Ah, fried chicken. That apple pie of American entrees, with its thick Southern buttermilk coating, its accompaniments of mashed potatoes dented by a canyon of butter and gravy, its pickled Daikon radish and cabbage slaw with Thousand Island dressing….
If those last two don't sound like the right sidecars for traditional fried chicken or even fast food fried chicken, it's because they're accompaniments to that other KFC: Korean fried chicken, a creature from a whole other lagoon. Kids growing up in Flushing have been eating Korean fried chicken at home for ages, but only recently has it cropped up in many colorful storefronts and takeout bags across Flushing's Koreatown, inciting online fervor across the five boroughs among foodies and encouraging them to venture to Flushing's fascinating outer depths.
I wanted to know how this new wave of kitschy fusion Korean fried chicken chains radiated from its epicenter, and how it differed from my mother's homebaked recipe, so I took the 7 to the last stop, Main Street, and found myself in another world, with hardly any English signs. It is a pleasant tree-lined twenty minute stroll, past Korean churches, karaoke bars, grocery stores and hair salons to Korean Fried Chicken Nirvana: a strip of Northern Boulevard between 150th and 160th.
My first stop on the Korean fried chicken tour turned out to be my favorite, both in robust, fresh flavor and colorful, clean, laid-back atmosphere. KyoChon, voted Best Korean Fried Chicken 2006, gives you the standard choice of soy garlic sauce (the Combo) or spicy Asian chile (the Hot Combo), and of wings or drumsticks. Each large basket is enough to feed two hungry people as a full meal. The Combo was succulently, sweetly delicious, but the Hot Combo really branded our tongues with KyoChon's name. Atomic Wings spicy it was not, but it certainly puts out its own funkier red alert, with Asian chile rather than the Tabasco-y taste of American wings. With branches in LA and Korea, this franchise has had time to perfect its formula. Cool down with some of that radish juice and Bohae Bokbunjajoo, a black raspberry soju sure to help put out the flames, or with Coors beer.
Though recipes vary, I soon discovered from chatting with the purveyors that the evolved Korean fast food chicken isn't fried as long as my mother fried it, nor is the skin removed. Rather, it is lightly dipped in flour and then flash fried, then fried a second time when the customer orders, burning the fat off and creating a fresh, crispy taste. It is then coated in one of the two famous sauces, soy garlic or spicy Asian chile. A greasy batter and thick, buttermilk crust are avoided, leaving a still delicious but lower-fat alternative. The chicken is then packaged to go in bright, poppy bags with dancing chickens or brought to you with a cold Coors and the aforementioned pickled radish and salad or slaw.
The accompanying side dishes at KyoChon, unfortunately, as at many of the other restaurants, left much to be desired. Side dishes are essential to Korean cuisine – they essentially are the main dishes, splintered into many pieces, and can make a good meal spectacular, creating diverse flavors and balancing one another out. At the fried chicken restaurants, the side dishes are mostly limited to the aforementioned cabbage slaw (which doesn't qualify as cole slaw because there's no mayonnaise, and Thousand Island dressing is haphazardly splattered across the top), a lifeless salad that could have come out of a grocery store bag, flavorless boiled corn on the cob and pickled daikon radish in water that cools but hardly whets the appetite. The soy garlic chicken would truly benefit from some traditionally spicy Korean side dishes, like the more aggressive radish kimchi, traditional cabbage kimchi, a kimchi pajun pancake or stuffed and fried peppers, while the spicy chile chicken could use some inventive dishes, like lime butter-drizzled corn and maybe a doughy sesame pajun pancake to soak up the spice.
For a more elegant, formal experience, head to Bon Chon, which looks more like a Korean teahouse with its filmy curtains, padded chairs and orange color scheme (there is also a Bon Chon in midtown, which looks more like a sleek bar lounge). My dining companions and I planned to call and order ahead to Bon Chon as many of the restaurants advertise a wait because the chicken is freshly fried, but after we were advised of a half hour wait by a brow-furrowed waiter, the baskets of chicken arrived within two minutes. I was skeptical that the chicken would not be freshly fried and crisp, but Bon Chon's formula proved to focus on a much thicker fried coating, and the batter tasted more like honey than soy garlic. The advantages here were that the chicken seemed meatier, larger and more filling, as well as the fact that side dishes were not limited to the dreaded two, though more traditional Korean side dishes were not offered. We chose double-battered fries with mango sauce and ketchup, which we were encouraged to mix together, and a pitcher of Budweiser (wine is also available). The chicken at Bon Chon might be the best option for members of the Southern buttermilk old guard, as it was the favorite for the gentleman in our group, who likes his food flavorful and fried and considers himself a connoisseur of American Southern-fried chicken, Bisquick chicken and Chinese takeout chicken.
Next was Cheogajip, which inexplicably brands its food as "Pizza and Chicken Love Letter," though there is no pizza, and humorously plasters a happy chicken and strange paintings across its narrow interiors. Unfortunately, the kitschiness was not enough to overcome the culinary shortcomings. Though the chicken was sprinkled with flavorful sesame seeds, the sauce tasted funky, like a homestyle recipe gone wrong, with a heaviness and curry taste that leaned more toward Indian than Korean. The one advantage here was that very tender breast pieces included, not just wings and drumsticks. The environment was more casual and bar-like, and the HOF sign outside witnessed that it was a late-night joint offering alcohol.
At Kyedong, the chicken was only passable, with the hot chicken trumping the soy garlic chicken, but the atmosphere was too sterile; with such IKEA-ish decor, the absence of liquor and our waiter hovering by our table constantly, it was hard to settle in at Kyedong. The waiter also said that it would take 20 to 30 minutes, but then brought the chicken out in less than five minutes. The presentation was excellent, with cute decorative boat dishes for the condiments and the chicken neatly arranged in a frying pan, surmisably to keep it hot, although the pan itself was not hot. The spicy batter was spicy, but not spicy enough, and not nearly as flavorful as KyoChon.
Whether you board the 7 train with a languorous sit-down meal in mind or intend to just grab a quick takeout bag, you can guarantee that at the end of the night, you won't feel as weighed-down and immobile as you do after you down a greasy bucket of the Colonel's KFC. If you have the energy left after your meal, why not follow the kimchi and karaoke formula? Head to Monster KTV (4052 Main Street) to belt out some Korean dance jams or American 80s classics, stop by Han Ah Reum grocery store (156-40 Northern Boulevard) for some shrimp chips, noodles and kimchi to satisfy those 3 a.m. cravings, and call it a night.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
"Dumbo's Olio" (FemmePOP: June 26, 2007)
DUMBO, the Brooklyn neighborhood cradled between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, is known for its annual BKLYN DESIGNS fair, open art galleries, Belgian block stone streets and high rents. Resembling a ghost town some evenings, the nabe has not recently been known for its nightlife, despite the stalwart existence of performance space St. Ann's Warehouse since 1980.
That’s all about to change. With the much buzzed-about anticipated move of Williamsburg’s premiere performing arts space, Galapagos, to a 10,000 square foot former horse stable in DUMBO in 2008, the neighborhood may soon hear more of the clattering of heels across its stone streets. But if you can’t wait until then to check out DUMBO, there is already a monthly homegrown variety showcase at the powerHouse Arena called Dumbolio.
The brainchild of one mad and madly dedicated man named Ed Schmidt, Dumbolio showcases performers you might have seen in a small traveling circus or variety show in the late 19th century. Though there’s burlesque, none of it is of the Badass variety. After all, in New York, the World Famous BOB and Scotty the Blue Bunny can be counted as family fare when performing at more genteel venues.
Part of the reason for such modesty may be the wide open windows of the powerHouse Arena, but the tone of the showcase in general is lighthearted and absurd rather than risqué or political. Last Saturday, Schmidt, a sardonically droll playwright who had fashioned himself into a one-man marching band for the event, opened the evening with an amusingly megalomaniac monologue.
“Some people ask why it’s called Ed Schmidt’s Dumbolio. It’s called Ed Schmidt’s Dumbolio because I’m the creator, I book the performers, I’m the publicist, I fold the programs, I maintain the website, I even pour the drinks,” Schmidt explained. Not an unusual system for small arts shows or performances, but Schmidt did have some unusual characteristics, especially a half-serious desire to impart knowledge regarding performance rather than shroud it with mystery, which is a bit unusual for New York variety. “This is the pedagogical moment. This isn't just about entertainment. I want you to learn something,” he explained. Schmidt’s erudite moment concerned the etymological roots of the word “dumbolio” (which, in turn, inspired our FemmeSavant Bon Mot).
Schmidt explained that the word ‘olio,’ (which descended from the Spanish for olla podrida, for a rich stew of sausage and chickpeas) means a conglomeration of various things – in effect, a variety of seemingly disparate objects lumped together to form something cohesive.
And at times, Dumbolio did feel like a mishmash grab bag haphazardly thrown together and failing to cohere. The audience, mostly well off families or middle-aged urbanites, seemed ill at ease with hula hooping burlesquer Miss Svetlanka Saturn's comical Cold War schtick and her attempts to get someone to spank her half-bared behind every time she dropped a hoop. The music began to skip during her act, and though the DJ graciously replaced it with a (somewhat ill-fitting) hip-hop tune, the rhythm of the act seemed to stutter from then on.Kelli Rae Powell’s embittered bad girl ukulele songs with their double entendres and witty verses seemed to echo right over the audience’s heads in the huge amphitheater-like space. Cardone the Magician lit up a few children’s eyes with his table-floating and voice-throwing acts (and caught mine with his sartorial prowess), but on the whole I was not fooled or tricked (and in this case, I wanted to be). Duo One Ring Zero’s delightful theremin and accordion music was like a creepy Halloween sideshow accompaniment, but lacked a rousing percussion that would make your toes tap and threaten to dance. Comedian Richard Bolster’s act on the dismal thoughts going through a comedian’s head while he is performing in a nightclub (“I’m not looking forward to going home to a crappy motel and watching porn all night.”) seemed to go over the best with the audience, which surprised me until I thought about the demographic represented.
Performers generally put on their best shows in familiar environments, with culturally savvy, participatory audiences – a burlesque performer wants to perform for a crowd that understands not just the sexuality but also the mocking pastiche, a musician or comedian wants to perform for a crowd that understands and appreciates his or her style, or else the "inside jokes" that are really cultural understandings between certain demographics fly right over heads. What was it about this space and this audience that lacked the old-timey warmth or kitschiness of old variety and vaudeville shows? Ed Schmidt has worked diligently to bring these acts, mostly young unfunded working artists, all the way out to DUMBO, but until the audience can understand that variety and vaudeville are about cultural interaction and raucous entertainment, Dumbolio seems more like a science experiment in a glass vacuum than a thriving arena.
That’s all about to change. With the much buzzed-about anticipated move of Williamsburg’s premiere performing arts space, Galapagos, to a 10,000 square foot former horse stable in DUMBO in 2008, the neighborhood may soon hear more of the clattering of heels across its stone streets. But if you can’t wait until then to check out DUMBO, there is already a monthly homegrown variety showcase at the powerHouse Arena called Dumbolio.
The brainchild of one mad and madly dedicated man named Ed Schmidt, Dumbolio showcases performers you might have seen in a small traveling circus or variety show in the late 19th century. Though there’s burlesque, none of it is of the Badass variety. After all, in New York, the World Famous BOB and Scotty the Blue Bunny can be counted as family fare when performing at more genteel venues.
Part of the reason for such modesty may be the wide open windows of the powerHouse Arena, but the tone of the showcase in general is lighthearted and absurd rather than risqué or political. Last Saturday, Schmidt, a sardonically droll playwright who had fashioned himself into a one-man marching band for the event, opened the evening with an amusingly megalomaniac monologue.
“Some people ask why it’s called Ed Schmidt’s Dumbolio. It’s called Ed Schmidt’s Dumbolio because I’m the creator, I book the performers, I’m the publicist, I fold the programs, I maintain the website, I even pour the drinks,” Schmidt explained. Not an unusual system for small arts shows or performances, but Schmidt did have some unusual characteristics, especially a half-serious desire to impart knowledge regarding performance rather than shroud it with mystery, which is a bit unusual for New York variety. “This is the pedagogical moment. This isn't just about entertainment. I want you to learn something,” he explained. Schmidt’s erudite moment concerned the etymological roots of the word “dumbolio” (which, in turn, inspired our FemmeSavant Bon Mot).
Schmidt explained that the word ‘olio,’ (which descended from the Spanish for olla podrida, for a rich stew of sausage and chickpeas) means a conglomeration of various things – in effect, a variety of seemingly disparate objects lumped together to form something cohesive.
And at times, Dumbolio did feel like a mishmash grab bag haphazardly thrown together and failing to cohere. The audience, mostly well off families or middle-aged urbanites, seemed ill at ease with hula hooping burlesquer Miss Svetlanka Saturn's comical Cold War schtick and her attempts to get someone to spank her half-bared behind every time she dropped a hoop. The music began to skip during her act, and though the DJ graciously replaced it with a (somewhat ill-fitting) hip-hop tune, the rhythm of the act seemed to stutter from then on.Kelli Rae Powell’s embittered bad girl ukulele songs with their double entendres and witty verses seemed to echo right over the audience’s heads in the huge amphitheater-like space. Cardone the Magician lit up a few children’s eyes with his table-floating and voice-throwing acts (and caught mine with his sartorial prowess), but on the whole I was not fooled or tricked (and in this case, I wanted to be). Duo One Ring Zero’s delightful theremin and accordion music was like a creepy Halloween sideshow accompaniment, but lacked a rousing percussion that would make your toes tap and threaten to dance. Comedian Richard Bolster’s act on the dismal thoughts going through a comedian’s head while he is performing in a nightclub (“I’m not looking forward to going home to a crappy motel and watching porn all night.”) seemed to go over the best with the audience, which surprised me until I thought about the demographic represented.
Performers generally put on their best shows in familiar environments, with culturally savvy, participatory audiences – a burlesque performer wants to perform for a crowd that understands not just the sexuality but also the mocking pastiche, a musician or comedian wants to perform for a crowd that understands and appreciates his or her style, or else the "inside jokes" that are really cultural understandings between certain demographics fly right over heads. What was it about this space and this audience that lacked the old-timey warmth or kitschiness of old variety and vaudeville shows? Ed Schmidt has worked diligently to bring these acts, mostly young unfunded working artists, all the way out to DUMBO, but until the audience can understand that variety and vaudeville are about cultural interaction and raucous entertainment, Dumbolio seems more like a science experiment in a glass vacuum than a thriving arena.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Joemca: The Composer in the Electronic Age (Hyphen Magazine)
Joemca is a musical Rubix cube. Flip him one way, and he’s a groupie-inducing rock star with a brooding onstage persona and a resoundingly deep voice set to catchy electronic beats. Flip him another, and he’s a humble, pensive classically-trained violinist and pianist. Flip him yet again, and you’ll find a composer of Chinese opera music who scored his own quirky music for puppet shows. No easy puzzle to solve, Joemca is a chameleonic hybrid of his diverse artistic and personal influences, from Slash to Dylan Thomas, Jeff Buckley to Sam Cooke.
A classical violinist and pianist from childhood, Joemca was enraptured with Mozart from a young age, but might have ended up in an orchestra if it weren’t for a certain guitar hero. “In high school,” he explains, “I literally learned from Slash, bought the sheet music of Guns n Roses. I really loved playing Slash’s guitar line in ‘Estranged.’” Soon thereafter in high school, Joemca began listening to the Smashing Pumpkins and the iconic solo folk rock troubadours who mirrored his musical style, including Jeff Buckley, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Hank Williams and Van Morrison.
But being the musical dodecahedron he is, Joemca wanted to expose himself to every genre of music under the sun, even if he wasn’t interested in rapping, jazz singing or playing the Cuban batá drum. “I'm mostly interested in solo artists who sound like no one else, but I also got into Wu-Tang Clan – production is amazing. And Cuban music is king rhythmically, that stuff is just fire. And then there’s the experimental and electronic stuff that I like – a lot of it is from Germany and Japan. And then there’s the old school stuff like Duke Ellington – monster with arrangements – Monk, Lady Day, Ella, Edith Piaf, Elvis, Lloyd Price.”
It wasn’t until college that all the loose ends of his various musical interests started to come together. Joemca took an electronic music course at Vassar College, toiling away with a few other dedicated musicians in a dark, gothic classroom, learning to make his own beats and experimenting with DIY recording. Molding together a host of friends playing classical stringed instruments, his own laptop beats, his electric guitar and his poetic, emotional lyrics, Joemca created a style that would later distinguish him in the big sea of New York folk and punk musicians. His hybridization of styles garnered him wide appeal, attracting electronic, folk, indie rock, punk and classical fans, although it did not fit neatly into any of those genres. With a voice as powerful and versatile as Antony and lyrics and instrumentation as intelligent and melancholy as Andrew Bird, Joemca seems poised for the same kind of indie stardom. How does he feel about the potential for fame and the strange effects it can have on an artist’s work?
“I'm hoping that as long as the music is good, it'll find a way out there with or without the whole business of the hype machine and everything,” he said. “Playing for large crowds seems like fun, and i imagine the pressure might be a good thing for the creative process, but this world is unpredictable and I'll be making music forever and that's what really matters. The best thing would be that I could keep doing it the way I do whilst paying rent, and eating, and taking care of the boring practical stuff.”
He’s starting to get there. Although few people outside of New York know Joemca’s live music as he has yet to embark on a national or international tour, his 2007 eponymous EP, produced by legendary Lennon and Ono producer Rob Stevens, has earned him spots as SPIN Magazine’s Artist of the Day, URB Magazine’s Featured Artist and CMJ Radio’s Top 200 Artists. And Ono herself showed up at one of his shows at Mercury Lounge.
In the band’s live performances, the tour de force that is Joemca’s voice fills the entire room without much need for amplification. It is clear that Joemca the artist is the star and director of Joemca the band, which thus far has been a rotating collective of poets and musicians. Now, that collective is solidifying into a more organized, focused four-piece band that is slowly maturing in its live sound, a challenge for any band with electronic sounds to replicate live, with Joemca as lead vocals/guitarist, Jess Luck as keyboardist/backup vocals, Alec Menge as drummer, and Tucker Yaro as bassist.
Despite recording for twelve hours a day in his home studio, Joemca found time to compose music for the FringeNYC Festival’s presentation of a Chinese opera starring Luck called “The Disembodied Soul,” which takes its story from an original musical drama from the 14th century Yüan dynasty. “Joemca’s music provides an evocative and creative soundscape,” said New York Theatre critic David Reinwald. “The singers’ voices soar over the glorious rhythms and musical overtones.” As if composing for an ancient opera wasn’t unusual enough, Joemca also scored music for St. Ann’s Warehouse’s Puppet Lab. “I made all the sounds and voices,” he explained. “It's sort of in between sound design, and scoring, and definitely more on the experimental end.”
Experimental, yes, but one could hardly describe Joemca’s music as soul or gospel, and yet he draws a very important inspiration from one such singer, a man named Sam Cooke. A legendary soul singer who injected the gospel style into his mainstream soul music and supported the civil rights movement, Cooke seems an unlikely godfather for an electronic rock artist like Joemca. But listening to his records in Joemca’s small sunlit home studio in South Park Slope, I heard a similar emotional vulnerability that that translated well into his recorded music.
“What I learned from Sam Cooke (who admired Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra for this) was the way they sing, it's like they're just talking to you. The music is really simple. That's what really got to me,” said Joemca. “Once I got into Sam Cooke, I started trying to be more direct, so it’s less quirky now, my stuff.”
When I mention to Joemca that his lyrics can be a bit difficult to understand and his musical patterns can convolute the brain, the side of him that is loyal to the simplicity of Sam Cooke seems to fret. “I would like to bring my lyrics a little closer to the surface,” he says. “Some people in the avant-garde world go too far, isolate themselves. As for my music, yes, I want my stuff to have that experimental side but it can also be enjoyed by anybody. That's how you communicate more.”
But those brooding, convoluted lyrics are part of what make Joemca’s puzzles so intriguing. “I shot the white bird out of the stream/I shot the white horses with a raging fury/I shot the old ghost with a panic vision/I shot the old world and I’d do it again,” Joemca sings passionately on “Panic Friend.”
“Panic Friend”’s dizzying beats hit like electronic hopscotch on the listener’s mind, making the simplicity of the next song, “Glass Eyes,” a bright clearing after being lost in “Panic Friend”’s dense, hazy forest. In “Glass Eyes,” echoing piano and whistled refrains layer with the clarity of Jess Luck’s opera-trained soprano and Joemca’s deep tenor. The classical element grooves strangely well with the electronic beats in other songs, such as “Strangers,” a song about the isolation of big city life and the separation between human souls. Multiple lonely Joemca voices layer over each other, keeping each other company.“I’m lost out here in the daylight, in the middle of a field/Out here we’re not free and there’s no one left around/In this town all the time, we’re all strangers/I see their faces in my dreams all the time/And I’ve always been afraid to find that someone.”
But sitting in his small sunlit studio, it doesn’t look like Joemca is lonely, his head tilted toward the radio playing Sam Cooke, the spirits of Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas and Mozart floating around the room, occupying his books and music. His music has connected many people already, including himself to many listeners who are eager for his next album. If the EP was just a fragment of his vision, we’re looking forward to what’s next.
A classical violinist and pianist from childhood, Joemca was enraptured with Mozart from a young age, but might have ended up in an orchestra if it weren’t for a certain guitar hero. “In high school,” he explains, “I literally learned from Slash, bought the sheet music of Guns n Roses. I really loved playing Slash’s guitar line in ‘Estranged.’” Soon thereafter in high school, Joemca began listening to the Smashing Pumpkins and the iconic solo folk rock troubadours who mirrored his musical style, including Jeff Buckley, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Hank Williams and Van Morrison.
But being the musical dodecahedron he is, Joemca wanted to expose himself to every genre of music under the sun, even if he wasn’t interested in rapping, jazz singing or playing the Cuban batá drum. “I'm mostly interested in solo artists who sound like no one else, but I also got into Wu-Tang Clan – production is amazing. And Cuban music is king rhythmically, that stuff is just fire. And then there’s the experimental and electronic stuff that I like – a lot of it is from Germany and Japan. And then there’s the old school stuff like Duke Ellington – monster with arrangements – Monk, Lady Day, Ella, Edith Piaf, Elvis, Lloyd Price.”
It wasn’t until college that all the loose ends of his various musical interests started to come together. Joemca took an electronic music course at Vassar College, toiling away with a few other dedicated musicians in a dark, gothic classroom, learning to make his own beats and experimenting with DIY recording. Molding together a host of friends playing classical stringed instruments, his own laptop beats, his electric guitar and his poetic, emotional lyrics, Joemca created a style that would later distinguish him in the big sea of New York folk and punk musicians. His hybridization of styles garnered him wide appeal, attracting electronic, folk, indie rock, punk and classical fans, although it did not fit neatly into any of those genres. With a voice as powerful and versatile as Antony and lyrics and instrumentation as intelligent and melancholy as Andrew Bird, Joemca seems poised for the same kind of indie stardom. How does he feel about the potential for fame and the strange effects it can have on an artist’s work?
“I'm hoping that as long as the music is good, it'll find a way out there with or without the whole business of the hype machine and everything,” he said. “Playing for large crowds seems like fun, and i imagine the pressure might be a good thing for the creative process, but this world is unpredictable and I'll be making music forever and that's what really matters. The best thing would be that I could keep doing it the way I do whilst paying rent, and eating, and taking care of the boring practical stuff.”
He’s starting to get there. Although few people outside of New York know Joemca’s live music as he has yet to embark on a national or international tour, his 2007 eponymous EP, produced by legendary Lennon and Ono producer Rob Stevens, has earned him spots as SPIN Magazine’s Artist of the Day, URB Magazine’s Featured Artist and CMJ Radio’s Top 200 Artists. And Ono herself showed up at one of his shows at Mercury Lounge.
In the band’s live performances, the tour de force that is Joemca’s voice fills the entire room without much need for amplification. It is clear that Joemca the artist is the star and director of Joemca the band, which thus far has been a rotating collective of poets and musicians. Now, that collective is solidifying into a more organized, focused four-piece band that is slowly maturing in its live sound, a challenge for any band with electronic sounds to replicate live, with Joemca as lead vocals/guitarist, Jess Luck as keyboardist/backup vocals, Alec Menge as drummer, and Tucker Yaro as bassist.
Despite recording for twelve hours a day in his home studio, Joemca found time to compose music for the FringeNYC Festival’s presentation of a Chinese opera starring Luck called “The Disembodied Soul,” which takes its story from an original musical drama from the 14th century Yüan dynasty. “Joemca’s music provides an evocative and creative soundscape,” said New York Theatre critic David Reinwald. “The singers’ voices soar over the glorious rhythms and musical overtones.” As if composing for an ancient opera wasn’t unusual enough, Joemca also scored music for St. Ann’s Warehouse’s Puppet Lab. “I made all the sounds and voices,” he explained. “It's sort of in between sound design, and scoring, and definitely more on the experimental end.”
Experimental, yes, but one could hardly describe Joemca’s music as soul or gospel, and yet he draws a very important inspiration from one such singer, a man named Sam Cooke. A legendary soul singer who injected the gospel style into his mainstream soul music and supported the civil rights movement, Cooke seems an unlikely godfather for an electronic rock artist like Joemca. But listening to his records in Joemca’s small sunlit home studio in South Park Slope, I heard a similar emotional vulnerability that that translated well into his recorded music.
“What I learned from Sam Cooke (who admired Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra for this) was the way they sing, it's like they're just talking to you. The music is really simple. That's what really got to me,” said Joemca. “Once I got into Sam Cooke, I started trying to be more direct, so it’s less quirky now, my stuff.”
When I mention to Joemca that his lyrics can be a bit difficult to understand and his musical patterns can convolute the brain, the side of him that is loyal to the simplicity of Sam Cooke seems to fret. “I would like to bring my lyrics a little closer to the surface,” he says. “Some people in the avant-garde world go too far, isolate themselves. As for my music, yes, I want my stuff to have that experimental side but it can also be enjoyed by anybody. That's how you communicate more.”
But those brooding, convoluted lyrics are part of what make Joemca’s puzzles so intriguing. “I shot the white bird out of the stream/I shot the white horses with a raging fury/I shot the old ghost with a panic vision/I shot the old world and I’d do it again,” Joemca sings passionately on “Panic Friend.”
“Panic Friend”’s dizzying beats hit like electronic hopscotch on the listener’s mind, making the simplicity of the next song, “Glass Eyes,” a bright clearing after being lost in “Panic Friend”’s dense, hazy forest. In “Glass Eyes,” echoing piano and whistled refrains layer with the clarity of Jess Luck’s opera-trained soprano and Joemca’s deep tenor. The classical element grooves strangely well with the electronic beats in other songs, such as “Strangers,” a song about the isolation of big city life and the separation between human souls. Multiple lonely Joemca voices layer over each other, keeping each other company.“I’m lost out here in the daylight, in the middle of a field/Out here we’re not free and there’s no one left around/In this town all the time, we’re all strangers/I see their faces in my dreams all the time/And I’ve always been afraid to find that someone.”
But sitting in his small sunlit studio, it doesn’t look like Joemca is lonely, his head tilted toward the radio playing Sam Cooke, the spirits of Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas and Mozart floating around the room, occupying his books and music. His music has connected many people already, including himself to many listeners who are eager for his next album. If the EP was just a fragment of his vision, we’re looking forward to what’s next.
An Interview with James Sumner
An Interview with James Sumner, Creator of the Animated Film “The Getty Address”
By Dakota Kim
James Sumner is a highly intellectual man. He also might not dwell on the same plane as the rest of the world.
The filmmaker speaks rapidly and easily on a wide range of unusual subjects, from Aztec mythology to an almost biblical infestation of seven-year cicadas. There is something equally shocking about Sumner, the rabidly intellectual combined with the intensely visceral, a rapid stream of thoughts accompanied by the urgency of tense hands that carve nearly-visible images into the air. Nowhere is this combination of his intellectual and visceral world more evident than in his opus thus far, The Getty Address. A series of shorter film segments that form an album-length narrative, the film is an animated opera, a feast of sights and sounds as breathtaking, ridiculous and tragedic as any opera.
The film was conceptualized as an accompaniment to an earlier-produced album of the same name by The Dirty Projectors, a mammoth musical conglomeration of separately-recorded vocals and instrumentation that succeeded only with talented maestro Dave Longstreth steering its unwieldy helm. Just as some legends and fables come to life with illustration, the already grand scope of Dave Longstreth’s masterfully-recorded and produced album amplifies itself when accompanied by Sumner’s entrancing, absurdist images. Try these two on for size: prehistoric kangaroos combating giant tarantula monsters, followed by Don Henley and Sacagawea spinning around one another on a grassy plain, caught up in the force of centrifugal love. With the anthropomorphization of animals and natural forces into central characters, The Getty Address is as much a fable of nature’s power and hope for constant renewal as it is the legend of a mythical Don Henley who represents both the force of colonization and the victim of his own power.
The film was produced in the fall and winter months in an unheated warehouse off the Halsey stop, “where I slept in a sleeping bag on my detached van seats,” Sumner said. Matching stories to songs and developing themes as well as some of the animation occurred off the Jefferson stop. “I was basically a teetotaling recluse through this entire period so the respective nightlives of each neighborhood … isn’t too salient. I needed a ridiculous amount of space to shoot full-body green screens and was lucky to find the amount of space I did anywhere.”
Screenings have occurred across the country with the Dirty Projectors national tour and in locations such as Monkey Town, Williamsburg’s multimedia audiovisual space. New chapters of the film were shown for the first time at The Dirty Projectors’ April show at Cake Shop, where audience members sat quietly on a floor used to feeling only beer-soaked sneaker soles, hushing louder audience members. It was a sight to see tipsy, chatty New Yorkers so spellbound and struck silent by the dramatization of the colonized, industrial, breathtaking world in whose nerve center they conduct their daily lives. Sumner has recently completed even more segments that take the epic story deeper into its own world of archetypes and characterization, available on www.vsanna.com and on sale at Other Music.
--
Dakota Kim: What drew you to the project originally, and how did you and Dave put your minds together?
James Sumner: Dave and I met at Yale … I played in some bands around and we had mutual friends. He actually moved into my room. It was all pretty calculated I think. He had seen a couple of shorts with the program I had started using, Mojo. It’s a little bit like Flash but it’s better for characters.
Dave had wanted backdrop for a show and had the album and the storyline so it kind of all snowballed from there. I was just attracted to the scope and ambition of incorporating music into film in a living way. It’s also a chance to have humor and gravity comingle. I appreciate the coexistence, that is not possible in much of the rest of the world, of the ridiculous and the serious, and that’s possible in animation.
How did the film progress over time? I know you’re still adding more.
Yeah, never enough time. A Peter Jackson quote to live by: “You never finish a film.”
Most of the tracks were done by the time we did the South by Southwest show. Some of the remix aspects where different songs are reinterpolated developed in the months afterward. I had a crane flying through a storm in response to one part of The Getty Address, another to the wildnerness theme. Dave responded to that and said, hey let’s do the DVD, and I said yes not having at the time any idea how far it was going to go. It was much more abstract, kinetic and flashy at the time, from a little program. I just figured I would do it a couple months with them.
Little did you know, right? That’s how it starts, with a little yes.
Yeah, and now it’s basically my life to make this a really solid whole – something that can be watched straight through, taken both seriously and on a comedic level.
Do you think your background and environment have had an ongoing affect on your style of creation?
I’m from a Mississippi small town, since I was thirteen. The differences between growing up in the South and somewhere else are definitely eroding. Like a lot of midsized American cities, it’s plagued with a lack of industry, brain drain, mall sprawl, white flight, the usual things… but the ten percent that’s different is definitely interesting and has affected me.
You’re far away from that small town these days, traveling all over the country to present the film. Has the experience of taking it on the road with a band proved difficult or did venues accommodate your needs for showing the film?
I needed to have my own screen so I did a rider saying either white wall or screen. I’m essentially the opening band so I like to be tightly integrated with the band—if possible, immediately before Dave so music sets aren’t split. It’s a creative process of collaboration that’s truly exhausting but I love doing it.
Before you presented your film to a crowd of tipsy, intellectual New Yorkers, you said that it should be easy to understand, but that if anyone needed explanation they should talk to you after the show. I certainly felt like I could use one.
It’s meant to be listened to and watched more than once, and I always have a different perspective every time I watch it. I’ve watched it and listened to the music literally tens of thousands of times by now if you add up all the seconds total and I’m still getting things. I mean, it's about Don Henley, the Aztecs and 9/11, but there's more.
Someone commented to me that your film is like a Japanese video game in its style, and it seems that many animations recently, such as Waking Life or Miyazaki’s work, have entered into the American mainstream. Are we moving toward a much more virtual society where animation rather than traditional film with actors will reign?
Our world’s mostly been like that for a while, so I’m not sure we’re necessarily moving toward a more virtual one. The film is a virtual world in the same way that a 19th century painting was for Londoners, the only way they could see America, which in their own way created these fairly ridiculous scenarios of nature. But it was almost beautiful and admirable. I really enjoy animation because it allows me a lot of control and I can’t afford animatronics or action sequences. It’s coming more to the mainstream as a very intense computer art, but I have also blended conventional actors and animation, as in the Getty Address.
Who do you cull inspiration from, in terms of animation and otherwise?
Most of the animation I like these days doesn’t look anything like what I do. I think inspiration would be sort of misleading but Paperrad has made some of my favorite videos. They have a very lo-fi 8-bit APHID aesthetic using perversions of 80s cartoon characters like Gumby, which makes it have this very insane aesthetic and logic to it. I watch a bit of Lord of the Rings. The way Peter Jackson makes movies is wonderful. I’ve looked at as many painters as anything else. As far as music, The Getty Address has made me very impatient with a lot of music, but I used to listen to a lot of drone and improv music.
Paperrad to Peter Jackson – quite a stretch. Not that your work is visually like either, but your film takes the legend/fable framework similar to adventure/fantasy stories, injects it with some of the absurdity of Paperrad and floods it with a serious environment-in-crisis morality similar to the Lord of the Rings. I was really struck by the scene with Henley overthrowing the semi-trucks, and as a city-dweller, longed for some of the greenness in the film.
One of the biggest thematic inspirations of The Getty Address is the destruction of the American landscape. Not even pure destruction but the genericization suffices. One of the best ideas was that truck scene and the kind of landscape involved. I wanted [Don Henley] essentially coming down the hill to travel on the roads and came to realize what Dave was talking about, that this shouldn’t be a country road, shouldn’t be just a rambling Tolkienesque walking through the roads. The entry to the wilderness itself can be through parking garages, roads, as much as anything else. There are these Greek choruses counseling Henley that there’s a way to see the oceanic expanse of the parking lot as as beautiful as any forest. Even for me it’s hard to say that we should that beauty in our minds because there’s no other recourse. But even in all this madness, there’s a sort of beauty in the craziness. The city’s industrial heat and creativity that you don’t find in other places, for instance.
At one point, you show the image of Fu-Hsi, creator of the I-Ching, in the clouds and dedicate the segment to him. What’s the meaning behind that?
I was thinking less of [Fu-Hsi’s] role as the creator of the I-Ching and more of his role as founder of Chinese civilization. Legend holds that Fu-Hsi taught the people hunting and gathering, and his successor Shennang taught them farming and settling. I was attracted by the accurate mythologization of the prehistory of a people.
Plus, he inexplicably has horns, just like Michelangelo's Moses, another mythical leader/colonizer guiding his flock to a promised or maybe just imagined fertile land.
That’s complicated. I need to think about that! Speaking of understanding method and philosophy, Thirteen does a series where you see the process of the artist at work rather than just looking at a finished product on a museum wall. Do you think it’d give great insight into your film to see your mental process at work, say as a special feature on a DVD?
I’m not sure if everyone would quite get my process, or be interested in all the dull moments, but sometimes it does help to explain where things came from. You’re kind of jumping from the rigors of “Okay, I need to make this finger palm the cicadas” to moments where it’s really exciting. The inspiration might be more exciting than the process in my work – for instance, in “Ponds and Puddles” I was inspired by that incredible seven year brood of cicadas that came to fly around and blindly hump just everything.
Are there any other significant past projects or things you’re working on right now?
This is more or less my corpus right now. There’s a short I did with a friend in Providence, Jeff Mullen. We used his music and I’d like to expand on it later.
Lastly, can I just mention that the scene with the cave paintings and the kangaroos is one of my favorites? It just gets you viscerally.
Thanks. I think it’s actually true they found evidence of body painting that predated cave painting, done in mammoth’s blood.
Only a fact James Sumner would know, and then be able to do something with.
By Dakota Kim
James Sumner is a highly intellectual man. He also might not dwell on the same plane as the rest of the world.
The filmmaker speaks rapidly and easily on a wide range of unusual subjects, from Aztec mythology to an almost biblical infestation of seven-year cicadas. There is something equally shocking about Sumner, the rabidly intellectual combined with the intensely visceral, a rapid stream of thoughts accompanied by the urgency of tense hands that carve nearly-visible images into the air. Nowhere is this combination of his intellectual and visceral world more evident than in his opus thus far, The Getty Address. A series of shorter film segments that form an album-length narrative, the film is an animated opera, a feast of sights and sounds as breathtaking, ridiculous and tragedic as any opera.
The film was conceptualized as an accompaniment to an earlier-produced album of the same name by The Dirty Projectors, a mammoth musical conglomeration of separately-recorded vocals and instrumentation that succeeded only with talented maestro Dave Longstreth steering its unwieldy helm. Just as some legends and fables come to life with illustration, the already grand scope of Dave Longstreth’s masterfully-recorded and produced album amplifies itself when accompanied by Sumner’s entrancing, absurdist images. Try these two on for size: prehistoric kangaroos combating giant tarantula monsters, followed by Don Henley and Sacagawea spinning around one another on a grassy plain, caught up in the force of centrifugal love. With the anthropomorphization of animals and natural forces into central characters, The Getty Address is as much a fable of nature’s power and hope for constant renewal as it is the legend of a mythical Don Henley who represents both the force of colonization and the victim of his own power.
The film was produced in the fall and winter months in an unheated warehouse off the Halsey stop, “where I slept in a sleeping bag on my detached van seats,” Sumner said. Matching stories to songs and developing themes as well as some of the animation occurred off the Jefferson stop. “I was basically a teetotaling recluse through this entire period so the respective nightlives of each neighborhood … isn’t too salient. I needed a ridiculous amount of space to shoot full-body green screens and was lucky to find the amount of space I did anywhere.”
Screenings have occurred across the country with the Dirty Projectors national tour and in locations such as Monkey Town, Williamsburg’s multimedia audiovisual space. New chapters of the film were shown for the first time at The Dirty Projectors’ April show at Cake Shop, where audience members sat quietly on a floor used to feeling only beer-soaked sneaker soles, hushing louder audience members. It was a sight to see tipsy, chatty New Yorkers so spellbound and struck silent by the dramatization of the colonized, industrial, breathtaking world in whose nerve center they conduct their daily lives. Sumner has recently completed even more segments that take the epic story deeper into its own world of archetypes and characterization, available on www.vsanna.com and on sale at Other Music.
--
Dakota Kim: What drew you to the project originally, and how did you and Dave put your minds together?
James Sumner: Dave and I met at Yale … I played in some bands around and we had mutual friends. He actually moved into my room. It was all pretty calculated I think. He had seen a couple of shorts with the program I had started using, Mojo. It’s a little bit like Flash but it’s better for characters.
Dave had wanted backdrop for a show and had the album and the storyline so it kind of all snowballed from there. I was just attracted to the scope and ambition of incorporating music into film in a living way. It’s also a chance to have humor and gravity comingle. I appreciate the coexistence, that is not possible in much of the rest of the world, of the ridiculous and the serious, and that’s possible in animation.
How did the film progress over time? I know you’re still adding more.
Yeah, never enough time. A Peter Jackson quote to live by: “You never finish a film.”
Most of the tracks were done by the time we did the South by Southwest show. Some of the remix aspects where different songs are reinterpolated developed in the months afterward. I had a crane flying through a storm in response to one part of The Getty Address, another to the wildnerness theme. Dave responded to that and said, hey let’s do the DVD, and I said yes not having at the time any idea how far it was going to go. It was much more abstract, kinetic and flashy at the time, from a little program. I just figured I would do it a couple months with them.
Little did you know, right? That’s how it starts, with a little yes.
Yeah, and now it’s basically my life to make this a really solid whole – something that can be watched straight through, taken both seriously and on a comedic level.
Do you think your background and environment have had an ongoing affect on your style of creation?
I’m from a Mississippi small town, since I was thirteen. The differences between growing up in the South and somewhere else are definitely eroding. Like a lot of midsized American cities, it’s plagued with a lack of industry, brain drain, mall sprawl, white flight, the usual things… but the ten percent that’s different is definitely interesting and has affected me.
You’re far away from that small town these days, traveling all over the country to present the film. Has the experience of taking it on the road with a band proved difficult or did venues accommodate your needs for showing the film?
I needed to have my own screen so I did a rider saying either white wall or screen. I’m essentially the opening band so I like to be tightly integrated with the band—if possible, immediately before Dave so music sets aren’t split. It’s a creative process of collaboration that’s truly exhausting but I love doing it.
Before you presented your film to a crowd of tipsy, intellectual New Yorkers, you said that it should be easy to understand, but that if anyone needed explanation they should talk to you after the show. I certainly felt like I could use one.
It’s meant to be listened to and watched more than once, and I always have a different perspective every time I watch it. I’ve watched it and listened to the music literally tens of thousands of times by now if you add up all the seconds total and I’m still getting things. I mean, it's about Don Henley, the Aztecs and 9/11, but there's more.
Someone commented to me that your film is like a Japanese video game in its style, and it seems that many animations recently, such as Waking Life or Miyazaki’s work, have entered into the American mainstream. Are we moving toward a much more virtual society where animation rather than traditional film with actors will reign?
Our world’s mostly been like that for a while, so I’m not sure we’re necessarily moving toward a more virtual one. The film is a virtual world in the same way that a 19th century painting was for Londoners, the only way they could see America, which in their own way created these fairly ridiculous scenarios of nature. But it was almost beautiful and admirable. I really enjoy animation because it allows me a lot of control and I can’t afford animatronics or action sequences. It’s coming more to the mainstream as a very intense computer art, but I have also blended conventional actors and animation, as in the Getty Address.
Who do you cull inspiration from, in terms of animation and otherwise?
Most of the animation I like these days doesn’t look anything like what I do. I think inspiration would be sort of misleading but Paperrad has made some of my favorite videos. They have a very lo-fi 8-bit APHID aesthetic using perversions of 80s cartoon characters like Gumby, which makes it have this very insane aesthetic and logic to it. I watch a bit of Lord of the Rings. The way Peter Jackson makes movies is wonderful. I’ve looked at as many painters as anything else. As far as music, The Getty Address has made me very impatient with a lot of music, but I used to listen to a lot of drone and improv music.
Paperrad to Peter Jackson – quite a stretch. Not that your work is visually like either, but your film takes the legend/fable framework similar to adventure/fantasy stories, injects it with some of the absurdity of Paperrad and floods it with a serious environment-in-crisis morality similar to the Lord of the Rings. I was really struck by the scene with Henley overthrowing the semi-trucks, and as a city-dweller, longed for some of the greenness in the film.
One of the biggest thematic inspirations of The Getty Address is the destruction of the American landscape. Not even pure destruction but the genericization suffices. One of the best ideas was that truck scene and the kind of landscape involved. I wanted [Don Henley] essentially coming down the hill to travel on the roads and came to realize what Dave was talking about, that this shouldn’t be a country road, shouldn’t be just a rambling Tolkienesque walking through the roads. The entry to the wilderness itself can be through parking garages, roads, as much as anything else. There are these Greek choruses counseling Henley that there’s a way to see the oceanic expanse of the parking lot as as beautiful as any forest. Even for me it’s hard to say that we should that beauty in our minds because there’s no other recourse. But even in all this madness, there’s a sort of beauty in the craziness. The city’s industrial heat and creativity that you don’t find in other places, for instance.
At one point, you show the image of Fu-Hsi, creator of the I-Ching, in the clouds and dedicate the segment to him. What’s the meaning behind that?
I was thinking less of [Fu-Hsi’s] role as the creator of the I-Ching and more of his role as founder of Chinese civilization. Legend holds that Fu-Hsi taught the people hunting and gathering, and his successor Shennang taught them farming and settling. I was attracted by the accurate mythologization of the prehistory of a people.
Plus, he inexplicably has horns, just like Michelangelo's Moses, another mythical leader/colonizer guiding his flock to a promised or maybe just imagined fertile land.
That’s complicated. I need to think about that! Speaking of understanding method and philosophy, Thirteen does a series where you see the process of the artist at work rather than just looking at a finished product on a museum wall. Do you think it’d give great insight into your film to see your mental process at work, say as a special feature on a DVD?
I’m not sure if everyone would quite get my process, or be interested in all the dull moments, but sometimes it does help to explain where things came from. You’re kind of jumping from the rigors of “Okay, I need to make this finger palm the cicadas” to moments where it’s really exciting. The inspiration might be more exciting than the process in my work – for instance, in “Ponds and Puddles” I was inspired by that incredible seven year brood of cicadas that came to fly around and blindly hump just everything.
Are there any other significant past projects or things you’re working on right now?
This is more or less my corpus right now. There’s a short I did with a friend in Providence, Jeff Mullen. We used his music and I’d like to expand on it later.
Lastly, can I just mention that the scene with the cave paintings and the kangaroos is one of my favorites? It just gets you viscerally.
Thanks. I think it’s actually true they found evidence of body painting that predated cave painting, done in mammoth’s blood.
Only a fact James Sumner would know, and then be able to do something with.
Professor Clown (Hyphen Magazine)
Professor Clown: How Rob Lok is changing the face of buffoonery, one gag at a time
By Dakota Kim
Riding a motorcycle on a steel high wire, leading workshops with Serbian and Albanian children, and performing his one-man show on the Cultural Revolution, Rob Lok is igniting his own revolution in the art of clowning.
Lok is a buffoon by trade, but he's not just out to crack a few laughs or scare small children at the circus or birthday parties. As director of the newly-relaunched Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, he leads a program that teaches the requisites in clowning education, from juggling and acrobatics to the history of clowning and character development.
“Circus clowning is much more than tying balloons and honking noses,” Lok says. “It can be anything from dropping your pants to something beautiful and melodic like the snowfall scene in Slava's Snowshow that makes people cry.”
“My approach is, how can you make it accessible, show pain, energy, humor all together? The only way to get there is by being completely honest. It truly is a complex, diverse art form, placed well for a day and age so full of absurdity, tragedy, joy, intense emotion.”
And sometimes clowning can get downright political. Working with the New York-based Bond Street Theater’s community outreach programs in Serbia, Lok supported an attempt to heal the rift between Romanian, Serbian and Albanian children through circus and clowning communication.
“We taught them communication through circus skills and a non-competitive atmosphere. Different ethnic groups developed shows that illustrated their issues. There was opposition to working together and bickering, but I believe it really created a cycle that keeps going,” Lok explained.
If Jackie Chan were a clown
While traveling abroad with the Bond Street group, Lok often ventured into areas where there aren't many Asian people, and received double takes for being Asian as well as being a clown. In some areas abroad, the only exposure people had to Asians was through the media and television.
“Even in corners of Afghanistan, people knew who Jackie Chan was. In this land of camels this kid looks at me and all he could say in English was ‘Jackie Chan,’” Lok recalled. “In Romania and Serbia it was always, ‘Jackie Chan! Jackie Chan!’ So I'd just give up and say, ‘That's who I am, man, that's who I am.’ I gave people my autograph. I was just totally happy that there was this opportunity to go out there and do outreach workshops in at-risk areas.”
“The title Chinese-American clown was thrown on me and I have used it to my advantage, but first and foremost, I am a performer,” says Lok. “I'm not really breaking any barriers, but I'm very proud to be Asian-American and have these roles.”
But Lok’s solo show about the Cultural Revolution, called "Revolutionary Chickens," which he wrote, produced and performed in, revealed a very politically-bent and personal approach, modeled on his parents’ experience in a brutal regime.
“Right now, our lives are starting to parallel my parents' story, whether you're in the U.S. or China. Big Brother is watching us, and now he has so many more tools to do it with,” Lok says. So he’s playing his part in educating the MTV and Internet generations to prevent history from repeating itself. “We need art to teach us the history of oppression so we can begin to fight it, he says.
A Life in “Edutainment”
This year, Lok was chosen to spearhead the relaunch of the Barnum & Bailey Clown College after its closure in 1997, when the group decided to change its focus.
Now, as director, Lok is charged with coordinating academic programming, including making decisions about curriculum and methods of teaching. He also teaches clowning to the children coming in to visit Wanadoo City, the Florida amusement park that houses the Clown College.
“Wanadoo City preaches a philosophy of ‘edutainment.’ Visitors can be whatever they want to be there, a firefighter, a musician, even a clown,” a philopsphy Lok himself could have used growing up.
Lok was born and raised in New York's Chinatown until being transplanted to Arlington, Texas, which was “hell for a fifteen-year-old Chinese kid.” In Arlington, Lok ran with a rebellious crowd, neglected his studies and eventually got kicked out of his parents’ house.
One day, he found a report card that his fifth grade teacher had written that said that he had a lot of potential that he was not fulfilling, and Lok had a revelation.
“I thought, there's nothing going on with my life right now. I haven't progressed much from that point. I was nothing. I couldn't have that.”
Soon thereafter, Lok saw an advertisement for Clown College auditions. “I saw it and thought why the hell not,” he recalls. He was one of a handful selected from a pool of three-thousand people. "Between twenty and thirty are accepted, so getting in is harder than getting into Harvard," Lok says.
In 1996, Lok graduated from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College with an official Bachelor of Buffoonery degree and became the first Chinese-American clown to perform with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
And now, as a teacher, Lok brings some of his own experience to the classroom.
Teaching someone to be a clown may be a somewhat misleading phrase, however. You can lead a horse to water, and a clown to a room full of juggling clubs, but as with any other actor or performance artist, you can’t teach a clown his or her unique identity and personal style.
"Sometimes we teach clowns and they're trying to mimic,” Lok says. “It's not natural, and it's better to just evolve and develop what you have already, to let it shine with honesty, to just wear your heart on your sleeve."
By Dakota Kim
Riding a motorcycle on a steel high wire, leading workshops with Serbian and Albanian children, and performing his one-man show on the Cultural Revolution, Rob Lok is igniting his own revolution in the art of clowning.
Lok is a buffoon by trade, but he's not just out to crack a few laughs or scare small children at the circus or birthday parties. As director of the newly-relaunched Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, he leads a program that teaches the requisites in clowning education, from juggling and acrobatics to the history of clowning and character development.
“Circus clowning is much more than tying balloons and honking noses,” Lok says. “It can be anything from dropping your pants to something beautiful and melodic like the snowfall scene in Slava's Snowshow that makes people cry.”
“My approach is, how can you make it accessible, show pain, energy, humor all together? The only way to get there is by being completely honest. It truly is a complex, diverse art form, placed well for a day and age so full of absurdity, tragedy, joy, intense emotion.”
And sometimes clowning can get downright political. Working with the New York-based Bond Street Theater’s community outreach programs in Serbia, Lok supported an attempt to heal the rift between Romanian, Serbian and Albanian children through circus and clowning communication.
“We taught them communication through circus skills and a non-competitive atmosphere. Different ethnic groups developed shows that illustrated their issues. There was opposition to working together and bickering, but I believe it really created a cycle that keeps going,” Lok explained.
If Jackie Chan were a clown
While traveling abroad with the Bond Street group, Lok often ventured into areas where there aren't many Asian people, and received double takes for being Asian as well as being a clown. In some areas abroad, the only exposure people had to Asians was through the media and television.
“Even in corners of Afghanistan, people knew who Jackie Chan was. In this land of camels this kid looks at me and all he could say in English was ‘Jackie Chan,’” Lok recalled. “In Romania and Serbia it was always, ‘Jackie Chan! Jackie Chan!’ So I'd just give up and say, ‘That's who I am, man, that's who I am.’ I gave people my autograph. I was just totally happy that there was this opportunity to go out there and do outreach workshops in at-risk areas.”
“The title Chinese-American clown was thrown on me and I have used it to my advantage, but first and foremost, I am a performer,” says Lok. “I'm not really breaking any barriers, but I'm very proud to be Asian-American and have these roles.”
But Lok’s solo show about the Cultural Revolution, called "Revolutionary Chickens," which he wrote, produced and performed in, revealed a very politically-bent and personal approach, modeled on his parents’ experience in a brutal regime.
“Right now, our lives are starting to parallel my parents' story, whether you're in the U.S. or China. Big Brother is watching us, and now he has so many more tools to do it with,” Lok says. So he’s playing his part in educating the MTV and Internet generations to prevent history from repeating itself. “We need art to teach us the history of oppression so we can begin to fight it, he says.
A Life in “Edutainment”
This year, Lok was chosen to spearhead the relaunch of the Barnum & Bailey Clown College after its closure in 1997, when the group decided to change its focus.
Now, as director, Lok is charged with coordinating academic programming, including making decisions about curriculum and methods of teaching. He also teaches clowning to the children coming in to visit Wanadoo City, the Florida amusement park that houses the Clown College.
“Wanadoo City preaches a philosophy of ‘edutainment.’ Visitors can be whatever they want to be there, a firefighter, a musician, even a clown,” a philopsphy Lok himself could have used growing up.
Lok was born and raised in New York's Chinatown until being transplanted to Arlington, Texas, which was “hell for a fifteen-year-old Chinese kid.” In Arlington, Lok ran with a rebellious crowd, neglected his studies and eventually got kicked out of his parents’ house.
One day, he found a report card that his fifth grade teacher had written that said that he had a lot of potential that he was not fulfilling, and Lok had a revelation.
“I thought, there's nothing going on with my life right now. I haven't progressed much from that point. I was nothing. I couldn't have that.”
Soon thereafter, Lok saw an advertisement for Clown College auditions. “I saw it and thought why the hell not,” he recalls. He was one of a handful selected from a pool of three-thousand people. "Between twenty and thirty are accepted, so getting in is harder than getting into Harvard," Lok says.
In 1996, Lok graduated from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College with an official Bachelor of Buffoonery degree and became the first Chinese-American clown to perform with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
And now, as a teacher, Lok brings some of his own experience to the classroom.
Teaching someone to be a clown may be a somewhat misleading phrase, however. You can lead a horse to water, and a clown to a room full of juggling clubs, but as with any other actor or performance artist, you can’t teach a clown his or her unique identity and personal style.
"Sometimes we teach clowns and they're trying to mimic,” Lok says. “It's not natural, and it's better to just evolve and develop what you have already, to let it shine with honesty, to just wear your heart on your sleeve."
Korean Shrimp Frites with MSG (McSweeneys)
Korean Shrimp Frites with MSG
By Dakota Kim
Imagine this: You stroll into Koreatown at 32nd and Broadway and proceed to the HanAhReum Market, and there it is, looming down on you: the 5-pound bag, bigger than your kitty litter. It's fire-engine red with a red shrimp on the outside that looks like it's been radioactively cooked to a crisp. Maybe their intention is to strike fear into the heart of the average consumer, creating a dangerous allure. Whatever it is, the buyer is an adventurous soul.
At first, the frites taste conspicuously fishy and woefully engineered, as if a shipload of shrimp were dropped in the vat by accident. They're wheat-powdery, messy, salty, and, well, a kid in a moving vehicle's queasy junk-food nightmare. But after a couple bites, the MSG kicks in, and it's all smooth sailing from there. Every bite melts flakily in your mouth and you just can't get enough.
MSG used to scare me, but I've been tricking myself psychosomatically; now I like to think that the MSG might be a natural ingredient contained within the shrimp powder haphazardly sprayed like DDT across the innards of the shiny silver bag. Who's to know whether shrimp naturally produce MSG (just like tuna naturally produce mercury, according to the government)? Maybe shrimp just want to make themselves taste good because they're naturally altruistic beings.
By Dakota Kim
Imagine this: You stroll into Koreatown at 32nd and Broadway and proceed to the HanAhReum Market, and there it is, looming down on you: the 5-pound bag, bigger than your kitty litter. It's fire-engine red with a red shrimp on the outside that looks like it's been radioactively cooked to a crisp. Maybe their intention is to strike fear into the heart of the average consumer, creating a dangerous allure. Whatever it is, the buyer is an adventurous soul.
At first, the frites taste conspicuously fishy and woefully engineered, as if a shipload of shrimp were dropped in the vat by accident. They're wheat-powdery, messy, salty, and, well, a kid in a moving vehicle's queasy junk-food nightmare. But after a couple bites, the MSG kicks in, and it's all smooth sailing from there. Every bite melts flakily in your mouth and you just can't get enough.
MSG used to scare me, but I've been tricking myself psychosomatically; now I like to think that the MSG might be a natural ingredient contained within the shrimp powder haphazardly sprayed like DDT across the innards of the shiny silver bag. Who's to know whether shrimp naturally produce MSG (just like tuna naturally produce mercury, according to the government)? Maybe shrimp just want to make themselves taste good because they're naturally altruistic beings.
Documenting ChangeWilliamsburg/Greenpoint: The Disappeared and the Endangered at Art 101 (Block Magazine)
Documenting Change
Williamsburg/Greenpoint: The Disappeared and the Endangered at Art 101
By Dakota Kim
Many have called Williamsburg a microcosm of New York - its many waves of immigration, its sheer diversity of history. In "Williamsburg/Greenpoint: The Disappeared and The Endangered," an exhibit of twelve local photographers at Art 101 Gallery, these different threads came together to illustrate the stark beauty of industrial architecture, a vibrant street life, and private scenes of a changing neighborhood.
An intimate space in size and atmosphere, Art 101 lends itself to accidental shoulder bumping and discussion of the work crowding its walls and the recent changes in the neighborhood. All the better in this exhibit, where community awareness is the intended result, said curator Nancy Wechter.
"As a photographer, I came to Williamsburg in 1984 for the space and light, and stayed because of the people," said Wechter. "With this exhibit, I want the community to come together in discussion so that we can really remember our history, identify what we care about, and learn to preserve it."
In one of the exhibit's most striking photographs by Joyce George, two middle-aged women sit side-by-side on the Grand Street waterfront in their bathing suits, lounging and smiling into the sun and breeze, Manhattan visible but a world away.
In a stunning multi-panel panoramic photograph, "Documenting the Transition: Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal I 1994-98," Peter Gillespie exhibits the industrial landscape changes from Owl's Head Park to the end of Newton Creek.
"Though not explicitly political, the photos do inform the recent community organization work I've done to try to promote and nurture the thriving but fragile industrial and artisanal sector that is now threatened, not by global forces, but by ill-conceived public policy," said Gillespie, who serves as the executive director of the local non-profit community group Neighbors Against Garbage.
Photographer Regina Monfort spent nine years photographing the Southside Latino community in a project entitled "Beyond Grand Street." In her images, families, children and couples interact together in energetic and tender moments, making the strong bonds of community evident.
"[These images] stand as an homage to the timeless beauty of a neighborhood and its people," said photographer Regina Monfort. "The very people I photographed over the years are the ones threatened to be erased from the local map."
Like Wechter, gallery owner and painter Ellen Rand came to Williamsburg in 1982 for the kind of light that artists in sky-scraped Manhattan often find completely unattainable.
"I still feel like there's a real community here – we're very lucky to live in a place that's so alive, and it's something worth documenting and preserving," said Rand.
The exhibit shows the importance of the physical landscape in creating a social atmosphere and a community. In photograph after photograph, Williamsburg residents are at their happiest in architectural surroundings that are not sleek and polished, but instead affordable and conducive to community interaction. An impromptu block party, a stoop, a bodega or a playground often provides as much interaction as an official community center. When these de facto spaces are lost or made hostile by architectural changes, the social fabric is rended, separating members of the same community.
"With beautiful old industrial buildings going away and forty-story towers appearing, a certain relaxation and ease as well as the working class and the artists are starting to go away," said Wechter. "The roots of the neighborhood, people who have lived here for years and years and who have very emotional ties to the neighborhood, can no longer afford the rents. We need to document this and do our best to stop it."
Williamsburg/Greenpoint: The Disappeared and the Endangered at Art 101
By Dakota Kim
Many have called Williamsburg a microcosm of New York - its many waves of immigration, its sheer diversity of history. In "Williamsburg/Greenpoint: The Disappeared and The Endangered," an exhibit of twelve local photographers at Art 101 Gallery, these different threads came together to illustrate the stark beauty of industrial architecture, a vibrant street life, and private scenes of a changing neighborhood.
An intimate space in size and atmosphere, Art 101 lends itself to accidental shoulder bumping and discussion of the work crowding its walls and the recent changes in the neighborhood. All the better in this exhibit, where community awareness is the intended result, said curator Nancy Wechter.
"As a photographer, I came to Williamsburg in 1984 for the space and light, and stayed because of the people," said Wechter. "With this exhibit, I want the community to come together in discussion so that we can really remember our history, identify what we care about, and learn to preserve it."
In one of the exhibit's most striking photographs by Joyce George, two middle-aged women sit side-by-side on the Grand Street waterfront in their bathing suits, lounging and smiling into the sun and breeze, Manhattan visible but a world away.
In a stunning multi-panel panoramic photograph, "Documenting the Transition: Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal I 1994-98," Peter Gillespie exhibits the industrial landscape changes from Owl's Head Park to the end of Newton Creek.
"Though not explicitly political, the photos do inform the recent community organization work I've done to try to promote and nurture the thriving but fragile industrial and artisanal sector that is now threatened, not by global forces, but by ill-conceived public policy," said Gillespie, who serves as the executive director of the local non-profit community group Neighbors Against Garbage.
Photographer Regina Monfort spent nine years photographing the Southside Latino community in a project entitled "Beyond Grand Street." In her images, families, children and couples interact together in energetic and tender moments, making the strong bonds of community evident.
"[These images] stand as an homage to the timeless beauty of a neighborhood and its people," said photographer Regina Monfort. "The very people I photographed over the years are the ones threatened to be erased from the local map."
Like Wechter, gallery owner and painter Ellen Rand came to Williamsburg in 1982 for the kind of light that artists in sky-scraped Manhattan often find completely unattainable.
"I still feel like there's a real community here – we're very lucky to live in a place that's so alive, and it's something worth documenting and preserving," said Rand.
The exhibit shows the importance of the physical landscape in creating a social atmosphere and a community. In photograph after photograph, Williamsburg residents are at their happiest in architectural surroundings that are not sleek and polished, but instead affordable and conducive to community interaction. An impromptu block party, a stoop, a bodega or a playground often provides as much interaction as an official community center. When these de facto spaces are lost or made hostile by architectural changes, the social fabric is rended, separating members of the same community.
"With beautiful old industrial buildings going away and forty-story towers appearing, a certain relaxation and ease as well as the working class and the artists are starting to go away," said Wechter. "The roots of the neighborhood, people who have lived here for years and years and who have very emotional ties to the neighborhood, can no longer afford the rents. We need to document this and do our best to stop it."
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