I don’t know about your city, but here in the tonier ‘hoods of DC, the Little Free Libraries are a big thing. Sounds really sweet and noble and grassrootsy mutual-aidy n’shit until you get a load of what’s actually in the goddamn things. It’s basically the kind of instantly-obsolete stuff you used to see stacked on the sidewalk in front of the fence in front of the house with a little post-it note reading “FREE” — old college textbooks, trendy disposable political tomes, pseudo-academic shartage by “public intellectuals”, cute trendy late ’00s millennial YA novels, trendy child-rearing stuff, trendy self-helpy shit, people unloading all the John Grisham and James Patterson novels they bought to read on the plane… Sure as hell didn’t see anyone giving away their copies of On The Road or To Have And Have Not or Sirens Of Titan or Ché Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries or anything, y’know…?

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With President Bubba ensconced in the Oval Office, we saw a quickly-established pattern of failure in domestic policy initiatives followed by dick-wiggling and small-scale military intervention overseas — or some bad-assed “criminal justice” action at home — in an effort to appear “Presidential”. This was especially noticeable in the areas of economic stimulus and the last laughable attempt at health care “reform”.

“Economic Stimulus”, medium-res jpg image, 436k; “Health Care Reform”, medium-res jpg image, 492k; “Housing and Education”, medium-res jpg image, 488k; “Reinventing Government”, medium-res jpg image, 428k; “Job-Creation Program”, medium-res jpg image, 516k; “Low-Income Housing Program”, medium-res jpg image, 464k

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I don’t know about anyone else, but at the time, it seemed like a single year under the Reagan Mob was forever, and getting worse. What a relief to finally quit doing cartoons about how grim things were getting and do a good old Smoke-In poster, this time with a Hollywood theme (of course) in honor of our esteemed host of Death Valley Days (or “Daze”, which things were in at the time). This is one of the last serious Smoke-Ins they were able to pull as the Just Say No™ rhetoric was just starting to take hold, and a generation of high-school and college kids decided they all wanted to be Gordon Gecko and Timothy Geithner when they grew up.

This piece wound up as a color full-age ad for the 1981 White House Smoke-In appearing in High Times magazine. Sadly, that’s the only piece I ever got into High Times, likely because their art director, a guy named Jeff Tiedrich, was also the art editor of the Yipster Times around 1977-79, and was shit-canning my stuff there as well — before he moved on, and the task of picking out the art fell to a guy who was quite a fan of mine back in the day: Yipster Times co-founder/co-editor and Yippies co-founder Dana Beal.

medium-res jpg image, 323k; high-res tiff image, 839k

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I’m Uncle Sam, that’s who I am;
I been hidin’ out in a rock and roll band!
Shake the hand that shook the hand
of Ferdinand Marcos and the Shah Of Iran!
–grateful dead, sort of

It was Abbie Hoffman, I think, who said that “a Yippie is a politically aware hippie.”

Actually, I didn’t get wind of that until around 1977 or ‘78, as a young art student — the worst possible time to become a hippie, in the deepest pit of Disco Sickness, to some the beginning of the end of American popular culture. I first tried pot and LSD within about six months of each other during that time and, not appreciating suddenly becoming an official “criminal”, managed to get hooked up with the DC chapter of the famous Yippies, or Youth International Party (I was a youth at the time), who staged the lengendary “Smoke-Ins” around the USA, most notably the New York City “May Day Is Jay Day” parade, and the one and only Fourth Of July White House Smoke-In at Lafayette Park and the Mall.

This was printed by the YIP house gang down at 10th and K Streets — there’s some godawful post-post-modern office pile there now — a regularly irregular bunch who organized local smoke-ins and protests and put out a tabloid ‘zine which I helped edit and illustrate, sharing one of the last few original row houses left in downtown at the time. This piece was printed using a combination of standard high-quality monochrome and then-new color photocopiers at a couple of little shops downtown (which are also long gone). The original art was sketched out and traced with black felt-tips on regular sketch-pad paper (oh, c’mon, you remember those), from which a run of several hundred was run on a standard monochrome xerox. The color was worked in with colored pencil on a sheet of vellum thrown over one of the xerox prints and cut to letter size. The whole kaboodle was taken to the shop with the color machine, the vellum overlay taped to the glass, monochrome prints loaded into the bin and run off in very short runs of ten or twenty at first, in order to set the registration, brightness and contrast on the overlay print — and it really was hit-or-miss back then, kiddies — and then went up to batches of fifty or a hundred at a time.

Registration, as you can see, was a big issue here, which is why we did the two-run route (color overlay on top of a monochrome print of the line art). We’d done some test prints of mixed felt-tip and colored-pencil art on the color machine, and it was crap; color xerography was really brand-new then, and one of its major weaknesses was an inability to create properly saturated black, along with its own registration issues. Even the best stuff from the color machine back then had these little fuzzy edges around everything, like badly-registered Sunday funnies. This is one of the last surviving prints from one of our “best batches”, given to me by ex-DC Yippie and blazing synthesizer player Rupert Chappelle.

high-res jpg image, 1mb

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