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