#ben morea

Memorial graffiti in Oakland & NYC for the late Ben Morea, an anarchist & artist who was a prominent activist in the 1960's New Left in NYC. He was a member of various revolutionary groups such as Black Mask, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, The International Werewolf Conspiracy and Armed Love.

A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE INTERNATIONAL WEREWOLF CONSPIRACY.

PICS INFO: Mega spotlight on a counterculture poster design titled "Armed Love," utilizing the era's ubiquitous "Zig Zag Man" character/icon, artwork by Ben Morea of the American anarchist collective, "Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers!," c. late 1960s.

MINI-OVERVIEW: "Largely unknown by choice, Ben Morea is the force behind the 1960s art/anarchist collectives UAW/MF and the International Werewolf Conspiracy, and the legendary anarchist zine/broadside "Black Mask." This is the first exhibition dedicated to a life work that intersected the underground press, rock and roll, performance art, experimental theater, and radical politics."

-- WE CAN BE TOGETHER! (blogspot), "Opposition: Black Mask, Ben Morea, And U.A.W.M.F.," c. January 2014

“We are neither artists or anti-artists. We are creative men—revolutionaries. As creative men we are dedicated to building a new society, but we must also destroy the existing travesty. What art will replace the burning bodies and dead minds this society is creating?” stated Ben Morea in Black Mask #3, 1967

Founded in New York City in the mid-1960s by self-educated ghetto kid and painter Ben Morea, Black Mask melded the ideas and inspiration of Dada and the Surrealists, with the anarchism of the Durruti Column. With a theory and practice that had much in common with their contemporaries the Diggers, Dutch Provos, and the French Situationists—the group intervened spectacularly in the art, politics and culture of their times. From shutting down the Museum of Modern Art to protesting Wall Street’s bankrolling of war, from battling with Maoists at SDS conferences to defending the Valerie Solanas shooting of Andy Warhol, Black Mask successfully straddled the counterculture and politics of the 60s, and remained the Joker in the pack of both sides of "The Movement."

By 1968 Black Mask dissolved into "The Family" (popularly known as Up Against The Wall Motherfucker—the name to which they signed their first leaflet), which combined the confrontational theater and tactics of Black Mask with a much more aggressively "street" approach in dealing with the police, and authorities. Dubbed a "street gang with analysis" they were reputedly the only white grouping taken seriously by the Black Panther Party, and influenced everyone from the Weathermen to the "hippy" communal movements.

Random Fact of the Day no. 12 (RFOTD #12)

Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, often shortened as The Motherfuckers or UAW/MF, was an anarchist affinity group based in New York City. This "street gang with analysis" was famous for its Lower East Side direct action and is said to have inspired members of the Weather Underground and the Yippies.

THE ULTIMATE DILEMMA - AN INTERVIEW WITH BEN MOREA (2016)

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A 2016 interview with Ben Morea, revolutionary animist and founding member of the 1960′s anarchist street gang, Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!

Hi old friends! Some memes!

I’ve been working on this podcast the past couple of months with my pal Lucia, I hope folks enjoy it. We focus on the on-going struggle to survive as an art/cultural worker. I’d say it’s got a bent towards Anarcho-communism, but we’re also into decolonization and other ideas to make these industries better. There’s an ep where we yell at Jeff Koons, it’s good.

Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ArtandLaborPod

Listen: http://www.artandlaborpodcast.com/ iTunes subscribe/rate: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/art-labor/id1387325985 Google Play subscribe/rate: https://play.google.com/music/listen…

For a band that sang about scoring drugs and sadomasochism, Velvet Underground shows in Boston were remarkably peaceful affairs unless you count the damage being done to the audience's ears. Peaceful was how you could broadly describe every engagement they had in Boston save for one night in December of 1968 when they were paired with a touring band from Detroit named MC5. As with VU's first show at The Boston Tea Party in May of 1967, in December of 1968 the band arrived with something to prove—this time, the fact that they were still compelling without founding member John Cale on stage with them. Doug Yule had been peforming with VU for a little under three months when they arrived back in the city where they found him. Steve Nelson, no longer a Tea Party employee but still a huge fan of the Velvets, curiously awaited to hear what the band sounded like without Cale. “I thought it was really interesting,” Nelson said, “that the first song they performed was 'Heroin,' which of course John Cale's electric viola was such a critical piece of, and yet they opened with it. They were sort of like saying, 'We're still the Velvet Underground, take this, go fuck yourself.' It was great. Crowd still loved it. Doug Yule brought a different thing to it than John Cale did, but I think he brought something very important, in terms of more musicality.”

The MC5 had something to prove as well, namely that their political activist persona was not just a put-on or a hook for journalists. “We had various partnerships around the country with other radical groups,” MC5's guitarist Wayne Kramer explained to me over the phone. “In the Boston area, there was a group variously called the International Werewolf Conspiracy or the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. They were rough and tough guys. They got involved in an altercation with some service men. Some people were hurt, and there was a trial pending. They asked us if we would help them lay some money for their attorneys. This was a kind of thing we did as a matter of course.”

An “altercation” is a mild way to put it. In truth, Ben Morea of the Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers had been charged with attempted murder. On July 24th, 1968, The Boston Globe reported, “Boston city officials have alerted police to the presence on Boston Common of a rabble-rousing group who, they say, have come here from New York city to use the tense conditions between police and the hippie community as an opportunity to create further disturbances.” The Motherfuckers from New York had encouraged the Boston Common hippies to ignore the city's new midnight park curfew, and on Tuesday July 23rd at 3AM, when two recovering soldiers from Vietnam wandered by the group, all hell broke loose. Edward McGilly and Alfred Crowley, an airman and a marine respectively, were both stabbed in front of Arlington Church. Ben Morea was charged and held for the stabbings.

In 2006, Ben Morea recalled the events differently. As he told interviewer lain McIntyre in 2006, “While I was in New York we heard that young freaks, we never called ourselves hippies, were being harassed by this group of vigilantes in Boston. It was pretty bad and a few kids had been hospitalised so I suggested to some Family members that we should go there and look into it. We went up and stayed with the street kids and freaks and sure enough they were attacked while we were there. The attackers were repelled and I was charged by the police.” It did not help Morea that an average handbill for his group might contain the harrowing image of a skeleton with accompanying text such as:

“To survive in Amerika as a total human being is revolutionary...The INTERNATIONAL WEREWOLF CONSPIRACY is the Hip Revolutionary Community in Action. Insanely hungry for the chance to discover how to live, and rabid for the blood and guts of the honkies and the pigs...WEREWOLVES OF THE WORLD JOIN THE FEAST”

“I was in jail for about two weeks before I raised ball,” Morea recalled, “I didn't get a lot of support for my case as the political community couldn't have cared less about the hippies.” But MC5 cared. Morea reached out to the band via Wayne Kramer. “They also asked us if they could make this appeal after we played in Boston, and we said of course,” Kramer said. “These are the kinds of things we did often, all over the world.”

“I seem to remember we shared a dressing room with The Velvet Underground and they all kind of stayed to themselves in the corner,” Kramer recalled. “We were loud and boisterous young men sowing our oats, and if you weren’t with us, it was easy for you to figure out you should stay out of the kitchen.” MC5 lit up the stage with their intense theatrics, as they had done the previous two nights, to great effect on Saturday December 14th, 1968. Kramer already knew the stage was made of concrete by night #3, but he couldn't resist employing his signature stage move of leaping off his amplifier and landing on his knees. “My knees puffed up like cantaloupes,” Kramer said. “That was probably one of the last times I did that. In the heat of the show, you don’t feel it. But when I got off and went to change pants and looked at my knees I said, 'Holy shit, Wayne stop this!'”

“We played really hard and we really wanted to do well. Then Ben [Morea] and a couple of his guys got up and they went in to a militant criticism of the police, the political structure, and the club itself. They tied it all together,” Kramer told me punctuated by a burst of laughter. Audience member Rob Norris recalled that the Motherfuckers' speech culminated with a call to “tear down the hall because it was not large enough to hold their energies.” Morea apparently specifically called out club manager Don Law as part of the problem. Backstage, Charlie Daniels, aka The Master Blaster, MC of the evening stood next to Law who was contemplating cutting the power to the stage. “I said, 'No, let em talk and when they're done, I'll say a few words,'” Daniels recalled. When the militant group exited the stage, running through the audience to exit the venue, Master Blaster walked out in front of a very confused audience and said, “You know, this is the only place like this here in Boston where people can come and see this type of music. The MC5 are getting paid to play here. If bands played for free we wouldn't have to charge. We could riot today but then we'll have no place to come to next week.”

Doug Yule recalled, “It was really unsettling because we were standing on the edge of a riot waiting to see if it was going to happen.” If anyone was still considering heeding Morea and co's words, Lou Reed's introductory statement at the top of The Velvet Underground's set dismantled any lingering thoughts of riot. “I'd just like to make one thing clear. We have nothing to do with what went on earlier and in fact we consider it very stupid. This our favorite place to play in the whole country and we would hate to see anyone even try to destroy it!” Reed's words were followed by a massive applause.

“Lou Reed hated us, apparently,” Kramer said. “Everything we were was like the complete opposite of them. They didn’t play all that well. Their rhythm section wasn’t that strong. Their music wasn’t that strong. They kind of took a passive-aggressive stance. We knew how to play, we knew how to dance, and we knew how to sing. We had something positive that we were trying to get across. We were probably everything that they weren’t.”

Kramer recalled a bandmate telling him that Reed even asked all the MC5 fans to leave before VU started their set. “And at that point, I was probably chasing some young woman, on my way to the after party. I could have cared less what he said. He is entitled to his opinion, it was his face and he can do whatever the hell he wants to do. We definitely did not connect there as allies or comrades.”

Don Law didn't walk away with a high opinion of the band either. MC5 were permanently banned from The Boston Tea Party, and as Don Law rose to prominence as a concert promoter, that grudge closed some important doors for the band. Kramer surmises that perhaps the Motherfuckers/Werewolf contingent raised a few dollars that night, but nothing too substantial. In the end, narrowly, Ben Morea was acquitted of the two stabbings in front of Arlington Church. “The foreman told me that it was all down to one juror. On the first vote it was 11 to 1 in favour of convicting me, but one guy managed to convince the others that there was enough doubt to let me go. I don't know who he was, but I owe that one guy my liberty.”

In the coming weeks, things only got more intense for MC5. The day after Christmas in 1968, the band was booked at Bill Graham's Fillmore East in New York where most of the tickets had been given away for free on various radio programs. A label representative at Elektra was spooked by an anonymous call threatening to burn the venue to the ground if a percentage of the tickets didn't go directly to “the community,” so many of the exact troublemakers they were worried about ended up being admitted to the concert. As the show began, there were hundreds of people still trying to get inside the venue. Graham, worried about going over-capacity tried to seal the front door but was whipped in the face with a chain. As MC5 finished their set, the stage was attacked by a portion of the audience, smashing their equipment and instruments. Outside, the sight of the revolutionary rock band climbing into a limousine didn't sit well with the hyped-up crowd either, and the band were pulled out of the vehicle, pushed around, and pelted with their own records.

Even after being generously assisted by the band in Boston, the events in New York soured Ben Morea on the MC5 for good. “They projected themselves as a 'revolutionary' rock group...then they ran out symbolically getting into a limousine, going to a restaurant no one in our community has ever been in. The whole image of that was rather obnoxious.” After MC5's disastrous night in Boston, local writer Jon Landau, the man who had trashed the “Boston Sound” in Rolling Stone Magazine, made the leap from page to studio, producing their 1970 album, Back in the USA.

The poster for the weekend of shows had been created by former Tea Party manager Steve Nelson who drew the band in the style of stick figures as a child might render them. In light of the events of what transpired, the innocence on display is amusing, but also correctly contrasted the Velvet Underground against the antics of MC5. “I was going against the grain of what their image was,” Nelson showed the poster to Lou Reed who asked, “How'd you know that's who we really are?'”