Oral history interview with Al Hansen, 1973 Nov. 6-Nov. 13

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Al Hansen, 1973 Nov. 6-Nov. 13, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Al Hansen
Conducted by Paul Cummings
November 6, 1973

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Al Hansen on November 6, 1973. The interview was conducted by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Funding for the transcription of this interview provided by the Smithsoinian Institution's Women's Committee.

The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

PAUL CUMMINGS: It is the 6th of November, 1973, 6:05. Paul Cummings talking to Al Hansen.

AL HANSEN: H-a-n-s-e-n.

MR. CUMMINGS: S-e-n? All right. Hansen. Why don't we do what we always do, start from the beginning?

MR. HANSEN: I was born in Jamaica Hospital on October 5, 1927 at about 11:15 - between 11:15 and 11:25.

MR. CUMMINGS: A.m. or p.m.?

MR. HANSEN: Because, right after it happened, my mother said they brought in lunch and said they were a little early, but she could have her lunch if she really wanted it. Therefore, I'm supposed to have an Aquarius moon and Sagittarius rising, in addition to being a Libra, but I'm not sure.

MR. CUMMINGS: What day were you born, again?

MR. HANSEN: October 5th.

MR. CUMMINGS: Fifth? Right.

MR. HANSEN: Interesting number of art world people were born right around there, in October. We were always going to have a Libra party.

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, yes?

MR. HANSEN: [Inaudible], David Borden [phonetic], Larry Poons, and - Larry finally had a birthday party, but he didn't invite all the Libras. Nobody could understand that better than a Libra.

MR. CUMMINGS: I see, I see. Anyway, did you live in Jamaica? Did you grow up there? What was -

MR. HANSEN: Yes, I grew up in Richmond Hill, which is between Hugh Gardens, Jamaica, and South Ozone Park. And it's an area recently famous for the persecution of a woman named Alice Crimmins, who is supposed to have - who is thought to be the murderer of her two children, and who has really been tried and chased around, and put in jail finally for working as a cocktail hostess and dating various men while being separated from her husband. You have to really know Queens to appreciate that.

MR. CUMMINGS: Really? All right.

MR. HANSEN: And Queens is a bastion of all the bad ideas of white Anglo Saxon and Catholic humanity coming out of the diaspora and the Greek synagogues, lending its way west through Byzantium Rome, France, and the British Isles, coming here by pilgrim -

MR. CUMMINGS: And it carries on. But let me ask you, do you have brothers and sisters?

MR. HANSEN: Yes, yes. I have an older brother, Robert, who is a half brother. His name is Robert Duckworth [phonetic], who lives out on Long Island. And a brother a year younger named Gordon, and a brother 10 or 15 years younger, named Kenneth. His middle name is Thor, T h o r, which is a kind of family name. I have an uncle from Norway named Thor Thorsen, pronounced -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, right.

MR. HANSEN: And he is now 88 or 89.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right. Well, did you live there for a long time?

MR. HANSEN: Yes, yes.

MR. CUMMINGS: You go to schools out there?

MR. HANSEN: Yes, yes. I went to school out there completely.

MR. CUMMINGS: Okay.

MR. HANSEN: Public schools, public elementary schools, and a new experiment in education called the junior high school, and then Chima [phonetic] Junior High School, which is now a trouble spot school in Jamaica, and John Adams High School, from which I was rather - I was given a choice of being suspended or expelled.

MR. CUMMINGS: For what?

MR. HANSEN: My friend, Bob Orlando [phonetic], in the cafeteria, asked me to get him an ice cream pop, and then just throw him his. And he was about 75 feet away. And I tossed it to him underhand, and it made a nice, long, looping arc through the air. And with perfect timing, a big bald man with glasses named Bill Clark, who was the principal, opened the door and walked through, receiving the ice cream pop against his forehead, knocking off and breaking his glasses.

MR. CUMMINGS: I see.

MR. HANSEN: For some reason, Bob Orlando, who is now a policeman out there, just wasn't visible anywhere, and was very quick on his feet. And I understand that part of his arrest record now is involved with having to run people down several blocks away. He was also a track man. Very inventive, wonderful guy. I haven't seen him for a long time. And in the next few minutes, I was in the dean of boys office, and for some mysterious reason my mother was there, giving me her, "Oh, Alfred" look. And they told me that were I to go to the Bumpetts [phonetic] food processing products factory, where I worked part time on Atlantic Avenue, and become full time, and not fool around the school anymore, they would be very happy. A lot of my steps, or a lot of my plateauing in life has been through being forced up or down to the next plateau, promoted or advanced, with an assist by the faculty or the powers that be. And shortly after I was arrested with several other kids for stealing a car - which is known as joyriding, if you haven't done - it's automobile theft or grand larceny if you do it a lot.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: But if you just do it once, it's joy riding.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And then that was like what 1944 was like. And then, for a year, I tried to join the armed forces, because World War II was very popular at the time. And then I got drafted for Halloween of October, 1945 and went off to the service for 3 years.

MR. CUMMINGS: You were in, what, paratroopers, or something, at one point?

MR. HANSEN: Yes, I was in the Army infantry, the 82nd Airborne Division, and did a lot of art in the Army, and -

MR. CUMMINGS: How did you like the military experience?

MR. HANSEN: I enjoyed it very much.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes? In what way?

MR. HANSEN: Well, I had grown up on - I had a very good childhood friend named James Breslin [phonetic]. We both have the same middle name, Earl, except he has an E on the end of his. But Jim Breslin, the writer, and I were kids together, and just - my earliest experiences were with doing art, and artwork, and being good at it.

MR. CUMMINGS: I wonder, when did that start?

MR. HANSEN: From when I was just six or seven months old. If you put a pencil in my hand, I would be quiet. Now I have learned to do art and keep right on talking at the same time. I do art that makes noise from time to time.

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, how did your family take this, with your, you know, playing around as a child, with -

MR. HANSEN: Well, they always enjoyed it. A lower middle or upper lower class family isn't usually that happy about children becoming artists, daughters wanting to be actresses, or boys wanting to be artists. Kids wanting to be artists are usually kind of led in the commercial art direction, or whatever.

MR. CUMMINGS: Practical -

MR. HANSEN: It's looked upon as suspect.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: For instance, amongst Italians, a person having a black friend is looked upon as a character deficiency. You know, Puzo had that in The Godfather. And amongst WASPs, a boy who likes to draw pictures and paint, this is really quite suspicious, you know. And also, I was very fair as a kid, and one of the - probably one of the last kids in WASPdom to have a Buster Brown Prince Valiant haircut, very much like a Beatle haircut.

MR. CUMMINGS: It's come back again.

MR. HANSEN: Yes, yes, it returned. And I have the pictures to prove it. And people were constantly wondering whether I was a girl, this, that, and the other. I remember that when I was, like, five or six. So, going to school got me the haircut, and what not. So that got me up into things. But something about the always wondering whether I was a girl or something, and always being, if not bright, predatory for information somehow. That led me to always be the kind of acting out one, or the fiend in school, when I was little. I was the one, when the teacher had to go to the principal's office for a minute, would get everyone to throw all of the erasers and the window pole, and everything else, including the teacher's chair and her purse, out the window, because it would be a nice surprise when she came back. So, I seem always to have been involved with this kind of Happening event, or, at first glance, put on a fabric stretching kind of activity.

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, did you do any art things in primary school, or second - or in high school?

MR. HANSEN: Yes. And now I think back on it, with all the studying and research I've done, and all my experiences, I see that - I see all my early experience as being singled out as "special," because of art talent, or being driven to express myself in different mediums -

MR. CUMMINGS: In what - how were you singled out?

MR. HANSEN: The one who is best at art is the one who gets to draw the picture over the map of November in chalk on the blackboard. He's the one who gets to draw the turkey and the pilgrim and the Indian.

MR. CUMMINGS: And the Easter -

MR. HANSEN: And like that.

MR. CUMMINGS: And all that kind of stuff, yes.

MR. HANSEN: As a poster to go in the hall, the one who is talented at art gets to do that. Always singled out as special.

MR. CUMMINGS: Did you do things like that?

MR. HANSEN: And then - yes. I'm using real material in this. And then, being a cute little thing with a pug nose and long hair and everything, being that I was always singled out as special, I had to come to terms with the tough kids who were not special, who were special for being tough. Therefore, I was constantly making this balance of if anyone unruly started something, or threw a rock, I threw the next rock. And quite often, I would even, like, move up to not being Iago, I would be Othello. I would throw the first rock, you know?

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, were you interested in sports, or any -

MR. HANSEN: Oh, yes, very much.

MR. CUMMINGS: You know, activities other than the -

MR. HANSEN: But I was never interested in sports in any kind of full or complete or dedicated way. For instance, my really closest friend, other than my brother, Gordon, with whom I had, of course, sibling rivalries - he came along and replaced me at my mother's breast a year after I was born - so Gordon and I were kind of Mutt and Jeff, Oliver and Stanley, knock down, drag out fight kind of contest thing, constantly. And being just ahead of him a year, I usually won, until we equaled out about 14, and he half killed me with a rock. The look on his face I still remember. I have never fooled around with him since. He's still rather big.

MR. CUMMINGS: What does he do?

MR. HANSEN: And -

MR. CUMMINGS: What does -

MR. HANSEN: He is an automobile parts salesman, or something. And he has just moved into a much bigger job in New York as a vice president for sales for some big corporation that is just completely out of my mind, because that sort of thing isn't important to me. And the art thing -

MR. CUMMINGS: Do you - were there any teachers? Did you have any art teachers in high school? You know, whether drawing classes, or you know, anything -

MR. HANSEN: Yes, yes. But I just realized where I got stopped. It was on the sports thing. I love to play sports, and I love football and I love baseball. And I was just delighted as I got a glove, or a ball, or a helmet, or shoulder pads, or whatever. But I wasn't serious about the game. I had absolutely nothing in me that could connect with the game, in terms of something that was important to win. I was a fiend when I was little, for - around puberty and just after - for reading things like Street and Smith Westerns and Zane Grey, et cetera, not to mention the effect Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy and everybody would have on a kid, right?

MR. CUMMINGS: The pulps, right?

MR. HANSEN: The pulps. And the radio programs. But let's avoid trivia. We have all had enough of that. From time to time, we will all be having dinner in a Chinese restaurant with Ivan Karp [phonetic], and we will have to play trivia. Let's not do it here.

MR. CUMMINGS: Who was in the Green Hornet program?

MR. HANSEN: Kato [phonetic], and that strange woman who was the companion. Margo.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: You know, what was a "companion?" I used to just sit around on the toilet and think about that. "When I'm grown up, I'll have a companion and maybe some kind of a show for her," but I really was interested in the companion. So, I had this kind of like from The Last of the Mohicans, from James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, Street and Smith's Western Stories, and Jim Breslin had an uncle, Tom, who was a state trooper, and another uncle, Jim, who was a sugar broker, or something, or an office manager for Domino's Sugar Company. And he had things that were known as "spicy detective." These were like sexy detective stories and sexy spy stories.

MR. CUMMINGS: For adults, right, yes.

MR. HANSEN: For adults. And the pictures in those magazines, they were like three or four girls running across the beach, pushing down their bathing suit bottoms, and the story was all about they came into some spell, or got drunk and took off their clothes, and what they did, and I would just go nuts reading that stuff. I just thought it was wonderful. But there was always this pulp magazine WASP honor system operative. And I really believed, like a good Englishman, that the game had value in how one played it. Winning was not important, it was how the game was played, you know?

MR. CUMMINGS: Style, right?

MR. HANSEN: So, that might have been part of it. All of my early report cards, they would give me very high marks, and cite - attribute me with very high powers in different directions. Then they would always say, "Never finishes what he starts," or, "Never completes work." I just - and this I see now as my way of - I would constantly lose interest, because I was probably always being held back to the mien of the norm, which is one of the basic things the matter with American education. We've got a lot of programs for rapid advancement, and now we have a lot of marvelous programs where people can be extracted on a kind of contract from a ghetto situation, and through remedial studies, not even have to graduate high school. And certainly the Harlem storefront college thing has put several hundred people in college who would never have gone there, otherwise, or even finished high school.

MR. CUMMINGS: Or Harlem Prep, yes.

MR. HANSEN: Harlem Prep.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Which has run out of funds and stopped. But I hope some day -

MR. CUMMINGS: I've got to ask you one other thing. Did you have - were there books around your house, or any paintings or pictures, or things like that?

MR. HANSEN: Yes, yes, yes. I've done a lot of work with disturbed children in different ways, and it's interesting - and it's documented - that the problem person who reads a lot is much more reachable and less to worry about than one that doesn't at all, or comes from a non book environment. My earlier memories are of my mother, particularly, and even my father, reading books. There were always books in the house. Books were always valuable. Someone reading a book was not to be bothered. And I was always fascinated at what the grown ups were looking in the book all the time about, and learned to read and write very early. And this was all part of - this is the kind of thing that makes book readers, if they're there, and they're around. I have a friend who turned his kids into book readers by taking anything with a sexy picture, any kind of interesting information, and keeping it on a top shelf. You would have to push over a table, and then put a chair on the table, and then -

MR. CUMMINGS: And get after it.

MR. HANSEN: Yes, you had to be predatory. And whenever he would see them put back the wrong way, he would rejoice. They're really working on that. And then he would put, like, things up here like, How to Make a Radio all by Yourself out of Spare Parts, and they would get into that, too.

MR. CUMMINGS: So it was a game.

MR. HANSEN: Yes. So -

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, tell me -

MR. HANSEN: I was always an early reader. And I remember my older brother, Robert, turning me into my mother for - he caught me reading Anthony Adverse. And being six or seven years old, he was quite aware that there were hot parts. And I still remember my mother's facial expression saying, you know, absolutely nothing about that. "Let him read anything he wants to read," which made me really give him a look as I walked off with the Adverse under my arm, to get back into it some more.

MR. CUMMINGS: How was this relationship with all these children? I mean, since their ages are so spread -

MR. HANSEN: Well, all of my early, formative years were involved with the older and the younger sibling, which was a nice spread. There were also plenty of other kids to play with. We had a house with what seemed like a huge back yard. It's rather dinky now. It was at least 50 square feet. My father was a truck crane operator, and he had his own truck crane, a Mack Truck, and he dug foundations for buildings all over the city. So this giant truck crane with the bucket hanging down in front pulling into the yard grinding away, it was one of those ones with the big gear chain on the side -

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, right, yes.

MR. HANSEN: And the classic old Mack hood, with the big bulldog on the front.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Huge tires.

MR. CUMMINGS: A child's greatest toy.

MR. HANSEN: So we had the big yard to play in, with the tall tree, several trees, and there was always a swing hanging from a rope or something. Most of the other kids had the lot lines number with the house and the yard and the garage. And so, our back yard was always a place to play. And my father came from - comes from - a completely lower class environment on the docks in Long Island City, and he enjoyed very much the fact that, throughout the Depression and after, and what not, he was making $30 a day, you know, with his own truck crane, hiring out to different construction jobs. And - but he was still a lower class hick. He would go buy Dugan [phonetic] and other large baking companies, where you can go into the company - the store, they always have a retail shop -

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, right, right.

MR. HANSEN: And you can get day old, or dropped and broken a bit cookies by the huge sack, you know.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: You'd get a huge paper bag full of cookies and cakes and just walk around the yard, handing them out to everyone. So my yard was really the place to play, you know?

MR. CUMMINGS: The place to be, yes.

MR. HANSEN: Just like my loft, later, was really the place to have a party, because there would be, like, 300 people there, all going nuts, you know. Or they would do a happening, or put on some theater pieces, whatever. So, I have always had that kind of old fashioned patriarchal thing, a kind of complex about having everyone over.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes, yes.

MR. HANSEN: I mean, this really goes back to the back yard and the big bag of cookies that I could always bring out.

MR. CUMMINGS: Let me ask you. Before you went into the military, was there any indication of going on to college, or some other kind of school?

MR. HANSEN: No. None, whatsoever.

MR. CUMMINGS: Grad school, or -

MR. HANSEN: Where I come from, people don't go to college.

MR. CUMMINGS: Well -

MR. HANSEN: In fact, the only people I knew - if I had an upper, middle class model back then, it would be Jim Breslin's family. His mother, Frances, is a school teacher now in Elmhurst or Jackson Heights, somewhere. And she was a marvelously literate, very beautiful woman, very intelligent. And all of Jim Breslin's posture comes from one kid with a younger sister, Deirdre, growing up in a house full of women. That was the grandmother and his mother and her two sisters and the two uncles who were always out. And in a way, one might say, "Thank God the two uncles were there, and my brother Gordon and I down the block, and the whole yard full of kids," and what not. He had a big yard, too. So, he and I not only Libras and born in October, but we're really like - we both had a big house and a back yard. And if they weren't all in our yard, they were in his yard. And if we got kicked out of his yard, we'd go right over to my yard, and vice versa. Otherwise, we had to play in the street. And he, of course, started as a sports writer and is, unbeknownst to Jackie Leonard and other friends of his now - Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon - is a very gifted artist, and has always expressed himself - my first experience with any kind of formal art training - because his mother was a social worker or school teacher - she knew about the Pratt Institute Saturday morning program, so she arranged for us to go to the Saturday morning school at Pratt Art Institute.

MR. CUMMINGS: When was that, about?

MR. HANSEN: It must have been around the time of the first World's Fair. It must have been around 1939 or 1940.

MR. CUMMINGS: So you were just -

MR. HANSEN: Or earlier. It must have been 1937 or 1938. We were, like, 12 or 13.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: Yes. We hadn't even masturbated yet. I mean, we didn't even think of that. We just - we were still looking at the pictures, and wondering why we felt funny in the knees, you know? And Jim - when we were kids, we called him Jimbo, which I guess is short for Jimmy Boy, and his mother and father were separated, which was an unheard of situation. The only other kid whose parents were separated was Roderick McKenzie, down a few blocks away. And Jim's father was very famous at Fordham. He wrote the Fordham marching song, and he was the drum major or something during his stint at college there. And his mother and her sisters, Harriet and Patty, were Bonard [phonetic] graduates. And their house was, floor to ceiling, full of books. And, as I remember Patty and Harriet, they were like Lorraine Day and Joan Bennett. And they were - this was like the early 1930s. They all wore these, like, clingy long silk dresses and cloches and jewelry and cigarette holders. And you'd expect Adolf Monjou [phonetic] to come in any minute. I'm making them sound terrible. They were wonderful, beautiful people.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes, yes.

MR. HANSEN: The first Broadway play I ever saw, Jim's mother took me to.

MR. CUMMINGS: Do you remember that?

MR. HANSEN: Oh, yes. Quite clearly. I forgot what it was called, but it was about American history. And it was in color. Color movies were very rare then. But this was like a stage play, but I'd never seen, like - I'd been in stage plays in schools, but I had never seen, really, a professional thing, you know? Also, Jim was a sports nut, and so was his family. So friends of the family would take his mother and Jim and I to - and Gordon - to see the Brooklyn Dodgers, or the baseball or football games, and things like that. So my first taste of really going out and what the big time was, or something -

MR. CUMMINGS: That got you out of your neighborhood, though, right?

MR. HANSEN: We would go see movies, Jimmy Cagney movies, and George Raff [phonetic] movies about night clubs. But his mother and her sisters, his aunts and uncles, actually would go to a nightclub or something, you know.

MR. CUMMINGS: A real nightclub, yes.

MR. HANSEN: My - I guess my parents went to nightclubs, too, but it didn't register. You know? The surrogate parent thing, you know?

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: I mean -

MR. CUMMINGS: Or you could see it when it was a distant -

MR. HANSEN: My mother was - went to college, or finishing school or something, and came from a wealthy family in New Bedford and Boston, she grew up in - I can't remember the name, one of those wealthy communities up there. And she was orphaned early by a diphtheria epidemic before World War I. She grew up with great aunts or something, who would come down to New York on - they would take horse and carriage down to New Bedford, and then get the steamer to New York, that wonderful boat that used to go back and forth, and stay at the Waldorf Astoria, and what not. So then, here she later, when I am born, you know, in 1927, the 1930s, married to this rough neck with turtleneck sweaters, with a cigarette always in his yap, driving this huge truck crane. So -

MR. CUMMINGS: Where did they ever meet, given the contrast? Did you ever find out?

MR. HANSEN: Well, having an older half brother, that's a whole involved thing that really isn't important here. I mean, I would love to tell it. If they hear this much and say, "Go back and get that from him," I'd love to tell it. But it would be much more fun to tell the story of my first day at school. I didn't want to go. I had been prepped up to it the way we all were, saying, "You're going to school pretty soon now," and then they say, "You're going to school next week," and then they say, "You're going to school tomorrow," and then they say -

MR. CUMMINGS: "Today."

MR. HANSEN: - "Eat your porridge, you're going to school today." You know? And we were all led into this egg crate number that we have here called an education system that way. So, I said I would really rather stay home and draw pictures or something, and play in the back yard. And my mother took a legal sized envelope and filled it with crayons. It was like a carrot before a donkey. Off I went. And they put me in the room, and I had to stand by the desk and tell the teacher my name and how to spell it. And it was a lot - she was a lot like a stewardess, with some kind of flight manifest. It's called the Bailey Identification Card System, or something. I keep confusing it with the Dewey Decimal thing for library books. But -

MR. CUMMINGS: You were a new library book.

MR. HANSEN: But this little card with these little squares and what not was slipped into a place in the book that had a seatbelt. There was a little thing that crossed that she slid the card into. And I was told to sit in a particular seat, and that was my seat, and I must always sit in it. So, I had grave forebodings. I had real misgivings. I just didn't like the way the whole thing seemed. And here and there, my mother stood in the door, and whenever I looked over, she would kind of nod and wave her hand, and what not. And then she was standing in the hall, talking to some other mothers, and I got interested in the kids around me. And then I noticed she wasn't there any more, and I figured, "Well, I am here with all these people, I will sit it out and see what happens." But it was really dull. And one kid after another raised his or her hand, and the teacher would look up their name in the book - which is why the ticket had a seat, it referred to the seat that you were in - and would say, "Mabel Paul, you can leave the room," or, "Edward Sheriff, you can leave the room." And I thought, "Well, I've really been here long enough, and nothing is going on." So I raised my hand, and she looked in the book and said, "Alfred, you may leave the room." And I got up and went out, and I was walking around the hall, and one of the kids who had gone out was coming back. And I said, "What did you do?" He said, "I took a leak." And I said, "Where?" And he said, "In the basement." And I said, "Where is that?" And he said, "Downstairs, you know, in the cellar." So, I went downstairs and looked around. And there was an old man eating a sandwich under, like, a pool table lamp by a big boiler. And I know now that was the janitor. But he seemed to be really like Sharen [phonetic], you know, or something.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: He was really great. And then I saw the tile john and what not, and I went in there and they had these, like - to a little kid it seems like an eight foot high Claes Oldenburg urinal, you know?

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: So, I used the urinal. And I came out, and I was walking around the basement. The furthest thing from my mind was going back upstairs and sitting in that room. I just assumed once you got - you were done that way or something. And sunlight was pouring in the basement stairs, so I walked up into the sunlight. And there I was, in the school yard. And I realized that that's the same place we had been standing before a few hours ago, in the crisp dawn. And I realized that that road went all the way straight back down to where you make a right -

MR. CUMMINGS: Where you came from, right.

MR. HANSEN: And when we came, we made a left.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: If I traced it back and made a right, I could probably just get home. So, I did that. The hell with the bag of crayons. And that must have been around 11:00 or so, 10:00. And around 11:00, Jim's mother, Fran Breslin, called my mother and said, "Are you going shopping in Jamaica today?" And my mother said, "No, no, I'm just enjoying the peace and quiet around the house." And she said, "Well, are you taking Alfred to the dentist?" And she said, "No, no, he's in school today. It's his first day of school." She said, "I'm glad I called. He's got his good clothes on, and he's playing in the lots behind my house," across the street from me. So, a few minutes later, my mother went by and said, "Alfred," you know, and I said, "Hi, Mom," you know. She said, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm playing in the lots. Where are you going?" She said she was going to Mr. Hartman's grocery store to get some stuff. She said, "I will come by and get you on the way back, okay?" And I said, "Okay." And that's her cool. She was always that cool. Whether it was detectives coming in the door to say, you know, I had, with some other people, taken a care and they would have to take me with them, or whatever it was. So, she came back and got me, and we went home and had milk and cookies and stuff. And the next morning I had to go to school. So I went a couple of times. But they were making me promise not to leave, and all that stuff, and they were watching me extra careful, because the teacher had probably gone crazy when she realized she misplaced one. And for several weeks, I was dragged kicking, screaming, crying, throwing up, doing things in my pants, just a total global reaction against going to be back in that place.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: You know?

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes. What did you dislike about it so much, do you think? Just being there, or the -

MR. HANSEN: I don't really remember. It was just the vibes. It was some kind of - there was absolutely no opportunity for psychic resonance between me and anything like that, you know. And so it went throughout all my life, even now. Well, not so much now. I think I have conquered it the past couple of years. But now that I am 46, maybe I am calming down. But whenever I was in a situation like the Army or school, or a job that was disciplinarian, it was immediately a test or a strength thing, over who could get out of following the rules, and what not.

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, how could you enjoy the Army, though, which you said you did, given the fact that there is a certain amount of discipline there?

MR. HANSEN: Well, I enjoyed it very much, because there was - my whole freak out from American history, the fact that my father and everyone's father had been in World War I, and the way we are prepped to become cannon fodder. And in this sense, anyone growing up in America, from the time of the Civil War on, it was a very earnest attempt to prep everyone to be cannon fodder, and Teddy Roosevelt's great white fleet at the turn of the century. And the singing the Star Spangled Banner every morning, to me, is linked inextricably with the fact that, in 1900, 1905, the economy had changed from 1800, 1805. It was 5 percent industrial and 95 percent agricultural, and it had gone through a complete reversal. And we were along the path that seemed glorious, that brings us, actually, smack up to Watergate.

MR. CUMMINGS: Good old Watergate.

MR. HANSEN: Yes.

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, what did you do in the Army for all that time, in those different divisions?

MR. HANSEN: I made use of - I enjoyed being in the infantry, and I enjoyed playing soldiers in the lots, and I enjoyed shooting off guns and jumping out of airplanes and running around the airport, and doing push ups all the time. And I also enjoyed getting in trouble and being a troublemaker. And I think I spent the entire 36 months in the Army on extra duty. I was always the one who had to get up - called it the "bolo" [phonetic] squad, you get up and chop the grass on the parade ground with a machete, or double time around with a lawn mower, or shovel sand out of sewers that sand has blown in, or culverts, or something, and do the shit jobs and what not. There was a certain kind of Devil's Island camaraderie amongst the unruly soldiers, you know.

MR. CUMMINGS: What do you think -

MR. HANSEN: That was right where I wanted to be.

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, yes?

MR. HANSEN: Always with the rebels.

MR. CUMMINGS: Why was that? What appealed to you in that? Or was it just that you liked a certain kind of action?

MR. HANSEN: That's what all the Street and Smith stories were about, you know? And that's what - you can see existentialism beginning in early American literature like Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper. Hawkeye and Deer Slayer, The Virginian, the solo cat who has his own set of rules and what not, and all that wonderful bullshit.

MR. CUMMINGS: Kind of early on the road Kerouac -

MR. HANSEN: Yes, Lieutenant Cally [phonetic] wouldn't have lasted more than five minutes with any of these people. And I am sure I'm not being too subjective about this, but I don't think any of the people I knew in the 82nd Airborne in the late 1940s could be gotten to go to Kent State or any place and do anything against college students or other Americans or something. That's kind of a totally new thing. And now I think about it, there was the Pullman strike, and MacArthur did fire on or use troops against the World War I veterans who marched on Washington for their bonus, and all of that stuff. So I guess -

MR. CUMMINGS: It goes on.

MR. HANSEN: That doesn't apply.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes, it goes on forever. What did you do when you came out of the Army? What was your -

MR. HANSEN: Well -

MR. CUMMINGS: What were you interested in doing?

MR. HANSEN: My major idea, the kind of kid I was in the Army, my major idea was to somehow or other go into crime, and maybe go to the Mediterranean or China or Israel and run - this was December 1948 - run guns and smuggle, and have a ball, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. "Play it again, Sam," you know?

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: I would really have a place like that. And that was my infantile romantic thing, perhaps the way - but then I was only 25, you know? That means emotionally, an American at 25, I was - or 23 - I was about, emotionally, maybe 12 or 13, you know? A woman of equal age would be emotionally - well, maybe at 25, she would be 19 or 20, emotionally.

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, what did you actually do, once you came out? Because you had - did you have a GI Bill, or any of those things that interested you, or were you -

MR. HANSEN: Well, through being an avid reader throughout the time I was in the service, that was the pocketbook era, which led to the experiment with pocketbook production more widely in the late 1940s, it comes right out of World War II and all the pocketbooks that were easy to send around and put on troop ships and barracks, and what not, and Red Cross. And through always reading and what not, I fell in with other unruly types, who were also quite educated, an awful lot of guys who were very good - from very good backgrounds who had gone to prep schools, who were really, like, quite well educated, equal to preps - somebody with a master's degree from college, from the lower classes. Well, even - and I had one really good friend, Sam Turmboll [phonetic], who knew the Village very well. And I had been the Village a lot, but I was more interested in jazz clubs and night life and bars.

MR. CUMMINGS: When did you discover the Village?

MR. HANSEN: When I was about 17 or 18, before I was drafted in the Army. And I just discovered the Village by accident. I was much more interested in Times Square, and night clubs, and places like that. It was kind of a tradition in my neighborhood that a lot of stand up comics and talkers come out of. And it begins with who is best at telling movies on the stoop next to the candy store. And it works out to a kind of entertainment thing. Out there, even now, in Rockaway Beach in the summer, you will see one guy from one neighborhood holding forth, keeping 40, 50 people on blankets amused while he does imitations of movie stars. And these kind of guys were like a pack of high performance numbers who knew of each other. And they would go to night clubs in Brooklyn and Forest Hills, and what not, and copy down several times, having a beer at the bar and nursing it, memorize different comedians' acts, and then go over to New York and do that, too, and perform them on amateur night, and what not. But there again, like sports, I didn't have any drive to compete with it. I was just satisfied to do that, and dig the others, and be one of them, or a younger one of those, myself. But I was always finding myself toward art. So, the pal in the Army, the Airborne, Sam Turmboll, got out a little ahead of me, and was sending me letters about the fiendish things he was doing in the Village. It just didn't seem believable, the girls he had and the parties he was going to and what not.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: So I think, when I got discharged, I went to the Village before I went home, you know, and met Sam and what not. And then, a funny thing happened, which wasn't really any kind of identification between Sam and I. He got married to a girl, and they had a kid, and she left him, and he went around nuts for a while, and just went hitch hiking, got in jail in Mexico, and some Air Force guys bailed him out, so he enlisted in the Air Force. He didn't know what else to do. He was just completely broke, and on the other side of the country. And in the meantime, I went to the Art Students League, and hung around the Village, and hitchhiked to Florida and Miami.

MR. CUMMINGS: How did you get to the League? What year was that?

MR. HANSEN: The Art Students League must have been 1949, 1950. And I studied there -

MR. CUMMINGS: Who did you study with?

MR. HANSEN: - with John Groth, who I believe is still alive. And a fascinating guy, he works in pen and ink and brush and ink, and he is the art director of Esquire, I think, and several other things. And the old Esquire from World War II and just after was usually full of these quick pen and ink sketches by John Groth.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And the Village at the time, the place where everyone lived in the late 1940s was Cold Water Flats.

MR. CUMMINGS: How did you pick the League, though? What was that?

MR. HANSEN: The older artists around the Village would suggest a younger guy with talent go to the League, the way today older guys would suggest to someone of talent who is around to go - probably in SoHo, the place they would tell people to go would be the School of Visual Arts. And before the School of Visual Arts, there was Cooper Union and Pratt, et cetera.

MR. CUMMINGS: But who did you - who were the older artists you knew might have given you this indication? Who did you -

MR. HANSEN: Well, at that time, in the 1940s, one, from time to time, would run across people - see people around like Edward Hopper or John Sloan.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes, but who did you get friendly with, or talk to?

MR. HANSEN: There is a man who died not so long ago named Dehersch Margules [phonetic], who was a water colorist.

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, yes.

MR. HANSEN: Rather in the Marin [phonetic] tradition. I'm talking about the Village of the Waldorf cafeteria.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, yes.

MR. HANSEN: And the Jefferson Diner, and all of that, and the outdoor art show. And another was a League member named August Von Munchausen [phonetic], who did ballet pastels. And he was a kind of - he was antipathetic. Through the entire modern movement, he was, like, a super conservative. He had traveled with the Ballet Rouge, the Monte Carlo, or something, sketching them, and this, that, and the other. And a lot of other old ones. There was a wonderful caricaturist back then named Jake Spencer. And if I really pushed myself, I could make a big list. But the artists of the time that were talked about in the art world - which was then Greenwich Village - were Walt Kuhn [phonetic] and Stutvig [phonetic], and you know, Will Barnett was like a young radical at the time.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: I remember that I had a kind of very tight sharp pencil drafting style, and a good eye, and I really did it a lot. Various older people kept saying - it was the hip thing to say to somebody who drew tight to say, "Why don't you go study with Kumioshi [phonetic] for a couple of years? It will loosen you up." I guess if you were loose, they would say, "Well, why don't you go to League and study with Bridgeman [phonetic]? It will tighten you up, you know?"

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: All these people going around giving advice.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, one way or the other.

MR. HANSEN: You know?

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes. How did you like the League, and how long were you there?

MR. HANSEN: I went there on the GI Bill for a summer. And you're your own boss there. The teacher would come in, John Groth would come in about every two weeks, smelling just a bit of drink in a kind of romantic way, and he would sit over in the corner, and one after one, we would go over and give him the sketch books we had filled up during the preceding weeks, from the model and what not, posing, or - and he would look through the large pulp sketch pads, muttering, "Shit, bullshit, no good, shit, more shit." He would not only do this, he would tear the pages out, crumple them up, and throw them on the floor. It was really a moment of truth, you know.

MR. CUMMINGS: That was criticism with a vengeance, right?

MR. HANSEN: Yes, and it was quite good. It's supposed to happen in your head and in your eyeballs and your fingers, not on a goddamn pad, you know? It is not special. Or, he would take something that had promise, and working over it in charcoal, show you how it could be better. I have done this with brain damaged - I have been hired to teach frequently, and if you even put your finger to the surface of the drawing, they usually break up in hysterics, or go home to their analysts, or come down with mono for two months. But you had that feeling of satisfaction from the drawings where Groth would say, "Well, now, goddamn it, here you are doing something," and then he would proceed to show you why. And there is no point in keeping every goddamn thing you do, anyway. The experience, and the activity, and what you are reaching for is more precious than that particular object. Later, at Pratt, studying sculpture with Ruben Nakien [phonetic] -

MR. CUMMINGS: When was that?

MR. HANSEN: That was much later. That was in the late 1950s, or early 1960s - late 1950s.

MR. CUMMINGS: Like 10 years later.

MR. HANSEN: Yes, oh, yes. Much later. And there is a whole tour in the Air Force in between there, because I got married and had a daughter, and the whole thing went blooey [phonetic]. And being the girl I had married was kind of unstable, I had to figure out how to get out of the marriage, and still have some funds for them, or something. So I just kind of grasped at Sam's model and reenlisted in the armed forces. I was sent to Mitchell Field, quickly found a racket job on the base newspaper, and I was there for a year and a half of the four years. So I would just go out to get paid, you know. I really had it made. It's a country club Air Force base, which is now made into a big shopping center.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, right.

MR. HANSEN: It was quite prophetic, you know? Like a cartoon about the military industrial complex there.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And Ruben Nakien would get these incredibly Junoesque models, Lacheze Meyer [phonetic] type models, and you would work very hard for an hour or so with orange sticks, whatever they call them, lending out of clay this woman. And then he would go around smashing it with his fist. And I recognized immediately the old school, John Groth, this is the tradition.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And I would also crack up at the reaction of a lot of the kids, because Pratt has a certain cashmere sweater they're not all that talented, because you have to be able to afford Pratt, too.

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, you were also older than most of the students, too.

MR. HANSEN: Yes, yes, yes. And this Groth tearing up the things, and Nakien smashing the clay sculptures was also the Zen master going through with the pole, smashing people across the back, you know. It's the temptation - the challenge is to not have it register on your meditation, you know, to just keep on working. But Groth never explained. Nakien explained it. He would say, "Goddamn it, I want it to happen in there," poking you on the forehead with this incredible sculptor's finger, you know, which looked like a large sausage.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: "Not there," pointing at the ruined lump of clay -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: - that had been really getting so nice, you know?

MR. CUMMINGS: How long were you at Pratt?

MR. HANSEN: I was at Pratt about four or five years. In the - as the 1950s got late, we had received from - European artists of New York, like - artists of New York, young artists of New York like myself had received from European artists this kind of gift of the signature look. I'm not sure where I read that, maybe Sam Hunter [phonetic].

MR. CUMMINGS: What do you mean by that?

MR. HANSEN: Well, remember the thing of, "There is no need to sign the painting?" This was really de rigueur not to sign the abstract expressionist painting.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: "IT IS." Remember?

MR. CUMMINGS: Mm hmm [affirmative].

MR. HANSEN: IT IS. Therefore, your name on the back -

MR. CUMMINGS: It is [inaudible] -

MR. HANSEN: Yes, vaguely. It is in the tiger's eye. And we will have to instruct the typist how to type that out. "IT IS", "is" with capital letters, and Tiger's Eye, was the titles of two magazines.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Two quarterlies. So, somehow, the signature precedes the real growth of maturity of American artists into - we have to say abstract expressionism -

MR. CUMMINGS: What - you know -

MR. HANSEN: - because abstract expressionism was the thing that actually suddenly reversed the tide. And the big five or six or eight of abstract expressionism were the first to create a backwash of mannerism throughout the rest of the art world, globally, and actually created - changed New York into the art capital of the world, something people from our generation and even people that did it never dreamed would happen.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And this is like one of the big things of our time. And -

MR. CUMMINGS: You know, I'm curious, because we're getting off a little bit -

MR. HANSEN: This led to the seven day painter idea. This was a very popular handle, "The seven day painter." What do you do? You paint? How often do you paint? Weekends? "No, seven days," you know? And this we got from Gorky [phonetic] and Klein [phonetic] and Pollack [phonetic], and these guys, and Tony Smith, and -

MR. CUMMINGS: But it goes back -

MR. HANSEN: Oh, of course, of course. But I am talking in terms of my country bumpkin rube colonial American art world experience, and watching that grow and mature and become a machine, you know? "And right on, Barbara, right on" -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, yes.

MR. HANSEN: And - although there is another side to that. So, a great thing to do, in order to be a seven day painter, would be to teach art. You have a studio space available, you're involved with art all the time, even when you're not working, blah, blah, blah. And I had started to go to college on the GI Bill when I got out of the Air Force after seven years in the service, and -

MR. CUMMINGS: So you spent most of the 1950s, then -

MR. HANSEN: I was in the Air Force from December 1951 to December 1955. And I got out and went into McGraw Hill Publishing Company, I was assistant art director, or editor, whatever you want to call it, or assistant to the art editor of Chemical Engineering Magazine for a year, and then I was in their central art department for a year, and then I was with an ad agency for a year. So - and then I got into freelancing. But along with McGraw Hill, I was going to Brooklyn College nights, and I didn't find that too satisfying, although I had a wonderful art course with a sculptor named Al Terrace [phonetic], beautiful guy, very intelligent, wonderful guy I run into from time to time. And I was older than the kid who had been sitting around the coffee shops in Greenwich Village and what not. And in Al I saw a completely mature, hip guy who, in his lectures, would go on for maybe a half hour about the Bert and Harry Peel [phonetic] commercials, and I identified with that immediately. One of my first aestheticians, the first aesthetician or critic to make an effect on me was Zelden Rodman [phonetic] and Gilbert Seldies [phonetic] and the Old View[phonetic] magazine, and of course the Tiger's Eye, and what not. And it was just starting to come out, or it had been coming out for a while. And I had two good friends from that period in Greenwich Village after the Army, Murray Israel [phonetic] and Lucian Krakowski [phonetic]. And Murray was into social work, psychiatry, and Lucian was at Pratt, and was the head of the foundation. And he advised me that it would be smart to start going to Pratt nights, as they were getting ready to open up an art ed department. So, I began to go to Pratt nights, and I was doing kind of social work during the day. No, no, no. Freelance advertising stuff.

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, yes, advertising, yes.

MR. HANSEN: And then I met Tony Smith going to Pratt nights, and Tony got me a job at a community center in the west forties, over near the active studio called Hartley House. And the children's - and Tony had been the art teacher there. And somehow, whenever they needed a new art teacher, Tony would recommend someone he thought was worthy, and struck them that this must be treated like a plum, and if one wants to leave or quit, one must contact him immediately, so we could set up the next guy who would use it, et cetera and so forth, find the right person. And so, I was doing that, and then going to Pratt nights. And then Murray Israel had a problem with one of his social work things. It was a halfway house for disturbed girls in Gramercy Park called the Girls Service League, and it was a halfway house for, basically - although it's academic - sexually disturbed teenage girls in their early teens, up until 17 or so. And they needed a summer programming director. They had several guys who had an MSW [phonetic] and what not, who were caught up in the girls' rooms, or quit at the threat, because there were a whole bunch of little Brigitte Bardots [phonetic], and the costume of the time was matador pants and pedal pushers. And Murray thought I would be idea for this. And although I didn't have any degrees, they took me on, and I was getting, like, $100 a week, you know. And that was like, where I come from, that was, like, really kind of an executive wage. And I did that, and I became very involved with the group meetings and the therapy counseling, and the literature available there. And when the thing finally closed - it folded through lack of financial support on the part of the government, the city, and the state, they wouldn't increase the amount they gave it, although their laws dictated the girls had to have a winter coat and a snack between meals, et cetera. So, they just closed it down and kept several of the services going, and sold one building. It went through the block, with a courtyard in between. And one of the women there, who was a worker named Mary Dowery [phonetic], who had been involved in the Harlem Street Club Project, and she wrote a letter to the New York City Youth Board, the people she knew there, and I went and I became a youth board worker with street gangs for the youth board. And a great bunch of guys. I was in one unit that had been Frank Serpico's unit while he was studying to be a policeman, although people studying to be a policeman were in the minority, because they wouldn't usually be the kind of person - because Frank Serpico is a beautiful, unique individual - usually the personality -

MR. CUMMINGS: What did you do with them?

MR. HANSEN: - who wanted to be a cop would not want to do social work with street kids. He would want to beat them up or arrest them, or shoot them back, or whatever.

MR. CUMMINGS: What did you do with these -

MR. HANSEN: It works under the New York City Council of Social and Athletic Clubs, and it's called, The New York City Youth Board. And it's part of the government structure. And it's actually a detached lay social worker using a kind of like field therapist using group, or Gestalt, techniques. At Pratt, I was very turned on by several psych and social courses I had, and a lot of reading I was getting into, and this - the art of integrals, or units, in a field with people seemed to me very, very synonymous to the parts or integrals of a painting, physical and intellectual, being activated or not activated, or a static dynamic. The parallels just were, like, incredibly obvious. So -

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, what -

MR. HANSEN: It synergized me.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes, yes. I am trying to free out the pattern out, here, where you were doing what when.

MR. HANSEN: That's a job, Paul. From the Air Force -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: - I worked at McGraw Hill for two years, and then into advertising for a couple of years -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: - during which I was going to Pratt nights in evening school for a degree in graphic art and illustration, while working as a graphic artist and illustrator -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, right.

MR. HANSEN: - paste up/lay out man, whatever.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: You know.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And -

MR. CUMMINGS: So that gets us up to what, 1960 -

MR. HANSEN: I was becoming a big disgusted with advertising. And Tony got me into this teaching thing.

MR. CUMMINGS: Teaching, right.

MR. HANSEN: With these kids at this settlement house -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: - 3:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday. And from - and I was still going to Pratt. And then about 1960 or 1961, somewhere in there, I was a street club worker for the Youth Board, and -

MR. CUMMINGS: How long did that -

MR. HANSEN: One year, just about a year and a few months. And the - in the meantime, they had started the art ed program - department at Pratt, and I transferred into the day school.

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, I see. Right.

MR. HANSEN: So I was going days and - full time, and working nights full time with the Youth Board. And each week, ultimately, I would steal from one for the other. I would steal from Peter to pay Paul, Paul. And there were times when I couldn't be in my area, and I would have to lie about four or five hours, because I had to be in school. And then there were classes I would cut, because I had to be in the field. I couldn't -

MR. CUMMINGS: What did you do in the field, what was -

MR. HANSEN: I didn't do one -

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: Well, the main idea of the job was basically - it could be seen most simply, no matter it was supposed to be, as a way of protecting the citizens' property who elected the government which decided to have this department. So, one's first job was to call up and warn the police about impending gang fights, because this was the era of rumbles, which was wiped out completely by dope, and which - dope, in some ways, in Chicago and the South Bronx, has brought back, although that's a bit pat. But this is certainly part of what has gone on. And the - well -

MR. CUMMINGS: I mean, how did -

MR. HANSEN: An area where there was trouble, or where there had been gang rumbles and a kid had been shot, or guns had been fired or property was continually smashed would have a Youth Board worker sent to it, and it was a lot like Dr. Livingston going into the Congo and holding out a few beads and a mirror and approaching the tribe. You could end up full of blow gun darts that way.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: And they've lost - a lot of workers have been killed. It's quite dangerous work. You're handling volatile, anti social, hostile acting out, fucked up kids. And -

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, how did you, you know, get into their world?

MR. HANSEN: The bad apples cherish - the good apples cherishing the bad apples, and feeling like being bad apples, too. Well, one - if you're taking it over from a worker who is leaving, you would go in with him for a couple of nights, and be introduced to the core leaders. And they would usually be the Iagos. It wouldn't be the visual leader. That would be someone else who was really the power. And the worker who had been working with them for a year or a couple of months was backing out, an expert - any of the area chiefs or supervisors, in that they had worked up through it themselves, and were reading everyone's reporting, would be able to do a flying squad number and just land in any area to help, like, blanket it and do something. We had seed money, or funding money, with which we would take the kids for meals and stuff, or buy a kid a baseball bat or a pair of shoes, or a book, or something or other, food, you know. And one of the best ways to stop a rumble - because they happened all the time - would be to get - call leaders, the ones who would lead them into warfare, the war lord and the president or the chief, or whatever - whether they were that formal or not - and say, "Listen, you know, I know you got something going on, but they gave me $20 to spend on you guys tonight. Like, doesn't matter whether the rumble happens or not. Why don't we just go eat Chinese, and we take a cab over the bridge and go have some Chinese food and see a movie, or see a movie and see some - get some Chinese food?"

MR. CUMMINGS: Break it up, yes.

MR. HANSEN: And it's like cutting off the head of a snake, you know? There is a lot of wriggling around, but nothing much happens. I remember once I was - there was -

MR. CUMMINGS: How did they -

MR. HANSEN: I was in a candy store getting cigarettes, and I realized that the gang was going by outside that I was working with. And several of them were carrying, or trailing behind them, things like the - you know that big board that's part of the seats of a bus stop seat or a park bench?

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, right, yes.

MR. HANSEN: They were heading east or south - no, they were heading west, and that was, like, black neighborhood, and they were going to fight them. It was an Anglo Saxon, Italian, German, Irish gang. And I jumped in the phone booth and put a dime in the slot and dialed the first three numbers of the Youth Board emergency number, and I just paused to try to remember which were the right other three numbers, and I was going to get the paper out of my pocket that had it on it. And I put my hand in my jacket pocket, and the door opened and a kid placed a gun against my forehead, and said, "Don't drop a dime in the machine, Mr. Hansen." And I said, "Who wants to make telephone calls?" And I hung it up. And I said, "In fact, you might not find me in the telephone booth again for the rest of my life." So the kid put the gun away. And the people at the counter were doing their work, they hadn't noticed. And I said, "What I really came in for tonight - you're not going to believe this, you think I was calling the cops - I was trying to call my girlfriend, because they gave me $20 to spend on the group, and they were all acting like idiots. I was going to call my girl and take her to a club or to a show or something, just go out and have dinner, because you guys don't need the money tonight." And he said, "You got $20 to spend on us? Holy smoke," you know, like, "Who are you going to take?" And I said, "Well, you were one of them, you know that. Reno [phonetic], would I leave you out?" You know? And evidently, the worker with the black group on the other side - so this gets to be like counterspy, you know - had called it in. He had heard about it and called it in, and there were police cars everywhere. So, I found out where my guys were, and I took them. But that whole, like, organized rumble thing was just completely wiped out by dope. And I kept -

MR. CUMMINGS: How so? In what - you know -

MR. HANSEN: Well, somebody who is carrying drugs, marijuana or bennies or pills or -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: - Robitussin A C cough medicine or heroine or cocaine is not going to do anything to bring -

MR. CUMMINGS: Get in a hassle.

MR. HANSEN: - attention to himself in public.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: You know?

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, right.

MR. HANSEN: And these kids were all - I found one big drugstore down there in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, and there was a car parking garage next to it, one story high. And the kids would go into the drugstore, buy a bottle of Robitussin A C cough medicine, or some kind of codeine cough medicine, pass it around amongst the three of them, drink a third of a bottle each, and then throw the bottle up on the roof. And this one roof had something like 4,500 bottles there, you know?

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes?

MR. HANSEN: Really fantastic. And I went in and spoke to the druggist, and I called the company, and Pfizer and Squib [phonetic] and everyone else, and nobody knew anything.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Supposedly, you can't get this without a prescription, but all these kids were going in there and buying it. And so, the kid - a kid can - a kid would say that he wasn't addicted to codeine cough medicine, he just liked to take it regularly. And I would always explained that was like being a little bit pregnant. You can't be a little bit pregnant. You're either pregnant or not.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And if you need three bottles of this stuff a day, you're hooked.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And anyone selling hard dope finding out about it can get them on a needle right away, because they've got to have something or other.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: So they've got that. And it's interesting, the connections we see now between - like from the Serpico book and from events in the newspapers, French Connection -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, yes.

MR. HANSEN: - et cetera, aftermath of the French Connection case. The police were quite actively engaged in many areas in selling heroines themselves, and overseeing dealers, and running prostitution rings and burglary rings, and everything else.

[END CD 1]

MR. CUMMINGS: - ask you a couple of things. You were in that famous class at the New School, weren't you?

MR. HANSEN: Yes.

MR. CUMMINGS: The Cage class?

MR. HANSEN: Mm hmm [affirmative].

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes?

MR. HANSEN: Ah, yes.

MR. CUMMINGS: Ah, yes. And what was so wonderful, you know, besides John grinning, as he was wont to do on occasion.

MR. HANSEN: His famous idiot grin.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: Well, I had been working full time at McGraw Hill, and going to school full time nights. And I was like a human clock spring, not overwound, but you know, my God. And by the summer, I started going to Pratt evenings in fall of 1957, I think. And Rosemary Castora [phonetic], I think, was a freshman at that point. She was, like, 17 or 18. Just wandered out of [inaudible] with her little sketch pad under her arm. And I had been working full time days and going to school nights, four nights a week from, like, 6:30 to 10:30, or something. And one pleasure was that after one sketch class, Mercedes Mata [phonetic] would ride me back into the Village in her white Cadillac, and then we would talk all the way over. And then, for some reason or another, we would keep talking while she drove around for an hour, trying to find a parking space close to McDougal [phonetic] Alley.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Thoroughly wonderful, warm, vibrant, talented, wacky, wonderful woman. And anybody bad mouths Mercedes has trouble with me. And even she will admit that a bit of her goes a long way, at the same time, in all fairness. That's my Libra number, you know, both sides. Another favorite thing was to ride in with Tony Smith [phonetic] after class, and we would ride in and talk. And he would go to Bennington, his other teaching job from Pratt through New York, which is the worst way, just so that we could talk for an hour. And I was married at the time, I had remarried.

MR. CUMMINGS: Who was that?

MR. HANSEN: And my wife at the moment was a wonderful gal named Marvyne. And we had a very good friend across the hall from us - we had an apartment in New York - very good friend across the hall, a painter named Pauline Goldfine, who was an excellent painter who never surfaced or go out, but really totally fine. That kind of - from Kobinski [phonetic] and Coldus [phonetic], if you can stand that from me, Greek color in her work. Just really totally wonderful gal. And Pauline was a kind of a culture vulture, and she was really like - she felt like - she was older than us, a little bit - she felt like taking a course at New School. And she wanted to take, like, a seminar in modern art or Western civilization, or the philosophers, or something. Marvyne thought she would go with her. She thought she'd dig that, too. So, that was the summer of 1958. The summer of 1958. And I thought, "I've been going to Pratt, I've got, like, a B plus average, and I've been going there, like, every goddamn night and everything, I'm really getting a little wacky from this. I will just work at the Girls Service League, and do a few freelance accounts days, and I will do something completely different at night, like extra input." I have always been big on extra input, strange input. People say, "Well, why are we going this way, it's right over there." And I say, "Well, we never walked around the block this way. It's the long way, but what we see we would never see any other way." It's always been like kind of a visual or intellectual predatoriness, or hipness on my part, to do that. I always tell people, like, "Don't come home from work the way you went to work. Go the other way, even if you take a bus over to, like, Queens and around, and back up through Chinatown. Like, vary things so you can have an exciting life." If you - you have to work at it, though, it's hard. And - but it's a lot of fun.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: You go ride on a bus you never rode on before to the end and back. The people you - if you meet somebody on that bus, that's the only way you would have met them. It becomes valuable. Charged experiences. So, I thought I would go to the New School, too. And at the time, I had become pals with a wonderful guy named Harvey Gross at McGraw Hill. He was in the text film department. And through him, I began reading more and more into film, because I really dug film. But it's like digging art, and then you listen to someone who has an aesthetic base describing the experience available in a painting, and it's much more, you know? Someone who is an authority on film, and who has made them and studied them and loves that, talking about, like, movies at the time, that time, like the middle 1950s, there were a fantastic number of films that were all seen for the second and third time, the black and white movies that came out of France and Italy right at the end of World War II. The Snow was Black, In Paisan [phonetic], and -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Blah, blah, blah.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And it's just a marvelously vibrant, healthy time for film.

MR. CUMMINGS: But, anyway, you went to the school, right?

MR. HANSEN: So I thought, well, I was really involved with film, you know, or beginning to be. And I had just finished reading Eisenstein, and kept going back every eight pages and reading it over again, to make sure I got it all, rather than finish it and read it again, which [inaudible]. So, I looked through the catalog for something that was taking place on the same night at the same time. I thought we would all go together, which seems a bit disgusting to me now. But this was the 1950s, Paul.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right. Togetherness.

MR. HANSEN: So, I went through the catalog, and I got as far as John Cage's course in experimental composition of music, and I saw that you need no prerequisites, no knowledge of music, no experience. You could come in naked as a baby. And I decided that was the one to take, because Eisenstein said all the forms, all the art forms, meet in the film frame. The one I knew nothing about was music. I had never studied music. I couldn't play an instrument. The pitch pipe, I couldn't identify a note. So, it also said that it would also expose or use very contemporary, the most contemporary, avant garde musicians. And I thought this would be a good thing to, like, fill in on if I was going to make a film, if I get around - if I really make a film, I will have to have a sound track, and have to know the right guy.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, right.

MR. HANSEN: It's like an architectural team approach to - movie implies a team. And one person can't really do it, you need, like, several people. And if you read about really good films, you find out that he has an editor, and he has a shooter, and he has a -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, right, right.

MR. HANSEN: So, I thought I would do that. So, I signed up for it, and I was late for the first class. You know, it's history now, Paul, it's history now. As I'm dropping things and picking them up, and stepping on people's feet and bumping into them and finding a seat in the back to be, you know, low profile - that's my middle word, "low profile," middle name - high performance from a low profile, that will really throw everyone off. So, Kate [phonetic] said, "We have just finished sort of saying who we are and why we're here, and where we have been, and what we want to do. So you're the only other one. Perhaps you would like to tell us now." And I really kicked myself for being late, you know, because I got stuck in traffic, and what not. I would like to have had the model of what everyone else said, to either use or department from, depending.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, right.

MR. HANSEN: I was, like, naked. And I said, "Well, I am interested in making films, and film making, and I know nothing about music. So I am here to find out." And he said, "Yes, but you have studied music." And I said, "No, I have never studied music." And he said, "Yes, but you know about - well, you play a musical instrument," and I said, "No." And he said, "But you compose." And I said, "No." And he said, "You wouldn't compose music for your movies?" And I said, "No, I would want to get a really very good composer." So he laughed. And then he said, "But you do know something of rhythm." I said, "No." He said, "Harmony?" I said, "No." He said this, I said no, he said that, I said no. And as I kept saying no to everything, his face just kept breaking into a bigger and bigger and bigger grin, you know? And I thought, "Well, now, I am really, like" - it's like the guy that tries to make a move with the chick while the train is going through the tunnel, and as you cop a feel, here you are, hurdling out into daylight, and everyone is looking, including her. There isn't any way to escape.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Like hand in the cookie jar, you know? And he said, "That's just wonderful." He said it was really great. And he was laughing, and he said, "You're the only one here who doesn't have anything to unlearn." They had all really laid it on, how much they knew and how much they had studied, and how great they were, you know. So, I was the primitive.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right. Well, what were those classes like? I mean, did he give you problems? Was it set up as you came in?

MR. HANSEN: Well -

MR. CUMMINGS: What did he do?

MR. HANSEN: Sometimes he would begin by talking about Zen, and sometimes he would begin by telling anecdotes, and sometimes he would describe things. And in a way, he gave a history of music, but it really wasn't pinned down. It was very much the model for the way I teach, without a syllabus, but still touching, again and again, in different ways on certain basic premises, or certain felt importances. And before the middle, about one third point, he demonstrated several ways to make a music notation system for making sounds happen without - well, he made us invent ones, so that it would be about using anything that was not about music, just some kind of symbol structure whereby someone who didn't know anything about music could make a certain number of sounds at a particular time, loud or soft, or whatever, or leave it up to them, over a period of time, and a way for conducting or indicating that time, or forgetting about that, and let it happen as it happens. And each of us - so I began to get to know the people in the class. And now, of course, it's a kind of famous avant garde history story, and all of us have written books and had articles printed in catalog texts and shit, so it's even better, in that it isn't apocryphal, it really did happen.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: In some strange, crazy way, the people in the class were George Brecht, and Jackson MacLow, and Dick Higgins. And Jim Dine was frequently there, and I think Claes Oldenburg came once. Al Kaprow, Allan Kaprow, took it, I think, for several terms running, as did Higgins and some others, and Jackson MacLow.

MR. CUMMINGS: You took it only once.

MR. HANSEN: I just took it that one summer, and then I came back and visited from time to time, because I learned so much with it, I think Allan - I - in some ways, I don't think Allan Kaprow learned anything from it, although he got a very deep appreciation and understanding of Cage. But Allan stayed very much Allan. And with Allan, I think it was kind of like acid tripping or something. I'm more the kind of guy who takes an acid trip and then works on what I experienced or went through for 4 or 5 or 10 years. And I rarely went back, and I rarely contact Cage. And the reason I do is kind of the power of the experience, along with Tony Smith, who I met about the same time. It's a really powerful connection. So is Ruben Nakien, and, well, quite a few other people.

MR. CUMMINGS: Who else would you say was important to you at that point?

MR. HANSEN: Well, Dick Higgins was, to a great extent, in that Dick was just turning 18 at the time. He was a very, very brilliant guy with certain problems we all have to varying amounts. And coming from a kind of old family with a little bit of money, Dick, in - oh, it's not fair to say trying to wear long pants. But here were all these people in their late thirties, early thirties - early thirties and late twenties, actually, who had really been out in the world a little, and here was this guy still with his allowance and the business manager of the family, like, allowing so much for his rent, which was paid by the mail or something, and he had several check books, and several bank books, and totally brilliant guy, capable of instant recall. And Dick's manner was somewhere between archetypal bright, preppy, and Mr. Chips. He was - but what I dug about him, what I liked and felt contact with immediately was that he was a real one. It wasn't an act. And there were those in the class who treated him as if he was an act, or putting it on or something. So they would, like, retaliate, or freeze him, or say, "Listen" - he would try to talk to someone, and they would say, "Listen, I got to go," and they would walk away. And so, I would always make an extra effort to befriend him. So we kind of got to be pals. I could describe it exactly. "You really should go get Higgins and give him 15 minutes in there, if he wants equal time, because it's a bit unfair." He is at my mercy, and -

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes. Well, but it will happen, right?

MR. HANSEN: Yes. He just told me he's eschewing all publishing and what not. I had a letter from him, from his show with Block and Berlin [phonetic]. He is eschewing all publishing and any of that stuff. He is an artist, he has decided, and he's going to be an artist, which is silly, because he always was.

MR. CUMMINGS: Is he going to get up something else -

MR. HANSEN: His two and three dimensional art ideas and what not are just fabulous. I think the Something Else Press he has put into some kind of managership, or sold it, or something. And so, in that he is really an artist now, and that he says so finally, himself, then he can go be a Smithsonian tape, too. He can get his chance. So, to illustrate what I mean by that, Dick would put all his stuff in an attache case. I usually used a shopping bag. Dick had an attache case. I really thought that was class. And I had one from Madison Avenue. I would dream of, like, taking it to, like, a course at the New School or something. So, Dick would put all of his stuff in his attache case, and stand, snap it together, and while closing the things, raise his eyebrows, look at Cage, who was almost face to face with him at his little lectern thing, or table on this raised stage, a foot high, and, as he snapped the briefcase shut, he would say with raised eyebrows and pursing his mouth, "John?" And then Cage would look up, and then he would say, "Emilio's" [phonetic]? And Cage would say, "Well, no. Really, I told some people I would come by and visit them. I would like to, but I don't" - and Dick would say, "Very well, then." And I would usually say something like, "Hey, Higgins, I will go to Emilio's with you. I feel like a drink, you know." Humphrey Bogart. So, we came to be friends. And Dick and I found each other's lifestyles or attributes, or manner of performance as human beings hard to take, or indigestible regularly with vim and vigor. But I still have the highest regard for him.

MR. CUMMINGS: I was going to ask you about the New York audio visual group.

MR. HANSEN: Yes. Well -

MR. CUMMINGS: Were you a part of that?

MR. HANSEN: I am actually the founder and creator. Dick had some money from his family to - or that he had saved up from his allowance to put on a performance of avant garde music. And one place to do that, just as a group show should be had at The Stable [phonetic] or the Ruben Gallery.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Therefore - which didn't exist yet, but - therefore, a performance of music should take place at the Kaufman [phonetic] Hall or the Lexington Avenue YMYWHA [phonetic]. And I was rather naive about all these things and what not, and so was Dick, but you couldn't tell it. And we rented the hall for two rehearsal days, I think, and one performance evening. And we designed an awful kind of poster, just set up the way - pretty much centered type, the way the typesetter would do it, if we just left it up to him. And we called it, "An Evening of Advanced Musics," I think, which I still rather like the ring of. And we wondered whether we should - we had a little temerity. Should we be so bold as to invite John Cage to be on the program with us? Should we just cool it, or what? And we thought, what the hell, we would love him to be in it. All the new music I had learned and people I had found, like Martin Feldman [phonetic] and Earl Brown [phonetic] and Max Newhouse [phonetic], and - well, I hadn't found Max Newhouse yet, but what's his name, Dick Maxfield [phonetic], I meant to say, who later committed suicide. All these wonderful people. So, I think I didn't have the courage. Dick put it to him. And Dick said, "One way we can get him" - the truth comes out now, folks - Dick said, "One way we can get him, no one will perform his water musics. He is always - ever time he has had a concert, he has tried to get the water music performed, and no one would do it. So we will do that." And we got him. And we proposed to, and we did get him. He said yes, he would love that. And then, probably working off the idea of water music, Dick composed a piece called Something for an Aquarian Theater. And, as I remember, I did a piece called Alice Dannon [phonetic] in 48 Seconds Percussion Piece. And there was, I think, a Christian Wolf [phonetic] - either Christian Wolf or Carter Higgins [phonetic], who I think is - or Elliott Carter [phonetic], or - I'm not sure. I would have to look at the thing. I've done too much, Paul. I am getting foggy, I can't remember that clearly. But also in that summer of 1958 - well, earlier than that - I had seen Higgins around in the poetry reading circuit. He was very involved with poetry reading. And his things were just strange and different. They weren't different from the other beat poets the way Corso [phonetic] is. They were different in that performance or movement - often part of a poem of his would be to clap his hand four times, or to lift up the table he was reading from, and hit it on the floor twice, or to stand up and walk around the table and sit down. And I was going to all these poetry readings, and I guess it was over in Sheridan Square. The name of the joint, Kiddies, was Pandora's Box.

MR. CUMMINGS: On the corner, right.

MR. HANSEN: And it was above the Circle in the Square, and a wonderful bar.

MR. CUMMINGS: Lewey's [phonetic].

MR. HANSEN: Lewey's, yes. Never let a kid go out with this tape recorder. Take somebody who remembers. And early in the late 1940s, when I got out of the Army, I was incredibly enamored of a woman named Jocelyn Brando [phonetic], who had a kid brother who had just been in town a year or so, who would later turn out to be Marlon Brando. But she called him Bud. And she had a roommate named Mary Crabtree, I believe, who might even be the Mary Crabtree of Crabtree Movers. Mary Crabtree left the old Village to go to Sneedon's Landing [phonetic], because it was the only place that had thatched roofs, and she wanted to learn to be a roof thatcher. And these are the sort of things that happened in the old Village, folks. And I just adored Jocelyn Brando. And often I would be in the San Remo [phonetic] Bar, and one of the bartenders was a guy named Harry Jackson, a very tough Pat, and he remembered me during the late 1940s, 1947 and 1948, coming in in my paratrooper's suit with all my medals and stuff, and he called my "trooper," and sometimes "troop," which I rather liked, which I would now find embarrassing, but which I rather liked, you know, so that kind of set me up. And one of the hero groups in the Village at the time were the returning veterans. And the returning veterans who gravitated towards taking advantage of the 5220 [phonetic] Club and going to school on the GI Bill were a welcome additive throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s to every intellectual situation, in that - let's say it's something like St. John's in Annapolis, Maryland. The townies, who would amuse themselves by beating up on the faggots from the college with the glasses and the books and the pretty girls would quickly get a fist full of knuckles and a kick in the stomach from the veterans.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And that's what the late 1940s were like, Children.

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, what happened, you know, to keep on going -

MR. HANSEN: So, there were these poetry readings at the -

MR. CUMMINGS: The readings.

MR. HANSEN: - Pandora's Box.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And there was this kid who was hanging out in there, who wanted to do, in the Village, or the New York Theater, what Brando had done. His name was Jimmy Dean. And he even sought parts like the parts Brando had. I remember there was an unreal play called Tiger at the Gates, and Jimmy Dean had played a very - not too effeminate, but really, you know, attractive to an old pedagog -

MR. CUMMINGS: Pedagog?

MR. HANSEN: Pollywog [phonetic] type, a little Arab boy in Tiger in the Gates. And Brando - I forgot what the companion piece was for Brando. But if you call me from the Smithsonian, I will research it in the meantime, and tell you. And in that I am - had known Jocelyn very briefly - well, the thing about Harry Jackson was, often Jocelyn would be with some older guy who could really afford to buy her a lot of drinks in the San Remo bar, and Jackson would look over at me, and say, "That's tough luck, kid." And I would say, "Yes, I know. Give me another beer." And anyway, this is where I first saw Higgins, and I didn't remember that until later. During the summer of 1958, I was working in an ad agency called Afton and Courier [phonetic], and this is just before Tony Smith got me the job in the fall at Hartley House. And at Afton and Courier, there was a mail room clerk, a very brilliant guy named Donald McCarey [phonetic], who prefers to be called Max McCarey. And Don was an intellectual, just a brilliant guy. And we quickly became friends. And he was faked out that I was studying in John Cage's class. This was all taking place at Afton and Courier Advertising in the gray building on Lexington Avenue by Grand Central Station. Across the street is a large photo shop called Willoughby's [phonetic], which is now Willoughby Peerless [phonetic], and the record clerk in there was a kid from Great Neck, Long Island, who had been Don McCarey's roommate in Boston Conservatory of Music, and his name was Lawrence Poons, and he was the record clerk. And he would spend his lunch hours, strange little fellow, in the newsreel theater in Grand Central Station. I have never been more struck by anyone than when I met this kid, Poons, of a kind of aura of some kind or other. And I realize now that the reason I got into Brando being followed by Jimmy Dean, was that there was a kind of Jimmy Dean thing about Larry when he was a kid, then. He was 18 or 19 then, and very bright. Plays really incredibly beautiful funky folk acoustic guitar, was the first person to turn me on to Johnny Cash. I think a few years later, when Larry was about 21, he had 9 or 10 Johnny Cash LPs, and insisted on playing them all for me, one after the other, side by side. And I got on to - Johnny Cash is a Pisces, Larry Poons is a Libra, blah, blah, blah. It was a very good -

MR. CUMMINGS: Where did the Epitome [phonetic] Coffee Shop fall into this?

MR. HANSEN: So, Don - the - this was at the height of the coffee shop boom.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Now, the old Village we're talking about, Jefferson Diner and Waldorf Cafeteria, and what not -

MR. CUMMINGS: Well, that was an older -

MR. HANSEN: And the Chuck Wagon.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right. Mother's.

MR. HANSEN: This was an old group of people. And Mother's. And there was a place called Mama's, which is also after hours booze. Anyway, now there is one on Thompson Street called The Venus, which is just like that time. It's still going on, probably.

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, yes?

MR. HANSEN: Yes.

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, gee.

MR. HANSEN: Until 6:00 in the morning.

MR. CUMMINGS: Leave it to the Village.

MR. HANSEN: A gay bar at one end, and a straight bar at the other end, and you don't have any trouble seeing which bar you should go to, no matter what you are, when you walk in. It's quite obvious, you know? From the bartender and the people, like, straight and gay.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: So, Don McCarey was really avaricious to get a coffee shop in the Village going, to really, like, get into a business. He had saved up quite a bit of dough, and had arranged to borrow some through several relatives. And he had a friend, Howard Smythe [phonetic], who would also come in with at least $700 or $800 or $400 or $500. And Larry Poons was to get money from his parents or something to do it, maybe cash in some war bonds or something. But in the pre coffee shop boom, 1940s - in the late 1950s, this coffee shop boom phenomenon also saw something happening that had never happened before. Articles were being written in the popular newspaper and press about artists. This had absolutely never happened before. This is also a period, the post World War II Village up until the middle 1950s, late 1950s, in which photography, for the first time, really settled into being accepted as an art form. It wasn't fought or discussed or argued about any more. It was quite clear it was an art form. It was also five or six years after Mia Daring [phonetic] had gotten the first Guggenheim to do film work. And we were very clearly into - we can see it now, we couldn't see it then - we were just - we couldn't wait to see what would happen next. It was a time of - now we know that information was doubling in ever shortening periods, much less than - like in decades, or a six or seven year periods, rather than decades. And -

MR. CUMMINGS: What happened to his coffee shop? Let's pursue that for a minute here.

MR. HANSEN: The coffee shop thing was a fixation with Don McCarey. Max was, like, a prime mover, a very charismatic guy. And he set up this coffee shop called The Epitome. And the title - and it should always - Max was very Catholic. He was always like completely closure oriented about things. Things were either good or bad. He lived in a totally black and white world. And he and Larry and Howard Smythe painted geometrically. That is very clinically like Aftomondryon [phonetic], and into, like, Bergoyn [phonetic] Diller. And I'm not sure if Max Bill [phonetic] is accurate, but that just comes to mind. And this was at the height of abstract expressionism sort of conquering New York, and the whole 10th Street, and what not. But these three strong kids -

MR. CUMMINGS: But this was on Bleeker Street, wasn't it?

MR. HANSEN: Yes, it was on - it's on Bleeker Street. There is a souvlaki shop there now. It's right next to the new Circle on the Square.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Which used to be the Amato [phonetic] Opera.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: But I'm not sure.

MR. CUMMINGS: It was, yes.

MR. HANSEN: Too much has gone on.

MR. CUMMINGS: I remember that, yes.

MR. HANSEN: You can't really keep track of all of that any more, you know, after the population -

MR. CUMMINGS: I'm very curious about this coffee shop for something that we can get into, as it develops here.

MR. HANSEN: So, Don McCarey and Howard Smythe's prime book was the Dada Book, by Motherwell [phonetic], which also is probably even a much more influential effect on me than Cage. A wonderfully researched, scholarly book, probably at the time - I think it was published by the Museum of Modern Art.

MR. CUMMINGS: Whittenborn [phonetic], Whittenborn.

MR. HANSEN: Herr Whittenborn always strikes, doesn't he? Beautiful man. And the - Max's closure orientation. The name of the store, wherever it appears, or in any way, must be as it appears in the dictionary, with the accent, et cetera -

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: Just like that. And they painted this on the - a chair painted white, and they painted this on the seat of the chair, and hung it outside, kind of at an angle, so walking from east to west, you wouldn't notice it. Walking from west to east, you would see it on the seat of the chair. And it was a coffee shop that might be a gallery. The toilet was - the counter was to the right as you go in, there were chairs on the left, and it was a typical kind of converted vegetable store situation. And the off Broadway boom was quite strong, the coffee shop boom was quite strong. Johanna Lawrenson [phonetic] had written her article in Esquire Magazine, A Can of Beer, a Slice of Pizza Pie, and Thou Besides Me, which was about people hanging out, artist kids hanging out, in Washington Square Park.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: This was followed a few months later by an article in the Sunday Times by Dorrie Ashton [phonetic] on how hard it is for an artist to find a place to live, et cetera, and so forth. And these were very big turn ons. I remember in the late 1940s, all of us riding the Fifth Avenue bus up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and getting off to look at a - I think it was by Nivola [phonetic], Constantin [phonetic] Nivola, a cement concrete relief thing in the entrance to an apartment house which was really not on Fifth Avenue, but around the corner on -

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, right, yes.

MR. HANSEN: - 81st or 82nd Street. Modern art actually being incorporated and it was just a few years, in the late 1940s, since DeCooney [phonetic] and the rest picketed the Modern for not showing American abstract -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, right. But now -

MR. HANSEN: And here is all of this, like, kiddie population bomb going off in Greenwich Village, and the coffee shop boom, and the phenomenon. And Don felt that, and wanted to set up a coffee shop that was a gallery, which was very like conglomerate structure, mixed media, collage -

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes, because I remember readings happening there, and, you know, the sound, Dada sound being -

MR. HANSEN: At first it was going to be a gallery coffee shop. And then there was so much poetry reading going on, and what not, he wanted to have poetry readings there. And he asked me if I would, like, make it happen. He didn't know how to go around and talk to people, and - which is why he has never shown. He is a very fine artist, and he has never shown because he could not stand to propose a show to someone and have them say no. This is also the personality that is a bit of a bastard, as a cruel person in their own right. They're just not going to take a chance on not getting shown, or being turned down. So, I said, "Sure, I would go around and set one up for you." I had been very involved with going to all the coffee shop readings. There was the Gaslight, and one of the first was Pandora's Box. I think Anatol Briard [phonetic], or Vance Pujali [phonetic], or people like that were, like, sparking readings there, and what not. And this had been going on for some time. And it wasn't anything new, it was like a replay, but really big. And all of the - it's quite simple. It's academic, that a large number of poets are effeminate, or homosexual, or whatever. And the majority of the poetry readings were all male. So I thought it would be fun - there must be girl poets - I thought it would be fun to, like, go around and get up a reading of girl poets. So, I went around asking different guy poets who a good girl poet would be. And the majority said, "Chicks can't write poetry, man." And here and there, one or two people would say - like, I think Paul deMaria [phonetic] said, "There is a young girl from" - what's the college outside Philadelphia?

MR. CUMMINGS: What, Temple?

MR. HANSEN: No, not Temple. A little classier, or something, a little bit -

MR. CUMMINGS: Bryn Mawr, or something?

MR. HANSEN: There is a girl at Bryn Mawr who is dropping English lit to study nuclear physics. Her name is Diane DiPrima [phonetic]. She's just a young kid, but she is terrific. So, I went and found Diane DiPrima. And there is a girl named Hazel Ford [phonetic]. And I even called up Muriel Rickhauser [phonetic], who is in the phone book, and she gave me a couple of names of young girls she had had at Barnard [phonetic], or Columbia or some place. And we got up this poetry reading of girls, which completely faked Don McCarey out. And -

MR. CUMMINGS: Was it successful? Did it work?

MR. HANSEN: It was marvelously successful. And my younger brother, Kenneth, when he went to Hobart - he was going to Hobart at the time, I think - and he had an English prof there who told him that if they were ever down in New York City on the weekend or something, to be - find out whether there was a poetry reading at The Epitome Coffee Shop, because that's where the best poetry readings were. The counter and bar was to the right, as you go in. The tables were to the left, and then you - there was a partition into a back room, which had tables and what not around. The john was in the right rear corner, and we called it the "John Cage." And using masking tape, Larry and Don or Howard or someone - we can find out, these people are all still alive - had painted it in stripes that went around. So it was kind of like kinetic linear - they were like puce and chartreuse and forest green and fire engine red. It was the most unsettling place to look on the wonders of nature. And one of Don McCarey's basic axioms was that one could not be an artist without having read the Motherwell book several times, and that one was not allowed to buy it, one must steal it, and this made it pure information or something. He was always, like, full of riddles and adages and sayings of how a thing could be without any - there could be no -

MR. CUMMINGS: It's the -

MR. HANSEN: Yes, it had to be that way. So, part of the poetry readings were - I was going to Cage's class at the time. So I guess this was in middle to late summer. And Dick Higgins and I had several Sundays - used the Epitome to have people perform notations of ours involving local sounds, or -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: - using different percussive instruments. And the reason many of these things are called percussion works is that Cage said it just comes about through what exists. A thing that is neither strings nor brass nor wind is automatically percussion. So, if you're a -

MR. CUMMINGS: It's a catch all.

MR. HANSEN: - slamming down a trash can, this is percussion. If you are clapping two pieces of 2 x 4, or operating a 5 and 10 toy, this is percussion.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: So, like a sparkler, or whatever, for sound. So, an important part of each poetry reading was to have a couple of Dada works read from the book or something. And Higgins and I just naturally began to perform works and stuff there. Dick Higgins had a wonderful poem called Canzona. And Canzona was a kind of non notation. I think it began with an upside down apostrophe, and then there was no line of type, but - and the place where, if there had been four or five lines of type that ended like a widow, or a line or half a sentence. There was a right side up apostrophe. And the way he performed it, it was as elliptical as a notation. He would come out and sit at this little table on a platform under a spotlight, and announce that he was going to read - or have it announced that he was going to read - his poem, Canzona. And he would sit there, and he would put his bookbag next to the chair, and then he would take off his coat and put it over the chair, and put his hat on the floor, to the left of the chair. And then, he would open his notebook, and take out a kind of like term paper, or doctoral thesis, a folder of 8 x 10 pages, and put it down, and then go back and look through it for the thing, finally, and take off his gloves and put them to one side. And then he would put a glass or an ash tray or something, so the book was held open, rub his hands together, and then he would reach into his brief case, and take out a rubber glove, and very carefully and pointedly fit it down over his fingers, pulling them down, and then pulling it on to his whole hand. And then he would look, from time to time, to make sure he was doing it right, as if it said just how to do it there. Then he would get out the other one and do that. And then, once he had gotten them all on, putting one finger on the text and, like, finding where his place was - only there wasn't any text - he would remove the first rubber glove from his left hand and put it back in the bag, and then slowly, also checking to make sure he was at the right place, take the other one off and put it back in the bag. And then he would close the notebook, or whatever, and put it back in the bag and zipper it up. And then, he would put on his gloves and pick up his hat off the floor and put it on his head, and he would stand up and bow, and everyone would applaud, you know? A guy I had seen around the Village, who looked like a kind of Martian, and a guy Don McCarey knew from a pad he had up in the upper west 50s or 60s, the guy had a little storefront store and he was an artist. He was a painter and a writer/poet. And in the window of the store - on the glass of the window of the store he lived in up there in the east [sic] 50s or 60s, it just said simply, in white paint from the inside, "Taylor Mead [phonetic], Artist." So, Don got Taylor to come and read. And Taylor began to read from his Anonymous Notes of a New York Youth. And shortly after -

MR. CUMMINGS: What did Poons do there?

MR. HANSEN: I promise that's next. Afterwards, shortly after that, Ron Rice [phonetic] got Taylor to just - to be in an underground movie. Underground movies were starting, a natural outgrowth of off Broadway shoestring theater were shoestring films. And what Ron Rice did with Taylor Mead was just let him do whatever he wanted to and shoot him. There might be a paragraph like story line or something. So it was a very much kind of happening thing. Now, we get into Happenings, too. A signature part of every poetry reading at the Epitome Coffee Shop was the announcement that R. Mutt [phonetic] would now read Tristan Zarr's [phonetic] poem, Roar, and that was Larry Poons.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: This was always with the Madison Avenue Harris Tweed top coat -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right, right.

MR. HANSEN: - that buttoned up to the neck.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right. I remember that.

MR. HANSEN: And 15 or 20 neckties tied around the little collar, and what not, and then the collar folded down. And he would unscrew the actual toilet bowl seat from the toilet bowl in the John Cage toilet, and put it around his neck. And on his head he usually wore a - if you know the early 1890s, 1900s comic strip, The Yellow Kid, who wore a tin can on his head, as a hat, he would take a kind of pot or plastic container from the kitchen area behind the counter, and put it on his head. And then, he would come out very ponderously, and a special table was set up with a chair next to it, and with the chair on the table, and Poons would move to the chair and step up on it, and then step on to the table, and sit on the chair on the table, and proceed to read Tristan Zarr's Roar, which is just the word "roar," going on and on and on, and I think ends with the sentence, "He thinks he's pretty cute," or something like that. I'm surprised I forget it. And this would receive a big ovation.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: I remember one particular night - and we started improvising there - one particular night, Poons was reading Roar, the place was packed. There were chippies, teenage runaways, poets, madmen, freaks, literary professors from different colleges, everybody just completely swamping the place, wall to wall. They must have been 60 people over their limit, which should have been about 87 or 74 people. And as Poons began to read Roar, Howard Smythe stepped out from behind the counter with a big handful of nails and a hammer, and proceeded to nail around the edges, Poons's shoes to the table top, and finished, and stepped behind the counter as Poons finished the poem. And at this point, the door burst open, and this giant Irish cop, who said, "Now, just what the hell do you all think you're doing in here? You, what are you doing, sitting up there on the table like a fucking dummy? You know, you got too many people in here. You're going to have to get out, you're going to have to open up. This is against all the fire laws. In fact, I'm going to have to give you a ticket. Okay, now you, come on, get down from the table." And Poons, with great dignity and ingenuousness, tucking in his chin in a kind of like Jimmy Dean way, said, "I can't." And he said, "Well, don't give me any of that shit. I'm telling you to get down from the table. Get down from the table. There is nothing the matter with your feet, is there?" And Poons said, "Yes, in a way." And he said, "And that's why you can't get down from the table?" And Poons said, "Yes." And he said, "Well, what's the matter with your feet?" And Poons said, "Well, it isn't my feet, it's my shoes." And the cop was really getting ready to go over and bust him in the face with a club, which could have happened today, let alone then, in the 1950s, height of the McCarthy era, and what not. I think Edward R. Murrough was just killing McCarthy about then. So - television - so, some little girl said, "He can't get down off the table because his feet are nailed to it." So the cop went over and looked closely, and said, "Who the hell did that?" And the way he said it, you know, whoever was going to do [sic] it was going in the slams, or something, or really going to be taken down to the station house. So, Smythe said, "I didn't see who did it, but I will get him loose," and he just sort of came out with a hammer, and started to pry Larry's feet loose, and what not. And then he had trouble walking, because he had all these nails - it was really beautiful. I did a - I wrote a long -

MR. CUMMINGS: How long did that place stay open? It wasn't there very long, as I remember.

MR. HANSEN: Not too long. I remember much later, must have been 1961 or - must have been 1962 or 1963 - 1962 - I was in the Figaro [phonetic] Coffee Shop with my daughter, Bibbe - no, I was in there with Danny List [phonetic], the guy who writes the hub cap things for the Village Voice, and we were waiting for my daughter, Bibbe, to meet me there, because she was taking classes with Alice Speback [phonetic] at the Herbert Berghoff [phonetic] Studios, over in West Martin, or wherever it is -

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: West Bank Street, and down by Len Lai [phonetic]. And I saw, out the window, police fastening clothes lines to telephone poles, and putting it, like, around the headlight of a car, and the next telephone pole, and then around the parking meter. Whenever the police put up a clothesline perimeter like that, that means a murder has taken place, usually a shooting, and they're protecting the area for clues, et cetera.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: A classic police work thing. And it turned out that the person who rented the Epitome Coffee Shop to Don and Harry and Larry was an old Italian man named Peppi [phonetic], and it had once been a kind of after hours, late night place called Peppi's. And in that it was dimly lit, and what not, all kinds of fiends and bums would come in there, because there was a kind of dope fiend thing beginning to go on then. And junkies always came in to the Epitome Coffee Shop, and Don and I talked at length how to get rid of them, because they were comatose and surly, and they really couldn't move. They were, like, stoned out of their gourds. And we decided that in that a person who overuses drugs has very tender eyesight, we would put in 300 watt bulbs, because in that it was a kind of literary art kid hang out, The Epitome, nobody would really mind bright light. That's always bugged me in places like Max's, and the Broom Street Bar [phonetic], you can't really, like, look through a newspaper, or check something out, or -

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: - write an address down.

MR. CUMMINGS: That's because they remember all those dark, Humphrey Bogart bars.

MR. HANSEN: So we'd put in these - put in all these huge, 300 watt bulbs without any frosting, or anything, just naked, pure radiant electricity. And as the sun went down, the junkies would start to come in. And we would turn on all those lights, and they would jump, as if shot, and get up and shuffle out. "What the hell is going on," you know. They would leave. It worked beautifully. And then, they rented the place from Peppi. And then when they left it - and I don't remember the exact date, I am sure Poons would know - when they left it, it became The Café Rafeo [phonetic] shortly after. And I forget who the kid was. There was a wonderful Bohemian kid who had a reputation in the Village of the late 1950s and early 1960s, very much like Gallahad's [phonetic] over on the East Side, Gallahad and Groovy. But he had that kind of rep. Everyone knew who he was. His name was Von Benson [phonetic] or something. Anyway, there was some altercation with Peppi, and - I'm tempted to say, "Poor old Peppi," but Peppi killed the kid in the liquor store next - entrance to the liquor - the argument began at the restaurant, and then went across - he wanted more money or something, and the kid wouldn't - Von Benson, or whatever his name is - wouldn't pay it. And Peppi went to get his gun, and the kid went to get a bottle of booze in the liquor store, and Peppi ran across the street and shot him down in the entrance to the liquor store. And then Bibbe showed up, and we were all digging that. And right now it's a souvlaki joint.

MR. CUMMINGS: Somewhere in the midst of all these - you, at some point, started getting involved with the Happenings or -

MR. HANSEN: Yes, all that.

MR. CUMMINGS: Café a Go Go [phonetic], several Sunday places in these activities. But what about Kaprow? Were you involved with any of the Kaprow events -

MR. HANSEN: Well -

MR. CUMMINGS: - and activities, or Happenings, or -

MR. HANSEN: Well -

MR. CUMMINGS: Where did you get into -

MR. HANSEN: At McGraw Hill, and in different - particularly it was Afton and Courier Advertising Agency in 1957 and 1958.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And before left, I was at McGraw Hill like in 1956 and 1957, and at Afton and Courier in 1958. So, somewhere towards the end of McGraw Hill in 1957, I became involved with off Broadway theater. I had had a lot of experience on service newspapers, and doing public relations work in the armed forces, and it was a good way to run around and meet important people, or - not important, naturally important, but very interesting people, because, you know, being in the service down South is like being buried, so you have to read the papers. And anything interesting going on, you can go get in it if you have a mouth like mine. And you know, a bit of the weasel doesn't hurt. But, again, just being predatory, like seeking out a scene I want and making it, and I go looking for scenes and activities and particular people, the way some guys go cruising for - the way some people go cruising for a sex partner. And I remember at McGraw Hill, Harvey Gross and I used to go to a different place for lunch each day. We did a research on cheesecake. And we actually decided in favor of the cheesecake at MacGuinness of Sheepshead Bay [phonetic], which is very fudgy and thick - like Wolfie's [phonetic], and they're both in Brooklyn and Miami Beach - rather than Lindy's [phonetic], which is supposed to be famous for cheesecake. A lot of people tout Lindy's cheesecake as being superb, but we really didn't care for it. We both agreed that we would champion MacGuinness of Sheepshead Bay's cheesecake, the really thick, fudgy kind. It's a particular kind of - there are just four or five kinds of cheesecake. And we totally agreed that we totally abominated the dry kind of spongy, really dry cheesecake. And then we did a study of candy bars, getting one or two of each candy bar you could possibly obtain, deciding which one was better. And we realized the - there were, like, top candies that were so uniquely different, one couldn't be better than the other. They were all great. And the top ones, of course, are the top ones. Of course, Hershey Bar with Almonds, and Hershey's Bittersweet and Hershey's Milk Chocolate are superb. Baracini's [phonetic] doesn't get into it.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: We're talking about just what used to be a typical candy bar.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And the Mounds Bar and Chunky's and Milky Way.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: They're like basic time honored candies.

MR. CUMMINGS: Die hards, yes.

MR. HANSEN: There is nothing like a triple based play, three horse parley that wins, or a home run where the ball goes over the fence. And now I have come to believe, over the past 10 years, that art is a high performance cybernetic grid that you could lay across any field of human endeavor known to people kind. And the high performance area is where art is taking place. This is sort of like one of my basic tenants, or basic theories. And then, from that, Harvey Gross became very busy with film making in different ways. I wasn't getting anywhere being a publicist for off Broadway theater, because if you don't have - if you can have a publicist and the Union or the Guild finds out about it, then you're in bad trouble.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: They will picket you, and no reviewer will cross the picket line, because they have their thing.

MR. CUMMINGS: And the unions were beginning to come in off Broadway in those days.

MR. HANSEN: Along with the real estate operators, who, through trying to save plays, found out that it was really quite simple, and this kind of - the kind of Broadway theater where love comes from the audience to the stage, rather than from the stage to the audience, is very much like lot lines architecture and bubble gum rock, and the ordinary, the mediocre that is usually instantly successful, and that most people are, like, very broadly mediocre and barely competent at seeing or hearing or understanding, or anything. But otherwise, you wouldn't have a paper like the New York Daily News have the largest subscription and publication thing of -

MR. CUMMINGS: Anyway, back to the -

MR. HANSEN: So, I began going to galleries, just the way we had explored candy bars. I rediscovered galleries. And every lunch hour I would leave a little early and go - I would either take the 8th Avenue subway up to 57th Street and walk across, looking at galleries. I would go in some place and get a roast beef on rye to go and a coffee and stuff, and a piece of apple pie, and eat it in a cab, if I was late, or I would take a bus back down to 42nd Street, walk over to the building, and it would be, like, an hour and 15 minutes lunch, and I would have seen 10 galleries. And that's how I discovered the Huntze [phonetic] Gallery. And Kaprow had his - no, that was when I was at Afton and Courier. But I can't pin it down. I'm just really -

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes, Huntze was on 59th Street then, wasn't it?

MR. HANSEN: Yes.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Central Park South.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And I didn't know what brought me up there. I think I was on the old Stable.

MR. CUMMINGS: Around the corner.

MR. HANSEN: And I got to talking to some men there, or some girls there, or something, and they were going to look at the Huntze next, and I'd never heard of it, so I went. And that's the first time I ever laid eyes on Ivan Karp [phonetic]. Oh, great day. And galloping Gemini Karp.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And Kaprow's exhibition was up. The pieces I remember from the exhibition at The Stable - and maybe I just think I remember them - but was the first time I saw the sculpture of Gabriel Kohn [phonetic]. I think it was a one man show by Gabriel Kohn. This is a fascinating thing, now, to do anthropology on one's self, and go back and find out if there was a Gabriel Kohn one man show at the same time that Kaprow's great environmental -

MR. CUMMINGS: Great memory check, yes.

MR. HANSEN: - whatever thing was at the Huntze, you know? It might easily be two years apart, I don't know. The Kohn show might have been in 1965. No, it wasn't that late, but - The Stable was at the new place by then, I think. But, anyway, I didn't really have an instant access to that particular Kaprow show. I - where my head was at the time, I saw it as a kind of getting back to the boards art using really funky materials and stuff, which came to be the kind of hallmark of the neo Dadaists, which was Kaprow and myself and a lot of others a year or two later, 1959/1960, that winter season. And Dine and Oldenburg were in that, too. Red Grooms [phonetic], a lot of people - Marisol. So, my aesthetic connection with that Kaprow show was I had been reading in architecture a lot, and the architectural news at the time was involved with a thing called The New Brutalism in London. And I saw this as a kind of American rude form of New Brutalism. So there was a likeness and a complete dissimilarity. But I was really, like - I was flashing on that, is the best way to describe it.

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. HANSEN: I was flashing on these connections, saying, "I don't know what it is, but it is Brutalism. I don't know if it's new, or re Brutalism, or what."

MR. CUMMINGS: Yes. Right, right, right.

MR. HANSEN: And I never thought to call it Dada, for some reason. And this is all, like, part and parcel. So, the next time I saw Kaprow was in Cage's class. And it wasn't until, like, a year after Cage's class that I realized Higgins was the same Higgins from the Pandora's Box, and like that.

MR. CUMMINGS: Well -

MR. HANSEN: The - from the time I was very little, I was always involved with theater things. I was involved with puppets, I was involved with - my older brother Robert, and my brother who is a year younger than me, Gordon, and I would cut out all the naked - except for panties and bra - Tillie Toiler dolly cut outs from the Journal American Funnies on Sunday, and other things we could find. And we would make our Jungle Gym a huge compound of stakes, a stockade, and we would put a stake down all over in there, and we would tie all the Tillie the Toiler dolls and panty ads from catalogs cut out very carefully to the stake with thread, a little piece of string, and put straw and grass around their feet, and we would burn them. Does this mean my mother was a tough, hard woman? I don't know. Were we fighting approaching sexuality? I don't know. It's never one thing, it's always constellations.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: And in a way, this becomes kind of a set piece or theater event happening thing. I was also always a great one, as a kid, for delivering bombshells at the wrong moment, in I would say the wrong word or recite a dirty limerick at the right moment, when none of - the staid, frostbitten looking aunts and uncles were all sitting around with cake on one knee and a cup of tea on the other, I would suddenly announce a dirty poem or something, or say, "Does anyone know why Vivian Leighed [phonetic]?" And an uncle, who had had a few shots of Scotch in the kitchen with my father said, "I don't know. Why did Vivien Leigh, Al," poking the guy next to him. "Because, Preston forced her."

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: This is exactly the type of bombshell I mean, you know. I would be led a foot off the ground by my left ear out of the room by my mother, you know.

MR. CUMMINGS: Right.

MR. HANSEN: Who would not explain what I had done wrong. And I knew, and didn't know, at the same moment. In junior high school, I was in a play which was a movie with Shirley Temple and somebody who was in an Indian turban named Ram Dass [phonetic]. And Ram Dass is the transcendental name Gordon Alpark [phonetic] took for himself, which, in that someone told me he was a homosexual, could be described as "Rammed Ass." This Ram Dass was D a s s, or Ramadas [phonetic], or something. And there was some part of the play where I was supposed to mix some liquids in test tubes or something. And at the right point of the play, which was just put on once - it was for assembly - I tipped everything over, including the table, accidentally, and just ruining the whole play. And this showed the teacher who was running things - it was that kind of stuff, you know, which I flashed on a lot as a Youth Board worker, working with disturbed kids and teenage gangs, and what not. There is the testing going on all the time, you know, and oat feeling, and what not. And a lot of times I get into a rap, or something, and friends say, "Well, listen Al, don't start another one. We've got to go, we're expected across - come on, Hone