norton Lectures
Intermedia
Production :
Atlantic
Records
ROG.ER POWELL
Cybernetic Map
of the Diaspora
Yeshiva University
New York
381
382
EL UNIVERSAL - BtbadO de Agnate de 1S7B
1-19;.
Gerd Stern
.
:
y Carlos Penaherrera
Experimental.
con la Sensibilidad del Nino
Hacia las Comunicaciones
fUtm
profBcto .
ff
~
It
taaclta cnu*i *
Maria
Josefa
Perez
Con una amplla sonrlsa y
una gran barba. estaba
Oerd Stern aentado en un
cafe con un oompanero de
trabajo. Cartoa Pena He-
rrerR. que ea un fotagrefo
ecuatortano, que cotabora
con Stern, en Venezuela por
ahora. Stern slempre bten,
con sus Ideas nuevas sobre
la vida. loa medlos de co
munlcac!6n. el video, el
dne. la TV. Multimedia.
Intermedia. Mixedmedla.
Ea un hombre aUnpiUco,
que quiere eomuntcane a
como de lugar con ta gente.
No babla. mucho eapanol.
pero preflere conversar en
eate tdloma para enlender
nosmejor.
-Uno debe traUr de
comunlcarae dice
Cuando le preguntamoa
que eata haclendo reaponde
que ea un poeta y un pre-
atdente.
iPrealdente?
-31 -conteata- de la
compania .- Y aonrie.
Oerd Stern ea el presiden
ts de una compania liamt^f
Intermedia Statems Oor
poratlon. que ae ocups de
hacer programas au-
dwvlsuales de todo Opo,
para oocnpaniaa.
Carlos Pent
bernaclon del Dtatrlto Fe
deral, lo podemos ver en el
Dome que eata en la Plaza
Bolivar, que hie Ideado por
Stem. Tamblen fue el or-
ganizador del Primer Fes
tival de Video que se realize
hace mas o menos ano y
medio en el Museo de Arte
Oontemporaneo de Caracas.
Usted dice que es un
poeta, 4como es su poesia?
Yo he eetado trabajando
con Juegoa de palabras
durante mucho* anos. y
deapufe fid camblando eaoc
Juegoa y combtnactones a
trabajoa audlovtsuales.
Pero la audlencla que Uene
eate Upo de programaa es
muy reducida. en camblo en
la poesia eatructural y de
eatructura dnetica hay mas
audlencla, pero ea un pu-
bllco para el arte y yo quiero
que todos ae pueden-
comunlcar. pero creo que
con el Uempo ee tiara ma
yor. Por abora es mac facll
cornunlcaree can laa em-
preaaa y.el goolemo-. y a
su com-
bumos. Trmbeja mucho er.
las eo
get
uno
QUC yo V*sHfi&XbaB>
n la -Unlvanldad de Hmr-
j-vard y en Cambtrge. Maa-
-achuaets. T hace eu afloa
xrtneaquiadarunaemlnario
de .
Odmumcadon Au-
dloviaual. deade ew alto yo
he malliartn mucho* tra
bajoa en Venezuela para la
Oobemaclon y para el
Museo de Arte Contem-
poraaao. taoibien he tra-
b^ado para otraa dependen-
Cert Stern.
da* del Goblerno y aigunaa
empreaas prtvadaa. Ha-
cemos diaenoa de Co
municaciones. hemoa hecho
muchos de eatoa trstbajos en
Multimedia. .
En el Domo de la Plaza
Bolivar se presenta un ea-
pectaculo con nueve ca>-
maraa. y varlaa pantallaa.
Eate es un metodo de de-
aarroUar la eenslbllkiad y la
percepclon en otro aentido.
Stern hace exhlbldones en
muaeoa. con eacultura cl-
netlca. multimedia en los
Estados Unldos y en otras
partea del mundo. El ex-
puca que eon para publlco
muy pequeno. porque at ae
lucleran para mayor nu-
mero de personal habria
que utillzar grandes ea-
pacloa y no hay suflcientes
(ondoa para pagar el gaato
de alquller de las salas y el
mantenimtento de mayor
numero de eoulpoa
iTrabajan con todo Upo,
de medtos audlovisuales?
Trabajamoa eon dla-
poatttvaa. video, cine, o una
mexcla de todo eao expllca
Carlos
iHacen trabajoa comer-
dateaono? .
SI reapopde Carlos.
pero skfinpre que -aea po-
alble eombmar ei a-pecto
artistioo eon el eamerdal.
Nosotros . ereemoe que
atempre ea poaible hacer
eao. Bueno. si se podria
declr que la mayoria de laa
producdones que hacemos
im-uUus eon de objeto co-
merclal.
En todo caao. contt-
nua Gerd Stem no son
problemas ordlnartoa. slno
expoatctonea -apeclal-s y
"Un
poems an SpangJIsh", nalixado por Gerd Stem.
expllca tones de proceaoa
tecnlcoa. didacticamente
tratadoa. mottvacion para
que kw obreros pn<i
trabalar en mejores con-
dlclones. tratamoa los
problemas de comunicaclon
tanportantea para el mundo
y ahora noaotroa
cornpania con la Or-
gantatacion Diego Oaneroa.
Noaotroa produclmos tra
bajoa en dne y en television
en varlaa formaa. yo he
producido obras de arte de
video y television y do-
CUIIHI lltl M^t PMtCTtffm^Tltf
de. en lot Eatadoa Unldos
el Planetarlo. donde
slno la oportunidad de par-
Uclpar en muchaa experlen-
clas creatlvas y luago puede
eacoger qua ea lo qua mis le
de laaaer. programado por
on oomputador. aconv
panaitft de muslca. fiamatto
Luces de Amor. Tamblen
hiclmos una aerie de cor-
tometrajea aobre Football,
para enaeAar a los en-
trenadorea c6mo son laa
condlckmes flslcas optlmas
que deben tener los deportla-
tas. aobre todo para el entre
namlento de lo* nlnoa de loa
bceoa. para evttar poalblea
acrtdantaa en la pracUca.
Carlos Pens Herrera es un
eapeciallata en educacion
creatlva para nlnoa y eata
trabajando en Venezuela en
un proyecto de deaarrollo de
la aenaibuidad del nlno.
aobre todo en areas mar-
glnaJes. hacen experlenclas
eon dne. fotografia, video,
arteaania, plntura y arte
varlas.
iQue tlpo de experlenclas
hacen con los nlnoa en eate
programa?
El programa eata. ba-
iado en la Idea de que el nlno
Uene la oportunidad de
reeJizar la labor de un to-
tografo. o de un cb leasts y
da near ana carnara de
video expllca Carlos .
antonrea se le enaancha el
Pero at son nlnoa de areas
margtnalea. deapues que"
tengan eata expertencia y nol
puedan contar con loa-
medioa tecnlcos para rea-"
llzarto de nuevo ique paaaT
Entonces, parte de lav
recomendactanes de eate"
programa. en aw sentido.
aeria que eate ttpo de tra-"
bajo ae prolongu* o as haga
en varlaa etapas.
Yo creo que el puntb
Importante dice Gerd
Stern ea la expertencia Oe,
abrtr loa camlnos de la
percepclon en otr os sen-
1-
tldos. Eata ea una experten
cia unlca. pero que les va a
abrtr loa ojoe a eatoa nlnoe y.
luego ellos van a eatar
motlvadoa para buscar
nuevaa experlenclas. pues,
ya se lea ha dado la opor-
la
TO
le
lie
Cuando el nlno ha hecho
algo con BUS proplas manos
atgue expUcando Carlos
ya eata abierto el eamlno de
oonocbniento y de cu-
rtoatdad Para eate objeto.
que el va y la proxlma vez*
que tenga la ocaaion de ver)
una foto o tener an sus.
manoa una camara ae le
abrtra la mente hacla el.
proceso. ya eatara dotado de*
otro aapecto de aenatbuldad. ;
.Como ae eatshlocfi e*u.
relaclbn? ;
Los nlflos aaben que las,
rural exlaten dicen Ster->
n pero no ae atenten per-J
aonalmente Involucradoa.
-EUoa miran a dlarto la;
television contlnua Ca-,
rtos y ven los dlbujos*
aiumadoa. pero medlantej
eti xpertei . ellos tteneni
am a ver las coaaa de otra
forma. Puede tener una
expertencia ff^jp^fi^
eompleta. el nlno puede
tomar laa (otoa deade el
Interior de la camara y
darae uuenta del proceso,
tiene expertenciaa de con-
ciencla amblental con va-
rloa materlales como mex-
eladorea de aonldo proyec-
don. ceramica. entonces
Oene la oportunidad de
expreaarse, no eblo en una
forma artiatlca y creatlva.
contacto eon todo el me-|
canlsmo que rodeael hecho.
de .que eaoa Olbujo* anl-i
madoaenTVexlatan.
-En loa Eatadoa Unldos.
eenala Oerd Stern- eate;
programa de areas mar,
*"
as hace como un
programa de mUarsclbn. de,
demoatracion de per-*
me-JbUldad social entre laj
daae media y dichas areas,
margmalea, Ea muy impor-;
iDe donde aacaron la Idea,
de hacer eate Upo de pro-;
gramas con los nlno* .
To trabaje -expllca
Cartoa en un programa da,
eate Upo en Cleveland-*
cuando vine ac4 penes que
eeria una buena Idea, eate es
el primer pais la-
Unoamertcano donde se vaa
hacer
..this is a particip;
hat we have been accu.<
c call physical real;
urns out to be largely
>apier machi construe
o: our imagination
Mastered in between t
iion pillars of our ob
tese observations con
:lz only reality. . .
Ifzbil we see why the u:
.1 built this way, we 1
Ua first thing about :
APPENDIX B
\
LIGHT YEARS AHEAD OP ITS TIME
AT THE
CHARLES HAYDEN PLANETARWM
BOSTON S MUSEUM OF SCIENCE
^
: J.8:15. 9:30PM. F 9 30 10 45PM
SAT 530. 7:00. 8.15. 9 30. 1045PM
SUN 530. 700. 8.15PM
AOMKSON S3 00 - PARKING SOC
Tcfcee a a TiCKETRON ouneis ana ai
MUSEUM BOX OFFICE
For mkxmamn call - 723-4586
Doors ckase oromoiiy at snownme
CI9CX)
STREET
AT10: 15
JHM
384
AN BttanVUNMBIT SPECTACULAR
UGHT YEARS AHEAD OF ITS TME
OtWLESHAVOENPWNETAWUM
BOSTONS MUSEUM OF SQENCE
.- .9:30PM. F 9 30. 10 45PM
SAT 5M. 7:00. 8 15. 9:30. I04SPM
SUN 5.30. 700. 8:15PM
ADMSSJON S3 00 - PAflKNG SOC
Tows at al TCKETRON ouMR and ai tw
MUSEUM BOX OFFICE
For rtormaiicin call -
723-4586
Doors close promptly at snowdme
SCM Three Loelighk
35:40
Of tJftit* litjht
bright. r by far
thn oythirvj norwtofor*
TIM now than torn*
into wtMMlinq rainbow
rryd owr tha ntir don*
Most tb* dona is
fllld with whirlinq points
of lifitt in four colon
35:55 colors coal*ea into two rinaa
old and turquoiM
vhich orbit on* another one*
J6.-JIO
Im aravity s
bacoittwj tlM infinity halo
Wbila .il.Miltanously
36:25 ulo M taMM eoaduct liqht
* ch couple toraa
head., lipa. fturi
Multiply and !
diaol OIM into >aoThor
la aioft.i vitk to. lyrle.
40:00
o o
.... a suataiMad ploiion. roar b**in
softly, wvlli.
Citploaton crossCad** into arpaovio* on
harp
Chorua. awl* and Catula, humnirvg, soothinq.
.. qult but powerful aajor stooa chorda.
As tha two huMans couch on another the
strains of Lovali^ht COB up. triumphant,
happy and unraatrainod. .. .
. MM OM C cunt oft ** on.
-r* will J*IM yw uw r*
tov*litbf ia dvtat. aceoayaniad by
oapal-trP* elAppii.** vry dac*y. .
APPENDIX B
385 APPEN1UA >
OILBEPT & STERN
PRESENT
BUULBSCJUE OF THE SAN.
^NAaSSANCE S.R ARTJ FE*JTI\&L
fGA.7,1 HALL G7& GRREN. STREET
^ 27 AfT tt: 4L> PM SK>T 25 AT10^15
13^ MELGA. ^WIJLLMMSOMAND
DISREY FRKB RRBfc FCKB ,;HM
.
386 APPENDIX C
and Only ihowlr* In San Franclic*
Th drama of a man torn between
hit love for hi* mother and his malt lover.
nDr n v
MARKOPOULOS1
"***"
TWICE A MAN"
STAN BHAKHAQrs ACTOR-AUOIENCE EXPERIMENT
"BLUE MOSES"
lvn MJdr.koff.
"Y" (BANNED IN NEW YORK)
"ONAN" , (AUTO-EROTICISM)
A nr* J,n,n.. rp,rfnlwrtl|
UNDERGROUND CINEMA 12
TIekrt* Now AvilUblil
-PRESIDIO-
Chestnut nr. Scott
. WA W931
APPENDIX D
UNIVERSITY OF UTAH
SALT LAKE CITY 12
Department ofArt
Gerd Stern
Maverick Road
Woodstock , New York
Dear Mr. Stern: September 21, 1964
Let me make a brief reply to your letter of September 9th and
if you desire further informational will be pleased to write you
again. f _.
Your afternoon performance here at the University stirred up
considerable resentment and . trouble. Within an hour of your
departure our administration had received angered protests which
labeled your performance as crude, pointless and morally distaste
ful. I was not present for the film in the afternoon and felt no
immediate reaction of those present but realized after that most
of the faculty had walked out hoping the students would do the same.
Our overall evaluation of your performance was very negative. Per
haps if you had had something to say in support of your films,
etcetera, it would have had better acceptance.
We felt it important to suggest to other schools on your trip that
they preview your material simply to save them the embarrassment
that we found ourselves burdened with. We have not pursued this
cautioning since that time.
We do hope that you will not include our school on your list of
successful performances.
No malice simply a very unimpressed community of viewers.
Sincerely,
Edward D. Maryon, Head/7
Department of Art V
EDM/ds
HE HEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1967
388 APPENDIX
53
"The sexual map of a
relationship, where
emotion is only the
candy bar held out
as high pitched fnil-
fillment ... imagine
Norman Mailer mated
with Gertrude Stein
and yon have the pic
ture...! was reminded
of Strindberg s Miss
Julie, for here again
was the sexual parry
ing, the momentary
advantages, the repul
ses, advances and re
treats . . the acting
of Billie Dixon, blue
voiced, platinum-
haired, and Richard
Bright smiling with
oily confidence, could
no more have been
bettered than could
Rip Tom s direction."
-CUVEBftBJfS,RY.TnES
"Hett-bent-Sor-leatiter
.shock provofcer."
-lEESttVER,C
"A milestone in the
history of hetero^
sexual art,
"Could run as long as
the Fantastiks." -WINS
THE
BEARD
"A
boistrons, funny
and novel look at
American sexual folk
ways.*"
"The Beard is about
sex and its words are
the brutal, funny ones
the streets obscenely
apply to it.. .it is the
poetry of today*..
Mlchanfl McCJure is a
genuine poet.
9
-WOMEN S WEAR CAilY
"A way-way out piece,
heavily laden with
four-letter words,- and
ending with the
graphic depictation
onstage of an act of
sexual aberration."
-WHEW
"An interesting play
about the external
The .Beard is re-
-NEWARKKQVS
freshing."
"Not for the kiddies
or timid Aunt Min."
ASSOCJAJH)PRESS
alphabet soup
iof four letter words."
-UHff.HBfHOUSECKAffi
,-"It would make a
(sailor btash* -isiiuBn$,c8s-Tv
HliagdOiieeBeISpadct.Iac.pre.ent
YHIT "Mich*?! McClure
AJnJC* Billie Dixon ..H^
Richard Bright^BmyTb.^
directed by Rip TOWl
Design and Media MixbyUSCO
Costumes byAnn Roth Lighting fcy c. Morawski
Tues, Wad., Thurs. 830. Sun. 3 & 730: $4.50, 3.50, 2.50; FrL 830. Sat730 & 10:00: $4.95. 3.95, 2.95. Make checks payable to: Ever
green Theatre 53 E. llth St 533-5325 Enclose self-addressed, stamped envelope. List 3 alternate dates. Telephone orders accepted.
EVERGREEN THEATRE 53 E. llth St. 533-5325
.
.~
-
.. ..
,
c"
:
""
--,
-
-^ *^ <
2 .^^-?;>
^?^.
l
?i~S<-.C;<<:
>^X-"-
*
i-
"
.
-
"--.
-7
;
.r;
&$g^^^Zx^s/
390
--WHAT YOU WEAR SH
xjlli^Ss^au.-? : ._ 1^
- ;
::g^5&:Ba^^
391
INDEX- -Gerd Stern
Adams, Jerry, 53
Adams, Leon, 31, 50, 53
Adelberg, Doris, 157
Adelberg, Lotte, 157
Albers , Hans , 9
Aldcroft, Richard, 92, 299
Aleman, Miguelito, 58
Algren, Nelson, 30
Alpert, Richard, 83, 90, 92, 93,
95, 99-111, 142, 249, 307, 316
Altman, Jonathan, 110
Andres, Carlos, 123
Angelou, Clyde, 44
Angelou, Maya, 44-46, 60, 134,
173
Angelous, Tosh, 44
Arendt, Hannah, 195
Arques, Don, 37, 54-55
Arria, Diego, 122-124
Artaud, Antonin, 10, 78, 91, 164
Auden, W. H., 151
Augustine, Saint, 195
Ayers, Jonathan, 82, 105, 303-304
Baba, Meher, 92-93, 316
Babitt, Hal, 73
Baker, Richard (Roshi) , 93-94,
112, 114-115, 311, 316
Baker, Virginia, 93, 112
Baldwin, James, 224
Banducci, Enrico, 44
Barab, Seymour, 244
Bartok, Bela, 74
Basie, Count, 59
Bateson, Gregory, 158
Beatles, 87, 277
Beats, 254-255, 258
Becker, Allison, 272
Becker, Howie, 272
Beckman, Herb, 62, 178
Beebe, Lucius, 13
Berg, Norman, 302
Bergen, Candice, 60, 117
Bergen, Edgar, 60
Bergeron, Vic, 57
Betancourt, Don Romulo, 122
Big Brother and the Holding
Company, 101
Blanche, Arnold, 82
Bolivar, Simon, 121
Brakhage, Stan, 79
Brand, Lois, 141-142, 263
Brand, Stewart, 74, 141-142, 242,
263, 269, 270, 285
Braque, 255
Brink, Fred, 284-285
Brockman, John, 84, 86, 105, 116-
117, 138-140, 142, 241-242,
256, 301, 307
Brown, Jerry, 142
Brown, Norman 0., 119, 262
Bruce, Lenny, 59-61, 101
Buck, Jane and Bill, 58
Buck, Pearl, 133
Buck, William, 31, 42-43,97, 133
Buckley, Lord, 202
Buckwheat. See Loughborough, Bill
Burstein, Beth, 130
Cadavieco, Jose Ignacio, 119, 120
Caen, Herb, 48, 52-53, 59, 61,
72, 130, 265, 272, 322, 324
Caen, Sally, 52-53, 72
Cage, John, 9, 66-67, 202, 269,
291
Caldera, Rafael (President of
Venezuela) , 122
Callahan, Michael, 73, 76, 81,
85, 96, 100-101, 105, 107, 109,
110, 120, 162, 171, 193, 197,
200, 202, 234, 246, 251-252,
256, 261-262, 265-267, 269-270,
273, 275, 281-282, 285-287,
289-290, 293, 296, 305, 311-
312, 318-319
Camel, Mona, 233, 238
392
Cams, Karen, 66, 71
Cassen, Jackie, 92, 299
Celine, Louis -Ferdinand, 19
Chamberlain, John, 67, 80
Chaplin, Charlie, 14
Chekhov, 150
Clements, Grace, 34, 80, 82, 288
Clinton, Bill, 249
Connell, Evan, 62
Conner, Bruce, 79
Coomeraswami, Ananda, 82
Corita, Sister Mary, 154, 278,
290
Corso, Gregory, 266
Cousteau, Jacques, 85
Culler, George, 73, 268, 271
Epstein, Betsy, 70, 88
Epstein, Arnold (Ep), 70, 88
Everson, Bill, 10
Ferguson, Giana, 238
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 29, 253
Firestone, Susan, 153
Foerster, Heinz von, 139
Fonda, Peter, 117
Forbes, Malcolm, 104, 288
Fraenkel, Michael, 7
France, Anatole, 225
Francis, Arlene, 52
Frankenstein, Alfred, 74-75, 274,
276
Dacey, Bob, 82, 88, 303, 311
Dahlberg, Edward, 240
D Asencio, Tikki, 123
Davenport, La Noue, 66, 196
Deitsch, Fran, 26, 238
DePew, Mort, 64
Dewey, Admiral, 309
Dewey, Ken, 86, 103, 307-308
Dickens, Charles, 308
Diller, Phyllis, 44, 60, 249
Dodge, Jim, 195
D 1
Orleans, Charles, 182-183
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 3
Downs, Hugh, 140
Drew, John, 44
Dreyfus, Bob, 93, 316
Duncan, Robert, 29
Durkee, Barbara, 68, 71, 110,
116, 314
Durkee, Steve, 68, 76, 110, 116,
141, 261, 263, 269, 284-285,
289
Dylan, Bob, 101-102
Edgerton, Harold, 85, 304
Ehrlich, Jake, 63
Ellison, Thorborg, 26, 28
Emerson, Richard Wirtz, 51, 232
Emshwiller, Ed, 103
Ente, Lily, 88, 309
Gardner, Bob, 99
Geller, Herb, 59
Geller, Lorraine, 59
Genet, Jean, 19
Gide, Andre, 19
Gidlow, Elsa, 74
Gilbert, Jack, 51
Gillespie, Dizzy, 32
Ginsberg, Allan, 18, 20, 47, 51,
57, 71, 74, 102, 113, 233, 238,
272, 274, 321, 324
Goethe, 153, 198
Goldman, Elaine, 7, 10, 48, 143,
161, 231, 233, 240
Goldman, Toshka, 8
Goodman, Ginny, 233
Goodman, Nelson, 103
Goodman, Paul, 9, 11, 24, 30, 149
Gordon, Dr. Myron, 3
Gorewitz, Rubin, 100, 107
Gorgeous, Rose, 6
Gould, Joe, 243
Gould, Stanley, 5, 52
Gourmont, Remy de, 238
Graham, Martha, 78, 100
Granat, Frank, 72
Grateful Dead, 101
Graves, Robert, 111
Grossman, Al, 101
Gundy, Walter, 114
Gurdjieff, I., 56
393
Gutenberg, 76
Haverlin, Carl, 42
Halprin, Ann, 266, 293
Hambidge, Dr., 18, 149, 250
Hampton, Lionel, 51
Harmon, Sid, 271
Hayakawa, S. I., 31, 54, 191
Hearsts, 294
Heath, Percy, 45, 134, 181
Hecht, Ben, 12, 145
Hedrich, Wally, 80
Hefner, Hugh, 52, 58-59, 61, 183
Hershkowitz, Harry, 8, 145
Hesse, Hermann, 83, 190
Hill, Jane, 12, 23-26, 28-31, 38-
39, 95-96, 97-98, 111, 133,
150, 157, 173, 236, 240
Hill, Lewis, 24, 33, 40-41, 47,
103, 171, 228, 232
Hill, Wally, 12
Hitchcock, Billy, 83
Hitchcock, Peggy, 83
Hitchcock, Tommy, 83, 297
Hitler, Adolf, 1, 143, 320
Hoffenberg, Mason, 52
Hoffman, John, 16, 20-23, 25, 57
Hofstadter, 223
Holiday, Billie, 75, 162
Hope , Bob , 1 1
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 278
Hopper, Dennis, 80, 117, 140
Horne, Lena, 45
Hotchkiss, Christopher, 204, 226
Hube the Cube, 185
Hugo, Victor, 3
Hultberg, Lawrence, 246
Hultberg, Ethel Slutsky, 66, 69,
246
Hultberg, Paul, 246
Huncke, Hubert, 321
Ibsen, 150, 234
Indiana, Robert, 72, 93
Irrazabal, Fernando, 121
James, William, 223
Jimmy the Greek, 6-7, 242
Jones, T. C., 61
Jong, Erica, 103
Jung, Carl, 224, 288
Justice, Sandy, 11
Kafka, Franz, 5
Kaiser, Henry, 73
Katz, Karl, 143
Kaufman, Bob, 21
Kaufman, Murray (the K) , 87, 310,
312
Kempton, Murray, 312
Kempton, Sally, 312
Kentfield, Calvin, 62
Kerrigan, Joe, 64
Kerouac, Jack, 33, 47, 264, 321
Kesey, Ken, 96, 195, 283, 309,
310, 322
Kisburg, Nick, 8, 23
Koren, David, 71
Kostelanetz, Richard, 307
Kovner, Abba, 143-145
Kramer, Ellis, 7, 231, 243
Krieger, Jesse, 107
Khan, Kublai, 309
Kingston Trio, 44, 60, 249
Kunitz, Stanley, 50, 147, 260
Lamantia, Philip, 11, 16, 35, 57,
80, 91, 178, 189
Landesman, Fran, 238, 239
Landesman, Jay, 27
LaPorte, Paul, 278
Lauteamont, Comte de, 21
Leary, Timothy, 81, 83-84, 90-92,
95, 99-100, 111, 249, 298-299,
307, 318
Lee, Paul, 83-84, 99, 115, 118,
306, 308, 318
Lennard, Henry Loeblowitz, 157
Levy, Bill, 9
Lewis, John, 45
Lincoln, Abraham, 124
Lindbergh, Charles, 86, 308
394
Litwin, George, 99-100, 106, 318,
319
Lobel, Henry, 5
London, Ann, 30, 47-50, 56-58,
61-64, 72, 94, 105, 147, 152,
176-177, 180, 251, 294
London, Claire, 50
London, Dan, 48, 50, 321
London, Mimi, 40
Look, Wallace, 24, 43
Loughborough, Bill, 33, 38, 47,
59
Loughborough, Pam, 33, 38, 40, 59
Lowell, Robert, 57
Luther, Martin, 258
Lyon, Fred, 56, 272
Magdalene, Sister Mary, 154, 278-
279, 290
Maguire, Barry, 80
Majdrakoff, Ivan, 4, 28-29, 50-
51, 72, 74, 78, 103-104, 154,
157, 162-163, 234, 235-236,
240, 270, 280, 282, 323
Majdrakoff, Julia, 50
Marco, Frank di, 53
Marder, Eric, 157
Markfield, Wallace, 19
Marley, Bob, 136
Martin, David Stone, 291
Martin, Tony, 291
Marx, Groucho, 145
Marx, Harpo, 12, 145
Marx, Karl, 236
Master, Billie, 162, 277, 281
Mathers, McGregor, 111, 245
Mathis, Johnny, 60
Matson, Katinka, 140
May, Rollo, 139, 142, 242
McBean, Judith, 151-152
McCallum, Barbara, 65
McCarthy, Jr., George (Mac), 11,
13, 15-16
McClelland, David, 90-91, 100,
102, 108, 120
McClelland, Nick, 120
McClure, Michael, 30, 71, 74-75,
100, 266
McKenzie, Dr., 62
McLow, Jackson, 66
McLuhan, Marshall, 67-68, 74-77,
116, 118, 145, 154, 227, 242,
269, 284, 286
Mead, Margaret, 158
Meltzer, David, 33
Mekas, Adolphus, 84, 301
Mekas, Jonas, 84
Merabishvilli, Alexis, 294
Merrill, Jimmy, 151
Metzher, Ralph, 83, 90-91, 111,
249, 300
Meyers, Sister Adele, 141
Miller, Ginny, 9
Miller, Henry, 7, 35
Monkees, 116
Morris, Jah, 203
Morrison, Toni, 103
Moore, Eleanor, 41
Moore, Richard, 34, 41
Moorman, Charlotte, 119, 122
Mountanos, Louis, 63
Mullin, Jack, 296
Murray the K. See Kaufman, Murray
Meyerberg, Michael, 86, 308-310
Nachman, Reb, 134
Nesbitt, Gogo, 189
Neumann, Hans, 123
Newton, Frankie, 238
Newton, Huey, 109, 117-118
Nibloh, Phill, 126
Nicholson, Jack, 117
Noga, Helen, 60
Norville, Barbara (Bard), 10, 11,
13, 89, 96, 112, 141, 233, 240,
282
Oliveros, Pauline, 265, 267, 275
O Neill, Eugene, 150, 234
Onslow-Ford, Gordon, 35-36, 54
Obslow-Ford, Jacqueline, 35-36,
42, 235
Oyl, Lorraine, 32
395
Paik, Nam June, 119
Parker, Charlie (Bird), 25, 33,
44, 51, 134, 197
Partch, Harry, 34-36, 41-42, 59,
293
Pearl, Julia, 57, 149, 163, 234
Pegels, Elaine, 140
Pegels, Heinz, 140
Peluso, Franklin, 327
Peterson, Elsie, 5, 233-234, 238
Picasso, 255
Pirandello, 150
Plato, 118
Podesta, Al, 26
Porter, Bern, 51
Prest, Dr. Richard, 63, 184
Primus, Pearl, 43
Proust, Marcel, 19
Pudovkin, 53
Rafelson, Bob, 116
Rainer, Yvonne, 280
Ramdas, Bab a, 115
Rand, Ayn, 237
Rangel, Sofia Imber, 122
Rascals, The, 87
Raucher, David, 8, 231
Rauschenberg, Bob, 323
Reich, Steve, 275
Reina, Fredy, 155
Rembrandt, 165
Rexroth, Kenneth, 21, 30, 51, 98,
188, 197
Rheem, Bob, 151
Richards, M. C., 9, 60, 66-67,
70, 78, 232, 240, 268-269, 291
Richter, Marga, 27, 166
Riley, Terry, 275, 307-308
Roerich, Nicholas, 88, 309
Roethke, Ted, 49, 77, 147
Rolling, Hubert, 234
Romero, Elias, 291
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 9
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 75, 162,
194, 236
Rosa, Rene di, 72
Rose, Marion, 234
Rosenfeld, Isaac, 9, 231
Roth, Clarence, 157
Rubenstein, Douglas, 101, 230
Rubenstein, Sami, 165, 183
Ruedi, Andre, 99, 100, 108, 295,
318
Rudenko , Igal , 7 1
Russell, Ross, 25
Ryan, Bill, 61, 178
Ryan, Paul, 140, 242
Sabella, Angelo, 55, 56
Sahl, Mort, 44
S ant ayana, 158
Satchinanda, Swami, 112
Sauer, Augie, 6
Sauer, Hattie, 6
Schachter, Rabbi Zalman, 109,
111-115, 132, 134, 146-147,
153-154, 160-161
Schneeman, Carolee, 84, 105, 301
Schneider, Bert, 116
Schwartz, Delmore, 8
Secunda, Sholom, 32
Secunda, Sheldon, 32
Sender, Ramon, 73, 76, 265-268,
275
Seven Stray Cats, 253
Shakti, Shiva, 89, 95
Shannon, Del, 311
Shaw, Sally (Sara), 108-109, 112-
116, 124, 131-132, 134, 139,
152, 203-204
Sherwood, Blanche, 37
Shore, Jack, 24
Siegel brothers, 134
Simpson, Jak, 38, 45, 58
Sinatra, Nancy, 87
Sitwell, Edith, 235
Sizer, Ted, 102
Smart, Christopher, 19
Smileys, 27
Smith, Harry, 91, 300
Solomon, Carl, 18-20, 26, 47, 57,
78, 233, 238, 321
Solomon, Olive, 26-27
Somers, Barbara, 272
Somers, Roger, 73, 74, 272
Spectorsky, August C., 52
396
Spectorsky, Theo, 154, 183
Spicer, Jack, 232
Stein, Gertrude, 166
Steinbeck, John, 11
Stern, Abram, 124, 131, 200, 202
Stern, Adam, 38, 57, 58
Stern, Dixie Lee, 129
Stern, Jared, 105, 132
Stern, Lily, 1
Stern, Otto, 124, 126, 128, 130,
145, 236, 245, 247, 251-252
Stern, Radha, 25, 32, 43, 55, 57-
58, 96-98, 152, 154, 157, 200,
202, 216
Stern, Raymond, 124, 128-131
Stern, Rudy, 92
Stern, Sara, 203
Stern, Zalman, 96, 100, 108, 113
Sternberg, Naomi, 149, 234
Sternist Movement, 12
Stevens, Wallace, 34, 170, 228
Stewart, David, 80
Stone, Alan, 69, 79
Stock, Bob, 66
Stone , Bob , 95
Subotnik, Morton, 73, 76, 265-
266, 268, 275, 291
Summerhill, Neil, 97
Suzuki, Roshi, 35, 93, 112
Swig, Ben, 181
Taylor, Jack, 56
Taylor, Mary, 56
Teicher, Larry, 107
Teichholz, Eric, 144
Temple, Shirley, 11
Thomas, Dylan, 147
Tillich, Paul, 84, 306
Toklas, Alice B., 162
Tolstoy, Leo, 3
Torn, Rip, 100-101, 108
Toynbee, Arnold, 240
Triest, Frank, 24, 34
Triest, Shirley, 25, 34
Trilling, Lionel, 8, 19
Tudor, David, 66, 291
USCO, 81, 254
Van Doren, Mark, 19
Varda, Jean (Yanko), 35
Varma, Ashoka, 135, 137
Vasulka, Steina, 122
Vasulka, Woody, 122
Vidockler, Stuart, 121
Vogel, Herbert, 157-159, 170
Walker, George, 130, 279
Wapner, Grace, 309
Wagner, Marion, 28
Warhol, Andy, 86-87, 301, 309-310
Watkins, Peggy Tolk, 37
Watts, Alan, 34, 74
Weil, Gunther, 318
Weinberg, Shakje, 143
Weinrib, David, 71, 88, 136, 142,
171
Wiener, Norber, 139
Williams, Paul, 9, 66, 68, 70,
88, 97-98, 152, 250, 252, 311
Williams, Vera, 9, 66, 71
Williams, William Carlos, 50
Williamson, Helga, 51
Winard, Dick (Winansky) , 6, 230,
298
Wilson, Judi, 70-71, 75-77, 89,
96, 100, 108, 109, 111, 113,
114, 117, 136, 141, 151, 251,
285, 288
Wise, Howard, 104
Witt-Diamant, Ruth, 49
Woods, Remsen, 104, 288
Woods, Rosie, 288
Wright, Bagley, 77
Wright, Dion, 89, 311
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 54
Yalkut, Jud, 82, 303, 313
Yanovsky, Zalie, 114
Yeats, 245
397
Zacca, Carolyn, 181
Zalman, Reb, 112, 115, 132, 134,
147, 154, 160, 161
Zimmerman, Bob (Dylan), 181
Victoria Morris Byerly
Grew up in the rural industrial Southeast coming of
age during the late sixties and early seventies.
Immediately following graduation from Western
Carolina University in 1971 traveled to Europe and
Asia on a journey to Katmandu. Traveled twice to
China. Student of East Asian Studies, Harvard
University. Assistant Editor of Publications,
Radcliffe College. M.A. in philosophy and
psychology from the University of Massachusetts in
1988 and, in 1994, awarded the Ph.D. in U.S.
History from Boston College with special fields in
U.S. resistance movements, women s studies,
cultural history.
Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Boston
College, and at the University of California, Santa
Cruz. Full-time lecturer in Women s Studies and
Cultural Pluralism at San Jose State University
since 1996.
Author of Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls; Personal
Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South,
Cornell University Press, 1988.
Assistant Editor in the Regional Oral History
Office since 1995, interviewing in the fields of
social protest, women s studies, cultural and
countercultural histories.
7 2989