The Cloacal Scribe
Williamson, Chilton Jr.
Chilton Williamson, Jr. The Cloacal Scribe • When is an underground magazine not an underground magazine? When I set out a few months ago to plumb the depths of infernal journalism, it had not...
...There comes a point in intellectual and political history at which insanity becomes 'respectable...
...Then one morning you'd look at your pillow and find that your hair had begun to fall out...
...Never look up...
...The Moon has it all: paranoia, schizophrenia, illiteracy, obsessionism, sadism, lobotomism, and a sheer inability to distinguish the real from the merely fantastic...
...It publishes poems—one of which begins, "Beware the rapist, my horny friends"—as well as warnings from fat ladies: "The secret rage and humiliation of fat women could burn this country to the ground...
...Grauerholz, Bo), 842, Canal St...
...Please no ferns, fags or hairies...
...Make your next meeting a memorable occasion...
...c) reverent interviews with Himalayan catatonics...
...but it remains a fact nevertheless that the rest of the magazine is devoted to scatological bedtime stories for homosexuals, stories calculated to allow their readers to relax and forget Mom for a while—in brief, perverse versions of True Romance tales...
...Thus too RT attempts to bolster feminine morale by advertising in its back pages posters featuring "Judy Greenberg's beautiful 'Phoenix' graphic of the Phoenix-woman risingfrom the burning couch of a hospital," while Majority Report is keeping the lesbian-feminist and plain-feminist communities informed of happenings pertinent to their obsessions through a department called "Hot Flashes" that enumerates both setbacks—such as a statement by the Chief Psychiatrist of the National Hospital in Copenhagen that the female brain is inferior to the male in its powers of abstract reasoning and in "constructive association of ideas"—and advances—such as the appointment of a woman to the rank of Professor of Beer at an Edinburgh brewing school—in the slippery progress of the Second Sex...
...If you just like the feel of biodegradable paper between your fingers pick up a copy of The Alternative...
...Of JFK: "No, no, we did it...
...More, the political philosophy espoused by such magazines has been hanging around on the Left—in only slightly less ferocious incarnations—for nearly a century, and so can boast a well-established ancestry...
...We find," wrote something called Andrea Dworkin in WIN, "that millions upon millions of women have died as the victims of organized genocide...
...Of President Ford: "He probably hasn't had a good l*y in years...
...A. Lawrence Chickering Christopher DeMuth Leslie Lenkowsky Dr...
...Readers are reminded that, in the words of Andre Breton, "The simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd...
...It's barely possible you might find that for a time you were unable to beget children, although you could still have sexual relations...
...It is true that a faggot magazine like Big David—emblazoned with sketches of truck drivers wearing galluses and Continental Op hats, their hands plunged through each other's flies—flirts with paranoid obsessiveness in the editorial that introduces each issue ("Though the world was spared the headlines on the order of-FAGGOT SAVES FORD'S LIFE, we still think that Bay Area gay rights activist Oliver Sipple received short shrift for his heroic actions...
...i) the identification of editorial staff and contributors by their Christian—pardon me, given—names...
...Care to have a speaker that sets the blood boiling and the mind's wheels turning...
...Thin-identified women don't realize how political their fear of fat is...
...These publications serve as professor, syllabus, and textbook for hordes of the marginally-educated and counter-educated, and are generally rather specialized: they are the counterculture's Leisure, House and Garden, Popular Mechanics...
...The people by whom and for whom these magazines exist are pretty much of the type whose Diasporic wanderings in the seventies are portrayed by the film saga Milestones: that is to say, they are endowed with less intelligence than ,their intellectual pretensions cause them to assume for themselves, and they are underenergized, inarticulate, and dreamy...
...1) apowerful odor, like burnt feath- ers, of sectarian opposition—active or passive—to established political institutions—cultural or political—run into coitus with a fanatical restriction of emotional range and/or breadth of reportorial interest...
...Of Scoop Jackson: "I also like Senator Jackson...
...The vast swarm of magazines, hatched every week (or every month, or whenever the spirit moves some hophead or rock freak or Marxist fanatic) and loosely classified as "underground," are marked by numerous unpleasant features, among which the following are a few: a) biodegradable paper stock with hairs in it that appears to have been pulped with mortar and pestal by Ganges natives...
...It must, if it is to continue to survive...
...One carries articles mainly on astrology...
...k) the casual denial of the petit-bourgeois urge toward technological perfection ("our apologies go out to Michael and our researchers for the layout error—if you hadn't noticed, the order of the paragraphs was confused, and one unfortunate sentence was left hanging in midair...
...all treat their subjects with Teutonic solemnity, whether they be discoursing on natural childbirth, Cosmic Theater, Zen Tennis, or Pyramids as Energy...
...where pet snakes, similarly disposed of, grow six heads and hind feet...
...Most of Rr s contributors believe that the United States, conservatively described, is "a racist, sexist, capitalistic heterosexist society...
...one demands, not in the least rhetorically, "What do you say to a lesbian who's been raped by her brother...
...You might even have bloody spots on your skin and slight bleedings in your mouth...
...Even the more emotionally stable countercultural publications—like WIN, which manages to discuss such atrocities as racism and corporations with a semblance of composure—wax violent on the subject of women, in articles written almost without exception by women...
...Between squeals of rage, the self-obsessives of the paranoid magazines devote themselves largely to self-celebration and consciousness raising...
...They have not as much done away with traditional values as they have inverted them, and the moral self-righteousness with which they push those values, like the manner in which they correlate and explain them, is fundamentally bourgeois...
...h) the conscientious upper-casing of the ethnic noun "Black" and its unembarrassed juxtaposition with the lower-casing of the equally ethnic noun "white...
...Well, he was good...
...All correspondence of letters or donations should be sent airmail...
...However, scholarship is supposed to be broadening...
...the reason being that these magazines appear to be published by and for essentially normal people for whom sex is either a pleasant commodity and/or an impudent business for saucy Babbitts...
...Perhaps the hard-core sex mags represent the deepest recesses in which lurk the troglodytes of the American Fourth Estate, but of this I have my doubts...
...So there you are...
...Each is supported by a minuscule subscription list not because it denies the things with which civilized men are concerned but because it misunderstands those things...
...nor to read a violent editorial in Young Spartacus denouncing Eldridge Cleaver for the "obscene 'hot pants' " he recently designed —"a costume tailored according to the debased image of the black man projected by the Ku Klux Klan"—and calling the postlapsarian Black Panther "at bottom a victim of this racist capitalist state...
...but it is a world from which they may yet return to us and suffer in the process only a feeble case of the bends...
...DOZENS MOURN" the assassination of former Present Noxin, who was attacked by a killer clad in a faded 1958 Boy Scout uniform and brandishing an Afrocomb as he sat on the patio of San Clemenza, his California home, eating cottage cheese with A-1 sauce...
...Notable among them are the adherents of the she-wolf women's movement...
...its extroverted preoccupations serve to keep the heads of its editors safely above ground—thus making them fair game for right-wing sharpshooters...
...About the third,day you'd feel much better and you'd get along fine for about 10 or 12 days...
...Never start rumors...
...My candidate for the perfect example of top-flight hard-core underground journalism is a little magazine called The City Moon, published no doubt in some railroad WC on the New York waterfront...
...Selling ornithopters [mechanical birds] on the streets and parks of your town or campus...
...that point having been passed long ago by the blowzy ideologies propounded by scads of little magazines mailed out of back alleys, the passing has conferred upon such vehicles a certain cracked integrity...
...Any member who wishes to learn anything, no matter what the subject may be, has only to let us know what they want to study and we willarrange for other members to teach them...
...Thus Majority Report ("The material for this issue was brought to you by a couple of dykes who live in an avocado-colored VW van, which was parked for several weeks on the streets of Greenwich Village") recently carried a piece entitled "Lesbians Have Natural Rhythm," which argued that jazz was directly communicated to American culture by voodoo priestesses in mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans —a fact, it seems, that has been deliberately obscured by male chauvinists in musicology departments...
...James A. Meigis Peter J. Rusthoven Benjamin Stein R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...I would be scarcely more likely to describe a magazine like WIN—which regularly carries signed articles by such gilded wallahs of the New Left as Staughton Lynd—as an organ of the underground than I would beso to describe, say, The Nation...
...Gloria Hurd, a 29-inch dwarf, has given birth to an 18'/: -inch, five-pound nine-ounce son, The Moon announces...
...b) photographs of gaping, thrusting, and interpenetrating genitalia, frequently relieved by photos of slimy natural births in railroad apartments and Appalachian shacks...
...Baron Von Kannon Dale Vree If your campus, club, business, social, or civic group could use a good speaker, we can find one appropriate for you...
...C 26 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976...
...Said Blaze Starr, one of America's classiest strippers, to Screw of her encounter with Mr...
...The essentially nonpolitical magazines of the counterculture—nocturnal mushrooms of the Now Generation—are funkier than the political organs, and speak to a world less recognizable to a healthy beefeater, yet they are written and edited—and presumably read—by people who have an at least half-digested education under their belts and at least a tenuous grasp of the verbal and other civilized skills...
...There is a little magazine called Radical Therapy that is devoted to freeing therapeutics—mainly therapeutics as practiced upon sexually deviant women—from capitalist therapists and bourgeois values...
...They have made a world for themselves (to which, in the present sober decade, they are sufficiently wise not to attempt to wind in the straight world, as the moon try to wind in the Earth...
...However, if you want to read the article in its proper sequence, number all of the indented paragraphs, from 1 to 8. Then place paragraphs 15, 16 and 17 between paragraphs 8 and 9...
...Each of these magazines is of an advanced degree of political zaniness, yet each strives to make clear sense of a visible world that it portrays in terms recognizable even to its political enemies...
...Liven up your next meeting with one of the following: Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...drug laws, dismay and harass them...
...Any well-adjusted St...
...and instruct them in the multifarious riches of a world which is home to them...
...Similarly, Screw is a journal published not by warped and distracted people but by waggish fellows with a sense of humor and a biological resistance to sexual squeamishness who have discovered that crude sex—sex with every hair exposed—can make nearly as much money as does glossy sex—with every hair waxed off...
...Rizzo of Philadelphia: "One of the best 1**s I've ever had...
...Now I am saddened to find that the Aquarian is devoting much of its space to rock music and personal ads," editor Jim Rensenbrink—a street university graduate's Garry Wills—replied: "This newspaper reflects the society as much as it tries to increase consciousness about things that it believes to be true...
...Call or write: The Shore Line Company Post Office Box 553 Bloomington, IN 47401 (812) 334-2761 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 25 below this level we enter the dank cloaca of the true underground, one of the reigning inhabitants of which is the paranoid magazine published by and for creatures who consider themselves to be, not among the oppressed, but quite simply the oppressed...
...minister to their psychic hurts when exterior forces, like Nelson Rockefeller or the U.S...
...At a celebration of thanksgiving fielded last spring by the antiwar groups of the sixties to mark the communization of Greater Vietnam, Dave Dellinger, according to The Nation, "expressed the hope that the women's movement would provide the energy and direction needed to sustain a campaign" that could serve to reunite the Movement...
...not essentially different than that of his opponents in the MFA...
...j) the perfervid rhetoric of frog choruses croaking in the political marshes where the swamp-gas bubbles...
...nor to read in Guardian that New York City's fiscal crisis is merely an excuse for flunkies of the municipal government "to justify attacks on labor and social services, so a city 'bankruptcy' might be used to justify further anti-labor measures...
...But look beyond these particular attributes and others like them and you will have to recognize that the kinky press is actually divided into two broad categories: counterculture, and underground (or anticulture...
...Many of the propagandists for that counterculture are as serious in their pedagogical yearnings as a classics professor or Madison Avenue boy, as earnest as Norman Cousins...
...10013...
...For centuries, we have had male values slammed down our throats and up our c* *ts...
...Always drop flat on your stomach...
...Life to these beings is a stark drama in black and white, and their inability to put Life to rights makes them vicious with a lobotomizing anger...
...f) counter-career ads ("Looking for a Livable Job...
...It is hardly a surrealistic experience to stumble upon such a statement as that printed recently by The Militant, arguing that Portugal's Gonialves, though he has "been defended by the Stalinist Communist Party and identified as a leftist in the capitalist media," espouses nevertheless a "real political program...
...Rock music is the primary interest of a lot of people turned off from the present system and it is important and necessary that we cover it...
...We were in there [a closet] going ooh, ahh...
...They are guys who take a healthy man's delight in a risque and wicked profession...
...Those magazines which belong to the former category are yet reducible to a common human denominator: they are the organs of a sort of cultural and political shadow cabinet...
...The Moon believes the holocaust to be at hand—may occur in fact before the city defaults, before the $2.3 billion arrives...
...Yet here my article, as George Ade said of his fable, begins to differentiate: Care for a Good Old-Fashioned Harangue...
...A mysterious chap named Cockburn—resembling Alfred Hitchcock and apparently a familiar figure to the readers of The Moon—has announced himself, shortly after establishing a record as a world-champion snake-sitter, available for the Presidential nomination...
...it] used to concentrate on printing information that most of the other newspapers and magazines and media would ignore because it was 'too controversial...
...Those belonging to the second category are worms in the subsoil...
...all of Michael's ideas are there, and they make sense no matter what order you read them in...
...It is not easy for us to bear what we see...
...Screw's interviews with the celebrities of the sexual underworld are both clever and amusing, and possessed as well of a wry sophistication...
...another on rock music...
...Louis accountant can read that sort of thing forever—as can I. Screw's people are naughty: they're not submerged souls...
...By and by there's going to be a tremendous shock: millions of the Earth's "choicest inhabitants," including The Moon editorial board, are going to be carried away to another planet...
...The counterculture is at bottom a mirror-image of the American—or perhaps I 24 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 should say Western—culture...
...another (like Boston's East West Journal) on Zen...
...They are intent upon providing the counterculture with the same services with which an Arthur Ochs Sulzberger or Ann Landers provides the rest of us—that is to say, they fill its citizenry with self-sustaining and self-inflating images of themselves and of their roles in the world...
...Their spirit is communal and communicative: a magazine called Everything for Everybody—published by an organization of the same name in New York—announced recently that "We have now started what we call our free Learning School...
...Nobody who has anything to do with getting this little gem onto the streets could dwell anywhere but in one of New York's fabled sewers, where pet alligators, flushed down toilets, grow to be fifty feet long...
...Of Nixon: "In my opinion Nixon's a fag...
...When a reader of The Aquarian, a counterculture magazine published in New York City, wrote in to opine that "The Aquarian I used to know and love is dead...
...d) Letters to the Editor from languishing convicts ("My packages of books should be marked as a gift and as educational material for sure delivery and in avoidance of any duty fees...
...New York, N.Y...
...This one is fun, lucrative, and flexible to your schedule and interest level...
...When I set out a few months ago to plumb the depths of infernal journalism, it had not occurred to me that the term requires more stringent application than it is commonly accorded: the sort of publication it popularly denotes, it appeared to me, stood out upon the landscape as obtrusively as a hippie's tent beneath a sugar maple...
...where Italian waiters, driven underground by Mafiosi, bend double and guard hoards like Wagnerian dwarfs...
...We have decided not to reprint the article for lack of space...
...Like any mass-culture editor, the captains of the counterculture papers lead when they can and follow when they must, with a sharp eye always towards the drifting wants of their subscribers but with an eye also for the bounds of empirical reality...
...Love and Peace, Robert A. Bryant, prisoners and friends, Penal del Estado, Sonora, Mexico...
...e) muckily Levantine personals ("Attn...
...Well, Dave Dellinger better watch out: a lot of these ladies are crazy...
...and a couple of months of rooting about in the funky undergrowth of American journalism have taught me that the true and perfect underground magazine—the choicest slip of nightshade—is a comparatively rare and perfect bloom, frequently obscured by larger and more succulent growths with their topmost fronds exposed to the clear sunshine, and happened upon after long and boggy explorations in the swamps...
...If you want vintage underground, subscribe to The City Moon (eight issues per year, $5: "Subscriptions c/o Ed...
...g) the dogged substitution of the redolent noun "depression" for the more ubiquitous, but apologist, noun "recession...
...Of all these wing-and-a-prayer magazines, those which most clearly approximate the mundane press are the political magazines—magazines like Guardian, The Militant ("A Socialist Newsweekly published in the interests of the Working People"), Young Spartacus (published by the Spartacus Youth League, the' youth section of the Spartacist League), and WIN, which is printed with the aid of the War Resisters' League...
...This much the publications of the so-called "underground" are likely to exhibit in common...
...Local College Gays/Bis—TWO good looking w/ males, early 20s, sincere, discreet, easy going, clean-cut seek same for threesome and more...
...Of Rocky: "But I'm going to eventually...
Vol. 9 • April 1976 • No. 7
