One afternoon a little more than 50 years ago, the photographer Michael Cooper wandered into the bar at the Chateau Marmont in LA and happened to run into a friend, the writer Terry Southern. Southern had time for just one drink, and then he had to get to the airport. He had an assignment from Esquire to cover the National Democratic Convention in Chicago. Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs were covering it too—their editor, Harold Hayes, had a feeling that the event might be better understood by absurdists rather than political hacks—and they’d planned to meet up with Allen Ginsberg.
Michael Cooper: Chicago 1968 9/14-10/7: Reception Fri 9/14 7-9 PM and Sat 2-6 PM, otherwise by appointment, Land and Sea Department, 3124 W. Carroll, landandseadept.com, press@hatandbeard.com, free.
In one scene in Southern’s story, he and his companions, running from the police and tear gas, take refuge in the vestibule of an apartment building near Lincoln Park.
Southern, who joined the conversation later because of technical difficulties, argued that the chaos of 1968 is different from the chaos of the present. “It’s such a fractured time now,” he said. “If I would envy anything from 1968 and the protesters who got their heads bashed in, it’s their single unified purpose. They wanted to make a statement.”
After the convention ended, Southern and Cooper left Chicago and went their separate ways. That week was one more episode in a friendship that was based, in part, on a shared fascination with what was new and interesting—what was happening. (They were both drawn to the novel A Clockwork Orange for the way it created a new language to address the violence in contemporary culture and collaborated on a screen adaptation that was never produced, says Nile Southern; the film was eventually made by Stanley Kubrick, with whom Terry had cowritten the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove in 1964.)
