This week’s East Village Boy of the Week is Parker, a series of self-portraits
Photographed for EVB by Parker Tilghman, from San Francisco

The sublime Brooklyn-based band Grizzly Bear hardly needs an introduction. Their recent performance alongside the Brooklyn Philharmonic at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Grizzly Bear & Final Fantasy, was a perfect opportunity for them to showcase their influential sound and give us a sneak preview of tracks from their forthcoming album, Veckatimest.

Although the band may be mildly hairy, I wouldn’t class them as bears. Otters perhaps is more appropriate. Anyhow, that’s it for the bear-related gags. Meet Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear.

Richard Welch: How did you find performing with the Brooklyn Philharmonic?

Ed Droste: The whole thing was really surreal and incredible. We weren’t entirely sure how it would work out because it was the first time we’d ever worked with a full orchestra, and none of us can exactly sight-read, so there was this fear of a communication barrier. Luckily we had Nico Muhly, who was doing our arrangements for the show, as our translator of sorts. Considering how little time we had to rehearse with the orchestra and how new and nerve-wracking the whole lead-up was, I think it went off really nicely.
RW: Apparently the name Grizzly Bear refers to an old boyfriend of yours. Was he smooth and skinny?

ED: He was a little bit hairy and very tall and skinny, and we had nicknames for each other that were along the lines of “grizzly”, so I thought it’d be funny to call my (at the time) one-man musical act “Grizzly Bear”. This was way before I was aware at how utterly cliché it was to name your band after an animal. I’d never even heard of Animal Collective then!

RW: Let’s travel back a while. Your debut album was titled Horn of Plenty, care to explain where the inspiration for the title came from?

ED: Well, I just always thought the image of a cornucopia was really humorous and yet strangely interesting. It was at a time I was dating like crazy and there were lots of um, experiences in my horn of plenty. So, roughly I’d say you can sort of associate what you will. It’s always easier in retrospect to see where a title came from then at the time.

RW: You apparently wrote that album following a relationship break-up. Would you mind talking about how that effected you and your music?

ED: Sure. Horn of Plenty was the end of a relationship and the beginning of a new one. The last song on it is a very uplifting song (for me at least) that shows a bit of hope. The songs were written over the course of a year so they really reflect different reactions, for instance despair and anger. It was like the twelve stages! [laughs] It’s strange, I don’t know if I’ll ever write SO personally again and in such a manner. I never thought anyone would hear the songs, and they were at first strictly for me, sort of like a diary entry, which is partially why they are so rough-edged.

RW: With the Horn of Plenty remix album, was it you guys that wanted to be remixed or did it come about by popular demand from other artists?

ED: It started when one band wanted to remix us, and then us liking and just flying with it. It also served as a “stop gap” release, if you will, much like the Friend EP, since we are INSANELY slow at writing and recording new full-length albums.RW: You wrote and recorded the debut album on your own, and Daniel and Chris record as Department of Eagles. It appears that you boys are as much a collective as a traditional band. Is this liberating or simply a necessity for each others’ sanity?

ED: Well, I think it’s healthy for everyone to be able to do whatever they want and have side projects or do something solo. That said, I have no desire to be a solo act. I’m not sure I never will. I enjoy collaboration too much and I think I’d be too scared to perform alone on a stage. That said, Chris Bear and I keep dreaming about doing a dance project together - we want to call it Samantha. We’ve literally not even done a sketch of a song, so this project at the moment only exists in our heads.

RW: Do you think there is anything definably “queer” about your music?

ED: I think Horn of Plenty is more explicitly queer, lyrics-wise, than say Yellow House. That said, with recent covers of “He Hit Me” and a song like “Plans” on Yellow House, there is still a mild queer element, but it’s not a dominating dynamic to our music and is definitely not how we enjoy to being labeled. The boys and myself think it’s annoying and misleading to call us a “queer” band, as I’m the only gay one in the band, and our music isn’t by any means political. If anything, it’s more about the universal issues of love and relationships, yadda yadda yadda.

Grizzly Bear - “Plans”

RW: Do you listen to your own music during sex? Or maybe after?

ED: Are you KIDDING? NEVER. Jesus christ. I turn it off if it comes on anywhere that I have the ability to turn it off. I hear it enough. I love it, but I don’t need to listen to it unless I’m listening during the mixing process. Sometimes after a few years when I’m alone I’ll revisit something old like Horn of Plenty, but generally I don’t listen to my own music if I can avoid it. 90 percent of the Grizzly Bear plays on my iTunes are from listening to different edits and mixes of a song before it’s done.

RW: You toured with Radiohead last year, what was that like?

ED: In a word: Surreal. One of the most “did that really just happen” moments of my life. They were EXTREMELY nice and we got to barbecue with some of them each night in the backstage outdoor area which was really fun (on a little Webber grill). Each night after we were done with our set I’d go out and watch the show from the crowd and just marvel at one, how good they were; two, how massive they are; and three, how insanely fanatical their fans are. I’m not even sure bands can get to their level anymore. The upside to the internet and blogs and MP3s is your music spreads quicker. The downside is that there’s more out there and easier to get lost in the mix and harder for a band to that level of THE BIGGEST BAND EVER, which is OK. Also, they were on a major label and had radio hits, and yet are considered still “indie”. Most indie bands will never have a radio hit like “Creep” to open the doors for them and then be able to just do what they want. They are a brilliant band and totally deserve it, but I think they might be of a “mega-band” stature that’s a dying breed. Oh, and if they happen to be reading East Village Boys, we’d love to tour with you again please! [laughs]

RW: When you are the ones headlining stadium shows, what kind of demands can we expect to see on your rider?

ED: Ha! Well, because of the above reasons, that will never happen, but for fantasy sake, I guess we’d have our own chef cooking us fresh and healthy food. That’d be nice. Radiohead had that, but only the band got to eat it. Crew and opening band got venue catering. They also had a masseuse which I’d definitely love. A regular shower would be lovely. Some venues at our level have that. I guess it’s all about fresh, well-prepared food. That’s what the big jump in the rider would be about. Maybe a bottle of champagne to feel “blingy”?

RW: Speaking of “Blingy”, you and Chris were featured on Canadian TV extolling the virtues of the neti pot!

ED: TV needs an angle. We had a neti in the room. We just went for it. We were REALLY into it at the time but I’ve not used it for awhile.

RW: Do have have any gay groupies? Any funny tales to tell?

ED: Yeah, there are some gay weirdos, and then there are all the cute ones who super shy and say hi, and then vanish, and the following day write a super long MySpace email about how they were nervous and wanted to talk more, etc.

This one gross guy in Amsterdam, who’s in his 30s and looks a bit sickly always comes to our shows, and the first time he came he had read an interview I did in BUTT magazine, and he came up to me in front of my whole band and was like “Ed Droste?”, and I said “Yes?”, and he said “Heard you were a power bottom”. That was the funniest shit ever. The band still brings it up. He’s totally creepy, and to this day will show up at our Dutch shows, but luckily I can easily avoid him now.

The sweetest thing was at a Philly show, a very young, very awkward boy came up to me trembling with tears saying “I just want to thank you for making it OK to be gay in the indie rock world”. That was all he really said, but it was super sweet.

RW: That’s so sweet. We often get emails, tweets and comments about how bored our readers get by the constant feed of lowest common denominator music played in the majority of gay bars and clubs. How do you feel about the music played on the scene?

ED: I mean, I like a lot of it, but it’s also kind of a bummer sometimes. I was recently in Vegas and granted, it’s Vegas, but we went to a gay club and it was the worst music, and the worst people, and we left after ten minutes. It wasn’t even horrible in a funny way, it was just doomed and expensive. I’m not judging, if that’s what floats your boat, great, but generally a lot of the extreme house-remixed Kylie/Kelly Clarkson stuff is just headache-inducing. But I love a lot of the originals, depending on the track.

RW: I mentioned our Twitter feed - we’re kind of new to the whole T scene, however you are a prolific tweeter. What attracts you to it?

ED: A lot of my friends are on there. I’m often on the road and it’s a way of keeping in touch via cell phone. That said, I don’t think I fully grasp how public it is. I have a feeling I’m going to freak out one day and erase it. With each passing tweet I get stranger and stranger comments from people on the street asking me super-specific questions, and then I realize, oh yeah, I twittered that. [laughs]

RW: OK, back to the music. You recently completed Veckatimest, your forthcoming album. Can you share with us some details about the album, what it sounds like and the release plans?

ED: It’s a lot more sonically dynamic. I’m really pleased with it. It’ll come out in late Spring (May 26) and have over ten tracks. That’s about all I can say right now. Oh, and Nico Muhly did some arrangements, and Victoria Legrand from Beach House did some backing vocals on a song. More info coming out soon!

RW: What does Veckatimest actually mean?

ED: It’s the name of a small uninhabited island about the size of a city block near the house we were recording at. We got really interested in the topography of the region we were in, and loved how small and rocky and untouched it was having seen it a few times and fell in love with the name. We’d gone many times to the Cape for rehearsal and writing, and we just felt the word and name, while obtuse (and technically a Native American name, of which I don’t know the actual meaning), conjured up positive memories.

RW: Veckatimest can now be found online - illegally I might add. A cynical young chap might say that these leaks are done deliberately by the label or artists to build hype. After all, isn’t it touring and the merchandise that generate the money these days?

ED: Definitely not done deliberately. The version that leaked is really low quality and about the same as a YouTube stream, very flat and tinny. There’s an ongoing argument about whether a leaked record helps or hurts a release and people have told me it only hurts if the record sucks. So hopefully people don’t think our record sucks! [laughs]

Grizzly Bear - “Ready, Able”

RW: We hear you’re an avid gardener. From one mary to another, how does your garden grow?

ED: Well, Chad is even better than I am, but I love our little tiny garden and we just plant, plant, plant. We do bulbs, seeds, trees, hedges - one of each since we have so little space. We have a small table and two chairs and it’s lovely to read and have a drink in during the summer.

RW: When and where do you hibernate?

ED: At home, with my boyfriend and dog, whenever I can. My boyfriend is an interior designer so he made our place very soothing. I love it.

RW: At long last the wind has shifted and Spring is arriving in New York City. What’s your Spring soundtrack?

Ed Droste’s EVB Springtime Mix [download]

Golden Phone - Micachu and the Shapes / Stillness is the Move (Live at SXSW) - Dirty Projectors / Put It Down - The Dream / You Came Out (Demo) - We Have Band / Armistice - Phoenix / Fangela - Here We Go Magic / Vacationing People - Foreign Born / Daniel - Bat For Lashes / The Dazzled - Crystal Stilts / Used To Be - Beach House

RW: Oh yeah, one last thing - have you ever covered the theme from Grizzly Adams? It was number one in Germany for nine weeks - it’s THAT good!

ED: Wow, I’ve not even heard it! Yikes

Big portraits of Ed by Tom Hines
“Grizzly Bear & Final Fantasy” at BAM photographed by Kathryn Yu
Candid photos courtesy Ed Droste

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This week’s East Village Boy of the Week is Joey, from Staten Island (that’s in NYC)
Photographed for EVB by McKenzie Adkins

When performance artist par excellence, former notorious Warhol actress, East Village anti-gentrification activist, downtown art archivist, and libidinal hurricane Penny Arcade came across my manifesto Toward the New Degeneracy, which deals with bohemia and the artistic avant-garde, she knew we were destined to meet.

Wish I’d shared the same intuition.

For more than two years, on the advice of certain (ex-)friends, I assiduously evaded the Exterminating Angel known as Penny, out of fear that my narcissism wasn’t strong enough to vanquish hers. I mean, who knew more about bohemia, the cultural history of New York, or the disastrous gentrification of the East Village than she? Meeting her might force me to take my 20-year-old gold-braided chip off my shoulder, despite my fondness for epaulettes (they were big in the 70s). Maybe I’d have to turn in my crown of thorns and relinquish to her my prickly throne as the Royal Crank of Anti-Establishment Rants.

Well, never, Mary.

But actually, I had a lot to worry about. Nobody can harangue, disturb, delight, and mesmerize a crowd by relentless complaint and irresistible humor like the divine Penny. After going to one of her shows, which pulls in everybody under 40 still living in the East Village and those now populating Brooklyn, I realized she had accomplished the impossible: making moralizing delightfully entertaining.

Penny’s keen critical mind never tires in its efforts to forge a social and artistic utopia in which women will be treated equally, artists will be recognized for their contributions, and critics will magically have good judgment as well as refrain from ass-kissing the powers that be.

Lots of luck, girl.

It was only when I decided to take the chance of meeting Penny that I realized I’d only seen one-half of the picture. Whether her politics leave me fuming or her social insights leave me cold isn’t really the issue. The issue - at least from my superficial faggy point of view - is that Penny is delightful company. No one, in fact, is quite so spunky, so quick on the draw, so generous, and so community-minded as this kinky graduate of New York’s grimy streets. She also has nice skin, decent tits and cheekbones, which is more than I can say - on all counts. And no one I’ve ever met has given faggotdom so much credit for the development of her vivid personality and artistic skills.

Having abandoned a conventional working-class Italian home and a conventional working class Italian name (Susan Ventura) to rub shoulders with drag queens the likes of Jackie Curtis and Margo Howard Howard, or underground-filmmaking homo madmen like Jack Smith, Penny Arcade has been on the New York scene since she was jailbait. During her early period of life on the streets, sarcastic, campy and sometimes downright mean faggots were her playful father surrogates. Can you imagine? From them she learned to value art, spit at the establishment, field irony and survive as an outsider.

Wherever there is a sexual deviant of note, Penny is not far behind. She was the mainstay of Quentin Crisp right until his death, sat at the wealthy bedside of Charles Henri Ford in the Dakota to the bitter end, is currently involved in a struggle to preserve the legacy of Jack Smith and has interviewed a host of artists, performers, and writers for her video archives, known as the Lower East Side Biography Project. If none of these names seems familiar, you’re probably under thirty and most definitely a ditz-ball. You need Penny (and me) to clue you in about the history of the ground upon which you walk. I probably wouldn’t bother, but Penny would.

So continue on to see what Penny had to say from Vienna when I skyped her from New York.

Bruce Benderson: Well, darling, can you hear this? Is it being broadcast through a speaker?

Penny Arcade: No. Only we can hear it.

BB: Then let me just noisily wolf down the rest of this pizza. As usual, I’m a big pig when it comes to you.

PA: OK, then let me get a cigarette and I’ll be very happy, so hold on - nosh in peace.

[several moments later]

BB: I’m very interested in something you talked about in an essay you sent me, which was about snobbery and the class prejudice against you. I’d actually like to start there with our discussion, cause you know how interested and titillated I am by class issues.

PA: Well, I think that because the 60s downtown art scene was so diverse, I never had any experience of class issues at first, because one of the things that happened in the mid to late 60s was a complete class collapse in certain circles.

BB: Yeah. At first it had a really positive effect because it allowed people from other classes to sneak into the scene.

PA: Yes, absolutely, and mingle.

BB: Studio 54 was an excellent example. Although it was celebrity-minded, all sorts of lower class people were let in just for their bodies.

PA: That’s right, that’s also when I started going to gay bars at the age of 14, and everybody was there.

BB: Yes, they used to be so eclectic.

PA: Yes, used to be. So of course someone like me, who was a little working-class reform school girl, got snuck into gay bars in the early 60s in Hartford, Connecticut, and overheard conversations between, say, a mechanic who was into opera and the president of a bank who was into it, too.

BB. Did you have sex or love interests with any of these gabby homo culture vultures?

PA: Yes.

BB: Was it frustrating or rewarding?

PA: You have to remember that, classically, there’s a tremendous amount of sexual energy in a fag-hag relationship, it’s usually not just about wanting sex. There is a very strong erotic energy.

BB: I couldn’t agree more, doll. Look at you and me.

PA: [sighs] Yes, darling, and throughout my life I think it had less to do with people being gay or straight or bisexual than with the intensity of individual personalities bonding. At times they were able to surmount the big sexual difference of my not being a male.

BB: But you were never in a lovelorn position, or what one might describe as a masochistic situation?

PA: No, because I figured it out quick. You may remember that I say in my show Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! that by the time I was 18, I’d stopped trying to fuck gay men. I’d caught on.

BB: OK, but let’s get back to class. When I think about that subject and you, I immediately think of two older gay men who you were very close to and for whom class was a big issue: Quentin Crisp and Charles Henri Ford. Crisp, especially, made strong class judgments, and although he liked to think of himself as culturally upper class, I think his judgments about the subject were typically petit bourgeois, if you’ll allow me to make a class judgment. I wonder how you dealt with this or what your attitude about it was, because it always turned me off something terrible. I couldn’t stand Crisp.

PA: Well, first of all, I accepted the fact that Quentin was very elderly, and that he was invariably tied to his upbringing. In a way, I think all of us tend to be, as we get older. We may have rebelled against certain things in our 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, but we go a little bit in the other direction in our 60s, 70 and 80s.

BB: Crisp was petit bourgeois by background, I think.

PA: One of the things I noticed in the last ten years of his life was that he was far more middle class than he thought he was.

BB: Uh huh. I gave him my first book, Pretending to Say No, and he was scandalized by what he called the “obscenity” in it. He associated libido with obscenity, and with a lower class mentality, and he was against it.

PA: This issue is a very sensitive one because Quentin is somebody who was very, very damaged by his early sexual life. He was very, very romantic as a young person, and I think that the coarseness of the situations he found himself in… Well, that’s probably why he identified with women so strongly, because he had this kind of romantic idea and would find some guy and then it would be just about sex and the romantic part of him was never addressed.

BB: So his revenge was to judge these people in a negative way as lower-class types?

PA:  I think that sex was just a horror for him

BB: How come?

PA: Well, I’m sure it was because he was being paid for sex, and he was the bottom and had to accept whatever the person wanted. Mentally he was in rebellion against it, but emotionally I think he was quite masochistic and felt that was all he deserved. He was very conflicted. He was someone who never had great sex.

BB: And you really feel this led to all his harsh judgments about class?

PA: Well, not about class but anything connected with sex. At the end of his life he would continuously say, “Penny Arcade is only interested in sex,” and I thought that was such a weird take on me, because clearly that’s not true. But that was his interpretation of everything that he saw in me at that time. He was really all about propriety and politeness and, unfortunately, to a certain degree, his regard for people operated on a real surface level, it was about being polite. At the end of his life, I was one of the few people who actually knew how much money he had. Two months before he died, I said, “Listen, don’t you want to make some kind of provision for elderly gay people over 75 or something like that? Because this was at a time when the East Village was really changing and people were being pushed out of their homes, and there was no money for lawyers. He was absolutely against it, and his response was, “If we all got what we deserved we would starve to death!.”

BB: OK, despite what Quentin thought about your sexuality, it’s certainly an important aspect of you. Because I know you’re interested in Reich and his theories.

PA: I started doing Reichian therapy in 1983 and had the opportunity to work with Dr. Jorge Stolkiner, a Reichian doctor from Argentina, a country where the work is very close to what Reich himself practiced. The first time I went to see him he said only a couple of things, and one of the things he said just by looking at me, and it was, “You probably work in the sex industry.” I was completely shocked, because at that time I did. I was flabbergasted that he could see that in character analysis, just by looking at my face.

BB: Well, darling, what were you wearing?

PA: No, it wasn’t the way I was dressed, I was always dressed, you know, casually. But the point was that I was very intrigued by this. Reich understood that armoring takes place in the body because of fear, and I’ve always been very sexual, from the time I was a child. I’ve been knowingly bisexual since I was five. My fantasies were always about girls and boys, and I had a very active sexual imagination, and many of these things I’d imagined actually existed, I was later to find out. In Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! there’s a little girl section where she talks about tying up other little girls and spanking them in the basement. And all the little boys would come in and pee and we would cook with it, and all that sort of thing.

BB: They’d pee and you’d cook. I’m sure you didn’t use one material for the other activity?

PA: Yes, we did, absolutely. They wouldn’t let us run the garden hose, and you can’t cook without water. The boys would run in and out all day saying, “Need any pee?” and we’d say yes.

BB: And did you eat what you’d cooked?

PA: No.

BB: I want to talk with you about Warhol, as I’ve been thinking a great deal - negatively - about him. I’ve even been thinking about writing about him, and I’m very interested in your take. Not only about what his aesthetic really was, but about what his motives really were, his modus operandi… and that really relates to everything we’ve already talked about so far. Not only sex, but class. Because what a few others and I have noticed is that, at least during the beginning of his career, when he achieved all his notoriety, it was people from working class backgrounds who were attracting all the attention for him. In fact, he himself was from a lower class immigrant background, and yet he seems to have abandoned it even though it was at the foundation of his success. So could you talk about that?

PA: Well, in fact, I just went to this symposium in Columbus, Ohio, connected to this big exhibition at the Wexler Center.

BB: Oh, was Bibbe Hanson there? I simply adore her! She has that je ne sais quoi, don’t you think?

PA: [mocking Bruce’s fake tone] Yes, I do, dahling. But, no, she was in Germany for some reason. I was really disappointed because I was looking forward to spending time with her, she’s very fabulous. Anyway, it was one of the most interesting Warhol shows I’ve ever seen. The way it was mounted put very little distance between the viewer and the work. It was just unbelievably well-designed, but unfortunately it’s only going to be shown at the Wexler - and somewhere in England. Anyhow, I looked at the exhibit with John Giorno and Taylor Mead. You couldn’t have two better people to see that exhibit with.

BB: I’m glad Taylor is still mobile.

PA: Yes, he was, we were wheeling him around.

BB: Oh.

PA: Yes, he’s had a bit of a stroke and it’s affected his balance. But you know, he is 84 and he has a marvelous mind, and of course both he and John knew Warhol from very early on. They knew him starting in 1961 or something.

BB: But you knew him, too, didn’t you?

PA: Yes, but I met him after he was shot, which was a whole other thing. But what I wanted to say was that when I first came to New York, the first scene I was involved in was this very heavy-duty downtown drug scene of amphetamine addicts, and most of them were the people who populated The Factory.

BB: And most of them were from lower class backgrounds, I’d like to add.

PA: They were all from lower class backgrounds, and Andy actually created The Factory for Ondine. Andy was a voyeur, and he was extremely drawn to this kind of criminal underground scene. Years ago, about 1997, I went with Victor Bockris to an exhibit about Warhol. It was about at the same time as the big retrospective on Jack Smith at PS1. They were kind of dueling exhibits at one point, and they had these vitrines with Andy’s clothes in them, his leather jacket and his Marseilles sailor jersey and black boots. And I looked at it with Victor, who wrote the best biography of Warhol, and I said, “Oh my God, Andy was so into Jean Genet! All those gay guys from the 50s and 60s, you know, Jean Genet was their hero, his rough trade, criminal thing; and Victor’s eyes popped open wide. ‘You’ve just hit the nail on the head,” he said, “I never thought of that before. In fact, when I first approached Andy and wanted to do the biography of him, his first response was, “Why do you want to do a biography of me, why don’t you do one on somebody interesting, somebody like Jean Genet?’”

BB: Let me add a thought. Really, his entire formula is very typical of exploitation, he’s somebody from the lower classes - who of course absorbed what he saw, some relative or certain working class social or cultural situations that were either sordid or energetic or ill-intentioned. And I think he repressed his connection to all of it. But because you can never get rid of these things, he then chose people on the outside world to act out these conflicts, to act out his closeness and connection to working class mentalities. But because he himself wasn’t admitting a connection to it, it became a kind of exploitation.

PA: Well, yes, Andy was from an immigrant background, and I’m from an immigrant background, too. When you grow up in 1940s America like him, or 1950s America like me, you really are The Other, if you know what I mean. So Andy was upwardly mobile, he was the first person in his family to go to college, he came to New York, he kind of patterned himself on Truman Capote, a kind of dandy, who was somewhat intellectual and very faggy. He was ultra-dandy-faggy… with his bowties…

BB: If you compare what you did as an artist with your immigrant background to what Andy did with his immigrant background, the difference is that you owned it, expressed it, and analyzed it. Andy Warhol never got up there and said, “I’m from a working class Czech background, my relatives worked in factories.” It had to be found out about him.

PA: I absolutely agree, but I mean, look, the guy was a super-hard worker, and by 1960 he was wealthy. Once he achieved this kind of financial success and acceptance, he then started to get voyeuristic… Whenever Ondine would see Andy, he’d say, “Get that guy out of here, he gives me the creeps.”

BB: But he had a need for his voyeurism because it represented what he had rejected in himself.

PA: Yes. In my early conversations with Andy, probably one of the reasons why my relationship with him didn’t develop more depth was that my immediate thing was to talk about us both being from working class and immigrant backgrounds. The town that I come from is all Eastern European Catholics: Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian. And Andy reminded me of all the people I knew in my hometown, some of whom lived there with their mothers because they were gay, and went to mass on Sundays, etc. Bringing this stuff up to Andy made him really nervous.

BB: But don’t you resent his exploitation attitude, not owning himself what he used voyeuristically, using others to act it out and profiting from it?

PA: No.

BB: Well, I do.

PA: Well, I don’t resent him for it. Here’s a funny story, did you ever know Herndon Ely? She was in the Playhouse of the Ridiculous at the end of the 60s. I knew her there. She was an East Village figure, an amazing artist, a speed freak, you know. She had a long relationship with Dorothy Podber, and Dorothy was the sidekick of Ray Johnson, a big speed freak, big meth amphetamine person. And all the speed freaks of the 60s of that circle were massively creative, they were all amazing artists. Dorothy was ill for a long time. She was 75 when she died. Within a very, very short time Herndon died, and I don’t know under what circumstances, but I had seen Herndon July 15th, when I had left for Europe on my birthday. At any rate, I was greatly saddened to hear about Herndon’s death. It was a big shock to me and I decided to google Dorothy Podber. This is like some really obscure East Village figure. Well low and behold, there is this obituary in the New York Times… and it talks about her relationship with Ray Johnson, and the happenings and how they used to go about terrorizing people as an art form. But there’s also an interesting little story about how she had gone up to The Factory in 1963, and there were a bunch of “Marilyn’s” sitting around and she said to Andy, “Oh, can I shoot them?” and Andy said, “Sure, go ahead.” So she took out a gun and shot a stack of four of them between the eyes. Andy flipped out and said to Billy Name, “Get Dorothy out of here and please don’t bring her here again, she really scares me.”

BB: Did he think she was going to shoot them with a camera?

PA: Yes! But what I thought about was the first foreshadowing of somebody shooting a Warhol and of somebody shooting Andy. And as for the original Factory, I heard about it when I was on the Lower East Side in all those shooting galleries, because a lot of those people who were coming through these dark, dank shooting galleries that I was crashing in as a 16- or 17-year-old were also hanging out at The Factory. You know, Andy used lots of speed, and he surrounded himself with these quite dangerous people. But I never experienced Andy as exploiting anybody. I think people were exploiting him while Andy was exploiting them; it was a two-way street.

BB: It was one big happy exploitation party!

PA: Yes.

BB: This is my last question: I feel that a lot about your performance and your value as an artist has to do with the cult of personality. Your art, in a large way, has to do with your personality in a very unmediated way, and that’s the first thing I’d like you to tell me about. Then as a corollary I’d like to know why you think you are important, why you think your cultural voice is important.

PA: Well, first and foremost, I never thought I was going to be an artist, even all the time I was making art. My goal was to live an artistic life, I thought I could do that. I’ve always been a great performer, ever since I started performing. I’m charismatic, I have a lot of energy, I have timing - all the things that are important when you perform. When I was in my twenties, I really felt like there was something I wanted to express. But I didn’t know what it was, and I ended up taking lots of time living in other cultures. The thing is, I’ve always been a storyteller. I’ve always been a person with lots of experiences and I’ve wanted to talk about them. So, fundamentally, when I started making my own work, it happened totally accidentally, out of telling stories about what had just happened to me or what someone had just said to me. And one day I was on Avenue A telling somebody a story about Dame Margot Howard Howard, you know, the famous junkie drag queen, and as I was telling the story I suddenly had the sense, “Wow, I could do this on stage. Being Southern Italian, I come from a storytelling tradition, and all through my childhood the stories being told around the kitchen table were definitely more interesting than Bonanza or anything else on television, so I come from that background. I also come from the bad blood of the family, you know. I turned 14 in juvenile detention, then got put into a soft-core reform school.

BB: Hot. Did you have a nice party?

PA: No. It was me getting my period on an iron bed in the Hartford House of Detention. That was my birthday. Here’s the point: I’ve always had a peculiar point of view, and I think artists report from the edge of society. Only outsiders can speak to the whole because they are outside it. That’s how far it goes with my unmediated voice. Around 1976-77, I was living in Maine, and there was this odd-job store in the middle of nowhere, and once I found a whole bunch of discounted copies of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music there. It was a completely instrumental screeching thing. Of course, I knew that Lou Reed had been involved with all these speed freaks I had known, so I bought one for a dollar and brought it home and said to myself, “This album is for the people who have no music, and I’m a voice for people who have no voice.”

BB: So this is political for you, this is almost like a crusade to give these voiceless people a voice.

PA: Kenneth Bernard, the theater playwright and academic, wrote an introduction to the new book about and by me to be published by Semiotext(e), and he made a very interesting point by saying, “Arcade is a reformer,”….and I am.

You can check out Penny at the Longing Lasts Longer Performance Festival in Puebla, Mexico, April
24, and in Old Queen, a new work in progress at the HOT! Festival at the new Dixon Place in New York July 1 - August 1.

Also, Semiotext(e) Press and MIT Press are publishing a book on the performance theater of Penny Arcade. Bad Reputation: Performances, Essays, Interviews in Fall 2009.

Portraits of Penny Arcade by Jasmine Hirst
.

Introducing East Village Boy’s newest I-Boy, Diego

Where do you live, and how old are you?
I’m 19 and living in downtown Los Angeles.

Who took these photos?
I took them all. I love self-portraiture. You’re playing two roles, the photographer and the model. It’s a point of view that really is all your own.

What’s your story?
Raised in the humdrum existence of Hawaii and thrust into LA at 15, where I would very shortly lose my virginity, fall in love, and consequently get hurt. Then finished high school, got a job at Dolce & Gabbana, moved out, and traveled the world. And all the while drawing and dancing.
What do you like about LA?
How easy it is to have sex with complete strangers.

What’s your favorite foreign city and why?
Barcelona or Paris for sure! The hottest boys in the world. Oh yeah, and the history.

What’s your favorite fuck song?
“Beat On/Beat Off” by The Presets is a hot fuck song. But if I’m stoned and having sex, anything off of Radiohead’s Hail To the Thief is mind-blowing.

If you could listen to only one band for the rest of your life, who would it be?
YELLE!

What do you shave besides your face?
I have to shave my balls and ass. I’m half Spaniard and half Italian, so hair growth can get out of hand if not shaved regularly. It’s funny because I’m not hairy anywhere else on my body.

Is your body a temple or a dumpster?
It’s somewhere in-between. I take care of my body and try to be as healthy as possible, but I also take part in a lot of destructive activities.

As a fashion whore, have you ever whored for fashion? What are your favorite labels?
I ONLY whore for fashion! My absolute favorite designer is Brian Lichtenberg, but I love April 77, Horace, Preen, and of course American Apparel.

You have 1,663 MySpace friends. How many of them do you know personally?
About a hundred. The rest just like my pictures.

Your MySpace page says “My life is one adventure after the next. When I’m not chasing the next party, or searching for the next altered state of reality…” What was your last adventure, last party, and last altered state of reality?
My last adventure was being in the front row at the Yelle concert last week. I went bar-hopping last night, so I guess that kind of counts as my last party. My last altered state of reality came a couple days ago when I ate two weed cookies, and listened to Kate Bush’s “The Dreaming” on repeat, and then watching the French film Fantastic Planet. INCREDIBLE.

Your magic wand can make any one man gay - who would it be and why?
I just met this straight guy named Chris. I know he has a big dick, but he also has a sense of humor which makes him a thousand times more hot.

Are you usually the hunter or the prey?
Four out of five times, I’m the prey.

Do you get an erection when you see your reflection?
No, but when I look through naked photos of myself, I do.

Would you date yourself?
Why not? I’m a great fuck and I’m funny. It would be fun for a while.

What’s your fetish?
I go crazy for a nice ass. And underwear! I have a huge underwear fetish - jock straps, tighty whities, boxer briefs - it makes me so hard.


What do you like to be called during sex?
I love when guys tell me how hot they think I am, or how good my ass is when they’re fucking me.

Toys or no toys?
Mmmmm, the double dildo.

Public sex - yes or no?
Yes, yes, yes, yes. So hot! I love public sex. I’m all for public masturbation too.

What’s your hot spot?
There’s a dance club I go to every monday here in downtown called Mustache Mondays. It’s good music, hot indie boys, strong drinks and no pretense.

What would you literally KILL for?
Art. Who wants to die for it!

How many pairs of underwear do you own?
Not enough - like two weeks worth.

What’s your single most valuable possession?
My MacBook. It’s my escape to a world outside of LA.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever stolen?
I’m so not good at stealing. I get really paranoid and end up putting everything back, haha.

If you could have anyone, alive or dead, at your next party, who would your top five be?
Julie Budet of Yelle, Kate Bush (circa 1979), Madonna (circa 1983), French DJ Yuksek, and I bet Divine would have some good drugs.

What do you want to be when you grow up?
A starving artist living in the East Village.

This week’s East Village Boy of the Week is Jeremy, from New York
Photographed exclusively for EVB by Mckenzie James