Human Syndicate - Human Images

Getting Out of Bed with Richard Foreman

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Storytelling is, among other things, the art of regulating the flow of information shared with an audience. Playwright Richard Foreman is a foremost master of this art, withholding much that makes our world familiar and meaningful. In his plays, we are thrust into a room – perhaps suggestive of the human psyche – where information circulates without context, and language often appears to lose its capacity to bear information or even conjure words. Characters inhabit situations and events transpire, but usually without the problem resolution endemic to most fiction. Ultimately, we never know whether what we have witnessed is satirical, psychological, resolutely absurdist, or somehow all three concurrently. Enduring such a bewildering circumstance, the audience is challenged to find or impose order and meaning – never knowing which they are doing. As you may well imagine, this is not easy art. It may leave the theatergoer uneasy – even queasy – amid buzzers, flashing lights, warped music, and the voice of un-reason. One may even wonder whether it’s akin to what Jeremy Bentham said of natural rights: “nonsense upon stilts.” If, however, the official tastemakers are to be believed, this is theatre operating at a high degree of abstraction, offering sly humor and curious insight into our social and inner worlds.

Foreman directs at Tanglewood, 1968.

Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater made its debut in 1968 – a year redolent with meaning for alternative culture – and his plays have been a mainstay of the weird and wonderful (and wise?) ever since. He has written, directed, and designed more than fifty plays, received five “OBIE” (Off-Broadway) Awards for Best Play of the Year, the Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN Club Master American Dramatist Award, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, was elected officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France, and his direction of the 50th anniversary production of The Threepenny Opera was nominated for both T.O.N.Y. and Grammy Awards.

For nearly 20 years Foreman has launched his plays from a little theater on the grounds of the historic St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in New York City’s East Village. For those of us for whom an annual trek to Foreman’s demented dimension provides regular respite from worlds we are otherwise doomed to inhabit, I bear bad news: this year’s play is slated to be his last. And for those new to Foreman, or without the ability to see one of his plays in New York or when they tour Paris or Los Angeles or Berlin, there is good news: he will now be turning his prodigious talents exclusively to film making.

A blinkered guest in Foreman’s book, art, and technology engorged SOHO loft – one of the original lofts designed by George Maciunas – I feebly tossed feeble questions before the “Genius” himself. Despite his telling me that he “didn’t like people,” Foreman was a good sport, ruminating on whether alternative- and counter-cultures have futures, the keys to a vital art scene and to becoming an artist, the meta-politics of theatre, and his mystical yearnings. Alas, I still don’t understand why existentialists get out of bed in the morning. The Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers maintained surveillance (see above) and the remainder was captured by my electro-ear (see below).

SHIT: What first brought you to lower Manhattan?

RICHARD FOREMAN: I moved to lower Manhattan because, in the middle 1960s, I got friendly with Jonas Mekas, who was head of the underground film movement, and a close friend of his was George Maciunas, who was the head of Fluxus. At a certain point, George made his art setting up artists’ coops. It was totally illegal. I was coming down all the time to look at underground films. At one point, I told George that I was ready to take the risk and move downtown, and he got ten people to buy a building together. Starving artists did all the work of converting the manufacturing lofts into living lofts. I was going to films Jonas was showing all the time and, at one point, I dared to tell him that I was writing plays. I showed him a play. He allowed me to show it at his theater when the fire department closed it after they said that he didn’t have a proper license to show films, since it was a play.

What makes for a vibrant artistic community?

At the time, we all believed that the world was going to change. The 1960s were the first time that I felt I could breathe freely in America. I grew up in the 1950s, which was a dreadful time. I was horrified by the people who put the 1960s down as a horrible aberration. I didn’t take a lot of drugs – I was scared to – but a lot of it happened because Timothy Leary “turned people on.” Drugs can ruin your life, but there is no question that it opened the possibilities for a lot of previously uptight people.

Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception. What would counterculture mean in the 21st Century?

I have no idea. I don ’t think there will be any counterculture. Things are too well organized, with the bottom line, but who knows about the economy? I’m in no position to predict. I certainly don’t like the direction American culture [has been] headed for the past 20 years.

Photo via Real Time Arts.

Do you seek out any artists or venues that you think are countercultural?
No. I’m a hermit. If I wasn’t doing plays, which I will stop in a while, I would write films by myself and not see anybody. For a while, that was why I wrote plays. I’ve always been ambivalent about the theater, but I know that without forcing myself to work with people during rehearsal and performance, I would see too few people for it to be healthy for me. I don’t go out and seek things. I haven’t gone to theater in years – except maybe once or twice a year – [as] I don’t like sitting amongst all those people. I watch movies at home. Art is terribly important for me, but I just read the magazines. I rarely go to galleries or museums.

What advice would you give to a 25-year old Richard Foreman?

The only advice I give is this: If you have a vision and you really believe in it, the most important thing is to have courage. I’ve seen so many who, if they stuck to it long enough, were able to achieve what they wanted to. We live in a culture that discourages that. There are all kinds of blandishments that tend to lure you into the entertainment, or some other commercial, world. I think that’s death, but who am I to say that it’s something other people shouldn’t do? …. If official, successful artists tell you that something you’re doing is wrong, that’s a sign that it’s something you should focus on, not to eliminate it, but to radicalize it. When I was a young playwright, I studied at Yale with John Gasner, one of the two greatest teachers I’ve ever had. He said to me: “Richard, you’re very talented, but you have a flaw. When you get an effect that you like, you don’t like to let go of it. You want to repeat it or sustain it.” I thought about it the next day and thought that, maybe, what I thrill to is that effect and I need to place it at the center of my work. That’s what I’ve done. When I was young I did a big production of The Threepenny Opera, but I knew that it would not be my life’s work.

Richard Foreman directs the 50th anniversary production of Berrtold Brecht’s masterpiece.

Regarding Brecht, your theater, with some exceptions, is not overtly political. Where do you see the relationship between art and politics?

Back in the ‘70s and ’80s, some people would aggressively complain that I was too aesthetic. I would reply, that, in America, reactionary psychological mindsets came because people were afraid of not being able to make clear, easy distinctions. I always thought that training that everything in life is a mixture of black and white is a kind of mentality that produced progressively-oriented human beings. So, I always thought that my work was political in that it trained people to be open.

Your theater has a very distinct, disorienting look about it. Oddly enough, I’ve always found it reminiscent of some dreams I had as an adolescent. What do you hope to accomplish? Do you want to jar people from their beliefs or entertain them?

I honestly don’t want to do anything to them. All of us have many people inside us: the person your parents made, the person your school made, the person you made yourself, and so on.

One of the lower parts of me, an upper-middle class Jewish boy, wants to be a success. The part that makes art couldn’t care less. That part does the art for himself without a concern for how it affects other people. I try to engage in a conversation about art that’s been ongoing in the West for two thousand years. Certain things are missing in my life and in the culture. I want to make paradise for myself by filling these gaps. If other people can derive benefit from it, that’s great, but I don’t make it for them. I’m oriented to the artistic possibilities that have been created and I’ve been influenced by everyone I’ve read, every piece of art I’ve seen. Sometimes I think that I have the answer, but I eventually become revolted by what I’m creating, as if I’d eaten too much chocolate cake. I try to pay attention to what is really going on when I’m making something. I try to close myself off from everything when I’m creating.

In Astronome: A Night at the Opera, there is a score by John Zorn, the distribution of ear plugs and multiple warnings. Is your need to warn your audience actually a disappointment in them? In us? Do the warnings defeat the effect you hope to have?

Absolutely not. I need them. I always try to treat the audience as gently as possible. When I was 30, I wouldn’t have. I liked listening to LaMonte Young while sitting next to the speakers. There are many people in my audience who are going to have a hard time with many aspects of my plays and I want to make it as comfortable as possible for them. I don’t want to attack them, despite what people might think. Like the bright lights in people’s eyes. I find it beautiful. I find it like Turner’s paintings.

I find it hypnotic. It leads me into a quasi-dreamstate.

That’s OK, too. That’s like Turner, in a way. The idea that light, which we think of as revealing, can blind us also has spiritual and philosophical implications.

Astronome: A Night at the Opera (2009)

Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland

For forms of knowledge and knowing?

For getting past forms of knowledge. Knowledge is not the place you want to arrive. It’s a distance from reality.

Knowledge is a series of presuppositions. How can you act in the world without concepts and presuppositions?

You can’t. It’s a step toward the impossible, but art can be an attempt to take a step toward the impossible. I’m driven by an unquenchable longing for something I can’t quite define and I know that I can’t achieve.

Yours is a mystical quest?

In a way. So much of 20th Century art is secretly mystical.

Where do you look for inspiration today?
I’ve always read lots of philosophy, psychoanalysis, some poetry, [and] aesthetics. I look at paintings. I listen to music, although not as much as I used to, and I look at a lot of film. Even films that I think are great, I have a hard time watching for more than 15 minutes. I can recommend a book I’ve been reading and re-reading for the past five years. It’s a work by a pre-Socratic, mystically-oriented author: Peter Kingsley’s Reality. It’s evil of me, but I’m more influenced by Lacan than Freud.

Hence, your seeing life as a yearning to fill a lack that, by definition, cannot be filled.
Yes. We’re all broken people. Lacan and so many French thinkers, note that we are imprisoned by language.

Language, at its root, is communication.
Yes, but it’s also a prison determining what you will communicate.

Strong Medicine (with Carol Cane, Raul Julia, & Buck Henry)

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Jo Boobs Teaches the Va-Va-Voom

All but her belly buried in the floor;
And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat!
We flee her spasm through a fleshless door…
Then you, the burlesque of our lust -- and faith,
Lug us back lifeward -- bone by infant bone.
-- Hart Crane, "National Winter Garden," (1930)

“Jo Boobs” Weldon is Headmistress of The New York School of Burlesque, whose home at The Slipper Room is just a few blocks from where Lydia Thompson’s “London Blondes” brought burlesque to America and a stone’s throw from where Minsky’s original National Winter Garden made burlesque part of the American vernacular. Minsky’s notoriously established Gypsy Rose Lee as an icon synonymous with striptease, and launched the careers of Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers and Robert Alda before being closed in the name of public morality.

Is burlesque - a word which refers to turning things upside down - still able to subvert morals and mores? In a popular culture where the use of sexuality to sell consumer goods is banal, pornography of nearly every stripe is freely and instantly available, and sympathetic gay and lesbian characters are commonplace, is the self-conscious performance of gender merely campy fun or does it still have a liberating capacity? Can sex work, titillation, gender play and masturbation undermine heterosexual monogamy? Whose moralities and identities might they challenge?

Catherine MacKinnon argues that sexualized depictions of women in patriarchal societies reinforce misogyny to the point of constituting a form of violence. Do sexualized performances by women lead to their individual and collective debasement? Is stripping a phenomenon where women who appeal most to men are degraded whereas burlesque liberates women who stand outside the norms of beauty as prescribed by male desire? Considering stripping and prostitution, I ask whether everyone sells their bodies at every job? Further, when men pay a high premium to be with a woman or just to look at one, whose body is exploited? More specifically, does it make sense to import 20th Century standards of judgment to a 21st Century United States whose educational system produces more female post-graduates than male and whose career women earn 94.2% of the income of their male counterparts? Despite shifts in income and status, why do so few straight males study burlesque or work as strippers?

Jo Boobs and I met at the basement headquarters of her school on the coldest evening in recent years to explore questions of gender, activism, and whether she and her ilk are gender traitors or gender busters. She even stripped down to fighting gear for an intimate performance caught by our unblinking digital eyeball. (See above!) In June 2010, Jo will publish The Pocket Book of Burlesque (with a forward by Margaret Cho), a volume whose slender design can slip under the inspector’s prying gaze. The New York School of Burlesque is in sympathetic affiliation with Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque in Seattle and Michelle L'Amour's Burlesque Finishing School in Chicago as well as programs in Washington, D.C and elsewhere. When will someone open a campus in Tehran?

SHIT: How does burlesque differ from stripping?
Jo Boobs: To understand the difference, look at it from the audience’s point of view. If someone goes to a strip joint, they usually go in whenever they want, they pick the performer they want, they negotiate how they interact with them, they interact one-on-one, and they leave. When they go to a burlesque show, the show starts at a [predetermined] time, they pay a cover (not the performers), they watch the show, there isn’t usually any one-on-one interaction, and they leave when the performance is over.

I would also imagine that sexual titillation is the priority for someone at a strip club whereas entertainment, costuming, dance or some fantastic tableau may be the driving interest for someone at a burlesque revue.
From the performer’s point of view, the difference is mostly of intention. A dancer in a strip joint is at least trying to tailor her performance to maximize her income – a noble pursuit – by putting the erotic qualities up front, whereas burlesque numbers tend to be more glamorous, with a greater focus on costumes than nudity and on creative content. Some people don’t like making a distinction because it seems as though you have to privilege one to the other, but it is necessary to do so when describing to a potential producer or someone who may host your event at their venue, you have to be able to.

The New York School of Burlesque is just three blocks from where Minsky’s Burlesque was once located. Do you feel like burlesque has a natural home in the Lower East Side?
Yes, absolutely, I really do. This is where burlesque first came to from England and developed into the combination of satire and girly show we now know it as.

Many of the performers have costumes with traditional flourishes. What is the role of tradition in burlesque?
There is a strong nod to the retro, a fascination with the stylings of pin-ups and strippers of the 40s and 50s.

Burlesque’s heyday was the 1920s and 30s – with Gypsy Rose Lee and others. Why is it that people would focus on the 1950s?
The heyday of burlesque is hard to pin down. In Burleycue: An Underground History of Burlesque Days, Bernard Sobel, writing in the 30s, argues that burlesque died then. [Others] argue that it died when [Fiorello LaGauradia] passed a law making it illegal to use the word “burlesque” on a marquee and some argue that it died in the 50s or in the 60s with nude beaches. It’s just like rocknroll – it’s been killed a hundred times. There isn’t one heyday for burlesque, although striptease is easier to associate with one era. Once striptease had put a generation behind it, [burlesque] had a stigma. When I see women who did burlesque in the 40s or 50s, I see women who were fierce in the face of this stigma. I’ve talked to some of them – the actual women from photographs. Their lives were not easy. The women who did burlesque in the 20s and 30s had even more stigma. Some say that I’m celebrating an era when women were oppressed [whereas] I’m celebrating the spirit of women who were denigrated but insisted on being fierce and glamorous, anyway. They did not always choose this life. Other performers on their bills – comedians, actors, dancers, singers – could move into other media. The art of striptease artists was not allowed to travel in this way - they were outcasts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zz603DiK5U&feature=related

It has been argued that burlesque helped to break down the gender roles of the Victorian age by women removing their highly-encoded, restrictive head-to-toe coverings in public.
In the second half of the 18th Century, burlesque artists sometimes dressed like men or somewhere in between, as argued by Robert Clyde Allen in Horrible Prettiness. Lucky, who teaches burlesque at [New York University], suggests that what had shocked people was that gender was blurred. [Women] were dressed in tights – as only men had been allowed – and sang and made jokes and addressed the audience directly, in a male way. It was not just the nudity, but the inappropriateness. I’ve always celebrated inappropriateness in burlesque.

Among other things, burlesque means turning things upside down, a spirit of transgression. When Lydia and her troupe of blondes came to the U.S. at the origin of burlesque, dressing in a male and highly sexualized way, was partly responsible for the success and notoriety of the art form.
Definitely. I’ve been hanging out with drag queens and heavy metal dudes all my life. I’ve always wanted to play with gender like they do by playing up female characteristics sometimes to the point where people think I’m a guy in drag. That’s entertaining for me.

Like Victor Victoria! When and where did the most recent burlesque revival begin?
The current wave began in Los Angeles and New York in the mid-90s. In Los Angeles, “The Velvet Hammer” was a self-conscious effort to create a modern burlesque show with a Cramps-style nod to the past. They were friends with The Cramps, so it was no coincidence. In New York, we were doing things in different venues: I was doing it in strip joints, Tigger was doing it with Penny Arcade in “Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!” at gay bars, Dirty Martini was doing it at “Pink Inc.,” Julie Atlas Muz was doing it at Serena Vixen’s “Red Vixen Show,” and Bonnie Dunn was doing it at “Blue Angel.” Kate Valentine of The Velvet Hammer also had a show in New York were all of these performers would do their numbers. At the time, there was no burlesque scene, but we were all interested in these images, flappers, iconic women of other ages, trying to put ourselves in their shoes, getting naked, and being generally irreverent while we do it. It’s still transgressive even if nudity doesn’t have the same meaning as it did in the Victorian era. It’s not something you do in an office and you don’t do it seductively in front of the children. In a class society, your primary status – what you do for a living – is described by the way you dress. Stripping has the connotation of: “Deal with my body. What do you see when you just see my decorated body, not my dressed body?” I’m not the biggest nudist, but I live with Julie Atlas Muz. She’s a nudist! It’s like living with clowns – it’s the best thing ever! I’m still uptight about nudity because I worked in the nude for a living. It has a certain specific place in my life. It’s still transgressive.

It certainly puts you in jeopardy in a variety of ways. There are some detractors who will say that you are feeding into women sexually objectifying themselves. How do you respond to this?
In some cases, it’s just true, but it’s not degrading every time someone is seen as a sexual object. I don’t have a lot of experience with 1980s-style feminist interpretations of what gender means: the horrors of the male gaze. [It’s the idea that] every time a man enjoys looking at a woman, he objectifies her and degrades her. I understand that if someone works at places like trauma centers or in trafficking, they may come to see men that way, but I don’t. Even in the sex industry, all men are not like that. I’ve met men like that, but only some men are like that and only under some circumstances. In the same way, some women performers seek that attention and some do not. It should be seen on a case-by-case basis. Until you judge each specific situation, you can’t address what’s going on or the underlying causes. Some people are just too skewed to see what’s going on. What I see in burlesque are women who say, “Fuck it! If I do not conform to Victoria’s Secret models or wear the make up or hair style or shoes that I’m supposed to wear, or if I’m fatter or skinnier or deformed, if you don’t like it, it’s your problem, not mine. I don’t need permission from Howard Stern’s interns to be hot enough to have fun.” I don’t see how that’s not feminist. I know that there are certain privileges given to people with a certain appearance, but I’m still going to have this. I’ve never met a guy who says, “I can’t wait to meet a girl who wears false eye lashes on the top and bottom of her eyes, wears a lot of feathers, and glues things to her nipples.” The idea that we are adhering to the dictates of the male gaze is beyond my comprehension.

Whereas in a strip show, the performance has its climax at the legal limit of nudity or contact, whereas, in burlesque, the journey – the performance – is the climax. Further, there are easily as many women in a burlesque audience as men and many of them men may be gay or bisexual. It doesn’t seem like a particularly heterosexist occasion.
I’m not saying that burlesque is all of these things to all people all of the time, but our performers are generally gender curious and choosing what they do. They don’t get paid more to act more feminine, whereas in a strip joint they [would]. Our performers define what they do, not the other way around. Our audience wants to be shocked and awed. That said, strip joints are not the natural opposite of burlesque. They are not places where men go just to be awful to women. I didn’t experience the sex industry that way and I was in it for fifteen years. The idea that to be sexualized is always degrading does not make sense to me. I have experienced being sexualized as degrading and as liberating. Any polarization is going to be inaccurate. I have this perspective, not because I am privileged, but because I have actually worked with, literally, thousands of other women in these situations. As an activist, I have spoken with women from all over the world who didn’t wish to be infantilized or described as helpless, who didn’t want their choices to be automatically categorized as invalid or to be called “Uncle Toms” for their decisions. There is a wide range of experience out there. Those who see objectification and exploitation operating one hundred percent of the time are not looking at what’s going on most of the time. It isn’t the only form of male behavior. Catherine MacKinnon says that it is the definition of “male,” but she doesn’t see her privilege as a skinny, white woman sitting in an ivory tower.

Catherine MacKinnon is the very definition of privileged. Clan MacKinnon is an immensely wealthy family with its own island.
Linda Lovelace said, in my presence, that she felt just as exploited to the same degree by MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin as by her ex-husband.

When did you start the New York School of Burlesque and why?
It started about five years ago with a class people asked me to teach.

What classes are taught?
We teach basic movement classes, so people can a bump from a grind and what a peal and a tassel twirl are. We also teach isolations – which are healthy and useful for communicating. Dr. Lucky teaches theater classes and the World Famous BOb teaches glamour and confidence classes.

You teach women how to own the room – not be owned by the room.
That’s a good way of describing it. Bob and Lucky have unique approaches that you can’t get anywhere else. I have been training Darlinda Just Darlinda and Gal Friday to teach my classes, and they’ve started their own. Peekaboo Pointe teaches from a pilates background and Angie Pontani teaches go-go. I’m about to teach a class where, at some point, in each act, women will appear male. I play Satan.

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Jack Terricloth is Alive and at Large in Gotham

Many of us across the Coilhouse nation dream of becoming full-time artists, and some of us actually become so, but few follow our vision as fearlessly as Jack Terricloth. Jack never learned any marketable skill like speed typing or graphic design or computer programming. He’s never had a “Plan B” of any kind whatsoever. He just jumped out his window and – wooosh! – he started flying. While most of us were in college, Jack was a full-time punk rocker. In fact, he never even bothered to graduate from high school. What would cause an abundantly gifted, middle class kid from a stable family to behave so recklessly? Why wasn’t he disciplined by a fear of falling through the social safety net?

While our current global economic bust forecloses conventional career options for many of us, it’s also an opportunity to change consumption patterns and general complicity with an economic order that is clearly unsustainable in the long run. Will the economic downturn lead more people to unconventional lives or will it make us ever more desperate to fit into the economic system? Will global recession be good news for the planet and for making art? Is this the best time to follow Timothy Leary’s advice: "Turn on, tune in, drop out"? Likewise, as file sharing rings the death knell of the music industry, will we see less mass-orchestrated pop sensations? Will musicians be more inclined to self-expression and artistic exploration once they no longer have the temptation to sell out?

Jack on the beach in Spain (Photo courtesy of the World/Inferno)

I first met our man o’ cloth way back in 1991, while I was working at Reconstruction Records, an all-volunteer punk record store in New York’s East Village. Back then, Jack was a snot-nosed teenager living under an assumed name with more than assumed parents in suburban New Jersey and fronted the band, Sticks and Stones [link to www.chunksaah.com/sticksandstones/news.html]. With Jack at the helm, Sticks and Stones restlessly explored new musical terrain – hardcore, punk, goth, techno, pop – until 1995, when his bandmates told him that they would go no further. Undeterred, Jack started the current cabaret revival by assembling the World/Inferno Friendship Society. The World/Inferno has since also explored a smattering of Northern Soul, pop, klezmer, and African-American spirituals. Now, several albums and scores of tours later, the World/Inferno has embarked in a more ambitious direction. They have integrated theater into their live performance in a production titled: “Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s Twentieth Century.” Doubtless, their tour will inspire some imitators, but there ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.

Always ambitious for art and undaunted by the strictures of grammar, Mr. Terricloth has also penned a series of short stories. They have been published as The Collected Cloth. [link to http://www.jackterricloth.net/] “Backsish,” the longest of the tales, is the story of a police informant. Our world is composed of wheels within wheels, dear reader, wheels within wheels.

On a bitter cold evening in New York’s first healthy winter in a decade, Jack was generous enough to belch confessions of artistic and political heresy into electro eye and ear. It should offer a very intimate view of Mr. Cloth, set as it was, deep inside his Gotham City grotto. We hope that you will find it tasty food for your hungry muse.

World/Inferno - Tattoos Fade - Zombie Prom!

SHIT: What were you like as an adolescent and when did you discover that you could sing?

Jack Terricloth: I was very angry. I always liked singing and started playing guitar just to facilitate singing only to discover that I couldn’t sing and play guitar at the same time. I remember, almost to the moment, that day when my skill level jumped to where I could do both. I was in bands since I was 15. There are photos of me and my sister singing “Rag Mop” at 5.

When did you first feel really different from ordinary people and decide to live an unconventional life?

JTC: Pretty early, maybe at 5 or 6.

When did you think: “Have a career like my dad? Not me.”

JTC: Around the fifth grade. I remember waiting for punk rock for a long time. When I discovered it, in the seventh grade, I thought: “That Bowie thing is cool, but this is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life.”

When did you feel like an outsider? Was there a time when the other kids were doing things that were age and gender appropriate and you discovered that you had no interest?

JTC: I was a very awkward child. I was pigeon-toed and wore braces on my legs, so I felt like an outsider early on. I was also wearing Coke-bottle glasses when I was very, very young.

Jack bursts through the paper (Photo by Lauren Goldberg, www.fairytalevegas.com)

What is the most trouble you’ve ever been in?

JTC: As a young person in high school with little money and not much to do, I enjoyed making prank phone calls. I’d call the operator and say that I wanted to kill myself and hang up. They’d call back and plead with me. I could spend 45 minutes that way. Or I’d call Pat Robertson’s organization. One day, I called the operator and quoted a Suicidal Tendencies song. I said: “I shot President Reagan and I’m going to shoot him again and again.” Little did I know that [Reagan] was in the next town over. The Secret Service took it all very seriously and closed my high school. The next day, my punk rock gang went to the school library to make photocopies of an article about it. The librarian noticed. The principal caught one of us and threatened him. He cracked under the old “this is going to go on your permanent record” bit. The Secret Service swooped in at my bus stop and held me incommunicado for a day and a half. They even took a gun out and rested it on the table in front of me, like in a movie. Eventually they realized that I was just a kid, but gosh, if that sort of thing were to happen today, imagine about how much MORE trouble I would’ve been in. It got me probation, which prevented me from quitting high school a year later. It didn’t end there. Supposedly, they expunge your record when you turn 21, but, for years, I would get a phone call whenever a president was in central New Jersey that would ask: “What are you doing today? Not thinking of going to Somerville, are you?” “No, I wouldn’t dream of going to Somerville.”

World/Inferno Friendship Society - Secret Service...

Have you ever noticed your phone being bugged or your band spied on?

JTC: Not since I came of age. I try not to be paranoid. Maybe they did expunge my record. I think I blew someone’s security clearance. A member of the World/Inferno was trying to get security clearance and was mysteriously turned away.

Being that you’re a band with these outspoken views and, being that you already have this personal history, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of your bandmates have been informants. After all, they say that one out of five citizens of East Germany informed for the STASI.

JTC: We don’t have to go there. Have you seen The Lives of Others?

How do people get into your Society? Are they tapped, like in Skull and Bones?

JTC: Pretty much. Generally, they are people we’ve known for a long time. We wait them out.

Jack Grimace (photo by Rose Callahan - www.rosecallahan.com)

As long as I’ve known you, you’ve always been a bit of an aesthete. Were you a debonair youth?
Was your double Mohawk your most outrageous haircut?

JTC: I went though the usual gamut of spiky hair and Mohawks, but the funniest one was when I was going for liberty spikes, but my hair was too curly. It looked like I had horns. We used egg yokes or sugar or glue to keep our hair up.

I used Ivory soap.

JTC: But then, when you went to shows, and started sweating, what then?

I never sweat. The Damned were among your early influences. What was your favorite Damned album?

JTC: I’m going to go for a controversial choice: Fantasmagoria. It was the first new one that came out when I was into the scene. I saw them on that tour a few times. I know that many Damned aficionados will scoff.

I denounce you.

JTC: laughs

I remember you playing “Tattoos Fade” for me and telling me that “Sticks and Stones” wouldn’t play it because they thought it was “too spooky” sounding. Was that the birth of the World/Inferno?

JTC: It was indeed. I wrote that song for Sticks and Stones, and I thought it was the best song I’d ever written. The boys said, “No.” So, I put it aside for a while and thought that I’d start another band to play it.

What was your inspiration for the song?

JTC: Those hardcore toughguys preening about their latest ink.

Do you still have “N.I.” tattooed on your chest?

JTC: Yes. It’s the only prison tattoo that looks better today than when I got it. I was in Juvenile Detention at Skillman in New Jersey. We had nothing else to do. We used a needle and ink. It’s my only tattoo. I got in a fight with a skinhead.

Well?

JTC: I won the fight.

Jack in Sticks and Stones, Photo courtesy of World/Inferno

Some skinhead! He obviously hadn’t read the book about attacking in superior numbers.

JTC: This skinhead was prank calling my family’s house in the middle of the night because he didn’t like punk rockers. We had an actual rumble at a skate ramp. It was a real gang fight. We won. He called the police.

Whose side were they on?

JTC: They didn’t seem to mind that we beat the skins.

What got you interested in cabaret music? Do you remember when you first remembered your Weimar?

JTC: I rediscovered Kurt Weill when I was bartending at The Continental. I’d given up making music and gave up on punk rock but wanted something that was still political. Adrian from Wandering Dragon recommended it to me. He always had vodka. He also worked at Le Ciel Rouge.

That was where, performing as a two-piece, you had the very first World/Inferno show. What do you find fresh and interesting to listen to nowadays?

JTC: I don’t listen to contemporary music much at all. I’ve been listening to Buddy Rich.

Where do you see your next musical horizon?

JTC: We’re supposed to write a new record soon. I’m thinking of a quieter record, but I’m not sure if that will fly. We won’t do two concept records in a row.

Read any good books lately?

JTC: I’m reading a biography of Lorca. I’ve been ripping him off.

Jack contemplating wine (Photo by Rose Callahan)

You’ve been largely nocturnal for most of the time I’ve known you. Are you “waiting for the blackout”? Do you have a fear of normal people? What’s up? Feel vindicated by increasing skin cancer rates?

JTC: Normal people do piss me off, but I’m not afraid of them. It’s just my default setting. When I was working at the Museum [of Natural History], well, there were issues.

Rocknroll never forgets, but museums do, eh?

JTC: They were very nice to me, but I was away an awful lot.

I remember you saying that you’d rather be famous than wealthy. How would you like to be remembered?

JTC: Just to be remembered would be swell. Maybe remembered as “that guy who was brave and gave me some ideas.

Do you get credit in the indie world?

JTC: Every time I get recognized it’s by someone who doesn’t like me: “I know you. You’re that loudmouth singer from that stupid band!” Or they recognize me when I’m having a fight with my ladyfriend on the street.

Today, with the internet, the record industry seems to be headed for the trashbin. How do feel about your not having signed with a major label?

JTC: We had an offer from Tommy Boy, a subsidiary of Warner. They had the idea that we should go techno. The first singles had loops, but they really didn’t get us and I didn’t give a damn about them.

Are downloading and filesharing forms of piracy that you endorse?

JTC: I endorse all forms of piracy. Information wants to be free. The best thing about the World/Inferno forum is the YSI sharing page where the kids in the greater World/Inferno community ask each other for records. It has 500 pages.

500 pages of albums anyone can download?

JTC: Let’s see…485. They do expire, though. Bands make money at shows. Record companies make money off records.

Is “Addicted to Bad Ideas” a turning point for the World/Inferno? Is it a nod toward Richard Wagner’s Gesamptkunstwerk?

JTC: It could be, but I wouldn’t put Wagner and Peter Lorre in the same sentence.

You just did. It’s now happened twice in one day. A catastrophe to language.

JTC: People have told us that we’re theatrical. It’s been very broadening and a lot of work. I’ve been making fun of actors for years. It turns out that they work very hard. I’d like to apologize to all of the actors out there.

Do you see more theater in your future?

JTC: Definitely, but not on the next record. Our next project will be a live radio show that we’ll take on the road.

With live Foley effects?

JTC: Yes

What can we learn about the 20th Century from the life of Peter Lorre?

JTC: Everything. Everywhere I looked in the 20th Century, he was there. He was born in Transylvania. What punk rocker doesn’t have a thing for vampires? He moved to Vienna, where he worked with Fritz Lang. He moved to Berlin, in Weimar, and worked with Bertolt Brecht. There was some unpleasantness in Germany in the ‘30s and he was Jewish, so he left for London. In London, he worked with Alfred Hitchcock, working phonetically, since he didn’t speak English yet. It fascinates me that someone could do that. He moved to Hollywood. He worked with John Huston and Humphrey Bogart. He was interviewed informally by HUAC at his home. After the war, he moved back to East Germany to work with Brecht again. He was a lifelong drug addict. He did everything that was good to do in the 20th Century.

You have a “what would Jack do?” button on your website. Jesus is said to have said, “If you want to follow me, be like me.” How is your life exemplary? What lessons would you like to teach the next generation of young soul rebels?

JTC: How to get away with it. I want to be an example of someone who made their dream real. Following your dream is tenable and sustainable. You don’t need to get a day job and live a life of quiet desperation.

You live in a historically Italian neighborhood. Do you feel especially at home here?

JTC: Yes. When I first moved in, people were suspicious. They asked me if I really was Italian. Just today, I saw a school kid throw his lunch at a yuppie. It seemed like it was scripted just for me. The yuppie defended himself: “I invest a lot in this neighborhood. You may not like that me and my friends are moving here, but we have a lot to offer.” I didn’t get involved. The kid said something like, “Go back where you came from, you yuppie scum!”

It was a hate crime!

JTC: That’s how the yuppie scum took it. Unfortunately, the yuppie followed me into a liquor store and wanted to get me to talk about it. I pretended to not speak English.

Do you have a personal connection to Nazi Germany?

JTC: My grandmother left Nazi Germany because my grandfather was Jewish. He was secretly Jewish outside the home. It said “Catholic” on his passport, but he celebrated Jewish holidays at home and spoke Yiddish. He died in the 1960s, before I was born. I learned German from my grandmother, which is why I speak old fashioned German. It amuses Europeans. The first time Sticks and Stones went to Germany, I asked for a pen, “Haben Sie eine Feder?” They laughed and asked why I wanted a feather. I’d literally asked for a quill.

Jack's grandpa as a child. Photo courtesy of World/Inferno

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The Gospel According to Reverend Billy

“Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” - Rousseau

The prime, often countervailing, logics of 21st Century America - capitalism and democracy - seem dangerously out of balance today. Meanwhile, vestigial factors, like Puritanism, sometimes affect public life in surprising ways. Since the Giuliani years, America’s largest city - New York - has seen lower crime, infrastructural investments, an infusion of capital, a proliferation of chain stores, a vast profusion of surveillance devices and, perhaps, the general evisceration of democracy. Just recently, Mayor Michael Bloomberg ignored widespread opposition to the construction of two billion dollar stadiums and the much-maligned Atlantic Yards construction project. More egregiously, he bullied our City Council into overturning a term limits law that had been passed fifteen years earlier by public referendum. Now running for his third term, Bloomberg’s campaign war chest has intimidated all prominent Democratic challengers.

As politics appears as (yet another) massively-financed spectacle of buzzwords, scandals, outsized personas and deep psychology, is it possible to enter the political fray without selling your soul?
Can we get the attention of the public eye by taking on an identity at once striking and also familiar to our public culture? Fifteen years ago, William Talen began the process of becoming a New Yorker and re-inventing himself as "Reverend Billy." Today, armed with this identity, he enters churches of consumption – like the Disney store in Times Square – to project a powerful message opposing corporate retail, a culture of consumerism, and the encroachment of our public spaces. Reverend Billy’s charisma, energy, and smarts have gathered him a gospel choir, the attention of CNN, a documentary film by Morgan Spurlock "What Would Jesus Buy", and now the nomination of New York’s Green Party for the 2009 mayoral race. voterevbilly.org Reverend Billy combines a Nixonian charm, the overly stylized tropes of a preacher, and, perhaps as prime mover, a rich Calvinist heritage. America has a long history of Calvinist preachers – you may know them as “Puritans” – who rail against impure desires, the “moneychangers,” and fret mightily for the souls of their congregants.

photo by Tina Zimmer

SHIT: Words like “community” and “neighborhood” have a special resonance for your choir. Are you a New Yorker?

Reverend Billy: I grew up in Watertown, South Dakota and Rochester, Minnesota, and I always dreamed of being a New Yorker, the way you can dream of New York on the prairie. When the satellites would go up across the night sky, I used to think they were New York City flying through space. I first moved here in 1974, stayed a couple of years. Moved back again in the early 80s and, for a longer period of time, in the late 80s. I was like a hitchhiker, I would come and crash in the Lower East Side. In March of 1994, I don’t know why exactly, my commitment became permanent.

SHIT: Do you feel like a New Yorker?

Reverend Billy: I do now because I perform in so many neighborhoods. I marry, baptize and bury New Yorkers in so many different boroughs. We - me and Savitri and the choir - some of us were born here and many of us are immigrants, we like the idea of a homemade spirituality that does not necessarily come from an organized religion. That idea became a New York idea after 9-11. Many of us gathered in rooms. The Reverend Billy idea of a different God or Goddess every day with another name, staying out of trouble with deities that cause us to kill each other, that kind of fellowship, I needed it, too.

SHIT: Is there a distinctive meaning to being a New Yorker, as opposed to other large cities, like Cleveland (with all due respect to the citizens of Cleveland)?

Reverend Billy: There’s a kind of harsh dance in New York. I’m a refugee from the theater world. When we aim for that proscenium arch that is the space between two buildings and there are too many of us, we just hit each other. We laugh and seduce and swear and culture happens. That’s New York. I’ve been in love with that for a long time. New York has its own eccentric, yet universal feeling.

photo by Tina Zimmer

SHIT: Where, when and why did you first become politically active?

Reverend Billy: We were always political, the Church of Stop Shopping, which became the Church of Life After Shopping during the recession. I was complaining to the choir that I was screaming “Stop shopping!” to people who were broke. That might have been a prophesy last year, but now we have to think about how to live after the consuming culture, with all its pain and glory, has crashed. It was always political. In the late 90s, when I was preaching in the doorway of the Disney Company: “Mickey Mouse is the Antichrist, my child. Don’t bring your little tourist family into this den of iniquity. They’re sweatshop products, every one of them. You don’t want to buy those Pocahontas pajamas!”

SHIT: What was it that drew you into politics and when? Was there a moment, when talking to a teacher or parent or friend, when you thought that the world isn’t as it could be?

Reverend Billy: As far as the psychological damage in me that makes me want to help everybody, I don’t know. I’m a Dutch Calvinist from western Michigan and these are severe, right-wing, judgmental people who are terrified: hell is very close and heaven is not promised. John Brown, who started the Civil War with Harriet Beacher Stowe, the lady who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. [Brown] was a Calvinist. Abraham Lincoln was a Calvinist. I think that Calvinism is not something that’s so directly a religious bequest as it’s a fascistic psychic presence, as it is for me. I was raised by them. I was supposed to be in the Dutch Reformed Church.

SHIT: As a parishioner or as a minister?

Reverend Billy: The difference is not that great. It’s a cult. It’s not quite the same thing as the upper crust Dutch of [Martin] Scorsese’s “Age of Innocence.” It’s more like the Afrikaners who invented Apartheid...

SHIT: …or the people Max Weber wrote about in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism?

Reverend Billy: Exactly.

SHIT: At it’s base, in terms of Weber, Calvinism leads to a certain disquietude, a neurosis, because the Elected are few in number and we are so great in number can never know who is so destined since acts themselves cannot bring us to heaven.

Reverend Billy: God is the ultimate elect, though the high end of the Chamber of Commerce may to persuade you that they are, so you become culturally neurotic.

SHIT: Now, you, yourself are running for “election.” An interesting twist, isn’t it?

Reverend Billy: You gave me some goosebumps - you’re getting too close! Running against a God-like figure, with his Falcon-900 jets and his eleven million dollars a week that he makes, there is a certain psycho drama there. A shrink would have a field day with the whole thing.

SHIT: Bill Thompson got the endorsement of the Working Families Party. Why didn’t they give you the endorsement?

Reverend Billy: They didn’t even invite Reverend Billy to the debate. They got their signals crossed. Two different sides of the office were telling mutually-exclusive falsehoods. One part of the office was saying, “You didn’t respond to our request,” which was not true, and the other part said, “You’re a protest candidate, and we love that, but we’re interested in people who can win.” What we really need in New York right now [is] new voices, new imaginations, new ideas. We need to not default back to traditional solutions - they’re not working. It’s a mistake to exclude third party ideas. They need to come out into the air and we need to accept or reject or argue with or be changed by them.

SHIT: What more can be done to help prepare New York City, flat islands near sea level, from global warming?

Reverend Billy: Today we’re sending out press releases, pretending we’re the Intrepid Museum, accepting Bloomberg’s two Falcon-900 jets, saying that he’s so ashamed of his CO2 emissions that he’s donating them to the museum. We need a leader who says, “We’re addicted to the two stroke engine. We’re addicted to leaf blowers and generators in parks.” More than half of New Yorkers still believe that we should drive everyday. We still don’t have a leader who will go into people’s lives and say: “Recycling is not working right now. We sill have a nine mile long convoy of garbage trucks leaving the City every 24 hours - 12,000 tons - and we pay people to take our landfill. When we have a rain storm of a certain size, our sewers overflow into our water system, and we sometimes don’t have filters to keep the water clean enough fast enough.” We don’t have a leader. [Bloomberg] is not the guy who he says he is in his ads in his windbreaker at the corner deli talking to people. That’s a video game. He isn’t that guy. We need someone who is comfortable going into the neighborhoods and saying, “We all have to change now and the rich can’t buy their way out of it. We all have to change together or these streets are going to be under water.”

photo by Tina Zimmer

Having written an article decrying the evils of shopping malls twenty years ago, I wonder if Reverend Billy’s message is especially timely in an age of ever-bigger, ever-greedier capital. Does working for a big corporation make you an entrepreneur or a bureaucrat? When chain stores achieve virtual monopolies over advertizing media, joint ventures with government, and prime locations, do we shop in them under our own volition?

On the other hand, do Reverend Billy’s antics disrespect your choice to bring your kid to a Disney store without some loudmouth with a megaphone and a choir hectoring you? Is this a case of personal decisions having a truly political nature or is righteousness slipping into self-righteousness? If Billy’s anti-consumerist crusade is, as he says, psychologically rooted in his Calvinist heritage, what can we learn from the history of “Puritanical” movements? How do Calvinists regard freedom of choice? Should his candidacy trouble those fearful of religion (mysticism, spirituality) in politics or is this a lampoon that suggests the opposite?

Just how dire is our condition? Does the repeal of mayoral term limits suggest the eclipse of democracy or are term limits an affront to the free choice of citizens to vote for whomever they choose? Do the excesses of the Bloomberg years require a reformist leader from outside the two-party axis? Are Billy’s moxie and inventiveness necessary for a leader facing dangers created by business as usual? Is the story of his campaign that New York City politics is a plutocracy, a vital democracy open to all voices, or a joke worthy of performance art? Has Reverend Billy‘s experience as a performance artist and political activist provided him with a sense of the City unknown to party machines? Even if he doesn’t win, is his candidacy a success for having introduced a unique and important set of issues? Supposing again that he doesn’t win in his bid for mayor, would a candidate who is solely dedicated to the issues run for a lower elected office or return to protest in civil society?

In practical terms, what would happen to New York City if Reverend Billy was elected? Would we have a greener, more egalitarian, pluralistic city, one more open to entrepreneurship? Or would the wealthy and their enterprises - like the Stock Exchange - merely move out of state? Since the stock market accounts for nearly ten percent of the City’s budget and one percent of tax filers provide nearly HALF of revenue, would New York City return to how it was in the 1970s, when it went bankrupt and lost a million inhabitants (despite immigration)? Does the addition of one million residents since 1990, at a time when Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and other cities shrank, suggest the City has been better run by Republicans? Is New York City a hostage to capital? Do bankers make good neighbors? Is it possible or advisable to be principled under these circumstances? If not now, when?

As being and seeming are smudged in postmodern performativity, a question emerges: Is Reverend Billy a reverend-turned-activist-turned-actor-turned-reverend-turned-politician or an activist-turned-actor-turned-reverend-turned-politician or an actor-turned-reverend-turned-politician or a politician-turned-actor-turned-reverend-turned-politician? You decide – especially those of you who can vote on November 3rd in New York City.

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Clive Thompson, “Why the Next Civil Rights Battle Will Be Over the Mind,” Wired, March, 24, 2008.

Thomas P. DiNapoli, New York State Comptroller, Press Release, October 30, 2007.. http://www.osc.state.ny.us/press/releases/oct07/103007.htm