Underground - Part 1
by Cork Marcheschi - 11/14/2006

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I have a routine that is sacred to me. I get up an hour before the rest of my family, turn on the water for tea, slowly walk out to get the newspaper, and sit for one hour with a cup of tea and the paper. It sets the tone for the rest of my day. Last week I saw an article about the happy COUNTERCULTURE types frolicking at Burning Man. If this is the counterculture, take me out and shoot me now! It took me a while to get my heart rate back down and when it did, I started to think about where the UNDERGROUND/counterculture had gone. It certainly wasn’t Burning Man. The nature of the underground has to do with being oppressed and pushing against the oppressor. Burning Man sells tickets and has set its large wicker man up in San Francisco tourist Mecca, Union Square. OHHHH let’s get radical!

My friend, photographer Charles Gatewood, started out his professional life as an anthropologist but got snagged along the way and he became the documenter of the past 40 years of underground activity

When Charles and Spider Web published Pushing Ink, it was the first book done on tattooing. In America, tattoos had been the exclusive realm of sailors, convicts and gang members. But below the surface there was a large group of people who collected tattoo artists’ work on their bodies. It was rarely shared outside of small groups. From this, Charles discovered the sex club underground of New York, and was allowed to photograph in the Hellfire Club. From these experiences he produced a great book Forbidden Photographs. At that time no one would sell the book. Over the past 30 years the activity of tattooing and body piercing have come out of the shadows and moved into the malls! Yep, let’s get radical, we can go shopping and get our navels pierced. That’ll show ‘em that we are wild and crazy counter culture kids!!!!

I think my first understanding of the Underground was the French Resistance. My dad had been in WW2 and he brought back stories of the Resistance and what an incredibly dangerous thing it was. In school I was introduced to the Underground Railroad. America in the late ‘40s and through the ‘50s had Senator Joseph McCarthy to fan the flames of Communism. What a dark and disturbing period of our not-so-distant past. The HUAC (House Un-American Activities) trials are frightening and embarrassing. If you are interested in reading about this period from the artist’s perspective, read The Making of Salt Of The Earth. The McCarthy Black List wasn’t formerly broken till 1967 when the Smothers Brothers had Pete Seeger on their TV show.

The post-war period had young men and women returning from the war in Europe, many of them influenced by the intellectual and cultural life that thrived there. They brought back questions and ideas about how things could be different in their lives in America. The Beat Generation was the counterculture of this moment. Poetry, Jazz, the mixing of races, and the flaunting of bourgeoisie morality. Alan Ginsberg’s poem Howl became the landmark First Amendment case that opened the door for books, films and art that had not formerly been allowed into the country. Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence’s books were in print in short order. The police harassed the 1950 Bohemians; they represented a threat to God and Country so the powers that be made it as difficult as possible for them to be.

Herb Caine of the San Francisco Chronicle coined the term “Beatnik” after the first Russian satellite Sputnik.

The ‘60s saw the commercialization of the Beatnik. Tour buses came down Upper Grant Avenue in San Francisco and Bleecker Street in Greenwich village in New York. The TV show Dobby Gillis had its own beatnik with Maynard G. Krebs (later to become Gilligan).

So far we have had underground activity that was about pushing against something that was large and not willing to listen.

The next obvious group was the hippies. There is a lot to laugh about during this period: long articles about boys with long hair, girls without bras, the birth control pill, the use of recreational drugs, and music. I will address the music situation at another time. The hippies were just carrying on with what the beat generation started. The anti-war movement was another story. The war in Vietnam was a very real thing and the freedom of speech issues that were raised definitely tested the system. The tension between the military/government and the anti-war movement was huge. The understanding was that you can’t participate with a government that makes the rules and then changes them when you attempt to use them. The answer was to make your own rules. This really pissed off the powers that be. There was an “us” and there was a “them”. At this same time the Black Panthers added the potent racial issues of the century to this already overflowing kettle.

Let me give you my hit on how the government eventually diffused this powerful moment. The war was eventually let go of; the sentiments of the country had arrived at the realization that we were not going to WIN. At this time of great unrest the NASA space program jumped into full swing.

We had rockets, astronauts, moon rocks (or some kinda rocks) and a focus that got the country looking up (literally). The two other components were: getting busted for smoking dope was now a misdemeanor; and food stamps became very easy to get. What a recipe for calming people. Get them fed, get them stoned, and have them looking up! It’s not scientific but before you go crazy on me, check out the history yourself.

Since those heady days of mass marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, bus sit-ins (thank you Rosa Parks) riots and sanctioned murder (Kent State), what have we been up to recently in the underground? What is the counterculture countering? To answer that we need to look at the status quo. What is the current state of our country? Well we have a President who was questionably elected to office. Does anybody remember Al Gore, Dimpled Chad and the President’s brother being governor of the state that couldn’t get its voting shit together?

How about those silly movies that Michael Moore makes? It is a wonder that he hasn’t been sued by the Government and by General Motors. But I don’t think you can sue when somebody has researched things well and is telling the truth. I guess the truth is what is lacking in today’s culture. You can’t shock people any more unless you are Janet Jackson’s nipple… What a special and unique nipple it must be to cause the stir that it did. I think she was fined for having that nipple escape. I wonder how many young people watching that super bowl show were corrupted by that nipple. So the Government and Martha Stewart can lie and it’s ok–just be sure to keep the nipple under wraps!

Our celebrities go into rehab on a regular basis. Paris Hilton has sex online. The PRODUCERS are more important than the artist and for entertainment you can see people being stabbed, hit, kicked, blown up, abused and allowed to suffer all of this on TV–but we can’t see Janet Jackson’s nipple. And let’s not forget the war on terror. What a great excuse that has been to move us back toward the McCarthy era.

So what this tells me is we are an extremely violent country with Puritanical views about our sexuality. We have lost our value of the truth and are fearful of whatever we are told to be afraid of. And privacy is out the window: our lives are available to anyone with a computer.

All of this gives me a picture of what the new counterculture type might be. They are honest, as in value the truth. They have a good sex life and are comfortable with that being a natural part of the human organism. If you have a problem with that statement I will use Lenny Bruce’s quote “complain to the manufacturer.” They are not afraid. And they see the bloated information age as a parasol whose shade can be a comfort instead of a threat.

So I guess the underground today could be a prankster like Banksy, who acts like a termite in the normal world of retail and advertising. Anything that strikes at the heart of over-control is a good thing.

The rest of the mixture could look like someone who has a family and understands what life has to offer and pays little or no attention to the noise of the day. Tom Waits comes to mind as an artist who has grown tremendously within the structure of a family and house in the country. He has been married to Kathleen Brennan for 26 years, has three kids and produces the most idiosyncratic music imaginable.

To be continued in Part 2…

— Cork Marcheschi | November 14, 2006

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