00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the 80s. I'm Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: I'm Jessica. Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City, where we still live.

[00:29] Meg: And where we are currently podcasting about New York City in the 80s. I handle ripped from the headlines.

[00:34] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:37] Meg: Oh, my God, Jessica. I have a very good one for you today.

[00:42] Jessica: I am so excited. I have one that I think is going to really speak to you.

[00:45] Meg: Okay!

[00:47] Jessica: When you say a good one, do you mean like, I'm going to have to crawl under the couch?

[00:50] Meg: No!

[00:51] Jessica: Okay, good, good, good. Because guess what, actually? Having been away for five days in rural Massachusetts, I am feeling so rejuvenated. I'm ready. Whatever you want to hit me with today, I think I can handle it.

[01:08] Meg: All right. Let’s do it!

[01:09] Jessica: I am emotionally prepared. Wait like 2 seconds later, I’ll be crying.

[01:15] Meg: Okay, Jessica, so your engagement question for today is: you know how it's kind of exciting when you get a new phone or an iPad or an Apple Watch or something like that?

[01:31] Jessica: Yes.

[01:31] Meg: Would you call that like personal technology or personal electronic?

[01:36] Jessica: Gadgets? Sure!

[01:38] Meg: Gadgets are fun.

[01:39] Jessica: Yes, they are.

[01:40] Meg: So what do you remember being excited about in the 80s in the personal electronic category?

[01:50] Jessica: 80s… personal electronics. I don't know. All I can think of is games.

[01:56] Meg: Okay.

[01:57] Jessica: Like Simon or the one that looked like a red telephone that no one can ever remember the name of. It was like, I don't know, calculators?

[02:07] Meg: Calculators were kind of fun.

[02:09] Jessica: Yes. Okay. That's what I've got. Yeah.

[02:11] Meg: What about, like, walk men?

[02:12] Jessica: Holy crap. What's wrong with me? Oh, my God. Yes!

[02:20] Meg: Right? It was boom of that kind of thing.

[02:25] Jessica: That kind of saved many teenagers from having to sit in the back seat of the car on long trips with their parents.

[02:31] Meg: Right. You could tune everybody else. Now everybody does that. But back then it was kind of unique.

[02:35] Jessica: No, then that was a very teenage thing to do. It was like, I'm just going to be in the back listening to Elvis Costello and thinking about how awful you all are. Yes. Maybe that was just me. I don't know. Yeah. Loved it.

[02:50] Meg: Okay, well, today's story deals

[02: 57] Jessica: Was it a walkman murderer?

[02: 58] Meg: No.

[02:59] Jessica: Murdered you with a walkman cable?

[03:01] Meg: No, nothing like that.

[03:02] Jessica: All right.

[03:03] Meg: My sources are Washington Post, 1989, and a New Yorker article written in 2016, TheHustle.com, and SammyAntarsBlog.

[03:16] Jessica: All right.

[03:16] Meg: And I will tell you who he is presently.

[03:21] Jessica: I’m excited.

[03: 22] Meg: But his blog is very informative. Once upon a time, if you wanted to buy a TV or a record player, you would find it in the appliance section of a department store next to the washing machines and the stoves. But in the late 70s and early 80s, people started to get pretty excited about boomboxes and walkman and VCRs and sales of personal electronics jumped from 8.5 billion in the late 1960s to 35 billion by the mid 1980s. A young high school dropout from Brooklyn named Eddie Anton.

[04:03] Jessica: I'm so excited right now. I can't stand it. I know where you're going with this.

[04:12] Meg: I was wondering how long it would take you to figure it out.

[04:16] Jessica: We have to create a scale for how excited I get about some of these. We're going to call it the Leona Helmsley scale because that was the first one that I got really excited about, so if a Leona is the highest you can go let's just say that Eddie Antar is like one notch down, maybe two. But I am so freaking happy. Yes. Go. Please. More!

[04:48] Meg: So our young high school dropout, Eddie Antar predicted this boom in personal electronics and with his father, Sam Senior, opened his store, Crazy Eddie, in Flatbush. Crazy Eddie sold personal electronics exclusively and by 1979, they had expanded to eight stores in the New York area. Now, Eddie was a brilliant marketer, as you well know. He hired a local radio DJ, Jerry Carroll, to be the pitch man and flooded local TV and radio with ads. Jerry would speed talk for 30 seconds, waving his arms and screaming about incredible deals, always closing with his prices are…

[05:40] Jessica: Insane!

[05:42] Meg: Thank you. I knew you would pick that up.

[05:42] Jessica: I'm so excited.

[05:43] Meg: Inspired by the humor of Mad Magazine. Interesting, right?

[05:48] Jessica: Yes.

[05:49] Meg: The commercials would riff off pop culture and music trends. The first TV spots aired on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

[05:57] Jessica: Get out of town.

[05:59] Meg: Were you ever allowed to watch that?

[06:01] Jessica: I don't know if I was allowed to or not, but I did watch that.

[06:04] Meg: I did not. My parents were like, that is off limits.

[06:10] Jessica: You know? Interestingly. My parents really never said what we could or could not watch, ever. It was just stop watching TV, you didn't do your homework. But it was never, like–

[06:28] Meg: –content based.

[06:29] Jessica: Yeah. And if they did get upset or anything, it was that I would watch something violent or scary, like horror movie and then be a pain in the ass because I'd be crying in the middle of the night. But other than that, yeah.

[06:42] Meg: I mean, my parents didn't really care that much about content either. Especially, like, sexual stuff.

[06:49] Jessica: Definitely not. Sex stuff was never an issue. Can I tell you about the incredibly uncomfortable time that my brother and I were watching HBO in my parents' room and we had no idea that An Unmarried Woman was going to be as incredibly horrific to watch.

[07:05] Meg: I saw that movie in the movie theater.

[07:07] Jessica: With your mom?

[07:10] Meg: I believe so, and I was so uncomfortable.

[07:12] Jessica: It was so…yeah. I think we talked about this.

[07:17] Meg: Did we talk about it on the podcast?

[07:18] Jessica: I don't know. But it was the same thing about going to A Chorus Line with my grandparents.

[07:27] Meg: Right.

[07:28] Jessica: Anyway, but back to back to Eddie.

[07:31] Meg: So Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was a Norman Lear sitcom that was pretty controversial. And it aired at 11:00 p.m. So that was the time slot that these local Crazy Eddie ads started at but didn't stay there. No. The unabashedly obnoxious ads hit a nerve. In one of the early commercials, they planned to dress Jerry in a turkey suit for Thanksgiving. Ruby's Costumes delivered a chicken salad–

[08:01] Jessica: I remember that!

[08:04] Meg: –by mistake and they went with it. And it became one of the most iconic local TV commercials in history. Also, Crazy Eddie’s was open on Sundays and Thanksgiving and Christmas, which was unheard of at the time. Quote, “I remember the first time we decided to open on Christmas Day. We all looked at each other and thought, hey, we're all Jewish. Why not? It was one of the highest grossing days of the year.” This is from Sammy Antar, Eddie's cousin, who started in the family business as a stock boy.

[08:37] Jessica: Wow.

[08:37] Meg: Another stroke of marketing genius. The commercials never stated what the actual prices were. They just guaranteed Crazy Eddie would have the lowest and they would match any competitors price. So it's a pretty good deal, right?

[08:51] Jessica: Absolutely.

[08:52] Meg: What's the catch?

[08:54] Jessica: I'm waiting for it.

[08:55] Meg: Well, Eddie salespeople, many of whom were his family members, were notoriously aggressive. If you went in to buy a VCR, you are not leaving the store without that VCR and also a TV to go with it. It was not uncommon for salespeople to follow customers out of the store in order to talk them into buying merchandise. The motto was to make every beija. I think I'm pronouncing that right? The Arabic word for sale. And that quote, “nobody walks.” That sounds a little scary.

[09:28] Jessica: That is a little terrifying.

[09:30] Meg: Another money making trick, they would put used merchandise in sealed boxes and sell it as new. And as it turned out–

[09:41] Jessica: Classic.

[09:42] Meg: Right. Fewer than one in five Crazy Eddie customers ever tried to match the prices. So people believed the ads. It was as simple as that.

[09:50] Jessica: Wow. Well, he was ubiquitous. It was like it was the only ad around, really.

[09:56] Meg: I would argue, like, it's possible there was a time when people were so naive that they thought people wouldn't lie.

[10:05] Jessica: No, I'm not debating that. I'm saying that I don't know. I'm speculating, obviously. But when you're flooded with Crazy Eddie ads, and you don't get ads from anyone else in the same way, it's sort of like…Well, this is pre Internet. How am I going to match the ad? Like, where am I going?

[10:23] Meg: Where am I going? Obviously, I’ll just go to Crazy Eddie’s.

[10:24] Jessica: Am I going to go to B&H? Wasn’t that only cameras anyway? But BNH or whatever. Like, what a pain in the ass. I remember this. And if you called places, they wouldn't tell you the price over the phone. No, you could never get a price on the phone.

[10:42] Meg: Now, unlike the Crazy Eddie on TV, Eddie Antar was notoriously private, secretive, and very eccentric. He's been compared to a cult leader. A former employee said, quote, “Eddie was subject to strange moods. He'd visit a store and have you tear up a whole room of merchandise. He yelled at people and would fire people on the spot. The business even developed its own internal language, which was a combination of Arabic, pig Latin, and other retailing slang handed down from the Antar family. Because the Antar family had been merchants for generations and had a motto, quote, ‘the government gets nothing.’” Isn’t that wild? Wild Arabic and pig Latin.

[11:34] Jessica: They have their own patois, if you will.

[11:37] Meg: Eddie did everything he could to avoid paying taxes. He hired family members off the books and paid them in cash to avoid payroll taxes. He skimmed the cash from sales without recording it to evade sales taxes. And he bought hard to find walkmen off the black market. The grift was going amazingly well. Every night, starting at 10:30 p.m., the managers from all the stores would come with bags of cash and checks to the Antar home. It was, in every way, a family business. Eddie received two thirds of the skimmed money, and his father, Sam SR, Got one third. And Eddie paid for his cousin. Remember his little cousin Sammy, who was a clerk or not clerk, a stockboy. He paid for him to go to accounting school.

[12:26] Jessica: No.

[12:26] Meg: Isn't that clever? When Sammy graduated, he became the CFO and was able to keep the double sets of books.

[12:34] Jessica: Damn.

[12:35] Meg: But the family had to find places to hide all this cash. They stuffed it in the ceiling and behind the radiators and under the beds. Eventually, Eddie started flying to Tel Aviv with cash strapped to his body. There, he opened a number of bank accounts under half a dozen aliases. The Antar family was literally rolling in cash. What could go wrong?

[12:58] Jessica: Ask Steve Rubell.

[13:03] Meg: Exactly. Okay, well, Eddie got greedy. Stealing from a family owned business is small potatoes compared to what you can make if your business goes public. So Eddie stopped the skimming and laundered much of the stolen money back into the company. And with millions more suddenly on the ledger, the business looked like it was experiencing a magnificent boom. Sammy, the cousin, helped with the audits. They carted a bunch of empty boxes from store to store to fake thei inventory.

[13:39] Jessica: Oh, my God.

[13:41] Meg: And distracted the auditors with pretty female employees who would offer to, quote, “help with the count,” nd slip the auditors some extra cash. Wall street investors thought they had found the golden ticket, and the company went public at $8 a share. And from 1984 to 1987, thanks to creative bookkeeping crazy, Eddie grew to 43 stores, and its stock price reached $79.

[14:09] Jessica: Oh, my God.

[14:10] Meg: I know, right? Around this time, most of the Antarcts sold their stock and made more than $90 million. But then the thieving Antars started turning on each other.

[14:25] Jessica: Again, how marvelously predictable.

[14:28] Meg: I know! It's like, this reminds me of Sammy the Bull. Sam, the dad, was jealous of his son's substantially elevated status in the family, so he hatched a plan to publicly humiliate his son, Eddie.

[14:43] Jessica: Cause this is how good families function. This is nice.

[14:48] Meg: He wanted to humiliate Eddie in an effort to regain the mantle of patriarch of the Antar clan. Eddie was cheating on his wife, Debbie, with another woman named Debbie.

[15:01] Jessica: That makes it convenient. Like all personalized gifts. Doesn't matter. Keep a grab bag.

[15:09] Meg: So Sam Senior tipped off the wife, Debbie one. And she tracked Eddie down at a Manhattan restaurant, bringing Eddie's brother Mitchell, Eddie's sister Ellen, and their spouses with her. Eddie was caught redhanded with Debbie two in a limousine, and a street fight broke out. The family was never the same again, with everyone taking sides and turning on each other. In the meantime, the electronics business was becoming more competitive, and Eddie couldn't keep up the level of larceny required to maintain his scams. And the stock price sank to below its IPO value. And Elias Zinn was able to orchestrate a hostile takeover of Crazy Eddie.

[16:00] Jessica: So what is Elias’ in?

[16:01] Meg: He's just a guy. But, like, now someone else is in charge. So what's gonna happen?

[16:07] Jessica: Well, hello, IRS? I have a special story for you.

[16:12] Meg: Zinn almost immediately discovered the $45 million worth of missing inventory, and the company went bankrupt in 1989. Sam Senior ratted Eddie out to the FBI. And in February 1990, Antar fled the country and lived under assumed names in Tel Aviv, Zurich, and the Cayman Islands, where he'd stashed $60 million. Israeli police arrested him in 1992 and returned him to the US where he faced trial for investment fraud. When he fled, Eddie had left his cousin Sammy holding the bag. So Sammy was an eager star witness testifying to all of Antar’s schemes. Eddie was found guilty and sentenced to 12.5 years and ordered to repay $121,000,000 to investors. He only serves seven years, which doesn't seem like enough to me.

[17:08] Jessica: It's never enough, right? If you're the one who is wronged by this fukazi insanity.

[17:15] Meg: I mean, I guess it’s just Wall Street guys, but still, he wasn't in trouble for selling bad merchandise.

[17:20] Jessica: There’s a difference between his karmic retribution and what he should actually be legally liable for.

[17:28] Meg: Right. And what I was saying was that he was never called to task for any of the bad things that he did before the company went public. He was just called to task for investment fraud.

[17:39] Jessica: It's hard to be indicted for being an asshole.

[17:42] Meg: That's fraud.

[17:43] Jessica: Yeah, it's fraud. I'm not debating that it's fraud. I'm just thinking about, like, selling refurbished shit is so common that it would be a bit difficult to go after everybody who does that, or at least at the time. How about all those places that are the stores that are called going out of business, that's their entire world. Clearly. I guess I'm a jaded consumer.

[18:14] Meg: I'm so impressed with how good he was at marketing. I mean, he could have actually been a legitimate, successful businessman.

[18:22] Jessica: Well, that's what's interesting, is the pathology behind all of these scammers and cheaters and, oh, this is a good moment to plug my first book, The Art of Cheating, which examines all of these reasons that people do all of these terrible things. Published by Pocketbooks 2007. All rights reserved. The need to get one over on the government or get one over on the average schlub.

[18:54] Meg: And that it's fun to cheat. It's not just about getting stuff.

[18:57] Jessica: It shows how superior you are, that you're winning in some whackadoo, indefinable way, or it is definable to them, but you're winning. Only losers play by the rules, like the mob. It's the same thing.

[19:13] Meg: It is very mobby, but also that it's not about getting more money. It's fun to do it right. They enjoy it.

[19:21] Jessica: It's a game. It's gambling, if you think about it.

[19:25] Meg: And there's also like, it's never enough. Is it that it's never enough?

[19:29] Jessica: Well, because as long as you keep playing the game and winning the game, why would you stop? Because it's scratching whatever the itch is.

[19:38] Meg: Well, a lot of people are like, he would’ve gotten away with it if he hadn't gone public. When he got out of jail, he tried to make a movie about his life starring Danny DeVito. I thought you would enjoy that, though.

[19:46] Jessica: I do enjoy that. I think that would be a great person- Did he look like Danny DeVito?

[19:50] Meg: A little, yeah.

[19:51] Jessica: Oh, my God. I have to look it up right now.

[19:53] Meg: But he wasn't allowed to sell his story because of the unpaid judgment, and he died in 2016 of liver cancer.

[20:01] Jessica: How old was he?

[20:02] Meg: 69.

[20:03] Jessica: He's a little Danny DeVito-ish. He's not wrong. This doesn't make me love Crazy Eddie’s any less, I have to admit. And in fact, you know what I now want really badly? I want to go on Ebay and find a Crazy Eddie T shirt. Remember those yellow shirts?

[20:20] Meg: I think that's easy to find, actually.

[20:21] Jessica: I hope so.

[20:22] Meg: I think that's in the Zizmore core or whatever.

[20:26] Jessica: Yeah, I can't hate him. I can’t. He's horrible. He's completely horrible. But the amount of joy that he brought when we were kids.

[20:36] Meg: And you bring up a good point too, that there was this whole… if you wanted to buy any of these things, you actually had to brace yourself because you had to go to the store, and you had to deal with a human being who was going to be pretty aggressive and throw out all these numbers, and by the end of it you didn't even know whether you're coming or going.

[20:55] Jessica: Well it was horrible. It was horrible. And I bring up B&H because it was the same thing. And that it was like. I remember, like, my brother and I would be like, oh, we want to go get a camera. How long can we put it off? Because no one wants to go down. And it was all downtown. It was all near the courts and near the Brooklyn Bridge, the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. And it was just like, it's a schlep, and some asshole is going to yell at you and, you know, intimidating.

[21:24] Meg: And now all you have to do is go online and compare prices. It's so easy.

[21:28] Jessica: But, you know, I think that's not necessarily such a good thing. I think maybe that gave us some good training for the world. Like, not everyone's going to be nice. Not everyone's just going to give you the best price when you show up. You have to fight for your walkman. That was real life, man. It was the grittiness of New York. You have to ask for a better price at first. This is entirely the golden haze of nostalgia descending on me.

[22:05] Meg: Absolutely. It was entirely unpleasant.

[22:10] Jessica: It was not good. And I was about to say that the sterility of what's on offer now is so unpleasant. But I'm like, think of the dirt down here.

[22:23] Meg: No, it was just convenient.

[22:24] Jessica: It was filthy, going down. And the subway, by the way, was the only way to get down there in less than 3 hours.

[22:33] Meg: Oh, another fun little detail. Did you know that Jerry wasn't Crazy Eddie? Did you think he was Crazy Eddie, the actor?

[22:40] Jessica: No, I got it. I got your point. I'm trying to remember.

[22:43] Meg: Most people did.

[22:44] Jessica: I think I did think so, but I think I was… No, I thought it was him.

[22:49] Meg: You thought it was him? Even though he never called himself... By the way, he never called himself Crazy Eddie, he always referred to-

[22:55] Jessica: Crazy Eddie’s prices are insane.

[22:57] Meg: Yes. In the third person. Somebody else I was reading said something about how the whole insanity idea was like, he's so crazy that he's giving you things so it's like you're getting one over on him. You can go take advantage of this crazy person who's going to basically throw this merchandise into your lap. That was part of the psychology of it.

[23:23] Jessica: All right, now I'm in. I want another hour of analyzing.

[23:29] Meg: And the guy who played Crazy Eddie, this DJ, do you remember most of the time he wore–

[23:34] Jessica: A white turtleneck with a blue blazer?

[23:37] Meg: Exactly. Well, because the ads were everywhere. He couldn't wear a white turtleneck and a blazer anymore, otherwise he'd be mobbed.

[23:48] Jessica: Really? And quite rightly. What a pitch, man. He predated Joe Isuzu and all of those guys.

[24:00] Meg: Oh, that's true. Yes.

[24:02] Jessica: He was the first obnoxious–

[24:03] Meg: Person who screams at you, and somehow that's effective? Why is that effective? Because you're just riveted. Like, what is happening? I'm experiencing something pretty extreme. I'm being assaulted.

[24:12] Jessica: Yes, but that was the same thing. Joe Isuzu was so horrible that it was funny. And that's the same thing. Right? Like, it was amusing. Wow. Well, I loved it. I want more like this. I'm just putting my oar in the water here, saying, bring me more Crazy Eddies. More crazies, generally.

[24:39] Meg: Well that was a nice break.

[24:41] Jessica: It was. What's not to like about a tuna sandwich and a beer?

[24:46] Meg: Yeah. And I've got a little bit more time today, so I'm feeling more relaxed.

[24:49] Jessica: I’m so glad!

[24:50] Meg: We're not in a rush.

[24:54] Jessica: I'm hoping that this topic will bring you joy as well. So, I have an engagement question for you.

[25:03] Meg: Okay.

[25:05] Jessica: But first I have to talk more and listen to the sound of my own voice. I just want to confirm. Hey Meg, you're an actor, correct?

[25:14] Meg: Yes.

[25:15] Jessica: And you do experimental theater downtown?

[25:17] Meg: I do on occasion.

[25:19] Jessica: Okay. So here's my engagement question. Have you ever found yourself having to walk out of a performance?

[25:28] Meg: No, I don't do that. I just don't.

[25:31] Jessica: Have you ever found yourself–

[25:35] Meg: Suffering? Yeah, of course!

[25:38] Jessica: Okay. Well, my problem, and I know this is not going to come as a great surprise to you, is that if something strikes me as absurd or kind of dumb, ridiculous, I start laughing.

[25:50] Meg: Okay.

[25:50] Jessica: And I laugh the kind of laugh that is like a little kid in church or whatever where you're not supposed to laugh, so you're just shaking with tears running down your face. Well, that's happened to me.

[26:06] Meg: Okay. In the theater specifically.

[26:07] Jessica: Well, I'm going to share.

[26:09] Meg: All right.

[26:10] Jessica: And it happened on two different occasions, and both of these fall into the category of what I'm going to talk about today, which is not a joke, but these two were to me at the time. So when I went to Kenyon college, there were many performers who would come, you know bands and whatever, that became really big later. And there were some people who came who were already very well known. And so there's a big hubbub because there was going to be an artist named Karen Finley, of course, coming to Kenyon to perform.

[26:49] Meg: You've seen Karen Finley? I have seen her up close and personal.

[26:53] Jessica: Well, wait till you hear about this one.

[26:56] Meg: Does it involve a yam?

[26:39] Jessica: Yes

[26:40] Meg: I saw it in New York City!

[27:00] Jessica: But it also involves– So here's the thing, as my dear friend Nick would say, and in fact, he's involved in this story. So there we were thinking we're very New York and very hip, and we go to, it was actually a church where she was going to be performing, and we're in the pews, and she comes out doing some kind of weird fluttery thing with her arms and making a noise not unlike, but I'm not going to say it's exactly this, blugablugablugablu. And then when it occurred to Nick and to me that Karen Finley had entered as a giant vagina, we were freshmen, so that happens. And then when the yam, so for those of you who are not fully aware, Karen Finley was a very avantgarde artist who would perform and would do things that were really disturbing to get a rise out of the crowd and to really push the boundaries of questioning what is art. And one of her most famous moves, literally, was that she would surprise the audience by revealing what she had inserted in what some might call her prison wallet earlier, prior to coming out onto the stage, she would shit out a yam. It was so insane that we just fucking lost it.

[28:39] Meg: I am shocked that Kenyon let this happen.

[28:43] Jessica: I think a lot of–

[28:45] Meg: I saw it in, like, a black box on the Lower East Side or whatever.

[28:50] Jessica: I think sometimes a lot of really interesting things happen there because the administration had no idea what it was.

[28:58] Meg: They did not do their research.

[29:00] Jessica: No, they did not. And the other thing is, my dear darling friend Nina, who I know listens to this, we've been friends since we were babies, and she's the one who I did the magic show with outside of the Metropolitan Museum. So she and I decided, because I was on the board of the Young Lions, which is like the junior committee for the New York Public Library. This was a long time ago. It was in the 90s. She and I were like, okay, there were some events. And I was like, okay, well, there's a film. Let's go see this movie. Well, it turns out that it's Matthew Barney's cream master too. Do you know what this is?

[29:50] Meg: No. I do not.

[29:53] Jessica: For those of you listening, and for Meg, I highly suggest that you check it out online. But it was a series of films by Matthew Barney, who's married to Bjork, which is a tip off.

[30:01] Meg: We love her.

[30:03] Jessica: I don't know if they're still together. It involved him being nude a lot and painting himself and running around, and cream master is a word that has something to do with your testicles. I don't remember what it was. Anyway, Nina and I were laughing so hard we were asked to leave.

[30:15] Meg: From the New York public library? Okay.

[30:17] Jessica: Yes. So I don't know if I'm the person to talk about today's topic, but maybe I am, which is performance art in New York City in the 80s. So while I think that some of the examples of performance art were downright silly, I think that what went on behind it was fascinating and interestingly, a lot of the things that –not a lot of the things – a handful of the things that we've talked about on this podcast actually fall into or intersect with performance art. A quick overview. And you know what else I think is really interesting is that I don't hear that term used much anymore. It's become very passé. And I think that interdisciplinary artwork is now such a thing that it doesn't need to be defined as this outsider, other discipline.

[31:10] Meg: I think you're right.

[31:11] Jessica: But performance art at the time, and I looked up a definition from the time, was any kind of performance in which the artist participates and is him or herself part of the art and uses another medium. So painting your body on stage, performance art. Shitting a yam unexpectedly, performance art. Turning yourself into your own genitals, performance art. But there was much more to it, obviously. And there were a lot of people who were experimenting with film in different ways. And in fact, the movie Boyhood, the one who did Dazed and Confused.

[32:02] Meg: Linklater.

[32:03] Jessica: Yes. He did a movie that had Ethan Hawk, and they filmed it over the course of twelve years. So they showed the boy actually growing up. That would be considered performance art at this point because they're using the medium and using the actual physical presence, the changing physicality of the actors as part of the thing. So anyway, that's how performance art, or one example of how it's leaked into mainstream. And what I also thought was really interesting, because you know I can't resist a historical detail, is that as much as this was considered so avantgarde and really came out of New York City in the 70s and 80s actually was entirely a pre-existing art form in the teens and twenties with the dadaists and futurists, and they were doing the same thing. And it frequently had to do with politics, gender and sex, all my favorite topics. So I looked up who were some of the other people who were performance artists at the time, and our friend William Defoe, his theater group, the Worcester Group, was one of the first in downtown Manhattan to become sort of a rotating cast, but always with the same core group of which he was a part, producing shows that they themselves had written. What's even more interesting to me is that there were certain places that performance art really came out of, such as Club 57, which I had never heard of before. And I was like, what is this?

[33:40] Meg: Yeah, what about that?

[33:41] Jessica: Well, turns out the Club 57 was a decommissioned church. 57 St. Mark's Place. Club 57.

[33:49] Meg: I can't even picture that.

[33:51] Jessica: I know.

[33:52] Meg: What is it now?

[33:53] Jessica: Well, it was the basement of a Polish church at 57. So it's still a church. It was a no budget venue for music and film exhibitions. And then it took pride of place in a constellation of countercultural venues in downtown New York. The Reagan presidency actually spurred so much of this, as we have discussed.

[34:12] Meg: I was wondering when you were going to bring this up.

[34:16] Jessica: Yes, intense rejection by the downtown scene that was also primarily gay. Another thing, we're now going to have a cross section intersectionality of our topics. So deeply rejecting the entire political scene and straight, I guess, social scene of the time. This performance art not only had this very political vibe to it, but was also angry and very aggressive. I'm not going to go so far as to say violent. And that aggression frequently came out in performance art in the way that the Performer would treat his or her body. So another Karen Finley special was smearing herself with feces or blood. But the Club 57 was the original home of artists Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Tom Scully, and the magnificent Ann Magnuson. She was a fascinating character because she was the grandmother figure for all of this. She was the one who really maintained and ran Club 57 and encouraged other artists who then encouraged her and worked with her.

[35:32] Meg: And was Club 57, was it an incubator or was it a stage? Were there performances there?

[35:39] Jessica: I think that there wasn't a distinction between the two. So there were performances there and there were art installations.

[35:45] Meg: Okay. So people would go, it was a venue.

[35:47] Jessica: Yes, it was absolutely a venue. But now that you bring up venue, you know what? It's not rival, but the equivalent at the same time was area, which we've talked about before.

[35:59] Meg: Right. Because they changed it over weekly.

[36:03] Jessica: They treated the entire thing as an installation and had performers in the space that in some way corresponded with the installation. Like, remember the Andy Warhol thing where they made alphabet soup and they had waiters standing in the alphabet soup? That's performance art. But Anne Magnuson, I always was, like, a little obsessed with her. She was just the coolest.

[36:30] Meg: She’s super cool.

[36: 31] Jessica: You know, in Pretty in Pink, how Molly Ringwald has the older friend played by Annie?

[36:33] Meg: Annie Potts. Yeah, we talked about her.

[36:35] Jessica: Anne Magnuson was the prototype for that character. So I looked up a little bit about Anne Magnuson because one of the other things that I really like about performance art, the more that I dug into it, it was dominated by women. And I can only imagine, and you tell me what you think from your experiences, but I can only imagine that's because the established art world was so hostile towards women that it was a safe place because there were no, I hate to say safe place. It was an open field because there wasn't a ruling body. There wasn't anyone, there were no gatekeepers. That's true, because it wasn't about being in a venue, necessarily, because their performance art was on the street. Anne Magnuson, who was really the ultimate New Yorker, actually grew up in West Virginia and unsurprisingly, her brother, who is gay, was an inspiration to her, as was, do you remember in the 70s there was a TV show on PBS, and they did something on I think HBO about it called An American Family. And it was a loud family. It was the first unscripted series. They just followed this family.

[37:51] Meg: No.

[37:52] Jessica: It was groundbreaking.

[37:53] Meg: Was it a documentary?

[37:55] Jessica: Yes, but it was the first reality TV. It was episodic.

[38:00] Meg: And what was this American family? Where were they?

[38:03] Jessica: They're in California.

[38:04] Meg: Okay.

[38:04] Jessica: I believe. And the thing that was such a big deal about it was that the son – this is the 70s – Lance, came out on air.

[38:07] Meg: Wow.

[37:08] Jessica:And that was like, everyone's jaw was on the ground. He was the first person to outspokenly say who he was and be gay. And she credits Lance with inspiring her to get out of West Virginia.

[38:32] Meg: Interesting. Now tell me more about her brother. Was he an artist? Is he an artist?

[38:39] Jessica: He is not. Well, he died. Of AIDS. But interestingly – this is on a personal note – she did attend a rival college to my own Kenyan college. She went to Denison in Ohio, but she was a dancer and an actor and was dancing and doing whatever at places like the Mud Club and was a DJ. But then she landed on Club 57 because her original performance art act, she would wear a wig backwards and become Anoushka, a Soviet lounge singer and would make up fake Russian lyrics to pop songs. She was in a faux heavy metal band called Vulcan Death Grip. And some of the theme nights that Ann put together for Club 57 were Reggae Miniature Golf and Model World of Glue Night.

[39:45] Meg: Model World of Glue?

[39:47] Jessica: She was also, by the way, the snarky cigarette girl in Desperately Seeking Susan.

[39:50] Meg: Yes, I do know that.

[39:52] Jessica: My mentioning all of this crossover with the gay community is also not an accident because the other biggest kind of performance art that came out of New York City and these clubs was the drag scene.

[39:55] Meg: Well, her character wearing a wig backwards and speaking faux Russian kind of sounds like a drag character.

[40:00] Jessica: Well, exactly. And if you do your research on who were considered some of the primary performance artists of the time, Lady Bunny, and I know that I pronounce his name incorrectly, Joey Ah-rias or Joey Ar-aye-as?

[40:22] Meg: I know. I mean, I know who you’re talking about.

[40:23] Jessica: For decades I have not known how to pronounce his name.

[40:25] Meg: Let's figure that out.

[40:26] Jessica: Okay. Gender fluid, queer, brilliant lounge singer. Any old who, the drag scene was one of the products of that. Not entirely. Came from a lot of different things. And of course it was happening in Atlanta and New Orleans and San Francisco all at the same time. But the way that it was in New York came out of Club 57 and area and that world which eventually became Karen Finley and her yam. Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes were the NEA Four.

[41:09] Meg: Okay. Who were the NEA Four?

[41:12] Jessica: They’re performance artists. They had proposed grants from the NEA and turns out that in 1990, John Frohnmayer vetoed them and he was the fifth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

[41:27] Meg: Who appointed him?

[41:29] Jessica: Bush.

[41:30] Meg: Okay.

[41:31] Jessica: And they were vetoed on the basis of a subject matter even after the artists had successfully passed peer review. And now reading from Wikipedia, this is my favorite thing, of course. John Fleck was vetoed for a performance comedy with a toilet prop, but the rest of them all had to do with sexuality and they were considered obscene. It went through litigation. Eventually the Supreme Court ruled against the NEA Four. In March of 1990, NEA grantees began receiving a new clause in their agreements that states: “None of the funds authorized to be appropriated for the National Endowment for the Arts may be used to promote, disseminate, or produce materials which in the judgment of the National Endowment for the Arts, may be considered obscene, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homo eroticism.

[42:32] Meg: Wow.

[42:33] Jessica: The sexual exploitation of children or individuals engaged in sex acts, and which, when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

[42:45] Meg: That still stands now? That's not okay.

[42:49] Jessica: And as you also know, the NEA was defunded radically.

[42:53] Meg: So it doesn't even make much of a difference in the lives of these artists, except in that it just shows how little this country, and specifically our government, values art.

[43:06] Jessica: I mean, the fact that they lump homo eroticism in with–

[43:14] Meg: Pedophilia!

[43:15] Jessica: Yes. Is deeply disturbing. By the way, the description from the NEA on what's banned at the time that I was giggling at Kenyon about Karen Finley's yam, which was late 80s. I don't know if I would have disagreed. It was so uncomfortable-making–

[43:38] Meg: Well, that was the point.

[43:40] Jessica: Well, I know, but I'm saying we look at discomfort in art now really differently.

[43:43] Meg: Did you see the Jillian Waring at the Guggenheim?

[43:46] Jessica: No.

[43:48] Meg: She calls herself a conceptual artist, but I think she might be a performance artist because she does use herself in her art.

[43:56] Jessica: Yeah. That's performance. By any other name–

[43:57] Meg: Right? According to this definition–

[44:00] Jessica: It's the same thing.

[44:01] Meg: And there's so much… I don't think the exhibition is on anymore, but there's so much in that exhibition that is deeply, deeply unsettling, but also completely fascinating. And I was telling everybody I knew to go see it. We have to sit in our discomfort sometimes.

[44:17] Jessica: Yeah. I mean, and I'm not, at this point in my life, saying that being uncomfortable is a bad thing. I mean, I'm uncomfortable every day. Otherwise, where would I be? It's not a bad thing. And it does force you to reckon with your own bias against X, Y, and Z. It's amazing how in the 80s, which was such an incredibly restrictive time, and we don't really talk about that much like we talked about the fun, interesting stuff that was going on, but it was unbelievably restrictive. And, I mean, just as a quick call back, you and I talked about how we were looking for men's overcoats from the 50s. All of that 50s revival shit in the 80s was just a reflection of another era that we were identifying with that was unbelievably restrictive.

[45:13] Meg: Yeah. There was a lot of, like, bad you, bad you and bad you.

[45:19] Jessica: Us against them, me against you. Desperate need to make a distinction between what is other and what is establishment. In the 90s, not so much. 80s? Eight hundred percent. Which is why, also back to provocative artists, people like Mapplethorpe were so important. And I think people don't remember that or understand that now that it wasn't necessarily just about a photo of a guy with a lily stuck up his ass. It was the fact of it.

[45:51] Meg: Right. The fact of the yam.

[45:54] Jessica: The fact. I want to do another podcast that we title the Fact of the Yam or Whatever Happened to that Yam? Or How Many Yams Were Killed for this Performance Art. Do we have an unexpected tie in today, Meg?

[46:21] Meg: Well, I would think so. Performance art and Crazy Eddie.

[46:25] Jessica: Oh, girl.

[46:26] Meg: It's like we planned it.

[46:29] Jessica: Oh, my God. It's true.

[46:31] Meg: It just fell into our laps.

[46:34] Jessica: Because it wasn’t even Crazy Eddie, it was someone playing Crazy Eddie playing– Oh, very meta.

[46:38] Meg: Yeah.

[46:41] Jessica: Wow.

[46:42] Meg: Yeah. I'm going to have to figure out how to get one of the actual ads onto Instagram, which is harder than you think. Unless I'm stupid. I can get it onto Facebook. Anyway, I'll figure it out. But is there anyone in the universe who hasn't seen one of these ads who doesn't know what we're talking about?

[47:00] Jessica: Good engagement question.

[47:03] Meg: Right.

[47:04] Jessica: Tell us if you've never seen Crazy Eddie ads.

[47:07] Meg: And you will, because I'm going to show it to you.

[47:10] Jessica: That chicken ad was fantastic.

[47:12] Meg: That's what I'll get. I'll get the chicken ad.

[47:15] Jessica: But you have to also have, like, a regular one, because the chicken ad isn't as potent if you don't know what's with the blazer and white turtleneck?

[47:24] Meg: Okay, I'll start with it. We'll do a progression. How's that? Crazy Eddie progression.

[47:31] Jessica: That sounds great.