29 June
An addendum to yesterday's sprawling entry on the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers and affiliated matters. As mentioned, the film I Shot Andy Warhol shows Valerie Solanas exchanging rants, then sleeping, with a character identified in the credits as Mark Motherfucker. The soundtrack for this scene is "Kick Out the Jams" by the MC5. (How could it not be?)
In the course of writing my article, I watched the film twice. Something about Mark Motherfucker's lines seemed vaguely familiar -- as indeed they had when we saw it in the theater in 1996.
Yesterday, I got a paperback copy of Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS (1973) in the very same paperback edition that was my constant companion of most of the 1980s. An altogether astounding piece of work which, like Theodore Draper's excellent research on the early years of American Communism, has never been equalled, though many have sniped at it without inflicting the slightest damage.
On page TK (don't have it with me now, will fill this in later), Sale quotes some early statements by leaders of Weatherman. And they are repeated, almost word for word, by Mark Motherfucker in I Shot Andy Warhol. In his memoir, Bill Ayers mentions going to meet with the Motherfuckers in the period between Weather's consolidation as a tendency and their decision to go underground.
Mary Harron really did her homework in making that film. The essay introducing the published version of her script is the most thorough account of Valerie Solanas's life available. The Motherfucker prose-poem expressing solidarity with her attempt to shoot Warhol that I quoted in the article is recited in a scene from the script that Harron says she was very sorry not to have been able to include in the final cut. That prose-poem also appears in Steven Watson's recent chronicle of the life and strange times of the Factory in the sixties -- an absorbing book, highly recommended.
[...]
28 June
Not long after starting at the Chronicle of Higher Education, I told some friends that one of my goals was to do a story that would require mention of the 1960s radical group known at the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers.
Having now written this item about a new edition of Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto -- and thereby contributed, however modestly, to the decline of civilization -- I have that feeling best summed up by the phrase, "My work is done here."
There was no room to mention this in the article, but a collection of writings by the Motherfuckers is available in a book called Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, available from Amazon -- which, quite unhelpfully, lists it only by the first two words of the title. Black Mask was a predecessor group, one of whose members was Dan Georgakas, who I know slightly via the world of C.L.R. James-iana. Dan went on to co-author a history of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers called Detroit, I Do Mind Dying, which is still in print, it's good to learn. An incredibly valuable book.
I only tracked down the collection of Black Mask and Mofo documents by searching Amazon for "Ben Morea," who I take it was the prototype of the character Mark Motherfucker in I Shot Andy Warhol. At one point circa 1967, Black Mask was the U.S. contact for (if not actually a section of) the Situationist International. They were -- in due course, and in keeping with the rituals of the SI -- "excluded" from the communion of the Debordist-Vaneigemist faithful. Though some of the BM/MF texts in the collection do have elements of the Situ analysis, the fact is that analysis wasn't really what the New York group was about. In one of the documents, they refer to themselves as a "street gang with an analysis," a line that turns up in I Shot Andy Warhol.
Sure wish I could draw a map of the relationships here. The game of degrees of separation is intriguing, given the thematic links. For example:
[...]