Space 55 Love Letter

I love Space 55.  There, I said it.  I'm ready to commit.  

There are very few places I have felt as at home at as Space 55.  The first time I ever stepped foot thru the doors was for 7 Minutes in Heaven, back in June of 2010.  I was in a weird place in my life- I was in the process of buying a house in Downtown Phoenix, and my girlfriend and I didn't want to renew our apartment lease if we might be moving out in a month, so there was an undefined housing limbo for the two of us.  I stopped living with my parents when I was 18, and they had moved and divorced in the intervening time, but my mother allowed my girlfriend and I to move in and stay in her guest room for a few weeks while things finalized with the house. I had never actually lived at this house, and my mother was working long hours and seeing her then new beau a lot, so the place was basically empty all the time.  I was working at a used book store and had spent the last few years trying to create a body of visual work (some of which had been shown at now-closed candy/record store, Sweets & Beats just a few weeks earlier).  

My high school friend and long time gaming buddy, the Amazing Ashley Naftule, came to me raving about a show he'd seen recently that he really wanted to perform in, called 7 Minutes.  I knew that, over the previous year or two, Ash had become more involved with the Phoenix art scene, and he was incredibly charged by the chance to get on stage at Space 55.  I agreed, and then looked up Space 55.  

This is a hilarious case of nearly missing the boat.  The first article to pop up was a New Times online article written by Robert Pela, which includes such statements as "the old guy, who started out wearing a kilt and a plaid shirt and ended up ruining everyone's night by taking them both off" and phrases like "appallingly lackluster" and "better than an evening of dinner murder mystery...Sort of."  I was petrified.

I'm going to derail this loving memoir a moment to laugh loudly over the internet.  I don't know Robert Pela, but from what I can gather in the articles I've read by him in the New Times since, he's one of the mythical "old guards" of art and culture in phoenix.  You know, those guys who wax fondly about how great everything was when they were youngish in the 80's and how nothing really speaks or matters and "Downtown is OVUH." Truthfully, I didn't live thru your mythical Lemurian golden age of Phoenix, so I can't comment.  Frankly, in my life as an artist and performer, I don't spend a lot of time looking back and going "whoa, that's way better."

Mom would be so proud.

Back to the story at hand- I was petrified.  This article made it seem like I was going to a death camp where I would be fed a bucket of liquified corpse juice and asked to clap, and now I was going to perform there?  This, for me, might have been the best decision of my life (which is harried by a colossal string of poor decisions).  I decided to not only do the 7 minutes, but I was going to do it as hard as possible.  There's not a lot of evidence of that show, sadly, and I won't delve too deeply into, except that it involves me playing a box-car hobo on a public access wine show across from Ash as a snooty sommelier and drinking from a bindle containing a bladder from a boxed wine.

I also don't remember if anyone thought it was very funny, but that's sort of inconsequential.

Over the next two years I would perform at every single 7 Minutes (with the exception of that time I got the shingles).  I've eaten Popsicles to tell the jokes on the sticks, tried to summon dread Azathoth, done Improv, fought inside a tiny city, and more.  The freedom of expression provided by the 7 Minutes shows is easily one of the best things available to see or do in Downtown.  From a 5 star Yelp review of the most recent June shows:

"[...] I underestimated Phoenix creatives. Every act was entertaining at worst, most were good and a couple made me laugh until my sides hurt.  Most notably a comedian known simply as Seymour."

In case I haven't dropped this bomb on you yet, I'm Seymour (whose full name is Seymour Samson, but nobody remembers that).  I've heard people talk up my Popsicle comedian character around or even right to me without knowing I was He.  The satisfaction is tremendous.  I'm a little flush right now just thinking that so many people like something as ridiculous as that.  It's flattering to know something that came out of my head has made so many people laugh. I owe Space 55 a debt of gratitude for that alone.

It goes deeper, however.

Last year our Artistic Director, Shawna Franks, came to Ash and I with a rough idea for a show- it involved a treehouse, a kid, and music and fun and games and dance parties.  Over the next few weeks Ash and I brainstormed like some kind of mental monsoon to create the show that has been running there for almost a year straight, every first Saturday.  I've mentioned Hollis' Travelling Treehouse and Dance Party on this blog before, but it bears a little more note here.

When we first sat down to create the Show, it seemed like an intimidating task.  We were planning to have musical guests, audience interaction, puppets and rotating characters within a kid's show framework.  I watched Blue's Clues and old Sesame Street carefully for days.  Since then, the show has ballooned into something I find very magical.  There is an undercurrent of mythology in Hollis that tickles the old gamemaster part of me- a land where all puppets come from, rules about fairies and gnomes and a series of subplots moving so molasses slow in the background as to be invisible to those not seeing every episode.  Is our audience aware of Hollis' origins?  Do they know why Shadenfreude and Treehouse bicker so much?  Do they suspect the truth?  It doesn't really matter, I suppose, when we get to do this.
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HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?  How did something I made reach so many people?  It seems almost unfair.  In the last year I've pretty much been able to look at someone I respect and find amazing, point at them, and then have a chance to work with them.  What kind of awesome punk rock dream is that?  If I ever thought that Phoenix was a boring or dull town with no art or culture, I need to jump in the time machine and punch myself in the stupid face.

But it goes DEEPER.

Several years ago, I was still consumed with the desire to start a GWAR-esque band where I would throw blood on the audience and stomp around grunting.  Still am.  I wrote and recorded a couple of pretty awful sludgedoomscapes, and a couple of tracks with my very talented brother, Andrew Flanagan.  The idea was to dress as evil, black robed cultists and chant the name of dread Hastur while also trying to recruit.  The music sat on Myspace and my hard drive.  I made a couple copies, with liner notes and everything, and forced them onto people, but not much happened.  I couldn't find anyone interested.

Ash, however, loved the idea of a doomsday cult of Cthulhu, and we ended up performing in 2010 at 7 Minutes in Hell and something clicked for me.  The music was simply the atmosphere I wanted to create for these characters to live in.  The Cult of the Yellow Sign was born.

"Give it up for the slaves."

The Cult is easily one of my favorite things ever.  I get to dress like an evil wizard and scream at people while throwing flash paper and poppers at them.  I find it is easily my most carthaic creative outlet, and the one that people seem to connect the most to.  I owe it's current form to a lot of talented and creative people, but at the heart of that, I owe Space 55.  It was on their stage and with the support structure surrounding the theatre that I found the tools necessary to make something I always wanted to see a reality.  The Cult attended the Phoenix Comicon, and our plan for next year is the San Diego Comicon.  We've done the Phoenix Home and Garden Expo- something I could never have even conceived of if not for the amazing creative minds in Downtown Phoenix.  If there's anything I work on that has the potential to raze an entire city (or raise an entire deity) it's the Cult.

All this is just how the Space has affected me in my own creative life.  I've also seen tremendously talented performers on that stage from around the valley and it's hard to believe I'm on a first name basis with them.  I could list them all off, but letter for letter that list would easily crush my blog post.  It almost seems like all of Downtown Phoenix's creative culture is a huge game of "Six Degrees" with Space 55 as a possible substitution for Kevin Bacon.  I may be gushing a little, and I'm surely the same can be said of other venues such as the Trunk Space, which is also amazeballs, but my heart belongs to Space 55.  I've grown tremendously as a creative, a performer, and a person within those black walls and I look forward to a future where others can as well.

If you don't know, now you know.

Hard to Explain (or) Do My Parents Still Think I'm Crazy?

Pazazul Great & Terrible

Watching the clip above after recording it, I had a sort of epiphany concerning one of the questions I used to ask myself alot as a teenager: "Do my parents think I'm crazy?"  then, the truth is that they probably found me incredibly annoying more than anything else, but watching myself adlib with a puppet for an online audience rekindled the curiousity.

Occasionally, I try to explain to my family what it is that I spend all my time doing.  I spent a couple of years avoiding this, because all it amounted to was an occasional "Uh, so hows....painting?" around the holidays when I'd see them.  Now, I take a sort of masochistic joy in trying my best to explain to my mother "This weekend I have a zine release and performance for my doomsday cult."    It's not that I want them to be weirded out, in fact, I'd love it if my family understood.  My brother is about 5 years younger than me, and he seems to understand alright; he knows what it's like to have a creative urge that doesn't go away no matter how crazy it might sound when you say it aloud.  In fact, I think my brother has actually come to really enjoy seeing me perform.  At the most recent 7 Minutes in Heaven show at Space 55, my brother came out and saw a piece I titled "Kevin Flanagan, Daredevil Extraordinaire" where his laughter rang out from the crowd in a way I found very validating.

"Bury me with my stuff."

"You'll love it, Dad!  We do improv metahumor."

 I had made the act revolve around me calling my mother to explain to her my plan to jump over a pile of monster trucks as she was my "next of kin" and the audience really loved listening to us talk. There was a sort of sheepish acceptance in my brother's laugh that stood out from the audience, a shared link not only to our (occasionally) hilarious mother, but to the sense that there's a sort of comic futility in trying to get anyone, especially one's parents, to really understand what you do and why.  I think we all must have this existential dread about being understood, and it's sort of lame to present it as something artists have to deal with alot, but the truth is that I suspect my parents DO think I'm insane.  I'm certainly not doubting their affection for me- but any time I try to explain to them what I did or am doing, they get a glazed confused face that speaks volumes.  I imagined, watching the clip above, what it would be like if they actually had a chance to consume the creative body of work I've produced over the last few years and was filled with total dread.  I'm not ashamed, but if they're confused now, actually SEEING my work certainly isn't going to help.

However, I do feel like maybe I'm just waiting for the right thing to invite them to.  So much of what I do now is either obscurist or offensive (The Cult of the Yellow Sign is both) that I worry about alienating them further with something that's going to march them right out of the room.  The time for blasting horrible music directly at their room is over in my life- I'd really take no salacious glee in going "look at me, isn't this something you hate"  like I might have as a teenager.  Sure, there's a little of that in me still, but for the most part I now try to find a chance to direct it at audiences.

You and Me and Toxoplasma Gondii.

I lived with a cat for about 5 years.  In that time, I cleaned his litterbox, slept with him at the foot of our bed, watched TV or played video games with him in my lap, and all the other standard cat-owner behaviors.  Never once did I suspect that a mind-controlling brain parasite might have lodged itself in my blood stream and been changing the course of my life in secret.

We, as humans, like to consider ourselves the masters of our own fates.  We imagine that we have the sacred power of free will, when it seems in truth that we constantly butt up against genetic predisposition, social structure, and our birthplace when we "self-determine."  But what if there was something more subtle at work, shaping our movements and changing the course of human history with an invisible hand?  No, not the Illuminati or some kind of Cthulhu cult.  A simple parasite.

"I Poop Mind-Control."

Toxoplasma gondii. This single-celled organism thrives in cats, where it produces eggs that are eventually expelled by the cat.  All sorts of animals can then become carriers for T. Gondii (which is my new hip-hop alias, by the way) if they come into contact with feline fecal matter containing the eggs. T. gondii forms cysts throughout its new host's body and brain. Fascinating, tho, is that despite this parasitical infection, the new hosts are often perfectly healthy.  In fact, infected rats are practically indistinguishable from non-infected rats, with one exception:  They are less afraid of cats.

Genius Risk Assessment.

Such a major departure from normal rat logic, i.e. "Cats are going to eat me and then I'm dead" bears further attention.  Evolutionarily, it makes perfect sense- parasites that move back into cats are more likely to begin their cycle over, and thus, more likely to reproduce.  Rats that get eaten bring the parasite back to it's original proginator- a sort of exodus back to the motherland (cat intestines) by a new generation (of disgusting parasites).  There, the wonderful (horrible) cycle of life begins again- all because the rats displayed a tremendous lack of self-preservation instincts.

Here's where it gets good- Humans can carry the parasite in the same way that rats due, and are often infected from handling soil or kitty litter.  For the most part, the parasite is unlikely to make us ill, and it's even more unlikely that it will complete it's journey back into a cat (since even the most aggressive housecats don't usually eat humans) but that doesn't exclude the possibility that it could have an effect on human behavior.  Parasitologist Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague gave psychological surveys to both people infected with Toxoplasma and uninfected control groups. The Infected (I like how this sounds more and more like a horror movie) showed a small but statistically significant tendency to be guilt ridden and insecure. Strangely, on average. Infected women tended to be more intelligent, outgoing and friendly, and sexually active.  Infected men were more likely to be jealous or suspicious, and more aggressive.  Okay, that's sort of weird, but it shouldn't really have that big of an effect on us, right?  Kevin D. Lafferty found in 2006 that T. Gondii infection is extremely common and rates can vary greatly from country to country; 7% of Brits carry the parasite, but about 67% of Brazilians were carriers.

This, but with more cats and sex.

Before you run off and create the next blockbuster sci-fi thriller (I'm looking at you, Michael Bay) or start suspecting your crazy cat loving aunt is a servitor of mind controlling parasites, the data isn't really strong enough to do anything more than suggest there's a correlation.  It's a pretty enticing concept, I have to admit.  What if that girl you like is only nice to you because she has a cat and IS ONE OF THE INFECTED.  Would the parasite eventually evolve so that we would desire to have MORE CATS and also maybe, you know, LET THEM EAT US?  Slowly but surely the infection spreads around the world and then WOMEN ARE FRIENDLIER and MEN ARE MORE SUSPICIOUS and RATS ARE HANGING OUT WITH CATS and EVERYTHING IS IN BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS EXPLOSION EXPLOSION EXPLOSION!

It's fun to hypothesize.