In the late 1960s, Alexander "kiko" Blake was the notorious
leader of an unsavory Lower East Side anarchist collective
called Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. As a young historian
who studies that period, I'd spent almost three years trying
to locate him. All the leads I'd followed went nowhere.
It was as if Kiko had vanished, every bit as thoroughly
as a jet contrail. Not that this was terribly surprising.
Even in his heyday, Kiko cultivated an air of mystery.
In the early 60s, he was an abstract-expressionist painter
who signaled his lack of compromising nuances by dressing
completely in black. Later in the decade, he used to strut
around St. Marks Place and Second Avenue, longhaired and
bearded like any number of hippies, but instead of adorning
himself in flowers and beads, he wore a leather jacket,
carried a switchblade and peddled manifestos full of cryptic
poetry and angry agitprop. The Motherfuckers described themselves
as a kind of politicized street gang, but in the media they were
known only as "a group with a certain unprintable name."
Their general attitude toward the counterculture summons to
mind something Patti Smith later said about
rock 'n' roll: "We created it; let's take it over!" -Poe Yo (1439)
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