Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People to Do Cool Stuff. You're a weekly podcast about puppets. I'm your host, Margaret Kilroy, and this week I have a guest, and my guest is Jamie Loftus.
Hi.
I should explain who you are. You're Wait, you do so many things. Sixteenth minute of fame is the easiest one to say because you are also a podcast host on the same network as me, which is true. Sixteenth minute of fame.
Yeah, let's stick with that. Yeah, sixteen fame.
Only thing you've done. We also have a producer named Sophie Hi.
Sophie him Magpie Hi, Jamie Hi, Sophie.
And we have an audio engineer named Eva Hi Eva Hi Eva.
I like that you looked up like you're like where Eva lives, if it even lives in heaven? He is up there.
Well, I have another monitor that has the recording progress. So when I look at the recording, which is what Eva will be looking at, that is.
There he is.
Yeah, that rocks.
I like Jamie's version better.
Yeah, no, absolutely, like I look up to heaven.
We're my editor's right.
Wait, but that's dark because he's very much alive. That's yeah.
We don't need to talk about Eva's mortality.
No, but someday. But that's as true. That's true Eva. I'm sorry to break this too. At one point, all podcast editors must.
It's the new All dogs go to heaven. All podcast editors good, also good to heaven.
Despite many of them doing terrible things to the world by creating podcasts.
It's true. Actually, yeah, you might be stuck in purgatory. You're doing a thoroughly neutral act.
Yeah, hosts go to hell. I'm sorry to say easy.
I mean, you don't even need to think about it.
Really, No, I think that's the basis of most Christianity. Actually is, podcast hosts go to help. I'm really well versed in the Jamie Loftus. You occasionally perform, Yes, as a performer. What are your opinions about puppets?
Ooh, okay. I like puppetry a lot. I guess I'm pro puppet. I'm not pro unnecessary puppet. I think that there's like nothing more insecure and unpleasant to me than someone using a puppet on stage simply because they are too nervous to be themselves on stage. I like when someone uses a puppet that is additive to the act.
That makes sense.
It's a very thorough answer, but I think that it describes how I feel.
Okay, what about eighteen foot tall puppets? Yes, all right, Well then you might like today's episode.
Well, oh, are you going to talk about the Broadway production of Shrek?
Well, I did first see this in New York City.
Two and a half minutes.
Well they have the dragon that are little shop. Oh my god, I'm thrilled.
So for the past few months, I've been doing this thing where all of the podcast episodes have been related in one way or another, and I've been trying to tell this story of the alter globalization movement, which was the movement of movements that came together at the turn of the twentieth century. The big famous thing that happened is the Battle of Seattle in nineteen ninety nine, where they shut down the World Trade Organization, And you know,
it's the battle against neoliberalism. We've talked about neoliberalism. We've talked about the Zapatistas in Chiapas, we've talked about the rise of the Black Bloc in Germany, and we've talked about the Battle of Seattle in nineteen ninety nine. But along the way, I talked about how giant puppets were ubiquitous in the alter globalization movement. Really oh yeah, that you could not walk down the street without tripping over a puppet three times taller than you.
Fascinating.
Yeah, and they were all very dramatic puppets. They are like weeping women that are like held up by three puppeteers, like as they like.
That makes sense because I feel like theater kids generally have a tendency to join their resistance.
That's true.
Yeah, it's part of why the resistance can get so.
Loud, that's true. The same way that like marching bands was like only a couple things as you can do as an adult who really liked marching band, and the primary one is Joined Protests. That is like the main outlet.
Yeah, I said Ice Protests at a hotel a couple of weeks ago, and yeah, there was a very enthusiastic pop up brass section that they're like, I haven't taken this out in years. Let's go like just oh, it was nasty business, but it was great.
If you are listening and you are a band camp kid, you should find a marching band and go join Ice protests, and they absolutely change the tenor of what happening in the street without diminishing the radicalness of it, instead encouraging.
Yeah, it's great. It's a very festive and effective way to join a protest.
Yeah, totally, Although it can be if you get pepper spray and arrested. At least there's good images as they like pepper spray the tuba or whatever.
You know, Yeah, you will be held up as an example of like they came for the tuba player.
Yeah, and I say nothing. Yeah, And one of the things that happened is that they came for the giant puppets. Actually, ah, but I am excited to tell this story about Giant Puppets for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that it ties together a lot of the themes of the show. But also I don't get a lot of chances to tell a pretty simple love story
on this show. And I can tie the rise of Giant Puppets to a hippie couple who one of them is still alive and the other person isn't, but like who spent decades and decades together making.
Things, making pits, making puppets. That's wait, fat, what is your history puppets? I be curious enough.
I don't have a lot of history of puppets, although I will say after I finished the script, I ran around my house telling everyone who's visiting and being like, I'm sorry everyone, I'm quitting everything I do to just make giant puppets.
Now.
We just make giant puppets at the land. That's that's what we do now.
I thought you were talking about like puppets is a part of stand up, which just sends you right to like Jeff Dunham's story, and it's like get them out.
Yeah.
No, these are like dramatic feeder, like serious theater puppetry.
One of my college internships was at a puppet theater, and like, though I don't know, I did it mainly because I had a crush on the puppeteer that lived on the top floor of the puppet theater.
Uh huh, the well adjusted person that you're about to describe.
Good old Brad. But you know, while I did not get Brad's attention, I did learn puppet folks are good vibes.
I have tended to think. So my own history puppets is that I went to a lot of these protests, and I was a little bit busy being like, oh, we got to accomplish the following things while wearing all black. But I loved the theater that was happening kind of everywhere around. And then also, well, I went to a radical puppet show before I became politically radical in New York City. I went to a show put on by Today's Guests. No, you're the guests. I was like, us, Yeah,
I actually a billion of time machine. I went to a show put on by Bread and Puppet. Have either of you all ever heard of Bread and Puppet? No, nope, I'm excited to tell you about Bread and puppett.
This is great.
The shortest version is that a bunch of hippies on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, especially this particular couple, got together and made giant puppets and did street theater and did community theater in the late sixties, and they had radical politics interwoven throughout the entire thing. And then they moved to Vermont and then they became cool hippies, and their theater troupe still performs all over the world, and they've inspired so much radical theater that it's kind of hard to track.
Wow.
I did a while trying to track their influence, and I'm like, oh no, they just was this well spring of political theater done with giant puppets. So the simplest version is the thing I just related. But I want to do the version that goes back fifty years and starts with someone's grandparents. Incredible because these people come from a lineage.
Are they puppet Nepo?
No, they're radical NEPO. I can accept that, but spread across a bunch of countries, but in complicated ways.
Cool.
One of the founders of Bread and Puppet is the woman who Okay, this is going to be the big reveal. The big shocking thing is that when people talk about Bread and Puppet, they mostly talk about the guy who runs it ugh. And you will be absolutely flabbergasted to realize that his wife, who is not necessarily equal part of all the creative things, but made the entire thing happen through labor. That somehow it's hard to imagine labor
being invisible. Ye absolutely, but I think that that sometimes happens.
Are you saying a woman did everything and no one cared what, what what?
And I will caveat that even though the man I'll describe it a little bit, is always centered in the conversations around Bread and Puppet. I don't believe he wrote his wife Elka.
Yeah, story that's always frustrating to encounter. And I always appreciate when in a dynamic like that, you know, the man's like, hey, appreciate the positive feedback. But Elsa's a bender the whole time, Like I don't know, it's hard.
Yeah, exactly, and like it's kind of funny because I realized after writing a script that a bunch of people I know have like worked with Bread and Puppett, and I just I am working off of written sources primarily, so I don't know as much about people's personalities and how they interacted besides like what I been able to glean from interviews and things like that. But I want to talk about Elka and start with her because I
actually think her background is more interesting. No offense, the man who might actually be listening to this because he's still alive, Alco.
She's listening in podcast Heaven that we made up.
Yeah that is, yes, absolutely, podcast even is the subjects of POC No wait, most podcasts are about bad things anyway.
Well your podcast subjects go to podcast heaven.
Yeah, exactly, I'll go to heaven. So Elka Lee Scott Schumann is a third generation leftist. Her grandparents co wrote, or rather her grandfather and his grandfather's wife, and then she gets left out of the story.
Well, family tradition, it doesn't happen elsewhere.
Yeah, they co wrote one of the core books that inspired the back to the Land movement of the sixties and early seventies. WHOA, So this is her grandparents or her grandfather and her grandfather's second wife wrote this. Okay, but we're actually gonna start with her grandfather. There's a man named Scott Nearing who is a regionally major player in leftist politics. Like he has a Wikipedia page in
Elka doesn't, right, okay, and this is her grandfather. Throughout the early twentieth century, he was like one of those names that would be known at the time that doesn't really get passed on, or at least I hadn't ever run across it before. He's a kind of classic American radical guy from this period. He's born in the eighteen eighties in Pennsylvania. He is rich as shit. His grandfather ran the coal company in town. But Scott as in
the nineteenth century became a vegetarian, pacifist, socialist, feminist. Okay, so if you're gonna be richish shit, you might as well do some of that, you know, may.
As well do it as ethically as you're able to.
Yeah. He first rose to prominence when he was let go from the university he taught in in nineteen fifteen for being too rattle.
Was it the vegetarianism?
I am constantly surprised by the like deep history of like I say, this is a vegan, the kind of annoying vegans. It have always been part of leftist politics. Yes, that part never gets like focused on necessarily, right, He's like mostly known as a socialist and a hippie back to the lander, you.
Know, I do like the concept of that somehow being the last straw.
Yeah. So they finally let him go because they're like, you're not gonna eat the fucking eggs because they said vegetarian, but he is, actually I believe it is vegan.
Are you serious?
Oh?
And I should be ashamed that I'm eating my egg Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, totally. He's like, I didn't say that, And they're like so you think I should hate myself.
I didn't say that.
I just don't want to eat it, Like, oh, you fucking vegan. I didn't say anything. I don't know. Maybe there's a dick about it. I don't actually know.
Could be a professor projection though, Like, you think you're so much fucking better than me, don't you. That's like my uncle's attitude towards veganism. You're just like, no, they don't leave them alone. They don't think about it.
I want to eat a messy doug. It's fine, Yeah, I don't care at all. I wouldn't be able to get up in the morning if I like.
Them A thousand uncles on your chest, like, and.
So they kick him out and people rise up to defend him, and like you can't kick him out, and soon enough he joins the Socialist Party and then the Communist Party. He traveled around, including to the USSR, but he was like, actually, I don't think I like the USSR very much. In the nineteen twenties, and in nineteen thirty they kicked him out of the Communist Party for he like wrote some article but he didn't follow the party line. And they were the Communist party, so they
kicked him out. He took his hefty inheritance and he bought a big old farm and he got really into hopesteading and vegan organic gardening. And this isn't the like early thirties and twenties, I think nice. He and his second wife, Helling Nearing, liked to pretend that they were self sufficient with their farm, but it was actually just their hairds that paid for it.
Wow, this is a tradwife model.
Yeah, exactly. And I actually do think this kind of like belaze a lot of the lies in the back of the Land movement. I say, this is someone who intentionally moved out to the country. But these folks with a bunch of inheritances wrote a book together called Living the Good Life, How to Live simply and sanely in a troubled world.
Okay, they're like influencers. Yeah, They're like Barnes and Noble influencers.
Yeah, because once the back of the Land movement gets big, hippies start making kind of a pilgrimage to their homestead to like learn from them and stuff. So I feel like they like influencer tradwife culture. They're stealing that from socialists.
That's what I have to say, one of their many crimes. Yeah, no, they're only crime, You're right, right, No, no, no otherwise.
Yeah, everything else, that's fine. So this is granddad. Scott Nearing had a son. I'm going to trace all these motherfuckers. Scott Nearing had a son named John Scott, who actually I think was originally a Nearing, but he didn't like his dad. By the end of his life, we changed his name to his dad's first name. Yeah, I know, it's weird. I it couldn't.
I didn't know you could do that.
All right, do whatever you want with names. Well, not sure, probably now now.
But it's nice to remember.
Yeah, John Scott is a second generation radical. His father was like, actually, the USSR isn't so great, But John Scott's like, no, they're doing the revolution. So he dropped out of college to move to the USSR in the nineteen thirties.
Okay, okay, how'd it go?
Well, it actually wasn't great to be a communist in the nineteen thirties Russia. It actually turns out.
I thought I was going to turn out different for him.
That's yeah, he survives, Okay, although it becomes a dick but we'll talk about that.
Yeah.
So he's eager to help build the glorious Bolshevik Revolution, and he gets a job as I think he's doing some like engineering stuff, but he's also a steel worker I think at the end of the day. And he marries a Russian woman named Maria Ivanova and they have two kids, including Elka, who was born in the Soviet Union. As we've talked about extensively on the show, the most
ideologically communists were among Stalin's main enemies. Stalin got paranoid about the internationalists, all the people who'd moved to the USSR to be steel workers and shit, he was like, those are the enemy inside. All the people who were like I love the USSR so much, I'm lieving America to go there. He's like, that's the real fucking enemy.
Get rid of them.
Yeah. So John Scott and a bunch of other people lost their jobs. Their family moved to Moscow and he got work as a journalist, and he did not keep his mouth shut, and he wrote a piece critical of Stalin and the family had to flee the country and their ship left port just hours before the Nazis betrayed their alliance with Stalin and invaded the USSR.
Wow.
Yeah, so that's Elka's childhood, right.
Honestly, it's like whatever coping mechanism you need, Alka, Yeah, giant puppets, yea, right, no worries.
Yeah. So she's only a few years old, she's already had to flee both Stalin and Hitler. And the family makes its way to America, first to a farm in Pennsylvania and with like family friends, and then at Greenwich Village in New York City. And she grows up speaking both Russian and German, and home and young Alka grows up obsessed with the arts and social justice and leftist politics. As a teenager, she would go work as a social worker in low income neighborhoods. And she decided to do
her junior year college abroad in Munich, West Germany. And the problem is that West Germany, of course was capitalist, and so therefore they had ads just like us, unlike glorious Russia, where you just get murdered instead.
Wow, what an incredible, incredible.
I should have been hired to do the Cold War. I'm always saying that there are people who basically whatever anyway, So here's the advertisers that support this podcast, and we're back. So she goes to West Germany to Munich. This is nineteen to fifty five, and she meets the man who is usually presented as the main character of the Bread and Puppet story, and he is the creative head of it, a German Bohemian man. When I say Bohemia, I don't whatever.
I mean what people think, not that he's from Bohemia, which is nearby.
We're talking about, Like he's wearing kind of silly pants.
Yeah, he's a proto hippie.
Yeah. Yeah.
And she meets this man, Peter Schumann, and she meets him I think in the hospital. I've read a couple different of their meetcutes, and I don't entirely understand why she's in the hospital, but I know why he's in the hospital. He is in the hospital because he had been out trying to recruit people for his experimental dance troop ooh, and he needed to do that by riding a bicycle.
I want to be in an experimental dance troupe.
And he got into a bike accident and almost died.
You think you do Experimental dance troup TV has probably the same energy of like an experimental comedy group. If it's anything similar, everyone's fucking each other and no one speaks five years from now. Also, it's like improv sort of, but a little bit cooler, a little better, and dancing as much. Yeah. Yeah, I'm very anti improv.
Fair enough, Well, I probably would have wanted to join his dance troupe. That would have been fun.
Yeah.
Well, especially because it's like I'm imagining, everyone's in their twenties. It's just a bunch of hot twenty something's dancing around. Hell yeah, who.
All survived World War Two as children in Germany?
Again, whatever you guys need, whatever you need, gess it out.
Yeah, they fall in love Elka and Peter, and Elka takes a year off of school. This is my favorite part, just because I identify with this so hard to go hitchhike around Germany bringing her loot with her, and the two of them bringing woodcuts to sell. Wow, they're both woodcut artists.
You are of them? Yes?
I love that there's a lineage that I can point to of Google's a word that no one knows what means. But people traveling around with instruments and whatever shit they can sell.
All that rocks her lut.
I know she does a lot of the music stuff for all of the things that go through. She's obsessed with music and do just like really amazing stuff awesome. Peter, for his part, was born in Germany and he started making bread. Bread and Puppet is actually just as famous for giving out bread. And I forgot to say that part in the short version they give out a rye sour dough loaf that is pretty that rocks. Yeah, hippies were into some like crunchy bread. You know sure.
I just anytime that like us is involved in the production, I'm like, yeah, I'm in.
They didn't coin that. I'm sure people have been doing that forever, but that is like their thing is like bread and Puppet, you get both.
That's brilliant because I do feel like, you know, whether you're into the performance or not, I will be thirty percent more amenable to what's happening in front of me, at least if you give me a snack.
See this actually makes sense because there's this way of when you run into a problem with your book and you don't know what the plot should do, and you're like writing a book and you don't know what plot should do. There's a tried and true method that I learned from a webcomic and I don't remember the author of the webcomic, and I'm deeply sorry. Where you go and you find a friend and you give them snacks and then you explain the plot of your book. The
friend does not react. The friend just eats the snacks, and you work through on all the problems while talking to them, and they get snacks.
I love that. Yeah, that does work.
Yeah, the very effective method.
There is no resentment sewn between the two of you. You've both forgotten something. Yeah, exactly, because what his friendship if not a beautiful, complicated transaction of feelings.
So he starts making bread with his mother when he's six in Germany, and sourdough rye bread was the common people's food of Germany at this time, and Germany wasn't doing real well throughout the twenties thirties forties, and I don't actually know when they turned it around, but twenties thirties forties not a good time to be in Germany. So his whole life until now, basically, yeah, sourdough rye
is his thing. And when his family is ten, they live in a part of Germany that the Allies are bombing and the Russian tanks are invading and it's not safe to live there, and they become internally displaced refugees. And so they moved to a small village in Germany near Denmark. And he can only bring one bag with him, so he brought a bag full of puppets.
Oh yeah, I hope he brought a sourdough starter.
Well, his mom has that.
Yeah, that's that's a mommy back thing. Wow, that's really wow. This is like a Pixar.
Movie, I know, although there's going to be a remarkably non Pixar actually an old school Disney move in one a second.
Nice.
So they're internally displaced and they're dirt poor, and they're like all the other refugees. They're living off of gleaning the field for like little bits of whatever they can get, and they make sourdough rye bread and spread elderberry and rose hip jam on it because that's what they can pick by the side of the road, or elderberry's and rose hips. It also means so he's German. This is
World War two, his first public performance. There's some dots people don't connect when they tell this story, and I'm just gonna connect the dots because I'm rude. I actually like this man. But his first public performance as a puppeteer was when he was eleven, and he is a refugee and he goes and puts on a puppet show for the German soldiers in town.
Was this show about Magpie?
I don't actually know what it was about, but it's for Nazis? He went his first public performance was.
For not was for Nazi Okay, yeah, unless.
There's a small chance the war had ended by that point. But it's nineteen forty five, Like there's a small chance that.
But anyway, look, Peter, there's still time to set the record straight. Yeah yeah, Or did you not perform for Nazis at age ten?
Yeah? Because this does not in any way influence this man's politics, like at all.
If anything, you performed for Nazis under duress, But we would like the record string. Yeah, this is a silly connection. But did you see the Del Toro animated interpretation of Pinocchio that came out a few years.
I haven't, which is funny because I really like Del Toro.
It's terrific. It's very characteristically, it's very very intense. But in that I believe that Pinocchio performs for Mussolini. WHOA I mean think if I'm remembering correctly.
Anyone who's listening who's mad at an eleven year old for doing this has not thought this through. No, It's like, here's like, no one's actually upset.
I'm saying, if the Peter performing for Nazis at age ten, allegations are true, Pinocchio did it. Pinocchio performed from right. It's true there were kids.
And for a glow up. The most recent interview I've read with this man is from a couple months ago, in twenty twenty five, and he is ninety one years old, screaming about how important Palestine is. Incredible, Like God, yeah, So Alka and Peter together now, and the pair of them are bumbing around Germany for a while, and Elka goes back home to the States after a year, finishes college and then goes right back to Germany to be
with Peter. And I think that's sweet. I like that she like had to figure out some stuff for herself, and also like I guess, just so mad about how this narrative could easily just be told on Peter about but it's like largely them figuring things out together and not deemphasizing Elka's agency like all throughout it.
So I feel like that's a classic indicator of a healthy relationship. It's like, Yeah, she doesn't drop her entire life right now, Like she goes to, yeah, do whatever she used to do.
Yeah, and he's gonna move to like to help her with her career or later he's gonna like anyway, we'll get to that. By nineteen sixty, the pair moved to the United States together with two kids in tow and they moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which at the time was the center of a growing counterculture and was also coincidentally an affordable place to live. And so you can kind of get away with being a weird artist.
Yeah.
I've actually talked a bit on the show before about the theater and arts movement of New York City during the fifties and sixties, but I'm going to like revisit some of it because it's of my favorite shit I've talked about on the show. I did an episode about an anarchist street gang called Up Against the Wall motherfuckers. That was in the late sixties, and they were like friends with all the Black Panthers and all the like
new left movements or whatever. Yeah, and they came out of an art group, a like anarchist surrealist art group
called Black Mask. Okay, all right, I want to revisit some of that episode to set this scene, because to show that they're part of this vibrant art scene, so it's not just like, oh, they invented theater on the Lower East Side, which they don't claim, you know, right, Okay, And I also like drawing these really weird big pictures about how everything works politically and getting all my string together. By the nineteen forties, leftist politics were dramatically waning across
the West for a few reasons. Prior to the Russian Revolution in nineteen seventeen, you have the anti authoritarian and democratic tendencies were more dominant parts of the left. Democratic socialists and anarchists were a bigger part of it. But after the authoritarian communist Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War by exterminating their leftist rivals. Yes, Margaret has opinions about this, theirs became the ascendant star and Bolshevism was kind of
the thing. So you're in the nineteen twenties, you get this big burst of energy of people being like, fuck, yoah, we're going to pull this off, like what happened in Russia, we can do it here. And then you find people would go to Russia and be like, oh god.
Uh, never mind, never mind, never mind.
Yeah, turn around, yeah, Jase, your mind. As Stalin became more obviously Stalin, the left started to fracture, as people of conscience died at his hands or left communist parties. At the same time, you start getting the first scares in the US and a real strong propaganda campaign against communism, and then at the end of the thirties you get the sort of big last hurrah for social revolution in the West with the Spanish Civil War nineteen thirty six
nineteen thirty nine. We've talked about extensively. I think I made you guess on that episode. Actually, I want to tell a story about this because I think it's funny. Okay, I was writing a podcast script at a coffee shop that my friend was working at, and they got off work and we're talking about some shit. We're talking about this and that and I knew a lot of stuff about a lot of the stuff I've been writing about, and you know, gave me at some point I was like, oh,
like the Spanish Revolution. I swear to God, they look at me in the cafe and go, I don't really know much about that. Can you explain it to Magpie?
That was your time?
I know, I felt like it was a track naturally, wasp, where's the cameras, Magpie?
I like to imagine a podcast microphone just magically appeared from the grounding.
Yes, the flames of hell light up behind me.
Well, I know a thing or two of that. Yeah. Wow. So how long were you at the coffee shop for?
Yeah? Days later? Yeah, longer than it took for the nineteen thirty six nineteen thirty nine thing to happen. It's actually happened before I started this show.
Good God, what a war drop that you're like, Well, actually this podcast came out of a day I held some what hostage for a sudden.
The theme song of this show takes over the coffee shop speaker system.
An echo from the back.
Yeah.
Oh that's God. Give Bloomhouse a couple of years. There will be a movie about a haunted podcast.
I have seen a horror movie about a podcaster who goes to go report on a Oh I can't remember it was actually it was alright. It was a podcaster goes to the middle of nowhere to go report and then it turns out that everything is whatever scary rural people.
I get really offended when they put the job of podcast into film or television, because I'm like, that's wrong. If you're not like unshowered and like on the floor trying to record a podcast, like that's inaccurate. They have them in these.
Like bougie studios like full hair.
I'm like, no, no, there needs to be pets or it's not a podcast studio.
Potentially smelly, like you don't know.
Yeah, I shower, I swear, I shower, I swear.
Listeners. I would love to see a super cut of like ways they've been report Like, yeah, because I don't think the media has been very kind, not that we deserve.
It, but we're not kind to ourselves either.
Yeah, it's like we hate ourselves already. That's so kind of part of the job.
I think, at least being a feminist podcaster is like being aware that you're in a field that is like not full of good in the world, hate us more we dare you.
A friend of ours made me watch the pilot of And just like that where Carrie Bradshaw is being a podcast and it's the worst thing I've ever seen, and it made me really sad.
I think it's kind of charming because it reminds me of like a kid show about a kid who does the morning announcement. It's treated like that. True, Well, I hope you have an awesome day and I'll talk to you next time. Okay, I'm done. Like it's like, I think it's kind of cute.
Fair, Okay, sorry, back to the script, back to the sorry, right.
Get three podcasters in the Oh god, it's true. So all right, Spanish Civil War happens. I've covered it extensively, but basically fascist forces took over Spain and the left kept their shit together long enough to join the partisan fight against Nazis in Europe. But honestly, at least the anti authoritarian left kind of fell apart after that, and
you have this very fractured thing. And between the Red Scare and all this stuff happening, and the fact that all these commanists and leftists of various stripes that just died right in large numbers, but actual people involved in
all of those struggles survived. And I love that I can draw this through line where like a ton of people, for example, who fought in the Spanish Civil War made their way to New York City, and the folks who kept the flame alive for several decades were some of the people who were politically engaged but mostly on a cultural front. Okay, you could draw this narrative differently, but you can kind of refer to this sort of dead period of the left between the forties and the sixties.
And obviously there's a ton of people doing a ton of work, especially the civil rights type stuff, but like there is a lull that you can map in terms
of militant leftism or whatever. And the people who kept the flame alive, among others, were artists, and they were pacifists, and they were like religious anarchists, especially Jewish anarchists, and they were like authors and musicians and play rights and they just kind of partly because they like weren't threatened, right because like kind of have some free speech sort of. I mean, it's the rest here, it's the only kind of do.
It's funny to think of like periods of time where making leftist art is not dangerous, but like, also it's not cool. I don't know.
Yeah, oh, I was gonna get dangerous again.
Oh yeah, it's true.
And the oldest experimental theater group in the US is called the Living Theater in New York City. Yes, and it was founded in nineteen forty seven by two anarchist pacifists, Judith Mulane and Julian Beck. And I find them really fascinating. And so I'm going to I've never done this before. I'm just going to quote my own previous episode.
Here oooh okay, because it was the.
Coolest side years ago, and I think it's the coolest side now, partly because it ties into the Adams family.
Oh okay, I'm in.
Judith Mulane was a German Jewish immigrant. Her parents came over in nineteen twenty nine when she was three. They were some of the first people to be like, this might go bad. We should get the fuck out of here. Julian Beck was her husband and they were in an open marriage in the early fifties. He is bisexual or queer or whatever. I'm not sure what he called himself.
He had his own boyfriend outside the marriage, but the couple were also sort of in a triad with yet another guy who was a doc worker who was also married to someone else. Okay, hot, yeah, long history of polyamorous, queer anarchist theater people.
Yeah, none of this is shocking to me. And they got into theater.
Yeah wait, they started the oldest experimental theater in the United States. And in nineteen eighty six. He also played the villainous preacher in Poltergeist two stop. Oh he died in nineteen eighty five, but it came out after if Terry died excellent, or he's the Poltergeist in it? Literally I don't know.
I mean there the productions are haunted.
Yeah, it was before podcast, so we might be in heaven. Okay. And then he wrote a ton of books, mostly poetry and some about theater and judas. I've played Granny in the Adams Family movies.
No wait, like the original series.
No, in the nineties movies, Oh.
My god, the Angelica Houston ones.
I don't remember the names of actors, Okay.
Having conversations with you, and because you can tell me five thousand things I don't know and then I can teach you a simple fact.
This is yes, I know the politics of the Granny of adams family, but I don't know the main characters.
Sports tsha, oh my god, jud yes, Judith Molina.
Wow, yeah, I yep. She's been on the Sopranos a bunch of shit.
Yeah, she was working. She didn't come back for Adam's family values. She was replaced by Carol Kane.
Oh okay, okay, so only in the first.
I mean, if you've got to be replaced by someone Carol Kane, not bad.
And I kind of can't get over the fact that the original crone witch of my childhood granny from Adam's family was played by a polyamorous, anarchist Jew who'd fled the Nazis at three years old.
What more could you want? That's terrific.
I know.
At one point the couple got arrested for not paying their taxes, and their argument was basically like, what we did a lot to pay taxes. Government's bad.
Oh sorry for bothering you, got it totally.
They represented themselves in court, and when they represented themselves in court, Jude is dressed up in a Shakespeare costume. I don't know how that went. But another time they got arrested for having indecent exposure because they would have plays that involved nudity.
Oh come on, okay, Yeah.
The Living Theater that they formed is still around and it performs in streets and in prisons, and they try to undermine authority in both content and form, and I think they're swell. And I also think that some of the first organizing meetings I ever went to for the ultra globalization movement were at the Living Theater before I knew what that was. Really, I'm not certain that's a guess because I remember the theater, but I don't. There's a lot of theaters in New York. Sure, Okay, that
is the end of that self plagiarism. And I brought them up in a previous episode because.
They sorry, oh that was cool, I'm going to use that.
Yeah, but you know who would never do plagiarism. These advertisers, That's right, none of them would ever.
They are not using AI to write the copy.
Guys.
Come on, no, no, God, you'd be the judge.
And we're back. Okay. So I brought them up in the previous episode, the Living Theater, because they helped radicalize bem Maria, who went on to become one of the founders of one of the more radical and interesting groups of the late sixties, the anarchist street gang, mostly white and Puerto Rican called Up against the Wall Motherfuckers and if you want to hear about it, I'm just advertising my own show. You can go back and listen. And that was part of the culture of New York City
at the time. This theater that was radical. Although they were pacifist. That actually doesn't make them less radical at all, but it means that they might not have joined an Anarchistrea King. But our protagonist of this week, Elka and Peter, they're part of a pretty vibrant art scene and they're part of yet another proto hippie movement that we've talked about on the show before, a neo dataist movement called Fluxus.
You randomly heard of this, no, so when I did a bunch of episodes about the band Crass, the like an arcopunk band from the seventies in the UK. They were also old hippies who were part of this neo dadaist movement called Fluxus that basically just like did Avant garde shit like pre hippie avant garde. That's how weird can we make our art? And so they're influenced by data,
which we've talked about on the show. Radical anti art movement from the early twentieth century, and Flexus was also particularly inspired by this gay anarchist composer named John Cage. I know, I just keep being like everyone's an anarchists,
This isn't true. Many of our Cage is amazing. Yeah, John Cage is fucking cool, and he is most famous for his composition for thirty three sits, where you, dear listener, could play this you just sit in front of a piano for four minutes and thirty three seconds and loot required. Yeah that's right. Yeah, although you did need a piano. Yeah, he'd be kind of like faking it to just imagine a piano.
Whenever I think about John Cage, You're like, oh, wouldn't be so cool to be like nineteen again and just learn about the existence of four thirty three And I'd be like, oh my god, Like it's ah, put that feeling in a bottle.
It's also so beautiful at how it like triggers conservative art people. Yeah, but also it's like made by one of the better composers of the twentieth century.
No, he could also play yeah quite well.
And near the end of his life he would talk about how he practiced four thirty three every day, what a good meditation practice.
That's I love that. He uh god, I'm like, what is our version of that? He somehow managed to take a meditation and made it part of the work too, Yeah, totally. It's like, no, he was still working yeah, yeah, ah, that's incredible.
Yeah, recording yoga for content that would be yep, yep. So Fluxus is basically this art movement that's like how weird can we get? And it ties into way more shit than I would have expected, like the fact that you can talk about an arcopunk, which heavily influenced European protest culture as well as like a ton of music. And it's through Fluxus that you get bread and puppet and therefore giant puppets, street theater at protests and these
are like really opposite lineages, but they're not. They come back together and like literally are at the same protests with each other, you know, decades later. That's amazing And I just I fucking love this shit. And so if you ever have like a street theater person and like a black block person are giving about tactics on the street, you can be like, y'all all the same grandparents, Like ideologically you all come from John Cage.
You four thirty three motherfuckers have to figure this out, get along.
Yeah, totally, that's beautiful.
That's like what makes me I mean, it does happen here, but it makes me wish that I had lived in New York at any point where it just seems like New York and Chicago is just like incredible places to literally walk into someone that shares your ideology but interprets it completely differently.
It just ooh yeah, yeah, totally, there's an advantage to cities. I have to accept this as I like living in the woods, but I'm also like, there's a reason that being around people can make amazing things.
I mean, it's still overrated at the end of the day.
Yeah, but yeah, so Bred and Puppett they move into this kind of New York City, this Lower East Side, Elka and Peter heavily influenced by John Cage and Fluxus aside a lot of other influences. I just am not going to track down all of them. But they're not just into doing avant garde shit. They want to do more medieval and traditional forms of storytelling as well, and so there's like kind of a sort of almost like ritual element to a lot of what they do, and
they're not just an avant garde. And so when they move there, they fall in with a group that their own web sites right up calls a commune slash cult, the Uranian philant Uranian Philanstery.
Okay, which and what do they mean by that?
Well, I don't really know, because I don't know what a philanstery is. Great, but Wikipedia says it's an artist collective and not a commune slash cult, and they still have a website, they're still around. But I didn't dive in any further to that because I was like asking to be a rabbit hole, and a rabbit hole that.
Sounds like a terrific rabbit hole, and it also sounds like the kind of thing where like it being confusing as a part.
Of it, I suspect as much. Yeah, yes, it is starting to make puppets, and he likes making large puppets.
He told some interviewers that the large puppet thing came from he saw Sicilian theater performed by working class Italian mechanics in New York and little Italy okay, which is another just like cool New York City thing, being like, oh, these like mechanics came from Italy and they were like, Oh, we're going to do the Sicilian theater where we make ninety pound wood and steel puppets that are like five feet tall or so, and like they like shake the feater as they're like moving around. Ah.
Okay, I love it.
And Peter doesn't understand a word of it because like I don't know if he speaks to any Italian, but I think he specifically said he couldn't understand like the Sicilian dialect. Okay, And Peter starts putting on performances, and I think he's already developed his signature move at this point. He bakes bread and he brings it to the performance and he passes it out to everyone to eat sourdough rye bread.
That's way better than my signature move, which was once passing my pubes around the audience in a bag and butt chugging milk, just aspiring performers. You can't overshoot a hospitable calling card. Yeah, that's my best friend, some harder cell when you're like, does anyone seem the funnel I put in my asshole because I go, I would die for you. I love you.
So you can just do the midsummer thing and bake food with your pupes in it.
And then there's like, what was it? It was like menstrual blood cocktail or whatever to be like, you are my chosen one.
Yeah, exactly, Like I think that's a fine and totally ethical thing to do. I don't actually think that. I get more and more nervous about people taking the things I say literally. No, I've learned I have a very dry sense of humor and my mind that was very
off anyway. Whatever, So we talked about hippies and bread a bunch on our episodes, and we did some episodes about the modern diggers, and I keep calling them hippies when I'm talking about them, because that is the word that communicates the thing that I'm trying to get across. But in this early scene in the sixties, the more radical elements of it at least would not have called
themselves hippies. They would have called themselves freaks, and hippies was coined in the nineteen forties to describe white people trying to be blacker than black people as a pejorative, and the concept of the hippie was more of a media construction. I don't know what Elkam Peter called themselves.
I believe that that scene would have called themselves freaks. Okay, I like that better, I know, because I feel like that's like still kind of like if you just like described like the outcast, like funny strange kids, it's like freaks for every probably like yeah, fuck yeah, you know, it's like one.
Of the most reclaimable terms there is.
Yeah, yeah, and it's a little bit more open ended. Hippie is like pretty specific connotations, you know, Yeah, some of which there are great hippies absolutely, but freaks you.
Could be doing quite literally anything, Yeah, and fit under the umbrella, Yeah totally.
Peter's first US show is at Judson Church, which is a longstanding social justice Baptist church where I've been to a bunch of events. It's right next to Washington Square Park, and so they're busy being freaks or bohemians or whatever. On the Lower East Side, but Elko wants to go back to school to work on her masters, and her master's is in Russian, not just in the Russian language, but like on Russian. Okay, And so the pair of them, because he's willing to follow her for her career, pack
up and move to Vermont in nineteen sixty two. And I think that their grandparents are doing the majority of the childcare during this period.
Okay, gotcha.
Elka starts teaching Russian at the university she's studying at, and basically like, okay, subtext here it was a little bit like, hey, you can get a job too, buddy, maybe with Peter's own or whatever. Anyway, he gets rejected for a position teaching dance choreography. They're like, ah, we don't actually need that, or we don't need you doing it. He does some work as extracurricular at the university, teaching puppetry, but he also just takes the time to start touring
around doing puppet shows around New England. He hooks up a trailer as a makeshift stage to the back of the car, which is either a jeep or station wagon. I've read both, and just like bums around doing this thing for a while in the sixties early sixties.
Look, I love this, But if the lone guy pulls up it says, would you like to see my puppet show? I would say I'm good. I just hope he's scheduling the shows, I guess.
And not just expecting, like anyone any you could busk with it, but it would have to be in a place people were going to be anyway, you know.
Yeah, yeah, puppet busking is you know, it's a harder cell. Yeah, it's hard.
Yeah, accordion, real good busking instrument.
Yes.
They moved back to New York City in nineteen sixty three, and the two of them come up with a name for what will become their life's work, the credit of which, of course gets given a Peter. I'm not a bitter feminist, kill joy. I don't know what you're talking about. And the two of them come up with the name bread and Puppet, and the idea is both we give you bread and we have puppets here. But also I assume it's a reference to the labor slogan of the early nineteen tens
and also suffragette slogan bread and roses. Oh okay, we need bread, we need to eat, but we need roses too. We need beauty as sustenance just as much as we need food. And in this case, beauty is just you know, represented by puppets.
Yeah.
He told a newspaper called Seven Days about this quote. We fed bread to the public so that they were chewing while they were watching the show. We thought they were a better audience. And I love that. Like, sometimes the answer is this like very dramatic thing about like politics and stuff, and somebody's like, no, they pay better attention if you give them food.
They just like the show better if they're not hungry. You really, Yeah, Yeah.
And he wrote a longer piece about this name in nineteen seventy and I want to quote that for a long time, the theater arts have been separated from the stomach. Theater was entertainment. Entertainment was meant for the skin. Bread was meant for the stomach. The old rights of baking and eating and offering bread were forgotten. The bread decayed and became mush. The breadshell remind you of the sacrament
of eating. We want you to understand that the theater is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce, that you think it is where you pay and you get something. Theater is different. It is more like bread, more like a necessity.
That's beautiful.
Yeah, And so I think this is where we're going to leave it. You know, Part one is context. And they have now created bread and puppet. Our heroes have just named the thing they will spend the next fifty years of their lives doing. And in one of my favorite love stories I ever got to tell on this show.
I love that having performed for years and years, it's really nice being like, you know, bread is a more political act than you know, warm tacats is what I think. That's mostly that's the version of bread that I'm familiar with with regard to the art uh huh free food. It is a warm takata. Does that count kind?
Does yeah? The various points in my life, the answer is.
Yes, yes, count yeah, CEUs enough.
Yeah. On Wednesday, we'll talk about them doing all the radical stuff they're going to do, and they're also going to create a festival that tens of thousands of people come to and they're going to influence a ton of folks and it's gonna, you know, do the whole beautiful change in the world one bit at a time, brick by brick thing that we can all aspire to do.
I love this.
It's not very dramatic cliffhanger. It's just a like, isn't this like kind of wholesome? This is one of the moost wholesome episodes I've ever gotten to do.
I feel great. Yeah, like, this is so lovely. I love a lack of a cliffhanger, like and do you want to hear about their positive legacy? Tune in Wednesday?
Yeah, totally anyway, Yeah, you got anything you want to plug? Here at the end.
Sixteenth minute right here on Cooles and Media. Produced by Sophie Lijaman, who I've heard of her.
I like everything she does.
She's just a legend. Yeah, she's a legend in the field. She's a credit to humans writ large. She's my best friend. I guess I will also plug my book raw Dog that just came out on paperback, so get it out of the library, which is so cool. By the way, thanks, I'm happy that it's available. I feel like it was always meant to be in paperback.
It's a very paperback style book. I listened to the audio, but it is a very like as adventure. I mean, it's not a pulp adventure novel, but it's a pulp adventure novel describing the history of hot dogs and you traveling across the country.
Thank you so much.
The most tragic thing that happened in these episodes involves a hot dog and you're gonna have to wait till Wednesday to.
Find really well, you have to wait like Tiger totally.
I want to plug that. I don't know. Listen to other shows on cool Zone Media. You can also listen ad free with cooler Zone Media. And also you can go out and directly interfere with wait Nope. You can join protests that advocate against ice.
They're everywhere and if they're not near you, yeah, make all right?
You see you all Winston.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the Ihard radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.