Questions & Answers
2001— New York City
Relocating
In March 1998 you had your worker’s compensation settled, and you had also completed the tech bootcamp with Microsoft by this point. Why did you move to NYC once the compensation cheque arrived?
My call and desire to live and make art/music/performance in New York City dates back to 1977 when I got stagestruck, age 15, living on the New England coast at the outer reaches of the New York radio stations and, thanks to the miracle of cable TV, the main TV outlets along with Mets and Yankees baseball. As a legit stage actor and conservatory student in the mid-1980s, the road to success in the American professional theatre of the day led to – and not always through – New York City.
If theatre and the stage was your gig, New York was your target. If your ambition was TV and film, Los Angeles/Hollywood is where you went. So I’d been oriented to the place from the first stirrings of the acting bug, and when I found my home in
performance art in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, the call grew stronger with each passing year.
The last time I’d was in New York prior to moving West was March of 1986, right after I’d quit conservatory, enroute to California for what I thought was going to be a two-week vacation to visit relatives before I headed to Phoenix where I was hoping to find a radio gig and finish my degree.
That visit is a three-act play with music in itself, and marked my first exposure to leather and BDSM sex, which as you know is foundational to Animal per se and my performative and imagistic aesthetic. It also was where I took my flute to a jazz open mic in SoHo where some monstrous cats were hanging, and I sightread a challenging chart that’s become perhaps my most beloved jazz tune (and was a talisman of hope for me during the homeless time after the blast): Clifford Brown’s Joy Spring. To this day it’s in my regular rotation and I make a point of playing the head when I practice my flute.
I didn’t see New York again until late 1996, when I visited my family on the Connecticut coast and spent time in the city and the music studio with my high school friend Jeffrey, a gifted musical theatre composer and performer who had
found success with a program of Greek myth presented for schools here an overseas. I remember being in the studio with him on piano and we’re jamming our asses off, and at a break I said, ‘You know, I’ve got a ton of cares and worries, but
when you and I hit that groove, there’s nothing in the world that can get in our way.” That’s what I found in the city as we made our way through another Christmas – the first one after my bout with AIDS wasting that summer and fall nearly killed me.
So when my settlement finally hit in March of 1998, I was primed to get the fuck out of here and on the road, to see what living and working in Manhattan would be like, if it would be anything close to what I’d been dreaming and researching and
longing for, rebuking in my mind the words of a longtime buddy who said, “You’ll be back – New York is for when you’re in your twenties!” I took the joint we’d been sharing out of his hand and left the bar. (We made up later, bless his soul.)
(Later, after the blast, in that exact spot in the same bar, I remarked, “There were a lot of ways I thought I’d come back to San Francisco but this was not one of ‘em.” Nods all around; maybe mid-October 2001.)
But my friend had a point: I was about to turn 36 years old, a little long in the tooth to be a fledgling anything, and a latecomer to applied tech engineering where once you hit age 30 you’re looking over your shoulder and feeling old. I knew that if I didn’t make the jump to national/international work soon, I’d be relegated to being local talent for the rest of my career. I had what I considered a strong body of work, a firm place in the national leather community that served as my entry into New York and a circle of fellow travelers who, I hoped, had an eye for what brought and would be inclined to give me a look, maybe a boost. I’d made the choice to build my gig in San Francisco, and I migrated to New York with archive and flute in hand, a lot of hope, and a modicum of faith that I’d made the right bet.
Were you still making art at this time, and with the intention to continue in NYC?
After Burn The Quilt was done, I continued to sketch and compose music as I was working my very first IT contracts. There’s a work in progress in the lower-left-hand drawer of my mental desk that came from the period between BTQ and my arrival in NY, with a working title of Hot To Trotsky!, but not nearly as funny as that monicker would indicate: John and Britt, my friends and collaborators, had loaned me their copy of Trotsky’s biography of Lenin, and upon reading it I was struck by the blazing screaming homoeroticism of Trotsky’s descriptions of the man, his visage, his voice and cadence, his virility on the stage as he declaimed to the masses... there’s a very nice song that’s the centerpiece to this two-man show I’d envisioned that came to me in May or so of 1998 in the laundry room of my firs NYC apartment that I’d like to revisit and develop for Nothing, &Then Suddenly Something.
Was your art work disrupted by your new tech work roles?
When I got to the city, my first year was a whirlwind of breaking in, finding work, meeting people, getting acclimated – my focus was on exploring my new surroundings and making connections more than developing new work. It was a 90-miles-an-hour pace, and it took me about a year and a half to land a steady tech gig, to find my place and my people. So for those 17-18 months, it was a reconfiguration of my entire milieu. Disruption would come later.
How did your art change in the new setting in NYC?
It took on the aspects I had hoped would accrue: bigger, grander in scale and ambition, expansive - taking a broader view of the world, breaking out of the AIDS polemic and church-y character of my ensemble work.
This was enhanced greatly by my participation in an artist residency in the summer of 2000 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the Goat Island Performance Group, most of whom were faculty at the School. It was my breakthrough gig - one of 24 artists from around the world selected to come together for education and exploration across disciplines.
It was transformative for me; several layers of scales fell from my eyes during the time I was there. - I left the program after about 10 days of the 21 that were scheduled due to 24-hour construction work directly outside my student dorm window (would have helped if I'd been able to find weed) that kept me from sleeping more than 3 hours a night. I wasn't eating, I wasn't that far past my AIDS scare, and to be honest my aesthetic was freaking out the faculty a bit, so I went back to NY with a bit of sadness but a lot of goodwill and a dynamite concept called Creative Response.
I've long had the habit of sticking with something just long enough to get the gist, the operative core that I know and sense is vital to assimilation into my way of working. It was like that in university, conservatory, and in general as I trained up.
In 1987, I was taking an acting class with a well-respected teacher who came up from LA and whose style I really liked. I'd been missing classes because I was getting so much acting work, and I knew I had to make a choice. One night, I did a monologue from a play about a Vietnam veteran who had committed a war crime; searing stuff. When I finished, he came to the foot of the stage with a smile and said, “Joe, I have no idea what the hell it is you're doing up there, but it's working!” That was the end of the acting classes. Then, as now, I had to get on with it.
My call and desire to live and make art/music/performance in New York City dates back to 1977 when I got stagestruck, age 15, living on the New England coast at the outer reaches of the New York radio stations and, thanks to the miracle of cable TV, the main TV outlets along with Mets and Yankees baseball. As a legit stage actor and conservatory student in the mid-1980s, the road to success in the American professional theatre of the day led to – and not always through – New York City.
If theatre and the stage was your gig, New York was your target. If your ambition was TV and film, Los Angeles/Hollywood is where you went. So I’d been oriented to the place from the first stirrings of the acting bug, and when I found my home in
performance art in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, the call grew stronger with each passing year.
The last time I’d was in New York prior to moving West was March of 1986, right after I’d quit conservatory, enroute to California for what I thought was going to be a two-week vacation to visit relatives before I headed to Phoenix where I was hoping to find a radio gig and finish my degree.
That visit is a three-act play with music in itself, and marked my first exposure to leather and BDSM sex, which as you know is foundational to Animal per se and my performative and imagistic aesthetic. It also was where I took my flute to a jazz open mic in SoHo where some monstrous cats were hanging, and I sightread a challenging chart that’s become perhaps my most beloved jazz tune (and was a talisman of hope for me during the homeless time after the blast): Clifford Brown’s Joy Spring. To this day it’s in my regular rotation and I make a point of playing the head when I practice my flute.
I didn’t see New York again until late 1996, when I visited my family on the Connecticut coast and spent time in the city and the music studio with my high school friend Jeffrey, a gifted musical theatre composer and performer who had
found success with a program of Greek myth presented for schools here an overseas. I remember being in the studio with him on piano and we’re jamming our asses off, and at a break I said, ‘You know, I’ve got a ton of cares and worries, but
when you and I hit that groove, there’s nothing in the world that can get in our way.” That’s what I found in the city as we made our way through another Christmas – the first one after my bout with AIDS wasting that summer and fall nearly killed me.
So when my settlement finally hit in March of 1998, I was primed to get the fuck out of here and on the road, to see what living and working in Manhattan would be like, if it would be anything close to what I’d been dreaming and researching and
longing for, rebuking in my mind the words of a longtime buddy who said, “You’ll be back – New York is for when you’re in your twenties!” I took the joint we’d been sharing out of his hand and left the bar. (We made up later, bless his soul.)
(Later, after the blast, in that exact spot in the same bar, I remarked, “There were a lot of ways I thought I’d come back to San Francisco but this was not one of ‘em.” Nods all around; maybe mid-October 2001.)
But my friend had a point: I was about to turn 36 years old, a little long in the tooth to be a fledgling anything, and a latecomer to applied tech engineering where once you hit age 30 you’re looking over your shoulder and feeling old. I knew that if I didn’t make the jump to national/international work soon, I’d be relegated to being local talent for the rest of my career. I had what I considered a strong body of work, a firm place in the national leather community that served as my entry into New York and a circle of fellow travelers who, I hoped, had an eye for what brought and would be inclined to give me a look, maybe a boost. I’d made the choice to build my gig in San Francisco, and I migrated to New York with archive and flute in hand, a lot of hope, and a modicum of faith that I’d made the right bet.
Were you still making art at this time, and with the intention to continue in NYC?
After Burn The Quilt was done, I continued to sketch and compose music as I was working my very first IT contracts. There’s a work in progress in the lower-left-hand drawer of my mental desk that came from the period between BTQ and my arrival in NY, with a working title of Hot To Trotsky!, but not nearly as funny as that monicker would indicate: John and Britt, my friends and collaborators, had loaned me their copy of Trotsky’s biography of Lenin, and upon reading it I was struck by the blazing screaming homoeroticism of Trotsky’s descriptions of the man, his visage, his voice and cadence, his virility on the stage as he declaimed to the masses... there’s a very nice song that’s the centerpiece to this two-man show I’d envisioned that came to me in May or so of 1998 in the laundry room of my firs NYC apartment that I’d like to revisit and develop for Nothing, &Then Suddenly Something.
Was your art work disrupted by your new tech work roles?
When I got to the city, my first year was a whirlwind of breaking in, finding work, meeting people, getting acclimated – my focus was on exploring my new surroundings and making connections more than developing new work. It was a 90-miles-an-hour pace, and it took me about a year and a half to land a steady tech gig, to find my place and my people. So for those 17-18 months, it was a reconfiguration of my entire milieu. Disruption would come later.
How did your art change in the new setting in NYC?
It took on the aspects I had hoped would accrue: bigger, grander in scale and ambition, expansive - taking a broader view of the world, breaking out of the AIDS polemic and church-y character of my ensemble work.
This was enhanced greatly by my participation in an artist residency in the summer of 2000 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the Goat Island Performance Group, most of whom were faculty at the School. It was my breakthrough gig - one of 24 artists from around the world selected to come together for education and exploration across disciplines.
It was transformative for me; several layers of scales fell from my eyes during the time I was there. - I left the program after about 10 days of the 21 that were scheduled due to 24-hour construction work directly outside my student dorm window (would have helped if I'd been able to find weed) that kept me from sleeping more than 3 hours a night. I wasn't eating, I wasn't that far past my AIDS scare, and to be honest my aesthetic was freaking out the faculty a bit, so I went back to NY with a bit of sadness but a lot of goodwill and a dynamite concept called Creative Response.
I've long had the habit of sticking with something just long enough to get the gist, the operative core that I know and sense is vital to assimilation into my way of working. It was like that in university, conservatory, and in general as I trained up.
In 1987, I was taking an acting class with a well-respected teacher who came up from LA and whose style I really liked. I'd been missing classes because I was getting so much acting work, and I knew I had to make a choice. One night, I did a monologue from a play about a Vietnam veteran who had committed a war crime; searing stuff. When I finished, he came to the foot of the stage with a smile and said, “Joe, I have no idea what the hell it is you're doing up there, but it's working!” That was the end of the acting classes. Then, as now, I had to get on with it.