Memorial
Day Is About Remembrance, but the
Atrocities of 30 May 1967 in New York City Are a Memorial Day the
Ruling Class Would Have Us Forget.
(Reprinted with minor revisions and an important update, below, from Dispatches from Dystopia, 29 May 2011, my blog slain and all its contents destroyed by the September 2025 death of TypePad, its server)
A GROUP OF young men and women – some of them professional musicians with a performance permit issued by the City of New York – were first illegally rousted, then attacked by NYPD riot cops for the “crime” of making music in Tompkins Square Park, on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
The episode was so outrageous I convinced Walter Bowart – founding editor of The East Village Other, (the newspaper of the neighborhood's then-burgeoning community of artists and bohemians), to put out an extra, which is where – along with a half-dozen images by other photographers – the riot photos below first appeared.
Walter then acted as an ad hoc agent for all of us who had contributed pictures; the topmost was published in Newsweek and, according to him (he paid me but never managed to get me the tear-sheet), in Paris-Match as well.
I was in the park that day by accident – filmmaker Ron Schade had asked me to photograph him and his wife Joanie at play with their son Jason – and I had only one camera with me, my IIIg Leica with its 50mm f/2 Summicron and most likely loaded with Panatomic X. My wife-to-be Adrienne, art student who always enjoyed watching me work and often made useful suggestions, was with us.
But when I saw the confrontation developing, I sent Adrienne running back to our East 5th Street apartment instructed to “bring me every 35mm camera body, every lens and every roll of Tri-X you can find.” (I normally kept as many as 20 36-exposure rolls of that film in our refrigerator.)
Adrienne did as requested. I thanked her, hugged and kissed her, tried to reassure her I'd be ok, hugged and kissed her again, handed her the Leica that was too slow to rewind to be useful for covering the violence I knew was coming, then said “now get the hell out of here while you still can” and sent her home.
I watched to make sure she got safely out of the park. Forty-four years later I still remember her reluctance to leave and how she repeatedly glanced back over her shoulder as she walked away, her green eyes huge with concern – Adrienne a slender blonde who like a smaller Veruschka moved with the leggy grace of a danseuse – her long hair bright as pale fire in the surprise gloom of an afternoon suddenly beclouded, as if Nature were hiding her face from the atrocity that was about to obtain.
Then I clipped my Working Press badge to my jacket lapel and – now thanks to Adrienne properly equipped with two VT Canons, lever-drive, screw-mount rangefinder cameras, one with a 35mm f/2 Leitz Summicron, the other with an 85mm f/1.9 Canon, plus a Pentax H1A SLR mounting a Spiratone f/2.8 135mm; probably a dozen rolls of Tri-X in my pockets) – I loaded the cameras and began shooting film.
At least 40 people were arrested that day. A pregnant woman and three men were hospitalized as a result of beatings inflicted by the NYPD's Tactical Police Force (the acronym for which, TPF, was ever after said to mean “Tasmanian Pig Fuckers”). Many of those arrested remained in jail for several days – the infamous Tombs for men, the even more infamous House of Detention aka “House of D” for women – while the Jade Companions of the Flower Dance, the neighborhood association for Lower East Side hippies and other bohemians, worked overtime to raise bail money.
Then as now, poverty was itself a crime – in the eyes of the Ruling Class an offense perhaps even more heinous than chanting the Hare Krishna and making other sorts of peaceful music on a day of war memorials.
Alas the incident has been disappeared down the Orwell hole: as I discovered when I returned to the City during the '80s, the EVO extra has been carefully snipped from the New York City Public Library's microfiche file – which means the censorship was official, imposed by a librarian acting on Ruling Class orders. And of course in my case there was also the fire. But because I had a copy of that extra in my portfolio case, I now own what is undoubtedly the only extant copy.
But ah the Jade Companions of the Flower Dance: how could such an exquisite name be lost to time and oppression and puritanical malevolence?
Say it aloud: Jade Companions of the Flower Dance.
Even now the words resonate with forbidden sensuality and resurrected sensibility, the lost rhythms of which we are reminded by Minoan frescoes and echoes of forgotten music, harps and flutes and drums, the choreography of women free enough to arch their backs and swirl their unbound hair, of men bold enough to join her – the Counterculture's breathtaking ghost-image remembrance of the once-was when God was a Woman and its implicit glimpses of what might have been and yes its premonitions of what might yet be. -- LB/29 May 2011
Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 1967, 2011, 2022, 2025
*********
ADDENDUM 11 JULY 2024 (expanded 23 November 2025): The cover of EVO's government-suppressed Extra and my contributions to its photographic content have been thoughtfully resurrected by Scott Orr, the Paris-based publisher of B Scene Zine, in that art magazine's Volume 1, Issue 9 (August 2022), copies of which are for sale at bscenezine@gmail.com. My deepest thanks to Mr. Orr for this welcome blow against censorship, particularly given that the photographs he published were among the very few escapees of the 1 September 1983 arson that destroyed all my life's significant work.
My photograph of the sad-eyed woman below was the image on that issue’s cover but had no chronological connection to the riot. It began its journalistic life as the lead picture on a story about an abysmally failed 1971 anti-Vietnam-War demonstration and probably was freelanced to United Press International. But it is thematically even more accurate in its present role, and I applaud Mr. Orr’s perceptive choice. Meanwhile the riot itself has authoritatively been connected to the Central Intelligence Agency’s infamous Operation Chaos, its clandestine effort to destroy the entire Counterculture. Given that I could recognize it as I did (explanation follows) -- so could the Ivy-League-educated aristocrats the Agency hires as its analysts. See https://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Operation%20Chaos.html And recognize therein yet more irrefutable proof Trump is neither accident nor anomaly.
Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1971, 2022, 2025
All the images herein were archivally processed and selenium toned c. 1967-1974 and still look as good as new because I printed them on on the best, highest-silver-content photographic paper ever made, the late and still lamented DuPont Varilure, which tragically was discontinued forever in 1973 by the skyrocketing cost of silver triggered by the Arab Oil Embargo. These photos survived the fire only because they were amongst the three dozen matted exhibition prints in my portfolio case, which I had with me the night of the fire. But the arson-destroyed nearly all my photography, hundreds of prints and contact sheets from thousands of negatives dating to my first camera, given me by my father in 1952. It burned all my award certificates; most of the contents of my clip books; nearly all my photographic tear sheets; all but five volumes of the annual journal I began keeping in 1956, and all my unpublished writing. What little was saved – including hundreds of negatives that raised my hopes but proved to be too scorched or otherwise too fire-and-water damaged to print – was dug out of the rubble a year later.
By far the most devastating loss was "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer," a work-in-progress that argued the Counterculture was not the spoiled-youth tantrum our masters wanted us to believe, but was instead the first wave of a spontaneous, potentially global revolution against patriarchy. The product of 24 years of reportorial investigation that consumed most of my days-off, weekends and vacations, it so impressed the late Cicely Nichols, the New York City book editor promised to mother it to major publication much as she had parented Sisterhood Is Powerful (Random House: 1970). But the arsonist(s) destroyed all my research notes, all of the approximately 150-thousand words of extensively footnoted “Dancer” text and all but 10 of its approximately 100 pre-selected photographs in a blaze lit at the exact moment Cicely and I met in the Lions Head to finalize and celebrate our working agreement. Our anything-for-capitalism-no-matter-how-Evil government in action? Message received loud and clear.
The emotional shock of the fire -- specifically its nightmare obliteration of a consciousness that blended journalism and progressive activism into a life of great expectations, all of my potential reduced in an indescribably wrenching instant to inescapably wretched permanently non-productive existence – flung me into post-traumatic depression, just as I’m certain was intended. At age 43, especially without my four filing-cabinet drawers of research notes, there is no possible way to reconstruct 24 years of work, and the realization I now had no more prospects than the Bowery bum featured in the January 1967 image below -- ironically long a mainstay of my working portfolio -- was literally overwhelming. (To potential clients, I typically described it as "a fortuitous grab" in my documentary efforts on the Lower East Side; to my political comrades I admitted what it actually was, an un-posed picture, yes, but nevertheless my best-ever photographic icon of capitalist reality.)
Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1967, 1971, 2025
It took me so long to recover from the post-traumatic depression that predictably followed the loss of all my life’s efforts, it forced me onto welfare in 1988, which mandates typically anti-male bureaucratic supervision of any subsequent quest for productive employment. The resultant odium excluded me forever from the newspaper and magazine staff jobs that had been my lifeblood since my 16th year, reducing my professional efforts to occasional, woefully underpaid freelancing in a dwindling market. When I protested the bureaucrats' opportunity-killing involvement in my quest for work and threatened a lawsuit against their repeated, brazenly anti-male refusals to refer me to appropriate employers, the always-tyrannical bureaucrats – the era's real “welfare queens -- arbitrarily and contrary to the advice of their own bureaucrat-psychologists proclaimed me “unemployable”and in 1990 forced me onto Social Security as a disabled person. Though no longer depressed and now officially retired -- I shed the always-hurtful stigma of “disabled welfare bum” in 2005 -- I disclose the following facts for three reasons: - firstly to exemplify how disabled people on welfare are undoubtedly the most scorned and despised demographic in this realm, which is today, post-Nazi-Germany, by far our species’ most incorrigibly self-destructive Hatefully Christian Nation;
- secondly to exemplify the operational meaning of the infinitely damning numbers I discovered in my investigative reporter’s swan song, a briefly Internet-published and quickly suppressed 1995 freelance expose´ that from 1970 through 1990, our federal, state and local welfare bureaucrats nationally increased their salaries and other administrative costs by 5,390 percent – say again 5,390 (not a typo) percent – even as they slashed stipends and services to impoverished and/or disabled persons by 66 percent;
- lastly, to point out that this (mostly unreported) welfare-bureaucracy treachery is yet another of the key factors that turned so many (politically ignorant) members of the 99.9 Percent to embrace Trump and his Deciders and the terminally ecogenocidal apocalypse they may yet inflict on ourselves, our fellow living creatures and our Mother Earth.
Meanwhile I thank fate for granting me total dispensation from any from concern the above disclosures might besmirch my reputation. The reduction to total and irreversible socioeconomic nonpersonhood inflicted by the fire damned me to spend the remainder of my years permanently deprived of any possibility of romantic love – another example of our Christian Nation in action – the realization of which admittedly embittering truth prompted me to long ago cease caring what anyone apart from a few former professional colleagues might think of me. That indifference and how it facilitates the unhesitating disclosure of personal truth is radically intensified by the fact I was officially declared terminally ill on 27 August 2024, this after a bout with Covid in June and July of 2023 – never mind I was fully vaccinated – that severely damaged my heart. Now I'm living on the proverbial borrowed time. Though I’m not the least afraid of death – indeed I will welcome it as an escape from the Auschwitz Nation with which Trump and his Deciders are replacing our failed Republic – I’m also in no hurry to leave. In fact the tiny part I am able to play in the Resistance has energized me as I have not been energized since the night of 1 September 1983, when -- unaware someone was already reducing my entire raisin-de-vie to naught but smoke and ash – Cicely and I were oh-so-naively celebrating the anticipated completion and publication of “Dancer” with dinner, drinks and mutually triumphant joy.
-30-
