DAY ONE: A BROADER SENSE OF POLITICS

Ben, if you don't mind, we'd like to start from an early age, in your life before the Lower East Side.

It's not political.

No, it's political. It's already political.

Right, everything is political. Life is political. I just said that meaning, it's more biographical. It might not be of any interest.

But I could start from an early age. I grew up in a city project, from a poor family. It was mostly Black and Puerto Rican, in an area called San Juan Hill. That was the north end of Hell's Kitchen. A lot of musicians lived there. Thelonious Monk lived there, I used to go to his house. Miles Davis lived there. There were a lot of Cuban musicians. It was really a music area. So growing up, I was involved with music. I started off as a teenager playing jazz. But I got addicted to heroin.

Heroin was really common?

It was big in the 40s and 50s. It was major. And jazz was all heroin. So I kept getting arrested, and I'd be in jail and I'd --- they used the term cold turkey, meaning to break your addiction without medical help, without drugs to bring you down. And one time when I was in jail, my liver gave out. I was dying, my liver was completely infected. So they moved me to a prison hospital.

But you were really young, right?

I was. But I'd been using heroin since I was fifteen years old. Then, while I was in the prison hospital, I had a therapist that took an interest in me, and she tried to help me. She said to me, this is the third time you've done this, cold turkey, been in jail and kicked the habit, then you go out and you start again. She said, you're gonna do it again unless --- why don't you leave the jazz world? Why don't you find another expression, try painting as your form of art? Because she understood that if I stayed in the jazz world, I would go back to heroin. So, as therapy, she started me painting. And I'm still painting, sixty years later.I never went back to heroin after that. I kept painting, and I got involved with the artists in the Lower East Side. I had a mentor, I met an older artist that took interest in my work. He just died last week. Aldo Tambellini. He was ten or eleven years older than me. I'm like a descendant of his.Anyway so we formed a group of artists, called Group Center. We were opposed to the commodification of art, and tried to find ways to present art that wasn't about commerce.

**Were you critical of the abstract expressionists, like Pollock or Rothko? **

No. I was critical of what was replacing abstract art: pop art. I hated it. The abstract expressionists believed in art, as a necessity in life. Commercial interests gained control by making it a product. But the artists themselves still believed in expression. The pop artists, though, were completely commercial. They believed in money and fame.

With Group Center we took the approach of showing art in non-commercial spaces, also combining music, poetry, dance, all the different media. I did the music, I created instruments out of machines. I'd always been interested in music, and I started using machines to make music. And so I worked with them for a couple years. But meanwhile I became more and more political. And there was another artist in the group that moved in the same direction. So he and I decided to start Black Mask, which was an effort to combine art and politics.

When you say that you became more political, what did that mean to you?

It just became more of a focus. Back in the jazz days, I also had a social consciousness. Because I was in the projects, mostly with Black people, I was aware of the lie of the American dream. I could see that something was wrong. I was part of the underclass. Though I had limited political consciousness of that, it was a visceral anger toward the suppression of people.

As I became more politically conscious, I became more conscious of the problems in the world. I always felt close to the struggles in Black America, that was very important. At some point I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War struggle, and that became really important. When we started Black Mask, we felt that at that moment in America, we were also fighting against the war in Vietnam, and we were fighting alongside the Black population. Black Mask was an expression of that.

What year was that, when Black Mask started?

It was 1965 or 66. It's hard to say exactly. The journal started in 66. But there were only ten issues. It existed only two years.

It was just the two of you?

In the beginning it was mainly just two of us that put the journal together. But as we did things around the city it would attract people, and sometimes those people would join us. Like when we shut down MOMA --- that was our first action. We weren't a big group, but we did involve a lot of people.Eventually we'd like to ask about the different relations you were able to make, from the Black Panthers to the Weather Underground, to Valerie Solanas, also you knew the Living Theater, the Diggers, Situationists... it's like a compendium of 60s radicals! For example I was surprised to learn, you knew Yuri Kochiyama? For me it's so important to learn about these connections.

That's the most ironic thing: Yuri also lived in the project. I met her when I was really young. I can't remember how we met exactly. I just remember that she was nice to me, like she would always say hi and try to talk to me, you know. She was really sweet to me. I was a kid, maybe thirteen, fourteen. She was older, like a mother.

Actually you didn't meet through politics, but because you lived in the same place.

Correct. But what's so ironic is that we met again, years later. When I was more political, after I'd left the project. And she was living in Harlem, and she was involved with Malcolm X. She was very close to Malcolm.

I know she was there when he was killed.

She held him as he died. But so when we met again, when we re-met, we hadn't seen each other in years. I had become completely political, and she was surprised like ohhh, it's you! And she invited me to her home uptown, in Harlem. I used to go up there for meetings with Black radicals and militants. Everyone there was Black except for me and her.

But when you were younger, she didn't tell you anything political, she was just like a friendly neighbor woman?

Right. To be honest with you, I never was clear how it came about. I can't recall how we met the second time. Like I don't remember our conversation, or how she recognized that I was that same kid. And I always wondered how she realized that I had reached a similar political understanding, that was parallel to hers. I don't know if she saw me with Black Mask maybe, cuz I used to be on the street with it in the Village... I can't remember where I came across her. It's really a blur.

That's really mysterious! So then after Black Mask, you started Up Against the Wall Motherfucker?

Correct. But we didn't name it that. To call yourself "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker" is almost pretentious. We didn't have a name. But the first thing we did was to bring garbage to Lincoln Center. There was a garbage strike throughout the city. So in the poor areas like the Lower East Side, the garbage was over the ceiling. In the rich areas there were private carting services. And so we decided that was unfair, they should have some garbage too. I mean maybe they're missing it. So we decided to bring garbage from the Lower East Side up to Lincoln Center and dump it in the wading pool. We made a leaflet announcing that we were going to do it. We called it a cultural exchange: garbage for garbage.

But then, how should we sign the leaflet? We didn't have a name. It was just this group that had formed around Black Mask. It had no identity yet. It had no ideology; it was just radical. I was friends with LeRoi Jones, aka Amiri Baraka, and he had written a poem that said "up against the wall motherfucker." We said why don't we put that, like a revolutionary slogan? So we wrote that on the leaflet. We didn't intend it as a name, but everybody who saw it thought that it was our name. And it kind of stuck.

"Up against the wall" means like hitting against something?

It's not a metaphor. It's literal. It meant you had to stand against the wall with your hands up. Like when the police arrested somebody, especially in the ghetto, they'd say up against the wall, motherfucker! Or if somebody was gonna rob you they'd say up against the wall! So it was a common expression in the ghetto. Both police and criminals, everybody used it.

You know, I hesitate to use the word criminal. It's not that some people are just criminals. Poverty makes crime. People in poverty turn to crime. So naturally in the ghetto, there are people who are criminalized.

In your case, and for other radicals also, there's an existential sympathy with criminals. Would you think of them as revolutionary?

Sometimes. They're rebellious. They're definitely oppositional. They may not theoretically be revolutionaries. But in their very existence, they're against the imposed order. A lot of criminals become revolutionary, at certain times. Even classic examples that everybody knows, like Robin Hood. They lived in the forest that the ruling class of England thought they owned. Part of that was their resistance. There's always this interplay between revolutionary and criminal, and living against the law.**Then the target of rebellion is the wealth itself, held by the ruling class.**And it's interesting --- actually Lincoln Center was built where I grew up. That was San Juan Hill. The project is still there, but all the ghetto housing was torn down. They destroyed it to build Lincoln Center. So that was also part of the reason for doing what we did. It wasn't stated, but that was definitely part of it.

Lincoln Center used to be San Juan Hill? Around the west 60s?

Right, it was the north end of Hell's Kitchen. See the southern end of Hell's Kitchen was all Italian, from 37th^ ^ to 42nd. My mother was born there. Then when it got to 42nd it turned Irish. From 42nd to 57th was totally Irish. Then from 57th up it became mixed. And that was San Juan Hill. There was a large Black population, there were Italians, Irish, Greek, some Puerto Ricans had started moving in. It was a viable mixed community, where a lot of musicians and cultural people lived. Thelonious Monk! Miles Davis! It was a cultural haven. And they destroyed it to put up an edifice to culture, which was its exact opposite.

So there was a double reason for doing what we did. It showed what we thought of Western culture.

I had no idea. I'd never even heard the name San Juan Hill before. It's like they erased it from historical memory.

There's almost no one left that knows what it was like.

**The Lower East Side must have been so different back then, too.**It was a ghetto. Mainly Black and Puerto Rican, and Ukrainian. And a lot of artists lived there, poets, theater people. It was a center of the counterculture, it drew a lot of people. So it was diverse.

That was the setting for your political activity, like neighborhood-based community organizing?

But we had a different orientation. We never thought of ourselves as organizers. You know, the Marxists were always talking about organizing, but we were the exact opposite. We weren't trying to organize anything! We were trying to live free. And that would attract people, and it would show an example of what this could be --- to live free. So in a sense it was organizational. But it wasn't organization.

I've always been curious about the word free. It seems like in the 60s it had a real meaning. But today hardly anyone uses it, except for the right wing. For you "live free" meant like something outside of capitalism and bureaucracy?

Your life was controlled by you. Not by an outside force. So that meant economic freedom, cultural freedom, spiritual freedom, artistic freedom. We wanted people to be free, totally. Not just in the anti-capitalist sense. We hardly ever even used the word capitalism. It was obvious that to be free you would be opposed to capitalism. But that's not the main objective. The main objective is to build the alternative. It's so subtle, the difference.It was more a positive orientation, rather than just oppositional. We were always oriented towards what we could do to make our life more free, rather than what we could do to oppose those who want to make us less free. Like when we cut the fence at Woodstock --- a lot of people don't realize, Woodstock was not intended to be a free event. There were fences where you had to pay. So we cut the fence! And a politico might say, so what? Big deal, you cut the fence. But it was a way of showing, this is our culture. It's not a commodity. It wasn't made to make somebody wealthy. It was made for us to share.

It was more about empowering people to act, than to contest the powers that be?

But it's both. To emphasize that, I always compare two things we did. The first was cutting the fence at Woodstock. The second, another thing that we did, was breaking into the Pentagon.

That was during the March on the Pentagon, right? You actually managed to break in!

We were the first people in history to do it! Probably the last. So obviously, that is a very militant act. Most political people would say oh that's the right thing, attack the Pentagon. But to me, they were equal. It's not that one was better than the other. They were both important. Because it wasn't just political, economic control that we opposed, but all control, cultural, spiritual... Like, religion is control. It's taking spirituality and using it to repress people. Spirituality should be freeing people. Everybody should be spiritual. But religion uses it, and it becomes another form of control.

So from the standpoint of freedom, both actions are equal.

Totally. It was an effort to live free. To express our freedom as people. And everything we did was like that. Like feeding people, I mean we fed people all the time. We'd have big feasts in the Lower East Side with hundreds of people, several times a week! It wasn't organizing like we have to organize people. But rather, communize people.Were there ever schisms in the group, with some people saying no we have to be more organized, or different ideas about would be more revolutionary?

That's not how we were. We didn't have to all agree. To be honest with you, I can't even say that everybody in Up Against the Wall was an anarchist. We didn't have an ideology.

How many of you were there?

In the core there might have been forty or fifty. But around them were another hundred. And then around them were another hundred. It's like the ripples when you throw a stone in water. So that was not... We weren't interested in numbers.

You weren't interested in growing as organization, or influence?

Right. We didn't do things to build our importance. We were not trying to be important. We were trying to live.

**That sounds like a real power. You weren't fixated on a certain effect; your activity was more open-ended.**That's why the politicos didn't like us. We always had this mixed style. Art was always there in the politics, and poetry, and spirituality. It was never just organizational politics. It was the broadest sense of politics, which is life. That's another answer to the question of what it means to be political. It's a different conception of politics.

Also, what's been lost is the sense of relativity. Like with political correctness. It's an absolute, it's not relative. But absoluteness has no place in life.

For instance, I was allied with the Black Panthers. But they had an authoritarian streak, and I was opposed to that authoritarianism. Yet I was fighting beside them in the struggle against the larger oppressor, America. I made it clear to them: I'm opposed to authoritarianism. Someday, when we're successful, we can fight it out. But for now, if it's America or you, I'm with you! See that's why you need relativity. But there were some people who felt like I shouldn't be pro-Black Panther, just on principle.

It's a problem of ideological purism?

And if you're absolute, it sometimes prevents you from coming to the right conclusions. Because you reject something based on whether it fits your ideology. Like sometimes I worked with Black nationalists. I'm not in support of nationalism. But we all wanted the same goal --- to reshape American racial reality.In other words, rather than making decisions based only on ideology, you have to think through each instance. It's not about being politically correct. You must be able to understand what you are choosing between, and base your choice on those possibilities. Case by case, you have to be capable of deciding... But it's hard for the modern young mind to understand that. Relativity today is almost gone. And it's so important to bring back that sense. Because when you lose the sense of relativity, then you're unable to act. It's a very subtle thing.Today we heard two important concepts, relativity and freedom. I've always wondered about that word. We don't hear it anymore. Maybe the meaning that it had in the 60s was lost.

Because people become so obsessed with the idea of opposition, they forget what it is they're opposing. What's the goal.

**What makes it hard to keep the sense of relativity, do you think? **A lot of it has to do with control. If your thinking is absolute, you're easier to control. And the authoritarian Left can control people by stressing opposition alone. But relativity allows for less control. It gives you, as a person, freedom of choice. You're not bound by dogma and ideology, but by what you feel better leads to freedom.

And you really can't control what you feel. It's beyond that.

Right. And relativity gives you the freedom to feel the depth of something. Not just what you call it, but what it really is.

DAY TWOARMED LOVE

Today we're hoping you might tell us some stories from everyday life in the Lower East Side. Like what you were eating, where you were living... how did you all get by?

Well, there's a lot of gray area there. You know, we were thieves. Especially the women, they were really good at it. So a lot of our food was stolen. At the same time, we fed people. We had non-profit papers that I got from one of the liberal churches, so we could go to the markets and get day-old food for free. Then we had people who cooked, and we'd get church halls, or meeting halls in the neighborhood. We could have three or four hundred people come for dinner! We did that maybe two or three nights a week.

We also raised money. We had what we called crash pads where we could put people up, so that there were free places for people to stay. Like we would find runaways on the street and we'd give them the address. We had multiple crash pads where people could stay. And we also stayed in some of them. So we didn't have much rent.

Were the crash pads squatted?

Some. Mostly we paid rent. But the Lower East Side rent was cheap, we're talking less than fifty dollars a month. And we raised money, we had a fund to feed and house people, and different people would contribute. At one point, all the dope dealers in the Lower East Side --- not hard drugs like heroin, but the grass and psychedelic dealers contributed to it.

**Interesting, why would they do that? **

We were building a community. And that concerned them too. See the Lower East Side was like a Mecca, it was drawing people. So the dealers were making money. And some of them would contribute to a fund for the community, because they also benefitted from the community. So we used to encourage that. We were always raising money.

It sounds like a big operation.

It was. We had the free food, and the crash pads, generally we had several crash pads. We had a free store, where people could get clothes for free. There was a bail fund so we could bail people out of jail. We had lawyers, and doctors, on retainer. It was extensive!

**How did you manage the money? I assume it was cash. **I don't know, different people handled it. I never did. But it was a lot of cash. The dope dealers, everybody mainly used cash. Raising money was important, but that was only part of it. It wasn't all based on that. I'll give you an example, to show how we operated. You know how yogurt is sold in a container, and it's labeled, say like strawberry. Well, when it goes through the machines, sometimes the machine misses the strawberry, so they can't sell it and they throw it away. We found out that Dannon was throwing away thousands of these containers every week --- of good yogurt! And we had a refrigerator at a crash pad that we weren't really using, so we started going every week, we had a fifty-five gallon drum and we would fill it with yogurt! We would take it out to the street on a cart and wheel it around, and people could get free yogurt.

You'd open each container?

Open each container and put the yogurt in the barrel.

But why open them, why not leave it in the container?

That way people could take a few spoons, or as much as they wanted. And it was an energy. It looked cool, I mean, a barrel full of yogurt! Plus it was easier to handle.

Then at some point, I don't know if Dannon decided to give us more, or they were making more mistakes, but at some point they had twice as much yogurt as we'd been getting. So I thought well we need another refrigerator. But how are we going to get a refrigerator? I said I don't know, but let's go. We'll just go walk around.

As we were walking around, we saw a place that sold appliances. Outside they had some refrigerators. But you know how heavy refrigerators are. So I went inside and I asked them "do you have a cart?" Of course they did. So I asked if I could rent it. They said "yes if you leave a deposit." I said okay, and I took the cart. As I was leaving, I passed the refrigerators outside. There were three or four guys ready. They put the refrigerator on the cart and we went off!

We didn't think of it as stealing. Like the Robin Hood consciousness, we thought of it as liberating from those who have it and passing it to those who need it. It was not theft for our own aggrandizement.

**Did you have a name for this kind of activity, or you just did it?**Well people knew Up Against the Wall. Then we had a name, like for the nonprofit papers we used the name East Side Survival Organization, ESSO. Like the oil company.

That's funny. So it was ironic.

Yeah, and we used to have a sign that mimicked the Esso logo. We had it up on the free store.

But you know, we weren't trying to be a charity. For example in the free store, we had free clothing. So people would come in and get clothes for free. At the same time, we had a printing press. And AWOL soldiers would come in and get clothes, and false ID. It wasn't a matter of getting something for free. It was about the possibility that life could be free!

Where was the free store, by the way?

East 10th Street. We had one around Avenue B, by Tompkins Square Park. Then we moved to a bigger one around 3rd Avenue. And we started squatting. See we rented the free store, which was the street level, and the rest of the building on top of it was empty. So we broke the lock and took over the building! Since we'd already been there in the free store, people were used to seeing us around.

It must have been a lively spot, people coming and going.

Oh yeah, people hung out there all day. There was a group that used to call themselves the Wine Group for Freedom. They were semi-homeless, like street people, mostly Black and Puerto Rican, and they would hang around. And we were always doing things around the neighborhood, like at St. Marks we would have free food, we'd have concerts in Tompkins Square Park, maybe every other week we would get bands to donate their time and play free concerts. We were always doing things.

How about Canned Heat, you were friends with them right? Did they play in the park?

Yeah, Canned Heat were my friends. They didn't play at the park, but they played at the Fillmore, when we got the Fillmore one night a week. That's another thing we did. We occupied the Fillmore East and forced Bill Graham to give us use of the theater, one night a week, to put on free concerts for people. A lot of rock bands came and played, including Sly and the Family Stone, the MC5 and Country Joe McDonald.

But when we did things in the neighborhood, like the concerts in Tompkins Square Park, we always took the effort to make it multicultural. We would never only have rock concerts. We thought that would be insulting, what about these other people that were there? So we had rock bands, but we would also have Latin bands, as well as Black bands and steel drums. So that there would be a neighborhood-wide representation. We were really conscious about that, not to cater only to the white population of hippies. We saw it all as one community.

It was a heterogeneous composition of people.

Totally. Some were white, some Native American, some Black, some Puerto Rican. And there were different groups in the community, there were street people, there were hippies and new age people. There were artists, poets, theater people, there were students. And within our group, there were different groupings. We were consciously very mixed.

Like the students for example. Since we helped with the occupation of Columbia University, a lot of students oriented towards us. And they had their own identity, their own way of being. So they would stay together, most of them would stay in the same crash pad. We all hung out together, ate together, did things together. But certain crash pads were more student, or more dropout, or more street people. We didn't tell anyone where to stay. People would find their own grouping.

What was the age range, it was mainly younger people?

It was all ages. Young people, old people, teenagers, even kids! There were runaways that stayed with us, some as young as ten or twelve years old. We'd find them on the street and put them up, if they wouldn't go back home. We would encourage them to go home but they would not, so we took care of them. We had a lot of them. There were crash pads where the kids could stay, as well as some of us that were older.

So there were multiple generations. In fact, we thought of our group as family. It wasn't an organization. We didn't call it "Up Against the Wall." We just called it the family.

**How about you, where did you stay?**I'd never stay in the same crash pad more than a couple nights. I was constantly moving. So that my whereabouts remained unknown.

At that point you were already underground?

I was off the grid, so to speak.

What were your interactions with the cops like?

It depended on the situation. They were always hassling people, trying to bust people, you know, as cops always do. But we were extremely volatile. So how we responded, often depended on how hard we were pushed.

Say there was a bust and they arrested a bunch of people. Then we would call for a demo, and that night a hundred people might show up at the precinct. Sometimes it would turn into a riot, and they'd arrest more people. Then the next day we'd be back at it again.

We had our own mimeograph machine that we used to make leaflets and fliers. So when something happened that we wanted people to know about, we could write a leaflet and immediately print it. I'll show you... Like these, we'd print hundreds of these and pass them out around the neighborhood.

I love these. "News from the streets!"

That's really what it was. Sometimes we'd take the mimeograph out with us, we'd make a leaflet and print it right there on the street!It's great to see these. It's like looking back into another time: "heads," "freaks," "the hip community." Did you identify with the hippies?

The term hippie was more of a media invention. We preferred the term freak. Actually, some of us were from an earlier generation, some of us came from the Beats. We were in the new age, what people call hippie counterculture. But we were older, with more Beat influence.

By appearance, we dressed a bit like hippies, and we had long hair. So we looked more or less like hippies, and we were around them. All these dropouts were moving to the Lower East Side, and they were a part of the community we were building. But you could feel that there was a difference. We had an edge. You know, the city was rough. And a lot of us had been criminalized as youth. We didn't fit with the love generation, we weren't flower children. Instead of peace and love, we proposed "armed love" --- I coined that phrase.

You were armed yourselves, right? You carried guns?

Correct. In other words, we were not pacifists. We believed in self-defense, and that could mean violence. So the real, hardcore hippies didn't trust us, or they were apprehensive of us, because of that. But to most political people, we were outsiders. Like some Marxists hated us! You know, we used LSD and hung out in the streets. So we were in this weird middle ground. And that was the beauty of our family. There was almost nobody like us. **What was their problem with LSD and hanging out in the street?**They were opposed to the culture. They looked down on it, they wanted nothing to do with it. They saw it as apolitical. And they dismissed the whole psychedelic, new age movement. Whereas we felt that the counterculture, combined with a political understanding, was where we were going. At that time there was a division, either you were political or you were psychedelic. And what made us different was that we were both. I mean there was no other group like us. We were militants, committed to revolutionary struggle. And we were totally part of the alternative, psychedelic world.

Because you recognized that as an important force.

But it wasn't just a decision, like we better go join this world. We were part of it, we believed in it. As psychedelic people, we believed that the mind had to be changed, as well as the body.

Will you say more? How did the psychedelic movement play into the struggle?

It was part of the larger struggle to find a way to live outside of the norm. And it was really important. People left the suburbs and white middle-class America, because they were psychedelicized! America was at the point of change, and psychedelics were part of it. And we were part of that energy.

Did you ever use LSD in actions?

It had nothing to do with street action. It was just part of our life.

Did you take psychedelics together, though?

Not necessarily together, it was up to a person. It wasn't planned. Sometimes I would take them and just walk around the streets. Or a couple of us would go down on the weekend to Wall Street, when there's no people, no cars, and we'd walk around. We'd get on the ferry and go out, you know, it was organic.

**But did you feel that using psychedelics could help, like maybe they were good for relationships between people?**I didn't believe in the concept of doing something for a result. We just lived it. And we believed in change.

See, the mind is programmed. There's no way to avoid it. And we realized that if you want to rewire your mind, you're going to need something. That's what LSD was useful for. To rewire, and shatter illusion. Yet for some people, LSD couldn't help. In some cases it even hurt. Some people were so damaged mentally that when they saw the way out, it was more frightening than being in. Really it's tragic. That's why we were vehemently opposed to the idea of dosing people, meaning to give someone acid without their knowledge. They did it a lot on the West Coast, like Ken Kesey and them with the acid tests. Kool-aid acid, that's what it was: a bowl of Kool-aid full of acid that they just set out somewhere, and people may drink it without knowing. Could you imagine, you think you're in the regular world, then all of a sudden it shatters? It could shatter you! I mean it's deadly. It's like killing someone, to dose them. So we were adamantly opposed to it. Something that drastic, you have to choose it, consciously. You have to be ready for it. You have to be aware of what could happen.

But in general, we encouraged the use of acid. We didn't see it as a cure all, as Tim Leary did. But we saw that it was helping to question one's place in society and in the universe. Although I eventually came to feel that psychotropics are a better avenue.

Psychotropics?

In other words, not the man-made chemical, but plants like psilocybin, ayahuasca, you know, there's all kinds that are part of nature.

I see. How did you encourage acid use, specifically?

We used the distinction between life drugs and death drugs. Death drugs were hard drugs like heroin and speed. Many of us had had problems with death drugs and saw that they were destructive. Whereas we saw that life drugs were promoting life --- namely psychedelics, also grass and hashish, and psychotropics. So when we had the free night at the Fillmore, that gave us a chance to distinguish. That was another thing that was disturbing to some Leftists, we actually distributed life drugs throughout the theater, for free! Because we wanted to make it clear. Life drugs, we advocated. We promoted them. Death drugs we were totally opposed to. We wouldn't let them in the door! We would not allow anybody to come in and distribute death drugs.

**The way you talk about the Lower East Side, it sounds like you played a protective role toward a lot of people. **We did. We felt protective of the youth coming from the suburbs. We didn't want them to become victims. You know, the Lower East Side was rough. I mean it was a ghetto. And all these runaways and young kids were out on the streets. And they could be preyed on.

There were a lot of runaways?

Hundreds of them! Some were really young kids, that had just run away from home. They had no idea what this world they just entered was. We had armed patrols every night, walking around to make sure the kids were alright. We were out there and if we saw some we asked them, do you have a place to stay? And we'd give them an address where we had a crash pad, and tell them you could stay there, you'll be safe.

Which means, the government didn't help these kids?

No. And the thought was, we want to do it for ourselves. We want to set up a separate, independent community. We protect our own people --- even from police. We don't need police.

It's a bad expression, but it's like the Lower East Side was really your territory.

It was. It went from 1st Street up to 14th Street, that was the northern edge. And from 3rd Avenue all the way to Avenue D.

That's pretty much the whole Lower East Side! You must have had a powerful presence.

We did. Like one night, we barricaded the streets and threw a party. We had hundreds of people out in the streets. The cops showed up, but there were so many of us that they gave up! They turned around and left.

Eventually we got too strong, and the cops starting busting us for everything they could. But for a time, the cops couldn't control us.

So the heyday was the 1960s, up until 68 or 69 I guess?

60s, correct.

But then, at some point you left the city, or it became untenable to stay. Was it hard to give up that territory? Or how did you think about it?

Well, it's complex. It was a situation where I had to leave. But there was also something somebody once said to me, that always stood in the back of my mind: this is their world. We can fight them, and we can resist, and we can rebel. But they think it's their world. At some point we reached the conclusion that, if we wanted to have an alternative world, we would have to build it.

A lot of you left together? What year was that?

I personally left the city in 69 (under a legal cloud). Some people stayed a little longer. Some left when I left.

Then what happened?

It took forty years until I came back. And in those forty years, I learned a lot. I went somewhere else. I tried to find what another life might look like. And now after forty years, I'm trying to bring what I learned back.Eventually we'd like to ask more about those forty years. Of course, some things you may not want to talk about.

If it gets to that point I'll just say I can't talk about it. Or I'll talk about it in a guarded way.

It does seem like many of your concepts, I know they were there from the 60s, but maybe you're seeing them through this other lens as well?

Right. It's not that I abandoned one and I embraced another. It's that they became one. For example my psychedelic life before, and my psychotropic life now, have become one.

But I'm running out of time.

I'm so glad that we have this time with you now. Thank you, Ben. It's getting exciting!

I'm excited about it also.

DAY TENREVOLUTIONARY ANIMISM

---

Ben, I was thinking about the first time we met.

I remember, it was in Brooklyn.

At the Wyckoff space. We were at the same party.

That was early on, when I had just reemerged.

At first I didn't know who you were. But you were very sweet and friendly, and we had a nice talk. Then later I realized, oh that was Ben Morea! And I was shocked. My image of you, I thought Ben Morea was kind of scary, like a scary biker man.

That's why I never look in the mirror. I'm scary!

You know, I found some pictures from when you were younger. I could only find a few. But you really did look scary.

Yeah, I used to be more intense.

Still I believe you must have been very kind. Like towards the kids, you must have been warm and open.

I was. But I was an intense person.

Will you tell us about your decision to come back to the city? Why did you resurface, after so many years away?

Well, I don't know how, but someone found out how to reach me. And she called and asked me to come to the city to speak. I told her absolutely not. I haven't been there for forty years. I'm on some other trajectory, I'm involved with other energies. And the last thing I want to do is get back into the political ideological crowd. So I told her no, I apologized and hung up.But I kept thinking about it. I first entered the world of resistance because I felt that things have to change, I decided I had to do something. Well, the world in the 60s was not as bad off as it is now. It's actually worse now. So I felt bad saying no I won't come back. And so I called her, I said I'll try it. But don't do a lot of advertising. If you keep it low key, I'll try it and see if I fit, see what kind of questions people ask, how do I respond. So they had a small gathering at a space called 16 Beaver. That was the first time I spoke publicly since the 60s.

At first it was a little difficult for me. But I became comfortable with it, and I felt some sense of accomplishment. And then somebody mentioned there's another place we want you to speak. I said okay, I'll try it. And that was bigger, like a hundred people. Then somebody approached me and said they wanted to have a big assembly at the New School. And that was like 500 people. At that point I felt comfortable enough. So that was how it happened. It just kept growing.

**That was also the time of Occupy right? Like 2011?**The New School was around Occupy. The earlier ones were before. You know, I'm no good with dates. But I felt like it was something that I had to engage myself in. I felt like, I'd spent forty years away, and things have gotten worse, if anything. And if I really wanted to see a change, I should contribute.

How would you describe how the world got worse?

It just feels like we've reached a point of larger tragedy. You know, with the environment, and now the pandemic, it's like the whole thing is coming unglued. In the 60s we had a big struggle, but it was pretty clear what it was --- you know, the struggle. But now it seems larger. The whole Earth is threatened with extinction. Everything is exacerbated.

**You said you left the political ideological crowd behind when you left the city. How did you find the political milieu, when you came back?**In the 60s there were a lot of Trotskyists, Maoists, you know, different Marxists. And I had to spend time dealing with them. When I came back, it seemed there was a more open community, and a lot were less ideological. So it was more of an open base, less controlled. It felt like more fertile ground. I didn't want to get into those internecine battles.**What kinds of questions were people asking? Did you feel that you could respond, you were able to connect with people?**In the beginning I was really nervous if there would be a focus on where I went and what I did those forty years I was away. I didn't want to talk about that. But if people were more interested in what happened in the 60s, and how it pertains to today, that was a conversation that I felt more comfortable with. So I was anxious to see what the orientation would be. I found that most people wanted to talk about the 60s. Or they wanted to talk about art. Or about Valerie Solanas, some groups mainly asked about her. Every place I spoke, the questions were different. And there were less questions like where did you go, what did you do? So I felt more comfortable with dialogue.

And slowly I began to find a way to articulate what I did, and what I learned during those forty years, that would not pose a threat to where I went. I formulated a conversation around general terms. Like animism. Where I came from, the people were animists. But I didn't want to identify those people. They had made room for me in their world. In no way would I expose it. But animism as an understanding, I saw could be introduced.

So now I'm comfortable proselytizing and expanding the concepts of animism, as a necessity. I personally believe that we cannot address the problems of the world without animism. Period. Capitalism is doomed. Religious ideology and theology are doomed. The humanist, materialist concept is over. But what replaces it? You have to have an understanding that transcends them. And to me, animism is what is necessary. To understand that we are part of something greater. We are not in control.The humanist conception perceives the human as a pinnacle, above other forms of creation. And that's a mistake. We're no better. We have a different consciousness. But it's not like other life forms are insignificant. They are as significant as us. And we have to understand how to interact with it. We're just part of this larger reality. Until we understand that, we'll never get along with it.

In the city everything is imported, commercial, provided. It seems like where you went, you did something different. You had to find food, you were exposed to the weather. And that also changed your perception of everything.

****Totally. And that's what I did, it was not an ideological search. It was a search for an alternative. It wasn't a search for another ideology. It was a search for another way of life.You said that you changed a lot, from this experience.

To be honest, this might sound extreme --- if I hadn't changed, I'd be dead. This way of life allowed me to change. If you're stuck with an urban consciousness, you can't survive it.**Will you say more about how?**You have to begin to understand that nature is in control. You're in its domain. It's not in your domain. You're in its domain, and you have to find a way to live with it. To be part of it. If you resist it, or antagonize it, you're done! That's the beginning of animist understanding: we have to find a way to fit into nature. Nature doesn't have to fit us. That's what the Western, capitalist mind thinks, that nature is there for us to use. That's how some people have destroyed the environment. They think of it only as a resource that they can use to make money, with no consciousness of what harm it might do. So they extract things from the Earth that they should have left alone. They do things with animals that they should not have done. That's why we have pandemics! Their actions caused the pandemic. And if they don't change, there will be future pandemics. The next one will be worse. Same with the storms, hurricanes, tsunamis, wildfires, drought, all of that. They're only going to get worse. I don't know how to put it exactly, to make it clearer. But there's a connection between what you do, and how nature responds.

That's what you experienced directly when you were living in the wilderness. You had to learn how to interact.

Not only to learn, but you have to accept your role as a subservient part of a greater whole. You're no longer in charge. See, that's why the overuse of science is dangerous. It's not that I'm against science. But the capitalist world thinks it can correct the problem through science. You can't correct the problem through science. Science can maybe help to explain to you the problem. But you can only correct the problem by understanding nature, and changing your relation to it.I like that way of thinking, to say that animism is a way for us to understand nature. That's usually how we think about science. But you're saying that actually, as an understanding of nature, animism is more powerful than science.

And animism is a way of understanding that the universe is alive. It's a living thing. It's one. You are part of that one. You are not in charge of it. You are only part of it. And if you understand that you are part of it, then your need is not to control other parts. Your need is to coexist, and be part of the whole process.

I mean think about it: the universe. Do you know how many stars, how many galaxies there are? We're talking billions, they can't even count them! And these idiots running around thinking that we are the center --- of what? The Earth is not even a speck in terms of the universe.

For you, the sense of being part of it involves the sense of being small?

Being infinitesimal.

Being part means being infinitesimal?

Because the whole is so great that if you're part of it, you're infinitesimal. And you have no choice. It's not up to you to decide.

**Also there's infinity in the smallness. So both ways, it's beyond us. **

Right. Like in Tantric philosophy there's a saying: if it exists here, it exists everywhere. I always remember that saying because it's so true. Whatever entity exists in the universe, it's all made up of the same elements, like hydrogen or oxygen or whatever. So what exists in the universe, exists in us. There's a whole universe in each of us. You're a walking universe! So we're both: we are a universe, but we are also part of the universe.

**So it's an insignificance, but it's a connection. But it's hard to sense that connection maybe? Or I feel like people are aware and afraid of their insignificance, but not so much their connection.**Actually I would say most Western people, not all people, but in Western culture they don't think that they are part of something greater, they think that they are something greater. That's the mistake. They feel like wow we're reaching this... They're not reaching anything! The further you reach the further you get away from what's real. Like they got to the atom bomb, and they think that's a high point. They're getting closer to extinction by the day!

**And they say that's progress for humanity. **They think it's a high point that humans have been able to understand the force of an atom. It was always there in nature, and so to understand it is one thing. But to recreate it is going to bring you to doom. And the audacity --- like America has hydrogen bombs. And they want to keep other countries from having nuclear bombs. Like they're trying to keep Iran from having nuclear bombs. Meanwhile Israel has nuclear bombs. Well, if Israel could have them, and the US could have them, anybody could have them. I mean that's logical. The US is not special.

They think they rule the world. And the war is always with non-Westerns.

They think. But what they forget is that nature rules the world. Nature doesn't need an atom bomb. It is an atom bomb!

**Right, the sun is the atom bomb. **

And if you get to a point where you're in the way, and nature doesn't want you there, you're gone! That's what's happening now. Nature's saying that's enough. You messed up enough.

So we have to recognize, people have to recognize that they're only part of it. They're not in control. The human is not the pinnacle of creation. The human is part of this creation --- and only a part. Until we understand that, we'll never get it right.

But to change the concepts of the human mind --- a revolution is easy compared to changing the way people think. That's overwhelming! That's going to take a lot of work, and a long time.

**For you it was a long process of changing your thinking, changing your way of living... How do you think about it?**I actually put in words in my mind: I wanted to go back to ground zero and see what I really needed. I went into the wilderness with nothing. I gave it all up! I gave it up to see what is really needed. What do we need to live? And that's what led me towards animism: understanding that I am part of this larger reality.

That was a decision you came to, it was like an intuition you had when you left New York?

Yeah, I had that thought before I left. But I didn't know how to implement it. Like I kept sensing that art and politics were important. But they weren't enough. There's something missing, what is it? I had to give up all material comfort to find out, what do we need. And it was a spiritual awakening. It was an animistic understanding that I could not have found if I had stayed in the city.