Kevin Balktick is educated on the 'War of Northern Aggression'

Name: Kevin Balktick
Age: 26
Hometown: New York City; Suffolk County, LI; Atlanta, GA
Job description: Event producer
Upcoming projects: Stranded III: The Forbidden City (Sept. 4th), Fourth Annual Horizon Conference (Sept. 24-26), Lost Horizons Night Market (October)
Select links: "Alex Vadukul spends the night at Sunset Park's most exciting warehouse party" (NY Press), "Truckloads of Freaks, Strippers, Art and Noodles Drive NYC's Lost Horizon Night Market" (Wired.com), "Decorating the Night in Brooklyn" (NY Times), "Burning Man festival raises up from the underground" (NY Daily News), Official site

Describe your current state of mind.

I secretly took a nap for an hour and a half in between when I got home from work, running errands today, and coming here. So, at the moment, I'm still a little fuzzy. But it should only take a minute.

You're leaving town tomorrow. Where are you going?

The Philadelphia Experiment Summer Festival in Maryland. It's a huge outdoor, 4th of July party; and it's about 1,300 people. I'm running a box truck there. I'm doing a tea lounge inside, [with velvet walls], and these gorgeous picture frames. I just printed a bunch of engravings from the Library of Congress. The archive has Harper's and all of these old magazines; it's like old photographs, illustrations, [and] engravings, scanned at super high resolutions.

 
It’s going to be a single table going all the way through the center, wooden folding chairs, candlelight, [and] tea service. Everything is in glass and ceramics. No plastics. Nothing packaged. I got all the loose tea in Chinatown at Ten Ren; it's all really nice stuff. The goal is, instead of having these projects that come off as being really rough around the edges, to do something that actually feels polished, quiet, and very conversational. Especially at a festival, where everything is really Burning Man-y, rave-y, and pulled together with duck tape all the time.

I remember at the last Night Market there were rocking chairs and -

Shadow dancing?

Yeah, that was an interesting combination. How did the idea for the Night Market come about?

It started with Mark Krawczuk and the noodle truck at two Decompressions ago, which is coming up on three years ago, now. He originally wanted to have an art car. He was talking about having a vehicle that was either going to be sculptural or serving something out of it. All of his friends talked him out of it because it's just terrible, you know? Where do you store it? Where do you build it? They're horribly expensive.

One of the venues had an exclusive license for food and drink. No one else could do a project about serving food or anything like that. So Mark built this fully functioning Japanese noodle restaurant in the back of a truck. He was in the parking lot, backed against a dumpster; you couldn't see it. That was his clever way around the rules. He didn't announce it. He didn’t ask permission for it. And it was really amazing.

I was on the radio, working that night, and someone recommended that I check out the secret noodle restaurant running out of the parking lot. All of the stories were true; it was just great. And I talked to Mark afterward, about developing it into something that was more. We could do it with a lot of trucks. We had lunch a bunch of times.

The concept of the Night Market is actually taken from a Neil Gaiman story for young adults that's set in, literally, a subterranean, Third World that goes on underneath London. And there's this thing called the Night Market that happens periodically in a different location, in this crazy, fictional, [and] romantic community full of charlatans. So that's where the concept for the name came from.

The truck thing is Mark's, originally. And then we sort of worked together to create a group event, where a lot of people could participate and do their own things. What would we encourage people to do? Would we have rules? What locations would we use?

In putting on an underground event, is it better to have it unannounced to the press, and have it be exclusive to a community of  people, or the opposite?

I’m a part of events that go both or many ways on it. There’s Figment, for instance, or Horizons, my conference on psychedelics, where we actively engage the press.

Things like the Night Market, some of the warehouse parties, [and] Jeff Stark’s plays, exist in certain gray areas, in terms of capacity [and] legal issues. And it's really out of necessity that they're promoted quietly. Or that they exist for a particular community.

[There are] also issues of etiquette. If we had it on the morning news that this Night Market thing was going to be happening, and that anyone could go, [it would ruin] a lot of the subtlety about what we're trying to do, in terms of the way people are supposed to be behave; [we're] having it be a free event, but asking for tips. The goal isn’t like a concert, where you're paying to be entertained. And it's not like a market, somewhere you're going to go to shop. Having the people who attend be within a certain degree or two of a community really makes it work better. What happens is the group of people that attend grows slowly over time.

Winkel and I had a warehouse party last weekend. And our numbers looked like 1,300 people. I didn't know most of the people there. But it was clearly working, where the staff didn't have problems with the crowd. People were fairly courteous. We didn't have to ask anyone to leave. So it’s this [fine] line. The scariest thing of keeping it too secret [is] the event feels lame because you don't get a critical mass; [and] you don’t have excitement. Or, I would say that we were already walking the line with the police at the last Night Market. If there had been another 300-500 people, I think we might have gotten shut down or worse.

On what grounds could the police do that?

The police don't need grounds to do anything. If you want to argue about what the police do, months down the line in court, you could, of course, do so. But it's sort of pointless. They're the police and you're not. And if they don't like what you're doing, they can arrest you if they like. It's illegal for you to stop them.

If I were a police officer who saw what we were doing, thought that it was a risk, and wanted it to stop, I'm sure that you can pull something out of the rule book. And at the end of the day, there’s a stray thing called disorderly conduct, which can sort of mean anything and everything. But it's less about being right legally and about finding a strong legal argument that what you're doing should be allowed. It's more about making the police feel that you're not a risk to safety, and that if they have a concern about something, you're going to play ball with them. 

As an event producer, do you find yourself running around and coordinating so much that you can't enjoy your own event?

Oh yeah. It's very rare that anything that I'm involved in producing, I'm actively enjoying while it's happening. [The Sweet Cheat] play was pretty good about that because my role was so narrowly circumscribed. I was [ushering the audience]. And it was something that I happened to think was fun.

But [at] a larger production that I'm nominally in charge of, it's just hard to have a good time, especially at the warehouse parties. You're just frantically running around and staying focused, trying to do things all night. People are interrupting you all the time, trying to say, "Hi." I've enjoyed the Night Markets a fair amount. But then again, I'm hosting a talk show by myself. I think the longest run I had was 5.5 hours in the back of the truck, hosting guests. So I certainly enjoy it, and it's fun. But it's not like I'm out walking around, having a good time, exactly.

Can you talk about your position on psychedelics and their significance in our culture?

I think if you look at the American pharmacopia, it's not healthy. And I'm not saying that there aren't people who absolutely do not need Ritalin, and people who don't actually need Prozac. But where people are taking these drugs as extremely expensive, and ultimately harmful, Band-Aids –

We have problems within our society. It's not just an issue of like, "Oh. You're missing chemical X. We can give you a little more of that." People need to stop and think really hard about what they do with their time, their relationships with their family and friends, and things that we do collectively as a society in the country. I don't think it's a crazy thing at all for people to have experiences on these drugs, that forces them to look at these things in a way that they can't ignore. Versus taking drugs that numb you, or taking drugs that force you to have an attention that you don't deserve, because you have an extremely distracted lifestyle.

I also do not think that everyone should take psychedelic drugs. I don't really use them myself anymore. Like a lot of people, I'd use them frequently when I was younger. I don't feel like I have a problem in my life, right now, that I need that kind of insight for. I also don't really recommend that people use them at parties for what you would call "entertainment purposes." I think they're for introspection.

There's a large group of people that we try to highlight at the conference. [They] are using them for actual research, either in a medical or therapeutic context, or a hard, neuroscience context. They're looking at it more at the mechanical level in the brain, as opposed to solving the problem. [Psychedelics] seem kind of controversial. But I think [if] it's acceptable to walk out of a psychiatrist's office with [drugs], I don't see why [psychedelics] are such a crazy alternative.

Have you ever experienced side effects from using psychedelics?

There are two kinds of bad experiences. There are ones that are extremely psychologically difficult because they force you to reconsider things that are challenging subjects. Pop Psychology 101: everyone has these things that have greatly influenced their life experiences with relationships, friends, family, and the things that always touches a nerve when someone mentions something. Or, you encounter some situation that reminds you of it, and [it] makes you upset. Because you haven't fully dealt with all of those things that people normally go to therapy for. Sometimes when you're having an experience, it's challenging. It's not fun and it's not entertaining. Those experiences are ultimately difficult because you're doing something important. That's not easy.

The other sort of bad experiences [are] when you take way too much, or you take them in a place you shouldn't have. You freak out and have a paranoid experience.  I've had them, too. They're awful. And they mostly happen because people don't know the drugs that they're taking. They're on a black market. They're sold things, where they don't know what they are. Or they're taking an unknown dosage of it.

I've met people who tend to be either predisposed to mental illness, or have used astonishing dosages over and over again - like the people who have gone on tour with the Grateful Dead and were tripping four-days-a-week for a year. But those [side effects] do happen; I've seen them. 

What's your idea of happiness?

That's sort of a loaded, philosophical question. I don't know if I really have one. I do the things that I find rewarding. I love really big days on my bicycle. I did the Montauk bike ride the other week. My legs were shaking. I was on the verge of collapse. [But] I felt great.

I feel really good at the end of an event. It's not what a lot of people would call happiness. I'm usually mentally and physically exhausted. I have a thousand things to do. I don't really have a lot of time in my life when I get to come home, read, or be mellow. So the things that I think feel great have a big work component to them. [When] I feel happy most of the time, I feel really busy, which is how I prefer to be.

I definitely have a great time when I travel. Sometimes I'll go away for a month at a time, or be in a country where I don't know anyone; [i'll] barely check email or my phone. I'd say, in general, I'm a very happy person. But I don't really have a philosophical perspective on it.

What's the most difficult thing that you've ever had to do?

In the event context, New Year's Eve this year was extremely brutal. We had way more people than we had anticipated. We were understocked and understaffed. I was genuinely nervous about safety issues, having enough security, [and] all sorts of problems. We ran out of water at one point. I was really worried about people passing out, not being able to hydrate, [and] being at an extremely busy party, where they'd been dancing all night and drinking.

Finding venues for Decompression was really tough because it's an event that belongs to a lot of people. It's not like my name is on it and I get to decide what is. [I experienced the] pressure of pleasing an extremely opinionated community. Meeting this checklist in finding affordable places that would be legal for thousands of people, [where] they would let us set up our jet-powered amusement rides in the parking lot, was tough.

The year I did crowd control for One Night of Fire was an extraordinary challenge, trying to safely and reasonably move a mob of 4,000 people in an illegal street parade all over the city. Those were incredible days and very big challenges. On the event front, we definitely keep pushing it every time.

In a parallel and previous life, working in computer security and research, there were very different sorts of technical challenges. You would spend weeks and weeks working on a problem, knowing that what you're looking for might not actually exist.

There have also been family sorts of things that have been challenging, with making amends between groups of family or things like that. 

Have you always wanted to do events?

Nope. Not at all. I still have a part-time job in computer security. I started working at a start-up when I was 16. And from ages 16-21 or so I was very dedicated to that. I barely graduated high school. It was the community I was living in. It was what I was doing with my time. And before that, growing up, my earliest ambition was visual arts illustration, drawing, things like that.

[Events] started in 2005 when I moved into my building [in Dumbo]. Winkel and I were living in different units in the building. Have you been to his place on the 2nd floor? It's a huge loft on the ground floor. There's no one who lives below, above, or next to him. We were having a lot of parties there. I sort of cut my teeth there DJing, doing whatever I could, seeing how things worked. I went to Burning Man that year for the first time, and it was sort of mind-blowing in its own way. I was coming off of a stint, working very hard for my job. I had quit. I was just spending money, not worrying about it at the time. And then after that I started doing Decompression. I started working with Complacent Nation, which is now Danger. And little by little I started taking on more responsibility, running my own shows, and partnering with Winkel.

I kind of got where I am by [doing] everything there is to do at an event, from cleaning up, electrical, working the door, and being behind the bar. There's pretty much nothing to do at an event that I have not done personally. Which is one of the reasons why I'm good at producing events. Which means I didn't sweep into it without an understanding of everything there is to do when one is involved.

I did have some previous exposure in an interesting way in that my father was the Herald Square stage manager for the Macy’s Parade; I experienced that growing up.

That sounds intense. Was your dad just running around all the time?

November was very busy for my dad because he was working on the Macy's Parade.

Actually, what a lot of people don't know is that the Macy’s Parade is a small group of full-time [employees], who get time off from their normal jobs.  The rest are Macy's Volunteers. Because the company thinks that the parade is so important. 

My dad was a Vice President of Marketing. [He had] nothing to do with events or anything. But he felt that the parade was really cool. As a kid, I was in the Macy’s Parade for a number of years as an extra in a costume. I got to see the huge warehouse in Jersey where they [housed] a brigade, all of the balloon floats, and all of the costumes; they designed, built, and stored them [there]. Every year they would have a pre-parade party, where all the people who would work on the parade would go to the warehouse. They would unveil all [of] that year's creations.

I remember those days really vividly. I was like 7-10 years-old; I was really young and [that experience] stuck with me very much. I had nothing to do with events for years until five or six years ago. It was totally something that was neither here nor there in my life. I was partying and stuff, but I wasn't creating them.

Do you have any advice on how to throw events?

I have an ongoing joke about writing a book or teaching a class, which someday may happen. But the main thing is: don't be afraid of starting small. I cannot tell you the number of people who come to me and they're like, “I want to do this event. Where can I have like 1,000 people?” Or: “I need somewhere off the bat [with] 30-foot ceilings. And I need this much room and all of this stuff.” And what I tell everyone is to do something for 50 people. Get you and a bunch of friends together, put it on the calendar, and swear that you're going to do it - and do it really small. It’s fine to make mistakes. It's fine to have a first event where not enough people come.

The first step is really the important thing. It's something that anyone can do. You don't have to have 1,000 people to have a big party. You don't have to have a giant warehouse. Do the thing that feels rewarding to you. If you want to learn about bar management, or how to set up a sound system, or things like that, those are not hard things to learn or to ask around about. The important thing is to make something that you enjoy doing, and to get all of your friends together. Find everyone who wants to talk, then make it a community thing.

Oh yeah. And if you're trying to [produce] events to make a lot of money, you're on a fool's errand, or will end up doing really lame events. Because really lame events can make a lot of money. [laughs]

What do you think is overrated?

I think pretty much everyone agrees that the nightclubs in New York City right now are pretty terrible. No one wants to go to them. They're super expensive. There's not any creative culture coming out of them.

I think the gallery world certainly has its place. But if someone is coming to New York and wants to see what the art is about, I think it's hard to justify those media in the gallery, or in the museum context. Going somewhere with white walls to look at square boxes with paint on them [is] great; I’m all for people painting, [and] doing photographs and sculpture. But in  the context of art history, Where is creativity going? Where is important art?

I think the participatory things that are happening in public are important. The important things are people doing stuff that is not about permission, in particular. I think it's astonishing how little political art work there is in New York. Do you notice this?

Like in what way?

Go to every gallery in Chelsea or go to every museum. [There’s] very little political work, like a fractional amount of stuff that engages political themes, or makes any discernible political statement. The theater world is definitely a bit better at it. Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway always has political stuff going on.

But for the most part, it's always shocking to me. I go to the Chelsea Rec Center Gym every Friday, and afterwards, I'll almost always go by those galleries to see what's there. And I often find stuff I love, whether it's a beautiful painting, photographs, or sculptures. But as far as the art being alive and exciting, I feel like the medium for it is shifting towards the things that involve participation, collaboration, or public space.

So would you say that political art is underrated?

I don't know that [political art is] underrated in terms of emerging arts being exactly that. They’re emerging. That's kind of an answer unto it's own thing.

At Campfire, our last event, we had 35 art projects. They [were] created by people who are professional artists and craftsmen, where that's all that they do; they create exquisite artwork. They have artist bios, position papers, artist statements, [and] all of these things. We also had people who have 9-to-5 jobs, who have something creative that they do in their spare time that introduces them to people.

The fact that the New York Times is not covering some guy who makes a little bit of stuff in his spare time, [which] is not awesome but is cool in the context that it is, is not shocking. I think events like One Night of Fire, Jeff Stark’s plays, or things like that, deserve a little more exposure.

[With] Figment, we had a lot of success with getting in print. I think we've been on the morning news shows a couple of times. We surface occasionally. But compared to the amount of coverage that gallery shows are sometimes getting, or the stuff that you see at museums, it seems a little strange. Where you can tell the public, to a large extent, is no longer interested in art, because it's not visceral; it's not engaging.

Art doesn't have to be fun. It can be disturbing. It can be alarming. And it should be in a lot of cases. But people are super turned off to art because they don't relate to the stuff that they're being told is important artwork. It's just not interesting to most people. It's interesting to an extremely small class of people, with a sophisticated education, who often make their careers on the idea that this art should be valuable in a financial sense.

I think most everything I've heard about at the Park Avenue Armory is totally awesome. What they're doing [with] Governors Island in general, even beyond Figment, is really wonderful... David Byrne's Playing the Building was great at the Battery Maritime Building a few years ago; it felt a little dry and conceptual but I still think, ultimately, it was a very cool art project that was utilizing dormant public space for people who got to do something cool. There's great stuff going on, but the art world is still focused on these things that are supposedly important, [but] are actually interesting to a small group of self-interested people.

What's one thing - tangible or intangible - that you could not live without?

My bicycle always comes up every time someone asks me a question like that.  I am such a salesman for bicycles. It's good for your body. It's good for your mind. It's good for the city. It's good for the planet. Everything about it is so incredibly wonderful and joyful. And like, yes, I've been knocked off my bike. And, yes, I've had friends who have been in the hospital, and all of that stuff. But on a day-to-day and two-week basis, it's just one of those things: if I were unable to ride my bike, I would lose something that felt great.

The other great thing is the community that I've become a part of by doing these events, where anyone can contribute and be a part of them. You're constantly meeting these wonderful people. It's not like meeting people through a job, where everyone has a career or a money interest. Or, you feel like, Well, okay, I'm going to go home. And then I'm going to live my life at the end of this.

Everyone who's at these events is there because it's exactly what they want to be doing with their time; it's the heart of my life. It's the way that I live now, being able to do these things that bring people together. As opposed to a different view of what art is, which is about creating an exquisite object, or, in the case of performance art, an important, transient object experience. I think craftsmanship is wonderful. I think people who can make incredible photographs, paintings, and sculptures, are great. But, for me, art and creativity are a way to change culture, and a way to get people interacting in a healthy and community-oriented way.

What are you reading and listening to right now?

I am reading Underground by Haruki Murakami, which is like a Studs Terkel-style book about people who survived the Tokyo subway gassing in the '90s. It's an entire book of three to five-page interviews with survivors who are comfortable being interviewed about it. 

I do have a pretty typical fascination with cults and terrorist attacks…as something we hear so much about. You want to read more about other cultures who have had this problem, and [learn] how they've dealt with it. I read mostly non-fiction, by the way. I very rarely get around to novels. Almost all of my bookshelf is sociology, history, [and] popular science kind of stuff.

The last book I read before [Murakami] was Liar's Poker. Which is a book that has sold like a trillion copies since the financial collapse. [It's] about a guy who got a job at a big trading firm in the '80s, managing vast amounts of other peoples' money. [Which] he was not particularly qualified to do. But he eventually became disgusted with himself, quit, and wrote this book. The author's name is Michael Lewis. If you want to read about the financial collapse, the articles that he's been writing over the last two years have been golden. He has a book that's coming out soon, that I'm looking forward to very much, called The Big Short. 

I also read a lot of books about the history of gatherings of people [and] nightlife. I've probably read more books than people know exist about the history of drinking [and] dancing. It started out [with] anthropomorphic origins - people imitating animals they were trying to kill - coming up to the present day of the history of disco music and rave culture.

Why do you think you read mostly non-fiction?

I am a super data gatherer. I have an engineering approach to solving any problem. It's a really weird thing. When I read novels, I kind of feel like I'm wasting my time; certainly not all novels.

To segue into your other question, I don't listen to music that has lyrical content that has this person expressing their situation. I like things that are little more universal. Rock music, [for example], gets into a lot of "me me me" territory. And I'd really not get into that. I'd rather learn about the world.

I listen to a lot of dance music and a few hours’ worth of new mixes a week. I have a large collection of ambient music, like the sound of time moving slowly, of ensemble bands with 10-12 band members, that play, largely, instrumental music: Broken Social Scene; Godspeed You! Black Emperor; Mogwai; Explosions in the Sky. When it's in season, I love going to the opera. I don't listen to it at home or anything, but I try to go once a month.

And finally, what's your hometown?
 
I was born in Jamaica, Queens. I grew up in Suffolk County, Long Island until I was 12. Then I moved to Atlanta. I would visit New York City throughout the year, including some prolonged visits in the winter and summer. So the "Where are you from?" question at this point is very confusing; I got two very different educations on the Civil War. 

Really.

Oh yeah. Back-to-back. I got the New York Public School system's American History class. And the following year, I had the same class in Georgia. [It] could not have been more different.

How was the class in Georgia?

The War of Northern Aggression.

That's awesome. [laughs]

I was not a popular kid in class that year.

But you were very knowledgeable, yes?

My many questions did not enamor me with my teachers or fellow students.

You would think it would with teachers, no?

Being a Yankee in a class full of Southerners in Civil War class? Pretty 
tough. [laughs]