On most days, you can find V. Vale in an alleyway off of Columbus Ave in San Francisco. He’ll be wearing all black with a Costco jacket and purple-tinted glasses. His folding tables attempt to attract passerby with displays of his books about Cabaret Voltaire, Burroughs, SPK, and Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Buy a book and he’ll ask you to pose with it for a photograph. I’d estimate that he’s taken thousands of these pictures over the years.
You might catch Marian, Vale’s wife and collaborator. Marian has been responsible for much of the production, archiving, and photo processing associated with RE/Search. She also helps Vale lug the wares, collapsible furniture and fixtures up and down the hill from the North Beach apartment where the two have lived and worked for decades.
The table is next to City Lights, the bookstore and publishing company opened by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the 50’s. Vale began working there in the late 70s. It’s here he met Burroughs, Ginsberg and others.
I’m not sure how old Vale is. The topic came up around his birthday and he suggested I look it up on Wikipedia, but I didn’t. He’s old enough to have accumulated a lot of stories. Some of them are contained in the books he has on display in the alley, but there are plenty more just spilling out wherever he goes. He and Marian make an impressive storytelling duo. He does a lot of the talking; Marian makes necessary revisions and corrections at regular intervals.
The apartment has a lot of stories, too. The place is like a museum, but very much alive. There are letters from people like Monte Cazzazza and J.G. Ballard, and a Christmas card from John Waters. Somewhere there’s some rare film footage of Throbbing Gristle at their final San Francisco show. There’s a handmade surfboard painted by one of the guys from The Screamers. There are walls and walls of books. In a corner of the room there’s the setup for Vale and Marian’s latest side project, a collection of songs and improvisations they perform on modular synth, piano, and voice.
In the late 70s, with the financial help of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, Vale published the hugely influential punk fansize Search and Destroy. Two years later, everyone decided that punk was dead. S&D was retired.
Vale started the RE/Search series shortly after and followed similar themes – provocative music, writing, and cinema. RE/Search dug deeper and contained more developed pieces. It would be among the first to explore subcultures related to contemporary paganism, body modification and more. RE/Search interviews are often accompanied by a list of suggested reading, listening, and viewing material. The lists open new windows and begin new threads of thought. In this way they seem to have anticipated the hyperlink.
RE/Search inspired generations of alternative publishers and writers. Books like Pranks, The Industrial Culture Handbook, Angry Women, and Modern Primitives exposed readers around the world to alternative ways of living and creating. Baited Area is one of many that likely wouldn’t exist without its influence.
Jeff Cook and I compiled this interview with Vale and Marian from intermittent meetings over the course of several weeks. Other friends chimed in, too, where noted. Color photos by Roxann Spikula and I.
Discussed: Martin Rev, Ryan Gosling, Seventh Day Adventism, pedal pushers, 8x10, page layout, modular synthesis, modern primitives, shock value, J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, guns, radio, Blue Cheer, Boyd Rice, Anton LaVey, Polish cinema, risk, motorcycles, sex scenes, Siberia, Jim Morrison’s pants, croaking, Cleveland, etc.
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When we arrive and buzz the doorbell, Vale can be seen darting away from the window. He and Marian have been doing their exercises– “Paula B’s knee-friendly cardio,” while listening to Adele.
Adam: How’s the [Vesuvio Alley] market been?
Vale: Well, it’s only a block down the hill. It’s a little challenging. We bring a suitcase and three tables down.
Marian: They’re folding tables. We use a little cart.
A: You bring the tables each time?
V: Oh yeah! You have to. And the chair.
M: We get it all there, but it’s downhill. Sometimes on the way back we have so much stuff, because if he sells something I bring a new copy. You think it’ll be lighter on the way home, but it’s not.
V: I think I had seven sales all day. I had one immediately, then I went two hours without anything. As soon as I got there a youngish man with a little kid showed up. He immediately decisively bought something in a few seconds–Search and Destroy #2, which is really rare. It’s from 1977.
A: An original copy?
V: Oh yeah! They’ve been known to fetch $1,000 each in NYC. Martin Rev came over and sat where I’m sitting now. He was just saying, “You know, I live in the East Village, near Avenue A. There’s a store down the street that had every issue up high on the wall. I asked how much, and they were $1,000 each. I came back in a couple months and they’d sold them all.” I don’t mind. That guy has a better mailing list than me! [Laughs]
A: That’s wild.
V: Well, there are all these different levels of wealth in the world. There are people to whom $1,000 is nothing.
Jeff: Didn’t you say Ryan Gosling bought a bunch of your books?
V: Oh yeah, Ryan Gosling! Of course, we didn’t know who he was. We didn’t ever used to watch TV or keep up with “real” popular culture.
M: We knew he was an actor.
V: No, we didn’t! I had to Google him and find out.
A: He was in Drive, right?
M: Yeah. That’s what we saw first. Then Blade Runner.
V: We started to watch his movies. I like Drive! Yeah, he was in a bunch of others. The one in Thailand, Only God Forgives. That was dark....
J: What’s the last thing you saw in the theater?
V: We went and saw Drive My Car. [Laughs] It’s a three hour Japanese thing. It’s just...
M: Very slow. I liked it alright.
V: She liked it, and I hated it! But I’m a Seventh Day Adventist, I realized. If you’re raised as a Seventh-Day Adventist you think you’ll change, but you won’t. That’s why I don’t drink or take drugs. No coffee. Coffee was illegal. Caffeine tea was illegal. You couldn’t even buy cigarettes or alcohol of any form in the town.
J: What town?
V: It’s called La Sierra. Population: 1280.
J: And the whole place was Adventist?
V: Yeah. I look back on it and think I was raised in some weird utopia. I never once owned a house key. We moved to a million crummy little apartments every year. I hated moving, but my mom was crazy and she moved a lot.
J: What did she do?
V: Nothing! She was mentally ill.
M: Well, she played music. She taught him piano.
V: She had been in the Taka Sisters. It was kind of an outsider nightclub act. They were three Asian girls in kimonos, and they all sang and played piano and violin and whatever. They went all over the world. I saw a picture of them on an ocean liner on the way to Europe. They played New York, Chicago, major cities here, too. But this was prior to WW2.
J: So your Mom was an Adventist?
V: Oh yeah. She got converted, so I was raised in it. And I’m really glad. In that whole town I never heard one house break-in, not one mugging, hold-up, robbery. No crime at all. And I say it’s because no one drank alcohol, or coffee.
J: No coffee-inspired crime.
V: Everyone was pretty even keel. If you can imagine living without alcohol or coffee or caffeine tea... It’s just pretty rational all the time.
J: Do you drink coffee now?
V: Decaf. I’m addicted to decaf. Instant only. I just make three thermoses every few days, and every time I want some I heat it in the microwave and put it in the small thermos I have.
J: When did your mom convert?
V: Before I was born. I’m glad she got converted to that! God, what a great religion, in a weird way! Oh–women couldn’t wear sleeve- less anything, much less short skirts. That was against the law. They couldn’t wear pants either, but when pedal pushers were invented they had to let women wear them in the summer.
J: Pedal pushers?
M: They’re like capris sort of. They’re named that because they won’t get caught in your bike spokes.
V: But they’re very tight, as pants go. But the church had to cut some slack in the summertime... It was 115 degrees.
[We’re looking at some of the newest RE/Search reprints, done in an 8x10 format...]
J: When the physical layout still was a thing and you’re cementing the text onto the layout board or whatever, they take a photograph of it basically. Is the contrast just so high that you can’t see the edges of the paper?
M: It’s on paper that has a blue grid and the blue doesn’t show up.
V: And you have like an architect’s graphing table.
M: The thing that it’s laid out on is bigger than the page.
V: You have to have a light box.
J: How’d you learn to do all the stuff with the physical layout? Did someone help you out with that?
V: Without friends you would get nothing done.
J: [flipping through Modern Primitives]: This book is so intense. You said this is the most popular one?
V: Yeah. It’s sold the most, by far.
J: Why do you think that is?
V: I don’t know. I didn’t think anyone would buy it. I thought it was too shocking.
A: All that stuff was pretty new at the time. Has interest increased as it became more mainstream?
V: Yeah. Basically no one had ever heard of body piercing. They’d sort of heard of tattooing, but not so huge, not such a variety. So that book gave thousands of people jobs doing tattoos and piercings!
A: You guys have any tattoos at all?
V: Nah. We don’t have time.
J: How’d you end up in this world?
M: From Gatewood, right?
V: Yeah, Charles Gatewood. He brought Kenneth Anger over in 1982 or so. I think I say that in the intro. The idea for that book was to put in the contents of one publication everything that humans have done since the beginning of time to allegedly beautify themselves. If I couldn’t get a human talking about it I got it out of a book and put it in the quotes in the back. I was trying to be thorough, but I’m sure I missed something. Very few people were doing piercing, like less than six all over the world. Literally. They were all gay. It was a gay thing.
I think there’s a macho college student subculture that likes to out-gross everyone else, or be edgier than everyone else. And they bought it and showed it to their friends, and then their friends bought it to shock other friends.
J: I had a copy of Apocalypse Culture, the Adam Parfrey book, when I was in high school. Basically, yeah, it was just shocking. You and he probably interview a lot of the same people. Were you guys friends?
V: He interviewed me. He’s quite a bit younger... Not that you can’t be friends with younger people, but it’s just a different generation. You just have time for very few people in your life. Only those who help you. He lived here for a while. He started this thing called Idea Magazine, and I was in his first issue.
J: It sounds like he was influenced by you. You have a look on your face right now...
V: Well.... A lot of people think what I did was for shock value, but it was absolutely not. I was being an amateur anthropologist. I want to know everything, and I don’t want to water it down or dumb it down.
Let’s put it another way: As an anthropologist I was always interested in the outer extremes of human behavior, and what’s perceived as normal and not. I love those societies in which people would literally go crazy, but it would be OK because they were in a trance state communing with a higher power.
I grew up with a black family for two years, and we went to this amazing church with a preacher named Pastor Robertson, in Long Beach. It was on Saturdays, and there’d be a big picnic after- wards on a huge grassy area next to the church. Every Saturday there’d come a point where all these women would start testifying in tongues, and then they fall on the floor and start shaking like they’re having epileptic fits. It was an amazing thing to see, because this is sanctioned. No one thought, You’re crazy, woman! No value judgment. They’d come out of the trance crying or sweating and everyone would congratulate them! [Laughs]
M: I think I accused you of shocking people when I first met you, and you’re like, “No no, I’m giving voice to people who normally don’t have an outlet.”
V: That’s true, too.
A: I don’t think of ‘shock’ in a pejorative way. I think of it as the sensation of being hit with something unfamiliar.
V: I learned early in life that there’s a lot more to know about than you think. You become drawn to finding out more and more extreme stuff. And it’s probably more fun, too.
I’m not scientific about it. It’s more intuitive. I guess I am almost 100% emotion-based. I’m not very rational. If I was more rational maybe I’d be richer. [Laughs]
J: Did you find this stuff shocking, personally? Like the stuff in the Modern Primitives book?
V: No. I mean, yes and no. I hate the split penis photo in there. I don’t wanna dwell on that one. But you just did what you did as thoroughly as you could really. And as respectfully, I suppose. You didn’t put anyone down for what they did, no matter what they did almost. Bob Flanagan, that’s my worst seller of all time. It’s too hardcore.
A: The super masochist?
V: Yeah. He and his wife are both performance artists. I would’ve put him in Modern Primitives, but I didn’t know he existed. We had various book openings at galleries, and Flanagan was the young whippersnapper who wanted to do his thing at them. Right in front of everyone he would nail his balls to a board! That happened at Southern Exposure Gallery, and a young man in the front row fainted. I said, Wow, that’s impressive! He didn’t die at least.
A: How’d you initially get a hold of someone like Burroughs?
V: I worked at City Lights. He would be around. I befriended him because of being raised in that Seventh Day Adventist town...At the age of 13 someone gave me an enormous pile of gun magazines. Sports and Field, Field and Stream, American Rifleman, Guns and Ammo...
M: ‘Sex no good, coffee no good, guns ok...’
V: Well, no one had guns. I got that job working for the beekeeper, where I got stung every 12 1/2 minutes. I saved up my money and bought a... If you’re 13 years old you’re not supposed to buy an automatic; you’re supposed to start out with a single shot bolt-action rifle. There were two made, one by Remington and one by Winchester. I think I got the Remington. There was a gun store, naturally, in the desert, quite a ways away. Somehow without a car I got there and bought the gun and ammo.
A: At 13?
V: Yeah. It wasn’t regulated. The desert mountains were three blocks from my house. I’d go there every day after school.
J: When’s the last time you shot guns?
V: A long time ago. I’m not sure.
J: At a range?
V: Yeah, you have to. You can’t shoot here. Although, I have shot in this room...
[Everyone laughs.]
V: You just set up a three inch telephone book as a backstop.
A: What would you shoot at? Cans or something?
V: Yes, exactly. You could shoot at rocks, though they do tend to bounce off. You set up various targets for yourself.
M: I wasn’t here for this.
V: So that’s what Burroughs and I bonded over. I joke that I brought Burroughs out of the gun closet. [Laughs] He had no one to talk about guns with. I’d read so much from a certain time frozen way back in the past that I actually knew a lot about them. That’s what started me doing mail order: I sent away for every free gun and sporting clothing catalog, anything you can think of. They’d give you a big fantasy life, and they’re pretty high quality color pictures. I built up a huge fantasy about going to South America on a horse and exploring the jungles. Like Burroughs actually did! Although I didn’t know Burroughs did it when I had this fantasy.