Rachel performing at Surf Reality on Allen Street, NYC, 1998
“Look, Dad,” shouted the bald guy onstage, his face magenta and the veins in his forehead starting to bulge. “I’m warning you now: you’re gettin’ me plenty STEAMED!”
It was another night at Reverend Jen’s Anti-Slam, the freakiest, friendliest, most fascinating open mic in New York City. Mike Raphone, a crowd favorite, was onstage, complaining about his job.
Like many New Yorkers, he had a lot to say. So like the rest of us, he came to the Anti-Slam every Wednesday to rant. Everyone enjoyed the retro, 1950’s lingo that peppered Mike Raphone’s rants: addressing other guys, especially ones who irritated him, as “Dad”, and describing his frequent fits of rage as “gettin’ steamed.”
Divorced, thirty-something, and the father of a kid who lived in another state with his ex, Mike Raphone worked during the day as a mailroom clerk for a Manhattan publishing company. A veteran of the New York punk scene, at night he played with his band in the few rock-n-roll hellholes that remained in a New York that was gentrifying with dismaying rapidity.
With the exception of Reverend Jen, I hardly ever learned people’s real names at the Anti-Slam, because your real name wasn’t nearly as important as the name you made for yourself.
Besides Mike Raphone, there was Reverend Hank, Queen Kathleen, World Famous *BoB*, Faceboy, Gecko Girl, Francis P. McNerdtz, Carmen Mofongo, Velocity Chyaldd…
Real names just didn’t do justice to the characters that people became in this weird little black-box theater on Ludlow Street.
If America is the land of the Self-Made Man, New York is the Island of Delightful New Identity. The only limit to who you can be is your own imagination, and that’s one of the reasons I loved living there. When I arrived there in 1996, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was like a leper colony of mainstream America, attracting societal rejects from all corners of the nation like some sticky, degenerate magnet. When I walked into Reverend Jen’s Anti-Slam for the first time, I felt instantly at home.
I began doing stand-up comedy at open mics in Austin, Texas, which had their share of weird characters. But that scene was like a basket of white bread compared to the freak show I found in New York. In Austin, comedy was comedy, strippers were strippers, and the criminally insane were safely locked away in institutions, except for the one they elected Governor of Texas in 1994 and went on to become the President of the United States in 2000.
In New York, everything was thrown together into one small theater. Sure, there were comedians, actors and writers trying out new material. But then you might also have a chick who made a living doing some kind of shady unspecified sex work whose act consisted of stripping down to her underwear and rolling on the floor in a cathartic ecstasy to an electronic composition that she’d composed herself.
That same chick might produce a long bread knife and insert it into her panties while moaning and writhing on the floor. After a few extremely uncomfortably seconds, a dark red substance would coat her thighs and belly. Then an alarm would sound that six minutes had passed – Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring! and she’d hurriedy collect her knife and clothes and leave the stage, to be followed by a gay man from the Deep South who sang throaty-voiced blues songs through a sock puppet.
The sock puppeteer might then be followed by a guy I’ll call Giant Jim, an affable character with shaggy blond hair and a beard who always dressed in camouflage fatigues that smelled a little bit on the ripe side because Giant Jim was, well, homeless. Or, if you’d prefer to think of it this way, his home was a cave in Central Park. Giant Jim wrote poetry, and walked 80 blocks south every Wednesday simply for the pleasure of reading it to the Anti-Slam audience.
The final touch on Giant Jim’s outfit was a large tool belt brimming with instruments necessary for his survival in the wilds of Central Park: tape measure, flashlight, notebook and pens, screwdriver, hammer, and a Swiss army knife. The rest of us at the Anti-Slam tried not to think about the variety of ways that Giant Jim — if one day he wasn’t feeling so friendly — could make any one of us disappear, right down to the last fingernail.
There was World Famous *BoB*, a beautiful, big-boned, big-bazoomed burlesque artist who was so statuesque that she was occasionally mistaken for a man.
World Famous *BoB* at Coneyland, Brooklyn.
There was Michael Portnoy, a performance artist whose projects include
“an aerobic restaurant where food leaps out from the walls, and Icelandic cockroach porn.” We knew each other through the New York alternative comedy scene, but he later irritated the world and alarmed Bob Dylan at the Grammys by invading the stage during Dylan’s performance with the words “Soy Bomb” painted on his naked torso.
There was Christopher Brodeur, also known as Peter Etcetera, a penniless, professional pain in the ass and the personal nemesis of Mayor Giuliani, who was able to jail Brodeur for a month at Riker’s Island on harassment charges. Brodeur won later in court, but was arrested again in 2005 for harassing Mayor Bloomberg, and ended up spending six months in prison. Other accomplishments include running for mayor of New York City and receiving 4% of the Democratic vote in the mayoral primary, and touring as the opening act for the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players.
Brodeur formed an avant-garde band called Liquid Tapedeck with Michael Portnoy, who took the stage name Matt Jokes. Brodeur had been banned from the legendary rock club The Knitting Factory, yet managed to perform there repeatedly with his new band. How? By changing his name to Peter Etcetera and showing up for the gigs wearing a long black wig… backwards.
The Liquid Tapedeck shows were hilarious.
At each performance you received a program containing the latest news about the Tapedeck, the status of each of its members and how much they hated each other, the evening’s set list, and a painstakingly detailed explanation as to why each and every song on the setlist was going to suck once you heard it performed.
Christopher Brodeur, also known as “Peter Etcetera”, performing undercover at The Knitting Factory.
None of the songs — which had titles like Raping Adrian Belew in the Dark of the Night, Eat Shit, Meshuggah!! and Lou Reed’s Cock — were ever more than 30 seconds long. The moment each show ended, Peter Etcetera would fly into the audience, distributing small pieces of paper and short yellow pencils to everyone. “Ladies and gentlemen, please take a moment to fill out one of our Quality Control Surveys, so Liquid Tapedeck can better serve your entertainment needs in the future.”
“Great show, Christopher!” I’d say, slapping him on his women’s spandex-unitarded back. “Er…” he’d lean forward and say very quietly, “Please try to remember to call me Peter while you’re here.”
And then there was “Timmy Chang” (not his real name), a petite guy in his early 20s with a heavy Chinese accent and an obvious mental illness for which it appeared he never took his medication. Flamboyantly gay and manic, he lived with his mother in New Jersey, though he was once spotted in Chelsea on the arm of a sophisticated-looking older gentleman in a Gucci suit.
Timmy Chang’s performances were disturbing journeys into the dark corners of his mind: for instance, singing a Madonna song while whirling around like a dervish and laughing maniacally. Or reciting poetry while whirling around like a dervish and laughing maniacally. As long as a performance whirled, twirled, and laughed maniacally, it was genuine Timmy Chang at the top of his game, and no one could complain.
Orchestrating all this insanity was Reverend Jen, also known as Jen Miller, also known as Saint Reverend Jen, a brilliant writer and visual artist from Baltimore. “Poet, preacher, prophet, performer, literary giant, Patron Saint of the Uncool, and Voice of the Downtrodden and Tired,” is how she described herself, often adding: “I carry the weight of the world on my hunched and pimply back.”
Saint Reverend Jen performing at Surf Reality, Allen Street, NYC, 1990′s.
Reverend Jen organized and hosted the Anti-Slam, always smartly dressed in groovy go-go boots and a vintage dress or a Star Trek uniform, plus a pair of elf ears.
To offer only a partial list of her accomplishments, Reverend Jen is the author of Sex Symbol for the Insane, an autobiographical book which she herself published by photocopying and binding each copy with staples and duct tape. She is also the creator and curator of “The World’s Only 24-Hour Troll Museum”, an impressive display of troll dolls… in her own apartment. Who says a museum can’t be in the same place where you live? And technically, it is open 24 hours. All you have to do is dial her number, which she readily publishes in all the city guides. If she’s home, she’ll enthusiastically open the door to her apartment and give you a tour.
Some of Reverend Jen’s troll dolls. Photo from Artnet.com.
In any city, to publish your personal phone number to the world and open your home to just anybody takes balls. In New York City, that takes Times Square-on-New-Year’s-Eve-sized balls.
There are too many fascinating things about Reverend Jen to fit in this column, so I’ll add just a few more essential facts: 1) She really is an ordained minister, as well as the creator of her own religion, called Hal. 2) She loves monkeys, trolls, TeleTubbies, and Budweiser, not necessarily in that order. 3) She speaks in Olde English. 4) She wrote her website by hand.
I don’t know why this last item impresses me more than the others, but it does. She wrote her website by hand. Jesus Christ! If you want more information about her — and oh, I know you will — check out her site.
Reverend Jen created the Anti-Slam in reaction to the “poetry slam” at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, an open mic in which three “judges” chosen from among the audience rated each performance on a scale from 1 to 10.
Appalled by the notion that “art could be reduced to an equation“, and inspired by Faceboyz Open Mic at Surf Reality, Rev. Jen founded the Anti-Slam at a small alternative theater at 145 Ludlow Street called Collective Unconscious.
Those who perform in the Anti-Slam are called “Art Stars”, and Rev. Jen has described the show itself as “the epicenter of a rippling, roaring Art Fart.”
Robert Downey Jr., Faceboy and L.A. Ruocco, NYC.
Besides hosting the show, Rev. Jen would perform her own material, then take a seat in the front row to enjoy the performances of the Art Stars, emptying many cans of Budweiser in the process, elf ears protruding from the sides of her head. After every performance, Reverend Jen would take the stage and say, “Judges?” At that point, a panel of three “judges”, which Rev. Jen had arbitrarily selected from the audience, would shout in unison, “TEN!” in mockery of the system at the Nuyorican Poetry Slam. Because no matter what the Art Stars did onstage, they always got a “10” at the Anti-Slam.
To ensure that as many people as possible could get a chance to perform, Reverend Jen set a six-minute time limit. “Don’t be dicks; stay within six!” she’d remind us at the beginning of every show. To keep track of the time, at the beginning of every performance, she’d set a clunky plastic egg timer. If a performance hadn’t finished after six minutes, the timer would go off: “Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring!”
At that point, the Art Star had one minute to wrap it up. It was always better to finish before the egg timer went off, especially if the performance was of a dramatic nature. ‘Cause nothing destroys the magic like the shrill alarm of a small kitchen appliance.
“My math teacher invited me to get in his car,” an Art Star intones, as Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack from The Mission pulses in the background.
“He said he could help me with my fractions. I knew I shouldn’t… but I got in anyway. And… he…he…”
The Art Star drops to his knees.
“He … raped … me… He raped me…”
The Art Star starts rolling on the floor.
“He –”
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring!
Reverend Jen: “Judges?”
“TEN!”
-Written September 12, 2008
Links:
Recent Comments