Name: John Law
Age: 52
Hometown: Big Rapids, MI
Current town: San Francisco, CA; Detroit, MI
Job description: Writer, semi-retired trouble maker
Bio: Primary event organizer and lead climber for The San Francisco Suicide Club (Feb. 1977-Apr. 1982); primary member of San Francisco Cacophony Society (Oct. 1986-Present); associate, crew member of Dark Passage (1999-Present); crew member of Survival Research Labs (1991-Present); crew member of S.F. Cyclecide Bike Club (1999-Present); consultant for Madagascar Institute (1999-Present); co-founder of Burning Man Festival; emeritus crew member of Seemen Machine Art Cabal (1992-1997)
Upcoming projects:
Fooling “artists” into moving to Detroit
Select links: "Caves: Urban Explorers discover secret world below" (SF Gate); "Face Time: John Law" (SF Gate); "Bridge Climbers Scale the Heights of Urban Adventure" (Blue Magazine); "Last Crawl" (SF Weekly); "Going Underground: Urban explorer documents the hidden world of speakeasies, sewers, and subways" (SF Gate); "Gunplay in the Desert: Playful gathering pumps hot lead in rural Nevada" (SF Gate); "Some tales about John Law and the bridges of the world" (YouTube); Santarchy & Santacon; Pranks!; The Art of the Prank ; Head Trip trailer
Describe your current state of mind.
I’m floating somewhere between euphoria and horror. This year, I’m leaning more toward euphoria. Last year was a pretty dismal year. The world in a treacherous tailspin. Everything seemed pretty grim and we’re probably facing some cataclysmic climate situation, if you believe the hippy scientists….
My dad was a young man in the late 1920s and 30s during the Depression and later during World War II. Grandpa lost his business, family lost the house; they ended up in the proverbial one room shack with a dirt floor for a while.
Think about it: commercial collapse; extreme poverty for so many; later tens of millions dying yearly through the war. Are things that bad right now? Looks like we’re going in that direction, maybe…I’m pretty optimistic, actually. If you look at history, the world has ALWAYS been a shithole. Or a field of opportunity. For most people, it’s a little of both, eh? Twenty years ago, I’d have said “No hope. We’re doomed!” I did say that a lot, ask anyone who knew me then…I’m more optimistic in my old age. Maybe I’m going kind of soft or just not paying attention...
I had a child when I was 47. He’s five going on six now, and that requires a certain amount of optimism.
What were you like as a kid?
There weren’t a lot of cliffs where I grew up, but there were a lot of trees. I was a climber. My buddies and I used to run down steep hills and grab the tops of maple saplings, about 20 feet tall and swing down to the ground. I climbed everything I could. Where we grew up, we would jump off the railroad bridge into the river. We would float down the river in inner tubes. Walk around the woods with a 22 rifle or head to the creek to catch crawdads. So it was kind of a rural upbringing looking back on it. At the time, I thought it was kind of dull. Silly me…I also read sci-fi, fantasy and horror incessantly. Lovecraft, Stevenson, Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen were my faves…Still are.
When did you move away?
I ran away from home, skipped juvenile probation when I was 17 and hitchhiked to California. I always wanted to be in the city even though I grew up in the a small town and hung in the woods...It was a toss-up: San Francisco or New York…I had an older friend in Berkeley, so it was California. All I did when I got there was walk everywhere, explore and climb things. I slept in Golden Gate Park for a couple of weeks, panhandled on Market Street and washed dishes for a month for room and board in a youth hostel. Then, fortunately for me, after about a year I was introduced to a group called the Suicide Club. I went on the first “initiation” in early 1977 and instantly knew that was what I wanted to do. I never looked back. The Club motto was “Live each day as though it were your last.” We explored
everywhere and mounted crazy events in abandoned buildings, climbed urban structures/ bridges, towers and the like. Infiltrated weird cults and political groups. Mounted goofy and sometime confrontational street theater. Organized elaborate costumed games on the street, in the cemeteries and any other weird environment we could think of. I was in heaven.
It was a very ethical group in a many respects. We would never break a window or lock, or destroy anything. We would just go into a place and make as though we [had] never been there. So we could go back. This served a particular purpose in climbing bridges - which are occupied structures. Once you start letting them know that you’re there they’d get more security and make it more difficult to get back in.
[The Suicide Club] [was about] doing what you wanted, and taking the consequences for your actions. So, if we’re going to go out and do something as a public prank, you can’t get mad if someone punches you in the nose. Their reaction to what you were doing is just as valid as your dopey street theater or lame prank. You couldn’t be mad if the police arrested you because they’re part of the game. If you got caught, the last thing you should do is whine about it because you chose to be there. It was about self-reliance and responsibility. I really enjoyed that and learned a lot from that philosophy. [It’s] informed everything I’ve done since to some degree.
An interesting way to look at the world is as a playground or a carnival and we humans as child like players. Gary Warne wrote a piece called Carnival Cosmologythat nails it.
Tell me about the Suicide Club’s initiation ceremony.
It wasn’t that scary really. As with many later events we just showed up and had no idea what was going to happen… particularly after we were blindfolded…Fifty or so of us met at Gary’s bookstore, The Circus of the Soul, were blindfolded, trundled into vehicles, driven for miles to we knew not where. After a long blind walk, single file, and hand in hand up a sandy slope somewhere near the sea (you could smell it), we enter some colossal underground chamber. After stumbling along for what seemed like hundreds of yards, we were told to take off the blindfolds (after at least a couple of hours blind). It was pitch dark...duh! We found our way out in dribs and drabs and eventually came together in a circle. Dave Warren had us drink from the "Bottles of Life and Death” and then touch each of our outstretched hands with a live flame…
Dave, who was Gary Warne’s partner of sorts and co-founder (along with Adrienne Burk and Nancy Prussia) of the Suicide Club, was kind of the spirit of Chaos in the Club. David was a carnival barker, magician, door-to-door salesman, and fire-eater; I’m pretty sure that [David was] the only fire-eater in San Francisco in 1977. He and Gary shared a sardonic humor; Gary was his polar opposite, thoughtful, a little reserved, always observing all going on around him. In this respect, they were a perfect odd couple match: the Felix and Oscar of
Urban Adventure. Crazy things happened around Dave. And he would do the oddest things. I’ll give you an example. When I was 19, I took a hitchhiking trip cross-country. I was very excited and after many on-the-road adventures, ended up in New York for three months. Before I left, David got really serious and pulled me aside and said, “Hey, Kid, I got somethin’ for ya. Yer gonna need this.” And he gave me this giant rubber thumb. That was pretty cool.
Stupid rubber thumb. It worked. People stopped to pick me up...
Dave had his problems. He had his demons. He was a hard drinker and would fall off the wagon every once in a while, and get outrageous. During a fire performance once at the Other Café (the venue where Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, and people like that got their start in the mid-70s), Dave was ripped to the gills, and he caught the stage on fire. Very nearly burned the rickety wooden building down. Fellow clubber, Pierre Barral, and I got it out with fire extinguishers, barely…
These guys kicked off a lot of what was to become Urban Exploration, “Culture Jamming” flash mobs, etc… The Billboard Liberation Front was another group to come out of the Suicide Club. Dave, under the name Irving Glikk, was one of the founders of the BLF. He and “Jack Napier” were inspired to do billboards after attending a Suicide Club event organized by Gary and Adrienne Burk.
Gary died in 1983 of a heart attack. He was 35 years old. Although largely unknown, his ideas live on in a number of ways. I believe his theory and practices of etiquette around exploring abandoned and dangerous places has informed the Urban Exploration field over the years. The “Leave No Trace” mantra of Burning Man (once true, now a corporate slogan) came directly from the Suicide Club.
How did the Suicide Club end?
The club was active for five years. As I said, it was a pretty extreme group, not all climbing and fun and games…The idea was to really challenge your fears, whatever they might be. A lot of the events were psychologically demanding and scary. They weren’t all for fun. We infiltrated weird cults, [and] political and religious groups. We went to stay with the Moonies. You know, one of the really weird Christian cults. We went to barbecues with the American Nazi Party (That’s right, they were around in 1978 and they still are – pay attention!). Tried to catch a serial rapist in Panhandle Park. A lot of this stuff was pretty demanding, psychically, physically, and emotionally. I think a combination of increasing paranoia about the authorities, a lack of new blood, and some relationship incestuousness (happens in many intense groups – who’s slept with whom...ad nauseum…) combined with other factors, eventually doomed the Club.
It was cult-ish in it’s own sense to some degree. I remember in the first year I would meet up with my fellow adventurers, go out, and do the most outrageous things, usually at night. And before dawn we would split…It was like this: you’d pick up your lunch pail after the shift and go home… “Okay Bob, see ya tomorrow.” And then the next time you saw the guy you were clinging to the undercarriage of the Golden Gate Bridge! I didn’t even know what most of these people did for a living or what their politics were or ANYTHING…and I trusted
my life to them. Extraordinary…
The Cacophony Society [came] later [in]1986, founded by five or six bored ex-Suicide Clubbers. It continued on in the vein of pranking and [underground exploration] that Gary and the rest had kicked off. One of the differences was the attitude about publicity. The Suicide Club was a secret society. Very cagey and media averse. Cacophony, a kinder gentler Suicide Club sorta, was much more open and encouraged attention. There were good and bad things about both stances…Cacophony ended up having a much broader reach. There still wasn’t a ton of forethought. And, honestly, Cacophony was more of a philosophy than an actual organization. There was never a boss or owner. There were many egos involved, but no single one ever tried to make a business out of it, or could stand alone as THE Cacophony guy (or gal). Nobody really ran anything; the closest anyone came was in L.A. Cacophony: Rev. Al Ridenour was very identified with Cacophony…but he’s a truly brilliant prankster. Also, to his great credit, he retired from Cacophony after a solid ten years of some of the craziest events. He could have whipped it into a successful cult, no doubt. Got people to paint the white picket fence for him as he reclined in an air conditioned RV…Oh s**t – that’s another story! Point is, Al knew when to stand down, move on. He does a thing called The Art of Bleeding, nowadays.
For most of the dozen or so really active chapters, there was no real leader. That came from a philosophy of the Suicide Club; anybody in the group was equal in that they could do whatever event they wanted. Others voted with their feet. If they didn’t like the organizer's way, they could come back later and do the event themselves in whatever fashion they liked.
Brooklyn Cacophony Society lasted about 8 or 9 months. It exploded, due to personality and scheduling conflicts, into other groups. Julia Solis’ Dark Passage and Ars Subterrenea, and the Madagascar Institute are prominent NYC organizations that got some ideas and personnel from Cacophony.
Portland Cacophony, after SF and LA, was the most active “lodge.” To date, they are the only one I know of that actually snuck into a nuclear power plant, the Trojan, and played around in the cooling tower…Chuck Palahniuk was a member of Portland Cacophony, long before Fight Club.
Detroit Cacophony’s main contribution to the world of CHAOS CACOPHONY and DARK SATURNALIA, was shooting flaming propane canisters in the bowels of colossal abandoned industrial edifices. “Big Badda Boom”, as Corbin Dallas says in The Fifth Element. Don’t try this in your backyard (unless you live in Detroit!)
Tell me about Santarchy in Portland.
Personally, in my mind, I liked organizing the event because I hated Christmas. Christmas was a grim time. It’s a commercial pretty much created by the Coca-Cola Company, and it’s something that people buy into. Getting dressed in a Santa suit, going out, and doing your own thing was a way of reclaiming the holiday and making it fun.
Portland was the third Santa Con we did. Two in San Francisco before that. Michael Mikel and I helped Santa Rob organize it in 1994. This was before the Internet picked it up and blew it up into the ridiculously huge, drinking binge-frat party-mob scene that takes place world wide every December now.
Okay, Portland. A nice quiet little town. What could possibly go wrong there? We were followed by the police everywhere. They thought we were going to trash the place, when, in fact, we just wanted to spend money and support the local economy!! Hehheheh...
We got Santas to fly in from San Francisco and LA. There were 70 Santas on a flight. One of the Santas was into ice skating and informed us that Tonya Harding was going to be skating at the big rink in Lloyd Center Mall near downtown. We showed up with 200 Santas to cheer her on. And we were met by the police. The security chief for the center says: “You can’t go into the shopping center, I don’t care how many Santa’s you have…” The Portland PD Captain backed him up. “We’re not going to do anything. We just want to walk around and get a photo-op and watch Tonya skate, Dude!"
Lloyd Center Security Chief: “This is private property and my instructions are to arrest you if you step on our property.” The Police Captain nods soberly. We were pretty discouraged. We had enough Santas to really cause problems for them, but that wasn’t the point. Santa Cupcake, Santa Victor, and I had an idea. We gathered the Santas. We start yelling and sprinting (all 150 or so) toward the shopping center. The cops thought we were trying to breach the property line. We ran right up to the curb across the street from their defensive line, right up onto a low retaining wall. We lined up in a huge single file row, and as the riot cops popped their cruiser trunks and frantically donned their body armor and shields, we sang “Jingle Bells” original, in unison, off-keyish - nice lyrics and all, not the amended ones in the Cacophony X-Mas songbook…and after shouting “MERRY CHRISTMAS” turned and filtered back into the park, like the Bedouin raiders leaving a smoking derailed train in Lawrence of Arabia.
I never looked at the cops as the enemy. They’re workers with a job. Their job is to protect property. The best of them will maybe help and protect you. Most simply don’t care. The worst are violent jerks. After they had chased us around Portland all weekend, some of them started questioning their command staff. Why HAD the city deployed dozens, nearly a hundred cops to chase around what was at the worst nowhere near as bad as the parking lot after a football game? “What the f**k are we chasing these goofballs around for? What a waste of money and our time. We should be somewhere else fighting crime…”
One tired looking cop asked me and some other Santas: “…why don’t you guys commit some crime so we can just arrest you and I can go home!”
The last thing I remember was two cops letting Santas into the back of their police cruiser to get photos of what looked like Santa being arrested and carted away. Oh, and the cops had '70s disco tunes blaring from their car radios.
Blues and Reds. I think the Reds won…
We weren’t anthropologists or anything. People taking over and creating their own holidays, based on cultural myths and general desire to interact festively with others, wasn’t anything new. It’s a common thing in history. And now it’s a thing. Thank the Internet for that - good
and bad. You be the judge.
My last SantaCon was NYC in 1998. Santa Dennis from Detroit Cacophony and I climbed to the top to the Brooklyn Bridge, later slipping down the cables and into the hundred or so Santa’s on the promenade using them for cover. “Officer Dude, it was SANTA on the cables!”
Nowadays, I wish I had a penny for every Santa...
Can we talk about Burning Man?
Sure! Let’s talk about Burning Man. The “Dirt Rave” as my friend Greg Reynard calls it. Cacophonist Ethyl Ketone (Carrie Galbraith) came up with a thing she called “Zone Trips” back in the ‘80s. Her idea of the Zone was sort of a surreal tourism. You would bunch up, go to some alien environment (L.A., Black Rock Desert, insane fire works festival in Mexico), and live the trip as though you were tourists on some weird planet…The first Zone trip was in 1989. About a dozen of us drove to L.A. We stopped at Magic Mountain Amusement Park at 3 in the morning, drew a long line in the dirt, and all stepped across it into the Zone. We went to West Covina (Carries boring suburban hometown), dressed in decontamination white jumpsuits, [and] handed out bizarre questionnaires to people at 7AM. Then off to L.A. where we climbed the Hollywood Sign, hung out in an abandoned housing tract RIGHT under the
LAX flight path, stopped at LaBrea Tar Pits, and did any odd thing that popped into the collective mind. It was amazing. I’d been to L.A. before, but had NEVER seen it the way we did on that Zone Trip.
The second Zone Trip was to the Black Rock Desert in August/September 1990. This was the first Burning Man in the desert. BM had been happening each Summer Solstice for a few years on Baker Beach in SF. We got shut down by the police. There were about four hundred or so people, all yelling and pretty stupid. We didn’t burn the wooden man and had to haul it back in sections to a parking lot we were renting. Meanwhile, Kevin Evans and I had been planning a Cacophony Zone Trip out to the Black Rock for months. We both had been to the playa and were blown away by the insane, ethereal environment. The Zone. Definitely.
Seventy people, (if that) mostly Cacophonists on the desert. Guns, fires, driving fast with the lights out, silly “art”, lots a hallucinating. The Zone. Long time ago.
Burning Man: Coming to a Cineplex near you soon! Check the official website for updates.
What was San Francisco like in the ‘70s and ‘80s?
Like Detroit is now. Detroit is big, abandoned, kinda scary, full of empty factories, scraggly artist/criminals collecting there because it’s CHEAP. And you can do pretty much do what youlike as long as you don’t piss off the local Baptist Minister…
I don’t know how else to put it. San Francisco was a devastated city in 1976 when I showed up. I found and joined the Suicide Club in 1977. A miracle. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I had missed that boat: perhaps in jail, or worse, an accountant or a maybe a production welder. San Francisco in the ‘40s,‘50s, and '60s had been an industrial center, a shipping destination, and a blue collar town. By the ‘70s, all of that shifted. Industry left and it was years before banking and tourism got a hold to rule the roost, as they do now. There were abandoned buildings everywhere. I thought, “This is great! Look at all these abandoned buildings.” A f*****g giant playground…San Francisco was wide open; you could pay $200 for a whole apartment. $50 for a share. [I wanted to make] money so I could keep doing events. That’s all I wanted to do. Every job I got, all work-work I did was to finance my event habit. Living in San Francisco was great. It’s still a great town. Unfortunately, nowadays you have to spend a lot more time getting your basic needs taken care of. It’s expensive. It takes away from creative time. But there’s still a lot here.
But if you’re young, ambitious and want to make a mark, build an empire, or just live in a goddamn house you own outright, well, it’s Detroit. There’s no money there. So bring some. You won’t need much. Also…winter…eh... cough cough...
What’s your concept of happiness or contentment?
They’re two things. You’re lucky if you’re happy 20 percent of the time. [What about] fear and anger and desire? Pleasure, you know? I think people who want to be happy all the time are stupid. It’s hogwash to me. One, it’s impossible to be happy all the time. Two, it’s not desirable. Why the fuck would you want to be happy all the time? You’d have nothing to compare it with, with the peak and the abyss; it’s what makes things interesting. I wouldn’t want to be happy all the time. I’d kill myself; I’d be happy and I’d kill myself. A certain amount of contentment is probably desirable, but not TOO much. People need to be struggling. So contentment sometimes: Right, maybe after having sex. Contentment after a good meal and a brandy, maybe a cappuccino.
I quit smoking after 34 years. After I finally stopped craving it I felt a little content.
How long had you been a smoker?
I smoked from when I was 13 till I was 48. I didn’t smoke a whole pack a day always or anything, but I smoked a few and would bum one and pretended that I didn’t really smoke. Then a month later I was smoking a pack, and hiking or fucking standing up would make me wheeze and cough.
I said, “Fuck it, I’m going to quit. I want to live longer.” I can actually smell stuff, now: The air. The people. Sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s not.
“Why would you want to barbecue with the Nazis?” (Suicide Club “infiltration in 1978)
Because I wanted to know what they thought. Really. You should, too, cause they’re still out there somewhere…
What’s offensive to you?
Hubris. That’s the worst offense. Short of undeserved, violet attack. Politicians or artists or whomever, [who] are so content with their place in the world that think they’re the cat’s meow. Know-it-alls. They windbag in front of Woody Allen in the movie line in Annie Hall. He’s blowing hot air about Marshall McLuhan theories to Woody’s great discomfort. When the guy bellows at Allen, McLuhan (the actual guy) himself comes out from behind a potted plant to excoriate the blowhard for clearly not understanding his theories! God, I wish
life was more like that. I find blowhards, sycophancy and social climbing truly annoying.
That’s the attitude. I think that’s one of my issues with Burning Man - that it’s become a hipster tailgate party in a lot of ways. When we started doing it, we were anything but hip. It was a collection of eccentrics and outcasts, clinging together because of a love of the strange, and a secret desire to hang out (only for a while, of course) and burn and blow shit up, hug and sing, fuck and trip.
Also, no one else would talk to us!
Mark Pauline at SRL is a perfect example in my mind of how to do it right.
So is Chris Hackett at Madagascar. Julia Solis with Dark Passage. They’re crazy good.
They do stuff. And if they didn’t get any attention, they’d probably still be doing it. Pauline’s got a lot of attention for his machine work over the years, but if he were ignored completely he would still be in his shop every week trying to make some stupid crazy machine. Same with Hackett. No TV show, he’d still be doing the same ridiculous, insane, beautiful stuff. Julia’s attention to, and deep love of, the dark and beautiful, and her embrace of decay and dissolution and the underworld would be with her whether others joined in or not. Their function in life isn’t to “win”; (OK, maybe Hackett…) it isn’t to get accolades. I don’t like that: those who do something with the trappings of “success” as their goal. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in weird [people] doing weird things for their own reasons.
What’s tragic?
Tragedy to me is a 17-year-old kid shooting a little baby in a botched drive-by. A kid who thinks he’s got to run around with a bunch of thugs. Happened recently here in San Francisco. Happens all the time, everywhere. There’s tragedy everywhere. Tragedy is a young person who doesn’t see the chances and opportunities that are there.
What’s romantic?
Anything by Rachmaninoff, Marvin Gaye, some Mendelssohn, Bongwater, “Tangled up and Blue”, the only Dylan song I REALLY love…
A mean woman when she’s nice. A nice woman when she’s mean...
What’s the best and worst thing about owning Doggie Diner heads?
I have three of them on a trailer…The best thing is that everybody sees them when you drive by; [they] break the ice. Everyone loves them, from gang bangers to cops. Even asshole lawyers laugh and nod when they drive by. It’s kind of a public service to take them around. There are a couple of guys I trust to drive the trailer, Paul Troutman, John “Chicken” Rinaldi, Chris Campbell. Jarico Reese.
And the worst thing?
They’re a lot of work; they weigh 400 pounds each...I don’t charge to bring 'em around; they just go to cool events, parties, benefits, whatever. I can’t possibly bring them to everything I’d like to. Not enough time.
Do you have any regrets?
I regret not going to Baffin Island in 1980 or ’81 to rappel off the tallest sheer cliff in the world on Mt. Thor.
I regret not climbing Mount Saint Helens with my Suicide Club buddy (and closest land survivor to the volcanic eruption), Robert Rogers, to look down into the glowing cone from the volcanic rim.
I regret not going to see the Sex Pistols at Winterland S.F. for their 7 minute performance. All I knew about them at the time was that they spit on people, and stuck safety pins in their faces. Got that from People Magazine or maybe the National Enquirer, I think. Duh. The novelty factor from what I had heard about them was intriguing, but paying to see that? I’m still kicking myself…
Mark Pauline went….. I hate him!
What’s the greatest risk you’ve taken?
Having a child. The best thing that ever happened. And the best I am capable of.
Do you have anything you’d like to add?
A quote:
“He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”
–Walt Whitman
Current town: San Francisco, CA; Detroit, MI
Job description: Writer, semi-retired trouble maker
Bio: Primary event organizer and lead climber for The San Francisco Suicide Club (Feb. 1977-Apr. 1982); primary member of San Francisco Cacophony Society (Oct. 1986-Present); associate, crew member of Dark Passage (1999-Present); crew member of Survival Research Labs (1991-Present); crew member of S.F. Cyclecide Bike Club (1999-Present); consultant for Madagascar Institute (1999-Present); co-founder of Burning Man Festival; emeritus crew member of Seemen Machine Art Cabal (1992-1997)
Upcoming projects:
Fooling “artists” into moving to Detroit
Select links: "Caves: Urban Explorers discover secret world below" (SF Gate); "Face Time: John Law" (SF Gate); "Bridge Climbers Scale the Heights of Urban Adventure" (Blue Magazine); "Last Crawl" (SF Weekly); "Going Underground: Urban explorer documents the hidden world of speakeasies, sewers, and subways" (SF Gate); "Gunplay in the Desert: Playful gathering pumps hot lead in rural Nevada" (SF Gate); "Some tales about John Law and the bridges of the world" (YouTube); Santarchy & Santacon; Pranks!; The Art of the Prank ; Head Trip trailer
Describe your current state of mind.
I’m floating somewhere between euphoria and horror. This year, I’m leaning more toward euphoria. Last year was a pretty dismal year. The world in a treacherous tailspin.
My dad was a young man in the late 1920s and 30s during the Depression and later during World War II. Grandpa lost his business, family lost the house; they ended up in the proverbial one room shack with a dirt floor for a while.
Think about it: commercial collapse; extreme poverty for so many; later tens of millions dying yearly through the war. Are things that bad right now? Looks like we’re going in that direction, maybe…I’m pretty optimistic, actually. If you look at history, the world has ALWAYS been a shithole. Or a field of opportunity. For most people, it’s a little of both, eh? Twenty years ago, I’d have said “No hope. We’re doomed!” I did say that a lot, ask anyone who knew me then…I’m more optimistic in my old age. Maybe I’m going kind of soft or just not paying attention...
I had a child when I was 47. He’s five going on six now, and that requires a certain amount of optimism.
What were you like as a kid?
There weren’t a lot of cliffs where I grew up, but there were a lot of trees. I was a climber. My buddies and I used to run down steep hills and grab the tops of maple saplings, about 20 feet tall and swing down to the ground. I climbed everything I could. Where we grew up, we would jump off the railroad bridge into the river. We would float down the river in inner tubes. Walk around the woods with a 22 rifle or head to the creek to catch crawdads. So it was kind of a rural upbringing looking back on it. At the time, I thought it was kind of dull. Silly me…I also read sci-fi, fantasy and horror incessantly. Lovecraft, Stevenson, Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen were my faves…Still are.
When did you move away?
I ran away from home, skipped juvenile probation when I was 17 and hitchhiked to California. I always wanted to be in the city even though I grew up in the a small town and hung in the woods...It was a toss-up: San Francisco or New York…I had an older friend in Berkeley, so it was California. All I did when I got there was walk everywhere, explore and climb things. I slept in Golden Gate Park for a couple of weeks, panhandled on Market Street and washed dishes for a month for room and board in a youth hostel. Then, fortunately for me, after about a year I was introduced to a group called the Suicide Club. I went on the first “initiation” in early 1977 and instantly knew that was what I wanted to do. I never looked back. The Club motto was “Live each day as though it were your last.” We explored
everywhere and mounted crazy events in abandoned buildings, climbed urban structures/ bridges, towers and the like. Infiltrated weird cults and political groups. Mounted goofy and sometime confrontational street theater. Organized elaborate costumed games on the street, in the cemeteries and any other weird environment we could think of. I was in heaven.
It was a very ethical group in a many respects. We would never break a window or lock, or destroy anything. We would just go into a place and make as though we [had] never been there. So we could go back. This served a particular purpose in climbing bridges - which are occupied structures. Once you start letting them know that you’re there they’d get more security and make it more difficult to get back in.
[The Suicide Club] [was about] doing what you wanted, and taking the consequences for your actions. So, if we’re going to go out and do something as a public prank, you can’t get mad if someone punches you in the nose. Their reaction to what you were doing is just as valid as your dopey street theater or lame prank. You couldn’t be mad if the police arrested you because they’re part of the game. If you got caught, the last thing you should do is whine about it because you chose to be there. It was about self-reliance and responsibility. I really enjoyed that and learned a lot from that philosophy. [It’s] informed everything I’ve done since to some degree.
An interesting way to look at the world is as a playground or a carnival and we humans as child like players. Gary Warne wrote a piece called Carnival Cosmology
Tell me about the Suicide Club’s initiation ceremony.
It wasn’t that scary really. As with many later events we just showed up and had no idea what was going to happen… particularly after we were blindfolded…Fifty or so of us met at Gary’s bookstore, The Circus of the Soul, were blindfolded, trundled into vehicles, driven for miles to we knew not where. After a long blind walk, single file, and hand in hand up a sandy slope somewhere near the sea (you could smell it), we enter some colossal underground chamber. After stumbling along for what seemed like hundreds of yards, we were told to take off the blindfolds (after at least a couple of hours blind). It was pitch dark...duh! We found our way out in dribs and drabs and eventually came together in a circle. Dave Warren had us drink from the "Bottles of Life and Death” and then touch each of our outstretched hands with a live flame…
Dave, who was Gary Warne’s partner of sorts and co-founder (along with Adrienne Burk and Nancy Prussia) of the Suicide Club, was kind of the spirit of Chaos in the Club. David was a carnival barker, magician, door-to-door salesman, and fire-eater; I’m pretty sure that [David was] the only fire-eater in San Francisco in 1977. He and Gary shared a sardonic humor; Gary was his polar opposite, thoughtful, a little reserved, always observing all going on around him. In this respect, they were a perfect odd couple match: the Felix and Oscar of
Urban Adventure. Crazy things happened around Dave. And he would do the oddest things. I’ll give you an example. When I was 19, I took a hitchhiking trip cross-country. I was very excited and after many on-the-road adventures, ended up in New York for three months. Before I left, David got really serious and pulled me aside and said, “Hey, Kid, I got somethin’ for ya. Yer gonna need this.” And he gave me this giant rubber thumb. That was pretty cool.
Stupid rubber thumb. It worked. People stopped to pick me up...
Dave had his problems. He had his demons. He was a hard drinker and would fall off the wagon every once in a while, and get outrageous. During a fire performance once at the Other Café (the venue where Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, and people like that got their start in the mid-70s), Dave was ripped to the gills, and he caught the stage on fire. Very nearly burned the rickety wooden building down. Fellow clubber, Pierre Barral, and I got it out with fire extinguishers, barely…
These guys kicked off a lot of what was to become Urban Exploration, “Culture Jamming” flash mobs, etc… The Billboard Liberation Front was another group to come out of the Suicide Club. Dave, under the name Irving Glikk, was one of the founders of the BLF. He and “Jack Napier” were inspired to do billboards after attending a Suicide Club event organized by Gary and Adrienne Burk.
Gary died in 1983 of a heart attack. He was 35 years old. Although largely unknown, his ideas live on in a number of ways. I believe his theory and practices of etiquette around exploring abandoned and dangerous places has informed the Urban Exploration field over the years. The “Leave No Trace” mantra of Burning Man (once true, now a corporate slogan) came directly from the Suicide Club.
How did the Suicide Club end?
The club was active for five years. As I said, it was a pretty extreme group, not all climbing and fun and games…The idea was to really challenge your fears, whatever they might be. A lot of the events were psychologically demanding and scary. They weren’t all for fun. We infiltrated weird cults, [and] political and religious groups. We went to stay with the Moonies. You know, one of the really weird Christian cults. We went to barbecues with the American Nazi Party (That’s right, they were around in 1978 and they still are – pay attention!). Tried to catch a serial rapist in Panhandle Park. A lot of this stuff was pretty demanding, psychically, physically, and emotionally. I think a combination of increasing paranoia about the authorities, a lack of new blood, and some relationship incestuousness (happens in many intense groups – who’s slept with whom...ad nauseum…) combined with other factors, eventually doomed the Club.
It was cult-ish in it’s own sense to some degree. I remember in the first year I would meet up with my fellow adventurers, go out, and do the most outrageous things, usually at night. And before dawn we would split…It was like this: you’d pick up your lunch pail after the shift and go home… “Okay Bob, see ya tomorrow.” And then the next time you saw the guy you were clinging to the undercarriage of the Golden Gate Bridge! I didn’t even know what most of these people did for a living or what their politics were or ANYTHING…and I trusted
my life to them. Extraordinary…
The Cacophony Society [came] later [in]1986, founded by five or six bored ex-Suicide Clubbers. It continued on in the vein of pranking and [underground exploration] that Gary and the rest had kicked off. One of the differences was the attitude about publicity. The Suicide Club was a secret society. Very cagey and media averse. Cacophony, a kinder gentler Suicide Club sorta, was much more open and encouraged attention. There were good and bad things about both stances…Cacophony ended up having a much broader reach. There still wasn’t a ton of forethought. And, honestly, Cacophony was more of a philosophy than an actual organization. There was never a boss or owner. There were many egos involved, but no single one ever tried to make a business out of it, or could stand alone as THE Cacophony guy (or gal). Nobody really ran anything; the closest anyone came was in L.A. Cacophony: Rev. Al Ridenour was very identified with Cacophony…but he’s a truly brilliant prankster. Also, to his great credit, he retired from Cacophony after a solid ten years of some of the craziest events. He could have whipped it into a successful cult, no doubt. Got people to paint the white picket fence for him as he reclined in an air conditioned RV…Oh s**t – that’s another story! Point is, Al knew when to stand down, move on. He does a thing called The Art of Bleeding, nowadays.
For most of the dozen or so really active chapters, there was no real leader. That came from a philosophy of the Suicide Club; anybody in the group was equal in that they could do whatever event they wanted. Others voted with their feet. If they didn’t like the organizer's way, they could come back later and do the event themselves in whatever fashion they liked.
Brooklyn Cacophony Society lasted about 8 or 9 months. It exploded, due to personality and scheduling conflicts, into other groups. Julia Solis’ Dark Passage and Ars Subterrenea, and the Madagascar Institute are prominent NYC organizations that got some ideas and personnel from Cacophony.
Portland Cacophony, after SF and LA, was the most active “lodge.” To date, they are the only one I know of that actually snuck into a nuclear power plant, the Trojan, and played around in the cooling tower…Chuck Palahniuk was a member of Portland Cacophony, long before Fight Club.
Detroit Cacophony’s main contribution to the world of CHAOS CACOPHONY and DARK SATURNALIA, was shooting flaming propane canisters in the bowels of colossal abandoned industrial edifices. “Big Badda Boom”, as Corbin Dallas says in The Fifth Element. Don’t try this in your backyard (unless you live in Detroit!)
Tell me about Santarchy in Portland.
Personally, in my mind, I liked organizing the event because I hated Christmas. Christmas was a grim time. It’s a commercial pretty much created by the Coca-Cola Company, and it’s something that people buy into. Getting dressed in a Santa suit, going out, and doing your own thing was a way of reclaiming the holiday and making it fun.
Portland was the third Santa Con we did. Two in San Francisco before that. Michael Mikel and I helped Santa Rob organize it in 1994. This was before the Internet picked it up and blew it up into the ridiculously huge, drinking binge-frat party-mob scene that takes place world wide every December now.
Okay, Portland. A nice quiet little town. What could possibly go wrong there? We were followed by the police everywhere. They thought we were going to trash the place, when, in fact, we just wanted to spend money and support the local economy!! Hehheheh...
We got Santas to fly in from San Francisco and LA. There were 70 Santas on a flight. One of the Santas was into ice skating and informed us that Tonya Harding was going to be skating at the big rink in Lloyd Center Mall near downtown. We showed up with 200 Santas to cheer her on. And we were met by the police. The security chief for the center says: “You can’t go into the shopping center, I don’t care how many Santa’s you have…” The Portland PD Captain backed him up. “We’re not going to do anything. We just want to walk around and get a photo-op and watch Tonya skate, Dude!"
Lloyd Center Security Chief: “This is private property and my instructions are to arrest you if you step on our property.” The Police Captain nods soberly. We were pretty discouraged. We had enough Santas to really cause problems for them, but that wasn’t the point. Santa Cupcake, Santa Victor, and I had an idea. We gathered the Santas. We start yelling and sprinting (all 150 or so) toward the shopping center. The cops thought we were trying to breach the property line. We ran right up to the curb across the street from their defensive line, right up onto a low retaining wall. We lined up in a huge single file row, and as the riot cops popped their cruiser trunks and frantically donned their body armor and shields, we sang “Jingle Bells” original, in unison, off-keyish - nice lyrics and all, not the amended ones in the Cacophony X-Mas songbook…and after shouting “MERRY CHRISTMAS” turned and filtered back into the park, like the Bedouin raiders leaving a smoking derailed train in Lawrence of Arabia.
I never looked at the cops as the enemy. They’re workers with a job. Their job is to protect property. The best of them will maybe help and protect you. Most simply don’t care. The worst are violent jerks. After they had chased us around Portland all weekend, some of them started questioning their command staff. Why HAD the city deployed dozens, nearly a hundred cops to chase around what was at the worst nowhere near as bad as the parking lot after a football game? “What the f**k are we chasing these goofballs around for? What a waste of money and our time. We should be somewhere else fighting crime…”
One tired looking cop asked me and some other Santas: “…why don’t you guys commit some crime so we can just arrest you and I can go home!”
The last thing I remember was two cops letting Santas into the back of their police cruiser to get photos of what looked like Santa being arrested and carted away. Oh, and the cops had '70s disco tunes blaring from their car radios.
Blues and Reds. I think the Reds won…
We weren’t anthropologists or anything. People taking over and creating their own holidays, based on cultural myths and general desire to interact festively with others, wasn’t anything new. It’s a common thing in history. And now it’s a thing. Thank the Internet for that - good
and bad. You be the judge.
My last SantaCon was NYC in 1998. Santa Dennis from Detroit Cacophony and I climbed to the top to the Brooklyn Bridge, later slipping down the cables and into the hundred or so Santa’s on the promenade using them for cover. “Officer Dude, it was SANTA on the cables!”
Nowadays, I wish I had a penny for every Santa...
Can we talk about Burning Man?
Sure! Let’s talk about Burning Man. The “Dirt Rave” as my friend Greg Reynard calls it. Cacophonist Ethyl Ketone (Carrie Galbraith) came up with a thing she called “Zone Trips” back in the ‘80s. Her idea of the Zone was sort of a surreal tourism. You would bunch up, go to some alien environment (L.A., Black Rock Desert, insane fire works festival in Mexico), and live the trip as though you were tourists on some weird planet…The first Zone trip was in 1989. About a dozen of us drove to L.A. We stopped at Magic Mountain Amusement Park at 3 in the morning, drew a long line in the dirt, and all stepped across it into the Zone. We went to West Covina (Carries boring suburban hometown), dressed in decontamination white jumpsuits, [and] handed out bizarre questionnaires to people at 7AM. Then off to L.A. where we climbed the Hollywood Sign, hung out in an abandoned housing tract RIGHT under the
LAX flight path, stopped at LaBrea Tar Pits, and did any odd thing that popped into the collective mind. It was amazing. I’d been to L.A. before, but had NEVER seen it the way we did on that Zone Trip.
The second Zone Trip was to the Black Rock Desert in August/September 1990. This was the first Burning Man in the desert. BM had been happening each Summer Solstice for a few years on Baker Beach in SF. We got shut down by the police. There were about four hundred or so people, all yelling and pretty stupid. We didn’t burn the wooden man and had to haul it back in sections to a parking lot we were renting. Meanwhile, Kevin Evans and I had been planning a Cacophony Zone Trip out to the Black Rock for months. We both had been to the playa and were blown away by the insane, ethereal environment. The Zone. Definitely.
Seventy people, (if that) mostly Cacophonists on the desert. Guns, fires, driving fast with the lights out, silly “art”, lots a hallucinating. The Zone. Long time ago.
Burning Man: Coming to a Cineplex near you soon! Check the official website for updates.
What was San Francisco like in the ‘70s and ‘80s?
Like Detroit is now. Detroit is big, abandoned, kinda scary, full of empty factories, scraggly artist/criminals collecting there because it’s CHEAP. And you can do pretty much do what you
I don’t know how else to put it. San Francisco was a devastated city in 1976 when I showed up. I found and joined the Suicide Club in 1977. A miracle. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I had missed that boat: perhaps in jail, or worse, an accountant or a maybe a production welder. San Francisco in the ‘40s,‘50s, and '60s had been an industrial center, a shipping destination, and a blue collar town. By the ‘70s, all of that shifted. Industry left and it was years before banking and tourism got a hold to rule the roost, as they do now. There were abandoned buildings everywhere. I thought, “This is great! Look at all these abandoned buildings.” A f*****g giant playground…San Francisco was wide open; you could pay $200 for a whole apartment. $50 for a share. [I wanted to make] money so I could keep doing events. That’s all I wanted to do. Every job I got, all work-work I did was to finance my event habit. Living in San Francisco was great. It’s still a great town. Unfortunately, nowadays you have to spend a lot more time getting your basic needs taken care of. It’s expensive. It takes away from creative time. But there’s still a lot here.
But if you’re young, ambitious and want to make a mark, build an empire, or just live in a goddamn house you own outright, well, it’s Detroit. There’s no money there. So bring some. You won’t need much. Also…winter…eh... cough cough...
What’s your concept of happiness or contentment?
They’re two things. You’re lucky if you’re happy 20 percent of the time. [What about] fear and anger and desire? Pleasure, you know? I think people who want to be happy all the time are stupid. It’s hogwash to me. One, it’s impossible to be happy all the time. Two, it’s not desirable. Why the fuck would you want to be happy all the time? You’d have nothing to compare it with, with the peak and the abyss; it’s what makes things interesting. I wouldn’t want to be happy all the time. I’d kill myself; I’d be happy and I’d kill myself. A certain amount of contentment is probably desirable, but not TOO much. People need to be struggling. So contentment sometimes: Right, maybe after having sex. Contentment after a good meal and a brandy, maybe a cappuccino.
I quit smoking after 34 years. After I finally stopped craving it I felt a little content.
How long had you been a smoker?
I smoked from when I was 13 till I was 48. I didn’t smoke a whole pack a day always or anything, but I smoked a few and would bum one and pretended that I didn’t really smoke. Then a month later I was smoking a pack, and hiking or fucking standing up would make me wheeze and cough.
I said, “Fuck it, I’m going to quit. I want to live longer.” I can actually smell stuff, now: The air. The people. Sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s not.
“Why would you want to barbecue with the Nazis?” (Suicide Club “infiltration in 1978)
Because I wanted to know what they thought. Really. You should, too, cause they’re still out there somewhere…
What’s offensive to you?
Hubris. That’s the worst offense. Short of undeserved, violet attack. Politicians or artists or whomever, [who] are so content with their place in the world that think they’re the cat’s meow. Know-it-alls. They windbag in front of Woody Allen in the movie line in Annie Hall. He’s blowing hot air about Marshall McLuhan theories to Woody’s great discomfort. When the guy bellows at Allen, McLuhan (the actual guy) himself comes out from behind a potted plant to excoriate the blowhard for clearly not understanding his theories! God, I wish
life was more like that. I find blowhards, sycophancy and social climbing truly annoying.
That’s the attitude. I think that’s one of my issues with Burning Man - that it’s become a hipster tailgate party in a lot of ways. When we started doing it, we were anything but hip. It was a collection of eccentrics and outcasts, clinging together because of a love of the strange, and a secret desire to hang out (only for a while, of course) and burn and blow shit up, hug and sing, fuck and trip.
Also, no one else would talk to us!
Mark Pauline at SRL is a perfect example in my mind of how to do it right.
So is Chris Hackett at Madagascar. Julia Solis with Dark Passage. They’re crazy good.
They do stuff. And if they didn’t get any attention, they’d probably still be doing it. Pauline’s got a lot of attention for his machine work over the years, but if he were ignored completely he would still be in his shop every week trying to make some stupid crazy machine. Same with Hackett. No TV show, he’d still be doing the same ridiculous, insane, beautiful stuff. Julia’s attention to, and deep love of, the dark and beautiful, and her embrace of decay and dissolution and the underworld would be with her whether others joined in or not. Their function in life isn’t to “win”; (OK, maybe Hackett…) it isn’t to get accolades. I don’t like that: those who do something with the trappings of “success” as their goal. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in weird [people] doing weird things for their own reasons.
What’s tragic?
Tragedy to me is a 17-year-old kid shooting a little baby in a botched drive-by. A kid who thinks he’s got to run around with a bunch of thugs. Happened recently here in San Francisco. Happens all the time, everywhere. There’s tragedy everywhere. Tragedy is a young person who doesn’t see the chances and opportunities that are there.
What’s romantic?
Anything by Rachmaninoff, Marvin Gaye, some Mendelssohn, Bongwater, “Tangled up and Blue”, the only Dylan song I REALLY love…
A mean woman when she’s nice. A nice woman when she’s mean...
What’s the best and worst thing about owning Doggie Diner heads?
I have three of them on a trailer…The best thing is that everybody sees them when you drive by; [they] break the ice. Everyone loves them, from gang bangers to cops. Even asshole lawyers laugh and nod when they drive by. It’s kind of a public service to take them around. There are a couple of guys I trust to drive the trailer, Paul Troutman, John “Chicken” Rinaldi, Chris Campbell. Jarico Reese.
And the worst thing?
They’re a lot of work; they weigh 400 pounds each...I don’t charge to bring 'em around; they just go to cool events, parties, benefits, whatever. I can’t possibly bring them to everything I’d like to. Not enough time.
Do you have any regrets?
I regret not going to Baffin Island in 1980 or ’81 to rappel off the tallest sheer cliff in the world on Mt. Thor.
I regret not climbing Mount Saint Helens with my Suicide Club buddy (and closest land survivor to the volcanic eruption), Robert Rogers, to look down into the glowing cone from the volcanic rim.
I regret not going to see the Sex Pistols at Winterland S.F. for their 7 minute performance. All I knew about them at the time was that they spit on people, and stuck safety pins in their faces. Got that from People Magazine or maybe the National Enquirer, I think. Duh. The novelty factor from what I had heard about them was intriguing, but paying to see that? I’m still kicking myself…
Mark Pauline went….. I hate him!
What’s the greatest risk you’ve taken?
Having a child. The best thing that ever happened. And the best I am capable of.
Do you have anything you’d like to add?
A quote:
“He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”
–Walt Whitman
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment