Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff your
Speaker 2: weekly reminder that I have a podcast and my name
Speaker 2: is Margaret kildoy and I also, in addition to having
Speaker 2: a podcast, have a guest whose name is Jamie loncas Hi.
Speaker 3: Hi, you left me on a cliffhanger on Monday.
Speaker 2: I know I left you on a cliffhanger, and it's
Speaker 2: going to take a while to get you to the cliffhanger.
Speaker 2: I promised the audience that the most tragic part of
Speaker 2: this story is going to be related to a hot dog,
Speaker 2: and it is true.
Speaker 3: I have a feeling that that's going to be something
Speaker 3: people can say about my life when it ends.
Speaker 2: The tragedy is that your dms are just full of
Speaker 2: hot dog memes that have been for.
Speaker 3: Have been for five years.
Speaker 4: Hey, thought of you?
Speaker 3: Have you seen this one? Sorry?
Speaker 2: I felt very bad. I sent you a hot dog
Speaker 2: thing the other day.
Speaker 3: To your credit, you said me stuff that I usually
Speaker 3: have not seen before.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, Eddie goes a kid selling hot dog on
Speaker 2: the Expressway because the protest had taken it over.
Speaker 3: Oh. That is one of the best parts of LA
Speaker 3: protests is that there are always danger dogs on hand
Speaker 3: and everyone is always so wonderful to whoever selling the
Speaker 3: danger dogs.
Speaker 2: It's just yeah, we must protect the danger dog sellers
Speaker 2: at all costs.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: We also have a producer named Sophie.
Speaker 1: Hi, Sophie straight from the Ashes of podcast.
Speaker 4: Hell no, I'm kidding.
Speaker 2: We should just do a podcast. Hell like, that's the
Speaker 2: Halloween reverse episodes. It's just being like weird podcast bros.
Speaker 4: So if you just rose out of a floor, that was amazing.
Speaker 2: I know it's not a visual medium, so y'all didn't
Speaker 2: get to see that. But the flame effect that's not
Speaker 2: a zoom background. Your house is actually on fire.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like magical flames that don't harm dogs or
Speaker 1: my furniture.
Speaker 3: So it's just like, looks cool. You have the little
Speaker 3: dog with the coffee cup. That's how I feel most days.
Speaker 3: Actually everything's my Do you think that the artist who
Speaker 3: drew the dog with the coffee cup? Well, actually, I'm
Speaker 3: gonna guess.
Speaker 2: No what to say? Are you going to do an
Speaker 2: episode about this?
Speaker 5: Yeah? I was.
Speaker 3: I guess I'm asking this like this is something I
Speaker 3: should find out, and I feel like, I know you're.
Speaker 1: Kind of the person that I would go to for
Speaker 1: that information.
Speaker 2: But what are you gonna ask.
Speaker 3: Do you think that they are, you know, well compensated
Speaker 3: for having created that art? And how do you think
Speaker 3: they feel about it? I know that the image is
Speaker 3: just like replicated in to infinity, but I wonder how
Speaker 3: they feel about it because I'm sure that it's been
Speaker 3: like fucked with via AI on the scary side, but
Speaker 3: also been illegally reproduced for positive reasons on the other right.
Speaker 3: I would just be curious to know how they feel.
Speaker 2: I agree, And if you, dear listener, think that'd be
Speaker 2: a kind of cool podcast idea. What if you went
Speaker 2: around and you found people who are behind some of
Speaker 2: the most viral hits on social media and the Internet,
Speaker 2: And I would love to hear someone ask them questions
Speaker 2: and then think deeply about these things, not just surface level.
Speaker 2: But what does this say about Oh I can't do
Speaker 2: your tagline? What does it say about the internet and ourselves?
Speaker 2: And if you like that idea, Jamie, do you know
Speaker 2: anything about where they can listen to that?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I guess I did kind of open up by
Speaker 3: quietly plugging my own show by accident. What do we
Speaker 3: think about this, folks? I? Yeah, you should listen to
Speaker 3: sixteenth minute. I wish I could answer that question specifically
Speaker 3: for you, but now I'm like, I'm writing it down.
Speaker 3: It's a question I would like to answer on that show.
Speaker 3: It's by an artist named Casey Green. All right, Casey,
Speaker 3: let's see what you're all about. All right, Well, I
Speaker 3: feel great already great. I feel like I haven't had
Speaker 3: a functioning idea from my brain in weeks.
Speaker 2: That was thrilling, amazing. My favorite version of it is
Speaker 2: the one where the dog is looking in the house
Speaker 2: that's on fire and says, so I have a book
Speaker 2: coming out.
Speaker 5: Yes, that is how I feel all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's been hard to even like focus on my substock
Speaker 5: because I like, I just like don't want to be
Speaker 5: a like hot topic, like hot, take what's happening right now?
Speaker 2: Person? You know, but so much is happening right now
Speaker 2: that I also am not trying to be like.
Speaker 3: You don't want to avoid it. I hear like it's tricky. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think about that a lot, where it is just
Speaker 3: like whatever makes people built for that? I lack with
Speaker 3: regards to like the quick like I must have my
Speaker 3: finger on the pulse. Yeah, it's like I need to
Speaker 3: be reactive in my life in that way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I don't know.
Speaker 3: Sometimes I need time to process. I don't know.
Speaker 2: And the hotter the take, the less likely it is
Speaker 2: to be true. And like, it's still necessary for people
Speaker 2: to see things that are happening and tell people on
Speaker 2: a pine about it. But it is like I want
Speaker 2: to be a cold take machine as much as possible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to be like guys, this take has
Speaker 3: been marinating, yeah for weeks. Get ready for a well
Speaker 3: soaked take.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: Fascism is bad.
Speaker 1: Like, before we jump to the script, I just want
Speaker 1: to say very adorable is that Normally Anderson sleeps through podcasting,
Speaker 1: but because her Auntie Jamie, she can hear you. She's awake,
Speaker 1: she's been a week the time, and just keeps looking around, like,
Speaker 1: what are you?
Speaker 3: I love to haunt her. She's in the box, Anderson,
Speaker 3: She's in the scary box. She's in the scary box.
Speaker 2: Podcast pets are an important part of podcasting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my very reactive dog will sleep quietly at my
Speaker 2: feet as I record on podcasts.
Speaker 3: What is podcasting if there is not a mammal asleep
Speaker 3: on your feet?
Speaker 2: Like, that's maybe what keeps you from a follow We're
Speaker 2: just so much better than all the podcasters. We talked
Speaker 2: shit on everyone else's garbage. We're great.
Speaker 3: If Joe Rogan had three cats in the room, I
Speaker 3: think he would be very different.
Speaker 2: That's actually probably true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's just an experiment. Just put a bunch of
Speaker 3: puppies in the room and see what happened.
Speaker 2: So, speaking of experimental the ideas, we are on part
Speaker 2: two of A two parts. Oh wait, I didn't finish
Speaker 2: all the introduction stuff. We also have an audio engineer
Speaker 2: who is named Eva hi Eva hi Eva, and our
Speaker 2: theme music was written for usd by on Woman and
Speaker 2: part two two parter about bread and Puppet, one of
Speaker 2: the more interesting theater things that has a long lineage
Speaker 2: and has had all kinds of impacts that is also interesting.
Speaker 2: I probably already said interesting, And that's one of those
Speaker 2: words that when I was in like fourth grade, my
Speaker 2: teacher was like, you can't use words like that. You
Speaker 2: can't describe things as good or interesting. You actually have
Speaker 2: to use adjectives that I mean things. Who's laughing now.
Speaker 3: Teachers calling it like twenty five cent words. Uh yeah,
Speaker 3: that was what my sixth grade teacher would say. He
Speaker 3: was cool he played opera for us and let us
Speaker 3: read the hobbit.
Speaker 2: So, oh that is cool, Yeah, he us prettymple. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So they start Bread and Puppet on the Lower East Side.
Speaker 2: They name it in nineteen sixty three. It's a thing
Speaker 2: that they've been doing a little bit together for years already.
Speaker 2: And it was Elka who provided most of the political
Speaker 2: underpinning for the project. Like it's an entertainment like artsy
Speaker 2: kind of avant garde a little bit, but also sort
Speaker 2: of medieval like theater troupe doing puppets and you know,
Speaker 2: trying to make this very beautiful stuff. Elka, as best
Speaker 2: as I am able to understand, was the more political
Speaker 2: of the pair, okay, And she essentially radicalized her husband,
Speaker 2: who was a bit more just on the art side
Speaker 2: of things. Elka did more of the administrative behind the
Speaker 2: scene work, including introducing the initial political spark, which is
Speaker 2: what made it stand out. So she doesn't matter anyway.
Speaker 3: Uh God, that's just like magna. Do you feel that
Speaker 3: in your gut? Like I just she radicalized him. Interesting? Interesting, okay.
Speaker 2: And this spark that radicalized her was influenced by her grandfather.
Speaker 2: The back to the Land socialist, feminist vegetarian guy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and not her ex Bolshevik father. Her father drifted further
Speaker 2: and further to the right after fleeing the Soviet Union,
Speaker 2: which is a pretty common thing. You flee the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union and you start loving right wing American capitalism. I
Speaker 2: think that both the US and the USSR can take
Speaker 2: the blame for that one.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: And he ended up I think friends with like Nixon
Speaker 2: and shit, oh, like he was like influentially right wing.
Speaker 2: I think. Okay, her grandfather never forgave her father, like
Speaker 2: his own son, for turning right wing and did not
Speaker 2: go to his own son's funeral.
Speaker 3: See, people talk about principle, and that is always such
Speaker 3: a diabolical thing to witness when the form of rebellion
Speaker 3: you're offered is going right wing like that, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: defying your artist parent by being like, well, I'm going to.
Speaker 4: Become a criminal defense lawyer and.
Speaker 3: You're like, I guess, like yeah, sure, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: And then like this is the guy who moved to
Speaker 2: the USSR to be like, I'm going to be a
Speaker 2: steel worker for Stalin and bring the worldwide revolution.
Speaker 4: No follow through, no commitment, yeah, right.
Speaker 2: So Alka took after her grandfather and looked up to
Speaker 2: her grandfather, and it was her own politics influenced by
Speaker 2: her grandfathers that infuse bread and puppett Although Peter in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight he's going to say very shockingly and
Speaker 2: clearly inconsistently, he says different things about politics in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight and twenty twenty five, which are the two
Speaker 2: time periods that I've read about his politics most directly. Hey,
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty eight he's very like, our work isn't
Speaker 2: about ideology, it's this protest theater. In twenty twenty five
Speaker 2: he is like, there is no world left because Gaza
Speaker 2: is being destroyed. And I am a communist and I'm
Speaker 2: obsessed with Peter Kropowkin, you know, like.
Speaker 3: I adore when someone becomes more radical as they which
Speaker 3: I feel like that is what a gift.
Speaker 2: No, totally, I think he's like, oh, we don't have
Speaker 2: an ideology. He's still actively doing direct action protests against
Speaker 2: the Vietnam War by giant puppets, which we'll get me.
Speaker 3: So I also think about this as a wild sixteenth
Speaker 3: minute connection.
Speaker 2: But no, I like these wild connections absolutely.
Speaker 3: When I talked to Taizon day who did Chocolate Rain, Yeah,
Speaker 3: which is like a very political song. For the first
Speaker 3: like ten years that he did interviews about it, he
Speaker 3: really avoided talking about the politics of like really what
Speaker 3: he was like, just listen to it and see what
Speaker 3: you think, and like gave kind of like obfuscating answers,
Speaker 3: and then I think at some point was like, fuck it, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's obviously.
Speaker 4: A political song, like yeah.
Speaker 3: And was willing to but I think it started from
Speaker 3: whatever the political climate at the time, but also a
Speaker 3: like resentment of like being asked to spell out what
Speaker 3: he felt was very obvious. You're like, oh, I don't know,
Speaker 3: is Chocolate Rain a political song? Like a baby born
Speaker 3: will die before the sin? I don't know, is that
Speaker 3: a chargelaar to you?
Speaker 2: Like, what's funny is that I don't know whether I
Speaker 2: actually listened to the entire song before, Like I knew it, right,
Speaker 2: but so I was like, I don't have no idea
Speaker 2: whether it was political, and then yeah, listening to those
Speaker 2: episodes very direct one of the clearest articulations of like
Speaker 2: kind of like where progressive slash radical politics are kind
Speaker 2: of at about a lot of issues are just like
Speaker 2: wad out really intelligent, like really fucking well.
Speaker 3: It's so wild that everyone and it was everyone in
Speaker 3: like two thousand and six who missed that, Like it
Speaker 3: was very much a skill error on the part of
Speaker 3: the general public. But I'm curious they were doing direct
Speaker 3: action yea. Were the shows themselves political?
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, I actually think that this is kind of
Speaker 2: a like, hey, I'm not like into ideology, okay, and
Speaker 2: also like a little bit of a defense of like
Speaker 2: I really do care about this as art, you know. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'll talk about with some of those plays where okay,
Speaker 2: they have this theater now and their friends are helping
Speaker 2: them pay rent on the space to run it in
Speaker 2: Elka started doing her own children's theater as well, and
Speaker 2: she would do art music just as much as her
Speaker 2: husband and.
Speaker 3: But forget about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but no she did. Yeah. No, it's funny because
Speaker 2: she like, throughout the whole thing, she's also gonna be
Speaker 2: running her own theater. But they're running this theater on
Speaker 2: a shoe string budget and always have the couple and
Speaker 2: their three kids. At that point, they're gonna end up
Speaker 2: with five all live in a railroad apartment with a
Speaker 2: bathtub in the kitchen, and it shares a toilet with
Speaker 2: all the other apartments, and they are absolutely radical. Through Elka,
Speaker 2: they are involved in some of the earliest protests against
Speaker 2: the US involvement in Vietnam. By nineteen sixty five and
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty six, they were regularly putting on shows that
Speaker 2: talked about the issues that people were facing, like to
Speaker 2: quote Bread Andpuppet dot orgs write up about it, rents, rats,
Speaker 2: police and other problems of the neighborhood. They're talking about
Speaker 2: the issues that people are facing, you know. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: they would lead processions of puppets to the streets protests
Speaker 2: of the Vietnam War. And there are some photos of
Speaker 2: this era where it's just like people wearing black robes
Speaker 2: with like kind of surreal stylized paper mache skull masks
Speaker 2: and it's fairly arresting. I really, okay. I like puppetry
Speaker 2: and like costume because it hits the uncanny valley and
Speaker 2: makes me feel like the world isn't real.
Speaker 3: Yes, I like when puppets are used for well, not
Speaker 3: scary reasons like Chucky, but like when they're used to
Speaker 3: make you feel unsettled and like, yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And masks are like it's funny because it's a kid.
Speaker 2: You're like, oh, people put on funny masks and every
Speaker 2: now and then, I'm just like, someone walking around with
Speaker 2: a bird mask is terrifying. You're just like, there's a
Speaker 2: bird over there, you know, but it's shaped like a person.
Speaker 3: Why does the bird have such meaty legs? I love it.
Speaker 3: Animatronics are essentially puppetry, Yeah, totally. I love animatronic history
Speaker 3: because you're like, Wow, this art for children that has
Speaker 3: consistently scared children, and that's the history of puppet. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they're kind of puppets and clowns unequivocally all kind of scary.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but also classics. Okay, See the reason I'm so
Speaker 2: interested in this, I've been talking for a while about
Speaker 2: this is completely unrelated to we're talking at actually's not
Speaker 2: you know what I'm going to say. This is related
Speaker 2: to Breton puppet and surrealism and like or not surrealism,
Speaker 2: but the concept of making the world feel surreal. I've
Speaker 2: been thinking about how like, I have a really mixed
Speaker 2: feeling about horror as a genre, like my own engagement
Speaker 2: of watching it, and I like things that make me
Speaker 2: feel like there's a world beneath this world and that like,
Speaker 2: things are different, we can feel and act in really
Speaker 2: different ways, and the easiest way to access that is
Speaker 2: through terror and like death and you know, horrible things
Speaker 2: and rot and whatever, you know. And I've always been like,
Speaker 2: but where are the other genres that give me that feeling?
Speaker 2: And actually puppetry, animatronics like dark crystal, like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: the things that are unsettling in that you are like
Speaker 2: going to just feel differently and to tie it back
Speaker 2: into the script, these protests, these people walking down the
Speaker 2: street protesting a war like solemnly as skull people walking
Speaker 2: down the street would actually get bystanders to stop what
Speaker 2: they were doing and look and engage with the protest
Speaker 2: marching by in the way that they don't if it's
Speaker 2: just an anemic chant and one badly played drum dragged them.
Speaker 2: I have sent so many hours of my life in protests.
Speaker 2: Dong dung du. Yeah, I have been the bad drummer
Speaker 2: at protesting.
Speaker 3: Look, we need the bucket drum. We need it. It's
Speaker 3: got its place in history. I don't know that I've
Speaker 3: seen it recently, but it is arresting, and it's arresting
Speaker 3: in a way that I can't think of in a
Speaker 3: way that like a pithy signe is just not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you can look and because the pithy sign
Speaker 2: I don't hate one, and it makes people really excited
Speaker 2: to go. They're like, I've got the best sign, and
Speaker 2: so then they actually go out right yes, but yeah,
Speaker 2: there's something about like, no, I want people to notice
Speaker 2: this thing, and like we'll talk about a little bit later.
Speaker 2: Peter actually has really beautiful things to say about puppetry
Speaker 2: and about like this way of like accessing this like
Speaker 2: beauty and this way of creating this like really solemn environment.
Speaker 2: Sometimes you know, well, anyway, okay.
Speaker 3: I also love that like how puppets are. I would
Speaker 3: imagine if they're like on the scale you're describing, like
Speaker 3: they're designed to interact with their environment and they're designed
Speaker 3: to move in a way that I don't know. I
Speaker 3: agree with you on the signs, but sometimes you're just
Speaker 3: like if kamala one, we'd all be at brunch right now.
Speaker 3: Well I don't know about that, but I'm not so
Speaker 3: sure about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well what can you do?
Speaker 2: People like, well, actually you probably should have been protesting.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, we would.
Speaker 3: Probably be out here if Kamalawa, But all good, glad to.
Speaker 4: Have you here totally.
Speaker 2: And that is the thing. It's like, it is probably
Speaker 2: better to let people do things that you think are
Speaker 2: kind of cringey rather than make people feel the long
Speaker 2: welcome at protesting.
Speaker 4: Yeah exactly, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So nineteen sixty seven, Bread and Puppett participates in
Speaker 2: Angry Arts Week and the angry Freaks of the Lower
Speaker 2: East Side were pissed about the Vietnam War. And I'm
Speaker 2: going to paraphrase my own episode, I'm gonna self plagiarize
Speaker 2: again real quick. Wow, Oh no, I can't do the
Speaker 2: same transition twice. Even though it's around AD time, you're
Speaker 2: all gonna have to wait for the ad. Sorry, dear listener,
Speaker 2: it's not yet. You just know it's just weak.
Speaker 1: Plagiarize your own self plagiarizing ad transition just.
Speaker 2: Oh amazing. Well, you know who doesn't self plagiarize unless
Speaker 2: it is certain things but not other things. It's the
Speaker 2: products and services that support this show. And we're back.
Speaker 2: So flyers went up all over town calling for the
Speaker 2: Angry Arts Week and they started having meetings regularly. This
Speaker 2: group called Black Mask that I mentioned earlier, though, like
Speaker 2: artsy surrealists, people who probably did the first Black bloc.
Speaker 2: They show up. There's also a group of quote quasi
Speaker 2: Marxist street theater called the Pageant Players, and I want
Speaker 2: to learn more about them one day. But the life
Speaker 2: is finite and Bred and Poppett are there, and none
Speaker 2: of the famous established art people would go to these meetings,
Speaker 2: just these like working artists, the sort of scrappy scene,
Speaker 2: and everyone at the meeting is like art should mean something,
Speaker 2: Art should direct people towards motion, towards action, towards unfucking
Speaker 2: the world. This was a radical viewpoint within the arts
Speaker 2: scene at the time. The avant garde was really into
Speaker 2: the idea of art for art's sake, that any the
Speaker 2: idea that any art would have a purpose, even if
Speaker 2: that purpose was to arouse like pornography, was not true
Speaker 2: art with a capital T and a capital A.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: And I went to art school for a little bit,
Speaker 2: and I would always get in trouble in sculpture class
Speaker 2: because I wanted to make functional objects like what they were,
Speaker 2: like the famous expansion and contraction. So I made like
Speaker 2: a lace parasol, and I like it. Built the whole
Speaker 2: thing out of wire myself from like scratch I mean
Speaker 2: I bought the lace, I didn't hand tap the lace,
Speaker 2: and I didn't get a good grade on it because
Speaker 2: I like it wasn't an art piece.
Speaker 1: Oh did you not fit in an art school that
Speaker 1: it's so magpie so magfie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's also dog shit too. That just like setting
Speaker 3: the boundary that art cannot be functional, that's absurd. But like,
Speaker 3: by by that standard, like a chef cannot be called
Speaker 3: an artist, Like what the fuck do you mean a design?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 2: And I bet you that, like a chef would only
Speaker 2: be considered an artist if they made like deconstructed food
Speaker 2: that has no calories in it, you know, like right,
Speaker 2: and like god forbid, someone want a burrito? Like I
Speaker 2: like fancy food too. But yeah, this idea that you
Speaker 2: can't do art unless you're completely abstracted from the world,
Speaker 2: no oat.
Speaker 3: Right, right, Yeah, like you can't. No, I can't get
Speaker 3: into my feelings on art school and art. But that's bullshit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the Angry Art Week people called bullshit on it.
Speaker 2: One of the things that they did. On January twenty third,
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty seven, Angry Artists went to a high mass
Speaker 2: at Saint Patrick's Cathedral. The Archbishop of New York was
Speaker 2: this guy named Francis Spelman who was like all in
Speaker 2: on the war. He was like, fak, yeah, Vietnam War.
Speaker 2: Even the Pope was actually like a chill the fuck
Speaker 2: out about that man. Piece is actually better. It's like
Speaker 2: overall better idea.
Speaker 3: No no, no, yeah, that's not what govild want.
Speaker 2: And so the Archbishop of New York declared quote total
Speaker 2: victory in Vietnam. Oh so the Angry Artist disrupted mass
Speaker 2: unfurling posters in the aisle in the middle of it
Speaker 2: of a named Vietnamese kid with the words Thou Shalt
Speaker 2: Not Kill and Vietnam written on it. Real subtle stuff.
Speaker 2: You know. Cops were on them immediately. The cops have
Speaker 2: been tipped off and the Angry Artist got dragged off
Speaker 2: to jail, to the tombs. But they only spend a
Speaker 2: night or so in jail before they're bailed out. Most
Speaker 2: of the Angry Arts Week was less action oriented and
Speaker 2: more like specific theater and street theater and stuff. About
Speaker 2: five hundred artists participated in total. There's a bunch of
Speaker 2: poetry readings, there's collective murals. There's film screenings, mostly at NYU.
Speaker 2: There was a bunch of cool things they did, Like
Speaker 2: they drove a flatbed truck around with people doing performances
Speaker 2: on the back around the street. They would pass out
Speaker 2: leaflets and poetry. Yeah, like I like the idea of
Speaker 2: like the float is like plays.
Speaker 3: Yeah that rocks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and bread and puppet's contribution. They did a performance
Speaker 2: that was a play, but it was just a physician
Speaker 2: lecturing a med school class about what napalm does to
Speaker 2: the human body and how to treat it. But then
Speaker 2: just like goes on a tirade for hours about all
Speaker 2: the statistics of how fucked up the war was and
Speaker 2: all the killing and all the sexual violence and all
Speaker 2: the costs of war.
Speaker 3: Would the puppets say it?
Speaker 2: I don't know how puppety this one was. This might
Speaker 2: have been a cost anyway. I actually don't know one
Speaker 2: or the other. It could have been all puppets.
Speaker 3: I was like, I would love if that were a
Speaker 3: puppet piece.
Speaker 2: I would go to a thirty minute of that. I
Speaker 2: would not go to an hour's long of that.
Speaker 3: Personally, Yeah, no, the bit would wear thin after a while.
Speaker 3: But conceptually that rocks.
Speaker 2: Oh, unless you did it where like you know, it's
Speaker 2: actually sort of all intermission like you can come and go,
Speaker 2: you know, like you're like, oh, I'm gonna go back up.
Speaker 2: They're still doing the thing, and it'll create this atmosphere
Speaker 2: of like it's the ever present background. It's the like
Speaker 2: casualties of war, rather than like you have to sit
Speaker 2: there and listen to this and they're mad.
Speaker 3: And then it becomes a durational piece.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so anyway, I could not tell you how
Speaker 2: they handled that. But Bred and puppett is part of
Speaker 2: the movement, and our theater starts growing in popularity. They're
Speaker 2: onto something. By nineteen sixty nine, they're touring around Europe
Speaker 2: bringing their five kids with them. But New York City
Speaker 2: is changing fast. A lot of reputable people who but
Speaker 2: this is me avoiding saying things that I couldn't say
Speaker 2: are totally proven and known in record. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of reputable people who believe that the US government manufactured
Speaker 2: the drug crisis and promoted drug trade in inner cities
Speaker 2: in order to break the power of the Black panthers
Speaker 2: and like black radicalism in general. That seems fairly likely
Speaker 2: to me, But I haven't examined this in depth myself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've seen such writings. Yeah, I'm inclined to believe it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like it seems perfectly plausible. Yeah, but I can say
Speaker 3: that drugs and crime are getting more common in New
Speaker 3: York City and people that have been poor forever but
Speaker 3: now that they are poor and also in danger from
Speaker 3: the drug war. And I want to be clear that
Speaker 3: the drug war is a big part of that or
Speaker 3: the main part of it.
Speaker 2: It's just harder there. And this is also what tore
Speaker 2: part up against the wall motherfuckers around the same time. Basically,
Speaker 2: Elka and Peter and their kids, they're like also kind
Speaker 2: of hippies at heart, and they spend a lot of
Speaker 2: time in Vermont and their kids and the volunteers at
Speaker 2: this theater and all of them. They keep getting mugged
Speaker 2: all the time. Oh, and they're like kids are getting
Speaker 2: held up for their lunch money on the way to
Speaker 2: school sometimes.
Speaker 3: Oh God.
Speaker 2: And they're like, let's go back to Vermont. And they
Speaker 2: take an artist residency at Goddard College in Vermont in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy and they're doing Bread and Puppet where Peter's
Speaker 2: mostly running again. I don't know entirely divisional labor. I
Speaker 2: just keep hearing that she does all the behind the
Speaker 2: scenes work, but she's also sets up the Dancing Bear
Speaker 2: Theater for kids and would go around and perform at
Speaker 2: schools in the area.
Speaker 3: I love that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Sorry, I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier,
Speaker 3: but I did google Bernie Sanders Bread and Puppet, and.
Speaker 2: Of course he's got some stuff to say.
Speaker 3: Bernie Sanders on State at the Bread and Puppet Circus
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, like no, that makes absolute sense. Yeah,
Speaker 2: really good. I mean Vermont probably friends with Ben and Jerry's, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: I'm like these Vermont I mean they call themselves free,
Speaker 3: these Vermont I love them.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And since most of their volunteers didn't come with them
Speaker 2: when they moved to Vermont, they rebuild the organization up
Speaker 2: all over again with folks from the area. Elko was
Speaker 2: always interested in music and starts getting into sacred harp
Speaker 2: choral music, which my friends have told me is like
Speaker 2: really amazing and I need to get really into and
Speaker 2: I have not yet, so I don't know as much
Speaker 2: about it yet. But it's like shape notes singing, and
Speaker 2: it's this early nineteenth century folk tradition, and Bread and
Speaker 2: Puppet helped the revival.
Speaker 4: Of that wow.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy five, they moved further north to Elka's
Speaker 2: family's land. I have been upstate Vermont. They rebuild yet again.
Speaker 2: Elko works the homestead and builds it up as a farm.
Speaker 2: They have sheep and apples and all these things, and
Speaker 2: the kids are now also puppeteers. Elka continued to run
Speaker 2: her own puppeteering as well, I believe, doing children's theater specifically,
Speaker 2: and CounterPunch says that she said that it was the
Speaker 2: opposite of Bread and Puppet. That to quote her, we
Speaker 2: were always on time and clean.
Speaker 3: Okay, sounds defensive, Okay.
Speaker 2: Well it's like compared to Bread and Puppet, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Look as someone who's been late and dirty many times, Yeah,
Speaker 3: let them cook.
Speaker 2: Bread and Puppet became slowly less popular in Europe, and
Speaker 2: they started touring Latin America more. But they started moving
Speaker 2: their focus to their next big thing, which was called
Speaker 2: Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, which is a free two day
Speaker 2: festival every year of giant puppets out in the woods
Speaker 2: or out in the fields.
Speaker 3: Lovely.
Speaker 2: Having their performances outside instead of in tiny storefronts meant
Speaker 2: that they could go big, like eighteen foot tall puppet. Big.
Speaker 3: That's Bertie Sanders nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 4: I think that's I am.
Speaker 3: It is massive crowd.
Speaker 2: Huge, tens of thousands of people coming to these things.
Speaker 3: It's a Springsteen concert at this puppet.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And they have a junk band orchestra of amateur
Speaker 2: brass musicians. And they ran from I've read one thing
Speaker 2: since nineteen seventy four, I read one thing that implied
Speaker 2: a couple years earlier. They ran until nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 3: Awesome.
Speaker 2: Their first performance was a history of the US from
Speaker 2: its origin up to the Vietnam War. The nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: five circus was seven hundred people attending, and by the
Speaker 2: end they were bringing about forty thousand people every year.
Speaker 2: Nearby farmers made a lot of their money for the
Speaker 2: year by renting land to the campers, and even though
Speaker 2: the event was free, the donations from festival goers was
Speaker 2: the main source of income for the whole theater for
Speaker 2: the year. A journalist named Scott strut described the festival
Speaker 2: like this, a little bit grateful dead concert with some
Speaker 2: undeadlike rules no drugs, no dogs, no alcohol, and a
Speaker 2: little bit rainbow gathering and a little bit religious celebration
Speaker 2: and a little bit political being.
Speaker 3: That's amazing. There's a historic I think it opened in
Speaker 3: the forties, but the Bob Baker Marionette Theater and they
Speaker 3: do a huge free outdoor summer event cool similar to this,
Speaker 3: Like I mean, I don't think we're doing forty thousand,
Speaker 3: but like it's yeah, these gigantic public puppet demonstrations that rules.
Speaker 3: It's amazing when I hear about stuff like that, and
Speaker 3: especially like on the breaded puppet scale, It's like, how
Speaker 3: amazing must it have been to get to grow up
Speaker 3: with that?
Speaker 4: I know, Like that's so special.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 2: Actually, one of the people I was talking to between
Speaker 2: writing the script and recording it with Someone's like, oh,
Speaker 2: my friend grew up in Brett and Puppet and I'm like,
Speaker 2: I weekly wish I had more than a week to
Speaker 2: do my episodes and that's so cool, and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I would love to know more about what it was
Speaker 2: like to grow up in this space. You know. So
Speaker 2: Peter runs the art right people help realize Peter's artistic
Speaker 2: vision with puppetry and things like that, but the whole
Speaker 2: actual organization of this festival is much more democratic. The
Speaker 2: whole thing was organized by committees that would take care
Speaker 2: of the various needs, and so like, the structure that's
Speaker 2: really influencing people's lives is more democratic, even if it's like,
Speaker 2: you know, this is my artistic vision. Helped me create it,
Speaker 2: which is fine as far as I can tell, you know, sure, yeah,
Speaker 2: and thanks audio engineer. And the committees would get together
Speaker 2: and sort out trash pickup and parking and camping. And
Speaker 2: there was too many people to bake bread for everybody,
Speaker 2: even in the ten foot long of it, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, forty thousand bread slices.
Speaker 2: No, And initially they would do it like kind of
Speaker 2: potluck style when it's like seven hundred people coming right.
Speaker 2: In the end, they were like, all right, people can
Speaker 2: set up food stands. And that was a bit chaotic.
Speaker 2: But it took them into the late nineties to determine
Speaker 2: the no drug policy more formally. I think they were
Speaker 2: a bit afraid of being authoritarian, being like, oh, you
Speaker 2: can't do drugs or whatever. But basically they were like,
Speaker 2: this actually needs to be a family friendly thing. And
Speaker 2: the no drugs thing didn't trickle down to the campgrounds, okay,
Speaker 2: And so you have this like it used to be
Speaker 2: about the puppets, man, but now it's about the They.
Speaker 3: Basically went corporate. Man. There.
Speaker 2: Now there's like because there's people selling food and tied
Speaker 2: ie and hemp clothes and drugs, and there's drum circles
Speaker 2: around the clock, and it becomes more of a specific
Speaker 2: festival that puppets are part of in the average participant's
Speaker 2: point of view. Like I read one piece from like
Speaker 2: a traveling kid in the nineties who was like, oh,
Speaker 2: I went to this amazing thing. There was drum circles
Speaker 2: and drugs and there's puppets, you know, instead of like
Speaker 2: I went to the third Yeah, yeah, exactly, like and
Speaker 2: some people loved this new vibe and some people hated it.
Speaker 2: It started getting absorbed into the mainstream subculture of the
Speaker 2: late nineties, like counterculture stuff. Newspapers covered it like it
Speaker 2: was a sixties nostalgia festival.
Speaker 3: I see, Okay, so it was a grateful that kind of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And they didn't necessarily want it to be, or
Speaker 2: at least that's the implication I get. And none of
Speaker 2: the newspaper stuff would ever include the like anti capitalist
Speaker 2: critique that was embedded rather unsubtly into the art itself. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it to me reads like they were victims of their
Speaker 2: own success. And then a thing I promised you a
Speaker 2: long time ago. After a cliffhanger, you're gonna have to
Speaker 2: wait for another cliffhanger because now those ads wow violence,
Speaker 2: all podcasters go to hell. I am lit by red
Speaker 2: light as we type this. I'm so used to writing that,
Speaker 2: I said as I type this. Anyway, ads, here they are,
Speaker 2: and we're back. So in nineteen ninety eight, a forty
Speaker 2: one year old logger named Michael Sarahzon, who've been going
Speaker 2: to this festival for years, got into a fight with
Speaker 2: a guy named Junebug over a hot dog.
Speaker 3: Ooh, there's enough to go around, fellas.
Speaker 2: Come on, I know Junebug hits Sarazen, and Sarahson died
Speaker 2: from internal brain hemorrhagon like internal bleeding in the brain.
Speaker 3: Oh my god. And it's not the only hot dog really,
Speaker 3: I yeah, I won't. That's another for another day. But
Speaker 3: that is sad. It's not the saddest.
Speaker 4: Hot dog death.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 3: And that's how we should view dead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so Peter Schumann, the bread and Puppet guy,
Speaker 2: is like, you know what, that's it We're done not
Speaker 2: with bread and Puppet, but with the domestic resurrection circus.
Speaker 2: And so the nineteen ninety eight when was the last one,
Speaker 2: and he was like, this became what it shouldn't be.
Speaker 2: And what they've done since is that they spread out
Speaker 2: their summer performances so that they're more focused on theater
Speaker 2: and less on giant blowout festivals. So you can't just
Speaker 2: show up for all of it and camp out for
Speaker 2: a weekend. You know, if you want to go see
Speaker 2: a piece, you can and it's still beautiful, but it
Speaker 2: focuses it back on the art, which honestly.
Speaker 3: Did it stay a free festival for everybody? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I am under the impression that it continued to be
Speaker 2: free the entire time.
Speaker 3: As frustrating as it is to have become like you're saying,
Speaker 3: a victim of a onestone success. I am very impressed
Speaker 3: with how long they were able to keep the project
Speaker 3: like to their moral standard, especially coming out of New York.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's like, I know that they were a
Speaker 3: part of a very political revolutionary group of artists, but
Speaker 3: like people are trying to capitalize on your shit in
Speaker 3: New York, but they moved to from I just think
Speaker 3: it's very very at ruple that they that they were
Speaker 3: such holdouts at Rocks.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm going to talk now about the way that
Speaker 2: they handled capitalism and art in a very very principled way,
Speaker 2: literally a more principled way than I do it, frankly.
Speaker 2: And at some point around the same time as some
Speaker 2: of the early circuses, they turned their old barn into
Speaker 2: a bread and puppet museum, holding all kinds of puppets
Speaker 2: and masks. And this was such an important place that
Speaker 2: Vermont put it on the official state map, the Bread
Speaker 2: and Puppet Museum. Elka ran a print shop and sold prints,
Speaker 2: and she built an archive of all the ephemera of
Speaker 2: the theater. She made sure that the bills got paid.
Speaker 2: Elka died in twenty twenty one, and in sort of
Speaker 2: an obituary for her, it's written like this quote, she
Speaker 2: was the glue that held the whole enterprise together behind
Speaker 2: the scenes of Peter's manic creative energy. And they started
Speaker 2: really developing their ideas together and putting them out there.
Speaker 2: And Peter put it like this in nineteen eighty seven quote,
Speaker 2: our glorious civilization glorifies itself with what it calls high art.
Speaker 2: Puppeteers have no soul searching trouble in that respect. We
Speaker 2: produce what has no ambition to be high art. Low
Speaker 2: art is what we make and what we you want,
Speaker 2: not the fine arts. The course arts are what we use.
Speaker 3: The course arts. That's terrific.
Speaker 2: And as someone who's done stand up comedy in a garage,
Speaker 2: I feel like you might identify with that a little.
Speaker 3: The course is art. I think what they're doing is
Speaker 3: far cooler than what we're doing, but I do. I
Speaker 3: mean low art rips like and it's also I mean,
Speaker 3: any low art is going to be considered high art
Speaker 3: in one hundred years because it's just a fucking passage.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, who cares.
Speaker 3: Yeah, course arts that's gonna stick with me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that rocks. They would sell these cheap art prints.
Speaker 2: That's like, the whole thing is cheap art, and they
Speaker 2: started taking it really seriously, and in nineteen seventy nine
Speaker 2: they filled a school bus with tiny paintings on scraps
Speaker 2: of cardboard and shit and would sell them for like
Speaker 2: ten cents to ten bucks. And by nineteen eighty three
Speaker 2: they had all cheap Art manifesto and I'm just gonna
Speaker 2: read it. It's good manifesto. Okay, just imagine the words
Speaker 2: that I'm slightly louder on as all caps, because this
Speaker 2: is absolutely a nineteen eighty of course.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it was written in Vermont.
Speaker 2: And I think it might have been a letter pressed
Speaker 2: the print. Yeah. People have been thinking too long that
Speaker 2: art is a privilege of the museums and the rich.
Speaker 2: Art is not a business. It does not belong to
Speaker 2: banks and fancy investors. Art is food. You can't eat it,
Speaker 2: but it feeds you. Art has to be cheap and
Speaker 2: available to everybody. It needs to be everywhere because it
Speaker 2: is inside of the world. Art soothes pain, Art wakes
Speaker 2: up sleepers. Art fights against war and stupidity. Art sings Hallelujah.
Speaker 2: Art is for kitchens. Art is like good bread. Art
Speaker 2: is like green trees. Art is like white clouds in
Speaker 2: a blue sky. Art is cheap.
Speaker 3: Hurrah ooh, stuck the landing too. I know I haven't
Speaker 3: spent a ton of time in Vermont, but I can
Speaker 3: see and smell that manifesto, and I mean that in
Speaker 3: the best way.
Speaker 2: I love that totally. And like, intersexual feminism has offered
Speaker 2: some critiques of like everyone should be volunteer and everyone
Speaker 2: should be poor, you know, like we've kind of at
Speaker 2: some point been like how self sustained are you? Like?
Speaker 2: You know, like do we want only people with generational
Speaker 2: wealth able to do certain types of things?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 2: And so there is a like getting down in the gutter.
Speaker 2: I actually think part of low art for me, I
Speaker 2: think podcasting is a low art honestly in a way
Speaker 2: that I like is being like, yeah, but sometimes I
Speaker 2: gotta sell it. But they actually they are selling it, right.
Speaker 2: They are making these things and selling it and trying
Speaker 2: to make enough money to feed themselves and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: You know, they're still making a living. I mean they've
Speaker 3: got to sustain the project.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but they're also almost everyone's volunteer their shoe string budget.
Speaker 2: They're very like we're back to the landers and like
Speaker 2: living off the land and stuff, and you know, it
Speaker 2: is like I've read some critiques of Bread and puppett
Speaker 2: around this, Okay, some of which I think we're better
Speaker 2: written than others, but okay, but I think it's important
Speaker 2: that we remember, like, yeah, I really like the cheap
Speaker 2: Art Manifesto. Actually it was one of the first political
Speaker 2: things I saw is that I got a it's probably
Speaker 2: a dollar I bought like a block print of it
Speaker 2: or something. I think when I went to Brand Puppet
Speaker 2: when I was like seventeen, I moved to New York
Speaker 2: City and someone took me to Bread and Puppet and
Speaker 2: it was like kind of weird. I didn't totally understand it,
Speaker 2: but the ours cheap thing was like, that's cool, you know.
Speaker 3: That's incredible. Yeah, and then you could afford to take
Speaker 3: a little bit of their philosophy with you.
Speaker 2: That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, totally. So giant puppets became an
Speaker 2: essential part of street theater. And I don't know that
Speaker 2: this is the true origin of it, but it is the
Speaker 2: origin that I have found of it, and they become
Speaker 2: part of a street theater in a solemn way. As
Speaker 2: we're talking about earlier, Peter said once quote, puppets are
Speaker 2: not cute like muppets. Puppets are effigies and gods and
Speaker 2: meaningful creatures.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, Well, there's many ways to look at a puppet, Peter.
Speaker 3: I mean, I love that. I mean, I'm a pee
Speaker 3: Wee's playhouse, yeah, man, But I like when a puppet
Speaker 3: is a little ugly, Yeah, you know, like a puppet
Speaker 3: should be a little bit uly. Okay, so what does
Speaker 3: he mean when he says that, is he referring to scale?
Speaker 3: What are the puppets look like?
Speaker 2: Well, an awful lot of their puppets are like real sad,
Speaker 2: giant faced people who are like mourning and like moving
Speaker 2: through the streets, where like one person's holding up this
Speaker 2: head with like it'll be like the head is paper mache.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of conflating it with like street protest puppets
Speaker 2: in general at this point, but like a lot of
Speaker 2: their puppets are different. But you know, you have a
Speaker 2: giant paper mache head held up by one puppeteer and
Speaker 2: that the shoulders will be fabric and then the arms
Speaker 2: will be fabric and then there'll be one person on
Speaker 2: each side holding hands out.
Speaker 3: I'm looking at them now, I know this style. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's I mean that's the thing. It's like they
Speaker 3: move with the breeze because they're wearing clothes and oh
Speaker 3: it's incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And they're like often in a crowd marching so
Speaker 2: that the hands and stuff are moving the way that
Speaker 2: the protester puppeteers have to move and like, yeah, there's
Speaker 2: some photos of the circus that I think are worth
Speaker 2: looking up. They look pagan as hell in a really
Speaker 2: beautiful way. Where's this beautiful open field with some people
Speaker 2: watching as these like eighteen foot tall puppets are walking around,
Speaker 2: you know, mm hmm, and.
Speaker 3: That feels good. I also love like in a big
Speaker 3: puppet operation like that, that everyone has to wear a
Speaker 3: little matching outfit and it's a little culty, but it's thrilling.
Speaker 3: I just love it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, I do think that the swipe at Muppets,
Speaker 2: I disagree with you, but that's not you. But with Peter,
Speaker 2: oh yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean it sounds like he's kind of being a hater.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think he's being a hater. I actually think
Speaker 2: the Muppets are absolutely going to be a subject of
Speaker 2: this show one day because I think that they impacted
Speaker 2: culture in incredibly positive ways. I will always hold the
Speaker 2: Fraggle was like the first anarchist show I ever saw. Yes, Okay,
Speaker 2: they convince a king to not be king, and they
Speaker 2: like all worship a compost heap and like give from
Speaker 2: each according to ability to need to each according to need,
Speaker 2: and sing nice songs. So puppets have a long history
Speaker 2: and political theater. And this is where I almost started
Speaker 2: this whole episode, and then I was like, no, I'm
Speaker 2: going to start where I started. They've been used to
Speaker 2: satirize the powerful a lot. Puppetry has been banned for
Speaker 2: decades at a time throughout history. In seventeen ninety three,
Speaker 2: they were banned in Saxony, to quote author Carrie magg
Speaker 2: quote being itinerant. Puppeteers were regarded with suspicion and accused
Speaker 2: of not only participating in crime, but of perpetuating it
Speaker 2: by attracting crowds of poverty stricken individuals to respectable places
Speaker 2: of business. My god, Okay, yeah, And basically it's like
Speaker 2: puppets are like sketchy, you know, they're low art. Their
Speaker 2: course art right. The bread and puppet model spread, including
Speaker 2: to a group called Art and Revolution that we briefly
Speaker 2: mentioned in our probably last week's episodes about the World
Speaker 2: Trade Organization protests. This was the group Art and Revolution
Speaker 2: got together, the group called Direct Action Network that shut
Speaker 2: down the World Trade Organization in Seattle, which means that
Speaker 2: they dramatically and directly influenced the economic model of the world.
Speaker 2: Because the neoliberal agenda, as a consensus of what everyone
Speaker 2: agrees is what should happen to the world broke as
Speaker 2: a result of the Alt globalization movement, and the big
Speaker 2: first Opening Salvo was a successful shutdown of the meetings
Speaker 2: orchestrated by people who are started by people who are
Speaker 2: inspired directly by Breton. Puppet and art and revolution started
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six from protests against the Democratic National Convention
Speaker 2: in Chicago. There's so many of these groups that I'm
Speaker 2: not going to name the mom I'm just going to
Speaker 2: name another one. There's Paper Hand Puppet Intervention out of
Speaker 2: North Carolina that made so many puppets for so many
Speaker 2: protests of the Alt Globalization era, many of which meant
Speaker 2: their just dirduction at the hands of police, Like when
Speaker 2: at the Republican National Convention protests in the year two thousand,
Speaker 2: police claiming to look for bombs raided the puppeteer space
Speaker 2: and destroyed three hundred puppets.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, Okay, that undefeated undefeated with I'm like, oh,
Speaker 3: that's a silly one. You just did a silly crime.
Speaker 3: That's so fuck now. I'm like hyper focused on, like
Speaker 3: we got to get these puppets back on this street.
Speaker 2: I know this is thrilling, Like we shouldn't like larp
Speaker 2: the anti globalization air again and do the same stuff.
Speaker 2: But there is some stuff around. We talked last week
Speaker 2: about some of the ways that they built coalition and
Speaker 2: like actually organized like direct action in ways that felt
Speaker 2: very inviting for people to join, and stuff like puppets
Speaker 2: and the way of like breaking the spell that the
Speaker 2: viewers are witnessing. And there's many puppets will break the spell,
Speaker 2: and so will cinder blocks or a truck. But like,
Speaker 2: these don't need to be enemies for me each other.
Speaker 3: To each their own. Yes, these can cooperate. Yeah, made
Speaker 3: the puppet cast the first cinder block.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. Although I will say, and maybe I'm wrong
Speaker 2: about this, but the last time I saw giant puppets
Speaker 2: is a big part of these protests. I'm going to
Speaker 2: claim the era of giant protest puppets came to its
Speaker 2: end in the year two thousand and four at the
Speaker 2: Republican National Convention in New York City, when a giant
Speaker 2: green dragon puppet went up in flames in the streets. No,
Speaker 2: I believe that it was set on fire on purpose
Speaker 2: as a way of turning it into like a blockade
Speaker 2: and a statement. Okay, well, I know someone went to
Speaker 2: jail for it.
Speaker 3: Fascinating. Thank you for the political puppet Drauma updates. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I did not know. This dragon set a flame.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the green dragon. It was the sound system for
Speaker 2: the march, and then all of a sudden, the sound
Speaker 2: system was evacuated and the puppet went up in flames.
Speaker 2: I think in front of the Convention Center, but I
Speaker 2: actually can't remember. I was distracted because the police attacked,
Speaker 2: and I was like, I don't want to get arrested,
Speaker 2: and I wasn't because I was there. I never did crime.
Speaker 3: You couldn't have been arrested because you weren't there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: Actually, now wait, I'm checking.
Speaker 3: This dragon is mass Oh.
Speaker 2: I want to look at the picture of it too.
Speaker 2: Everyone has to.
Speaker 3: Way, cow just got a picture of its head on fire.
Speaker 3: Really good.
Speaker 2: But puppetry continues, Street theater continues, and Bread and Puppet continues.
Speaker 2: Elka died of a stroke in twenty twenty one. As
Speaker 2: we mentioned a few days before she died, she was
Speaker 2: performing with Bread and Puppet. Because their work is performed outside,
Speaker 2: it was more COVID safe than traditional theater, so they
Speaker 2: were able to keep doing performances. Very much of twenty
Speaker 2: and twenty one, and a few days before she died,
Speaker 2: she played the International on a recorder, and this has
Speaker 2: been one of the main anthems of the left for centuries,
Speaker 2: and the opening lines, at least the version that she
Speaker 2: was playing. I believe she hand wrote these notes and
Speaker 2: handed it to someone who was singing or something. Arise ye,
Speaker 2: prisoners of starvation, A risey, wretched of the earth. For
Speaker 2: justice thunders condemnation. A better world is in birth.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: And she died a few days later with her husband
Speaker 2: and five children next to her. She was buried on
Speaker 2: a pine grove on her farm. I honestly can't imagine
Speaker 2: a better life. I don't know every I'm sure she
Speaker 2: had her shit. I don't know anything about the relationship
Speaker 2: besides what's available in these public sources.
Speaker 3: But it sounds like she lived a long, full life
Speaker 3: making radical art and building community and being loved. That's
Speaker 3: really amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I got tiery writing some of this where
Speaker 2: I'm just like she ruled, Like she just changed the
Speaker 2: fucking world by like sticking with what she believed and
Speaker 2: finding a way that, like brick by brick, you build
Speaker 2: a fucking better world.
Speaker 3: And I love that she performed through her life too.
Speaker 3: I know that not everybody's able to, but I just
Speaker 3: love stories like that where it's not a job, it's
Speaker 3: like their passion. Yeah, calling and God that souff.
Speaker 2: Totally like she was probably in her very late eighties.
Speaker 2: She dies, and you know, was playing stuff that ties
Speaker 2: into centuries long legacy a few days before. Like Peter
Speaker 2: continues to work, and his work in the past few years,
Speaker 2: at least since twenty twenty three, has been focused some
Speaker 2: on the Russian anarchist Peter Kopak and the sort of
Speaker 2: founder of the modern understanding of mutual aid, and specifically
Speaker 2: r Peter. Peter Schumann is really excited about talking about
Speaker 2: how to compare cooperative life among humans to trees living
Speaker 2: in the forest, but then also kind of ran into
Speaker 2: the well. He feels very strongly about Gaza, and so
Speaker 2: as soon as the genocide kicked up a notch in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three, he moved a lot of his work
Speaker 2: to that. Although controversially among some of his collaborators and me,
Speaker 2: his work around Ukraine is mostly critical of the US
Speaker 2: and NATO and Ukraine and not the Russian invasion. But okay,
Speaker 2: he's ninety one years old.
Speaker 3: I don't know, as we're just saying, say, he's sharper
Speaker 3: than most ninety one year olds, but yeah.
Speaker 2: He's a ninety one year old Communists, I don't know.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, like you're like, I guess we could
Speaker 3: try to move his position.
Speaker 2: It's not gonna happen. Yeah, and yeah, he's still as
Speaker 2: best as I can tell, he's ninety one or so.
Speaker 2: Now he spends his time painting bedsheet backdrops for the theater.
Speaker 2: Interviews with him are entertaining. They're a little bit raving,
Speaker 2: mixing religion and politics and all sorts of things in
Speaker 2: a very interesting way. And I feel like I want
Speaker 2: to end with some of what he said in a
Speaker 2: recent CounterPunch interview. When someone asked him what do we
Speaker 2: do next, he said, quote, my best examples come from
Speaker 2: Gaza and Lebanon, where people from under the rubble are
Speaker 2: declaring that no, we are not giving up. No, my
Speaker 2: family is dead, my grandpa died, my cousins are no more.
Speaker 2: We are not giving up. Amazing when people are like,
Speaker 2: you know, what do you do? What would you tell
Speaker 2: people to do? And he has this quote, immediacy, do
Speaker 2: it immediately to not do planning revolutions, to not do
Speaker 2: lengthy developments of a new type of engineering of this
Speaker 2: and that, but step right into the streets, step right
Speaker 2: into whatever is available, and speak right out in front
Speaker 2: of whatever you have out there, Peter, and hearing that
Speaker 2: from someone who's like, there's an assumption that like, ah,
Speaker 2: a person's older, they'll be like, oh, you know, I
Speaker 2: gotta be real careful, do everything slow, He's like, No,
Speaker 2: what I have learned through my life is you just
Speaker 2: do it. You just see a thing. You go right
Speaker 2: out and you see what's happening, and you speak about it,
Speaker 2: and you step right into trying to make things better.
Speaker 3: And that's what I love about his art forum, and
Speaker 3: just about low art conceptually in general, is that it
Speaker 3: is often, not always, but like often built to be
Speaker 3: reactive and built to be learnable, and built to be
Speaker 3: like I would imagine that, you know, all the puppeteers
Speaker 3: that he's worked with over the years did not start
Speaker 3: being like I want to be a classically trained puppeteer.
Speaker 3: It's like I have something to say, what is the
Speaker 3: vessel to say? And like, what a gift to meet
Speaker 3: some weirdo who's like puppets can do this and be
Speaker 3: like all right, you know, I just that's incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, totally, And like you know, most puppeteers are
Speaker 2: volunteer and stuff and then go off and do things right,
Speaker 2: you know, It's like by having it sort of focus
Speaker 2: on his artistic vision, it actually kind of also creates
Speaker 2: a space where it's like, yeah, you come here and
Speaker 2: you learn, and then you go do your artistic vision
Speaker 2: also and work with community to make your vision happen.
Speaker 2: And like the idea that can still be a community
Speaker 2: thing is like, really, it's really interesting to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I finished writing this, and I'm just like, I've
Speaker 2: never had any specific desire in my life to make puppets.
Speaker 2: It has never occurred to me. I love making stuff.
Speaker 2: I love telling stories. There's a different version of the
Speaker 2: world where I would have come up and just been
Speaker 2: like a street performing puppet tier and you would have
Speaker 2: run away. But I didn't. And now I'm like looking
Speaker 2: at this and I'm like, there.
Speaker 3: Is a chapter of your life that can and must
Speaker 3: be consumed by puppets. Let's start puppetting, let's start hearing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll do it at your comedy shows.
Speaker 3: But like yes, yeah, like, but not in the annoying way. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 3: that's the all. But sometimes it'll be annoying. I just oh,
Speaker 3: that's so exciting. Yeah, that's so exciting. Well, I feel inspired.
Speaker 3: This is great.
Speaker 2: Thanks thanks for coming to possibly the most PUSI episode
Speaker 2: I've done of the show, at least in a long time.
Speaker 3: This is incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, next week, bread and puppets. I know, I know
Speaker 2: two amazing things I'm gonna start.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think the most important thing that I
Speaker 3: learned is I should start giving out bread at my shows.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And there's like something kind of religious about sharing bread,
Speaker 2: but like, yeah, it brings people together. There's a reason
Speaker 2: that that's been going back thousands of years. You're making
Speaker 2: your share bread.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been focusing on wine. I should have been
Speaker 3: focusing on bread. You know, comedy shows are focusing on
Speaker 3: the wrong side of the religious equations.
Speaker 2: Not blood anymore, just body.
Speaker 3: It's all about body.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anyway, you got anything you want to plug speed bread?
Speaker 3: Check out Raw Dog The Naked Truth about hot dogs,
Speaker 3: of which bread is a component.
Speaker 2: That's true. I'm so hungry. I haven't even dinner yet. Anyway,
Speaker 2: whatever to do?
Speaker 3: No that's it. Now that I have tempted you with
Speaker 3: the hot Dog conceptually, I release you to the hot
Speaker 3: Dog Wild Wow, and there's a hot dog death that
Speaker 3: changed the course of Bread and Puppets.
Speaker 2: You know, I know. I have a new book out,
Speaker 2: Imagine Me as the Dog in the Burning House. I
Speaker 2: have two new books out, honestly, I have one that
Speaker 2: is the third book in the Daniel Kane series, but
Speaker 2: it's also a standalone called The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice.
Speaker 2: And I write very short books. If your attention span
Speaker 2: struggles with reading, sometimes people like my books, and that's
Speaker 2: out now through Strangers in Tangled Wilderness. And then I
Speaker 2: also helped write a tabletop role playing game world called
Speaker 2: Defenders of the Wild where if you want to play
Speaker 2: as animals teaming up to defend their forest against giant
Speaker 2: monsters that are coming and destroying everything, you can do that.
Speaker 2: It's a tie in with the board game Defenders of
Speaker 2: the Wild. They have the same name. Well, actually think
Speaker 2: the RPG is actually called The Defender's Almanac, And I
Speaker 2: wrote a lot of the world and so those are
Speaker 2: things you can read if you like. Well, I guess
Speaker 2: my art. I don't know, whatever it doesn't really relate
Speaker 2: to me talking about history.
Speaker 3: It is wild that you haven't done puppeteering yet, because
Speaker 3: you can do everything everything. It's amazing.
Speaker 2: My theory is if something is humanly possible, I'm a human.
Speaker 2: I think everyone should have this theory and not go
Speaker 2: out and do surgery. Right, but like within reason. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like some things take longer to learn and are higher stakes,
Speaker 2: but puppets aren't high stakes at first.
Speaker 3: Yeah. That's the best part about art is if you
Speaker 3: make something bad, usually no one dies.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, your job as a beginning artist is
Speaker 2: to fail faster, not to succeed more, but to fail aster.
Speaker 2: That is your job.
Speaker 3: Thanks, felt, you're the coolest. Thank you. We're happy.
Speaker 2: Yes, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 3: This is the best. Let's start a puppet commune.
Speaker 2: We're doing it. And Sophie, you want to be in
Speaker 2: the puppet commune? Yeah? Hell yeah. Now we have someone
Speaker 2: who actually knows it to organize things.
Speaker 3: I actually have an amazing fun mixed puppets.
Speaker 2: Oh amazing, that's cool. Yeah, all right, see y'all next week.
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