Lost in the ArtChurch vol. 1: Awakenings, Asleepenings, Adreamenings, Aschemenings

A few weekends back, we attended the sanctification of an an antinomian church, located deep along the border between Bushwick and Ridgewood. We'd been to the Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope before & had participated and written about the experience and art-exorcism of Gordon Matta-Clark. So we were excited about returning and reviewing the latest event slash artattack to take place far away from the well-trod artist paths of Williamsburg and the LES. The Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope (for simplicity's sake, CCSH) is a former storefront-turned-Latino-Roman-Catholic-church-turned-vacant-room-turned-artist-haunt-slash-performance-space, run by three friends of ours: Matthew Blair, Lech Szporer and Andrew Wingert.
The playbill promised a lot: performances, photography, hot liquored drinks, theater, mime, noise band, and possibly the sacrificing of a live chicken named Lucy. When we arrived at the CCSH we were impressed by the full house of young creative peoples jamming the floor, drinking hot toddies and exploring the decor, which included: tree branches rising out of dirt mounds on the wooden floor; two enormous church pews built on risers facing the stage; a ceiling-suspended rope web large enough to climb into, laden with dangling church organ pipes; candles spinning on a Victrola player; vintage radio microphones and more. The carefully constructed aesthetic of slow but beautiful decay contributed to the atmosphere.

Someone in the audience shouted "Cold as hell tonight" and the burbling laughter belied the fact that CCSH is a church, but instead of religion, it offers experience. The experience, like regular churches, is to pull the church-goers out of their expected levels of comfort, to shift their mode of intake and let that shift permeate other processes of life. To enter the building one way and leave changed. Such is the process of Artaudian theater, named after the great pervert of French theatrical aesthetics, Antonin Artaud. Not an easy accomplishment, especially with today's jaded and ironic youth. However it wasn't for CCSH's want of trying.
The opening act consisted of a not-quite-goth girl playing some plaintive songs on guitar, with good intention. Following the music, Becky the Burlesque performer as Neurotic Jewish Mother Necrophiliac. The stand-up routine that followed would've given Woody Allen a hard-on and material for his analyst. The act subsited of both a comic monologue and a live example of teabagging corpses set to Celine Dion. Subtlety it wasn't, and life-shifting it absolutely aint. Then the third act.

A stocky, not unattractive but not particularly engaging actress in a blond wig took the stage and started to do a Tammy Faye Bakker self-help shtick. The southern accent, the "Yes, you can do it too!" power attitude, the 80s music, all of it, a little tiring and expected. Until she stripped down naked in the middle of this unheated church, and proceeded to give a hygiene and sex-ed course on the proper way to insert objects into one's anus and vagina. It was astonishing - by the gaping mouths and wide-eyed shock it seemed that no-one in the audience had seen anything like it. The performer, Ann Liv Young, was using her own splayed legs as the easel and her cunt and asshole as the anatomy chart. Eventually Ms. Young got up, butt-ass naked and all, and thrashed her way around the church, grinding against audience members as 80s house music thumped. Her aggressively sexual dance piece would have been at place in a megaclub in Chelsea, but performed by a naked woman in a blond wig in the middle of an Art-Awakening truly blew this church-goers mind.
Then Lucy the chicken came into the picture. Lucy was supposedly due to meet the chopping block right on the floor of CCSH, but an unnamed woman in tears (who according to Mr. Blair, wasnt part of the show) rushed the stage and made a plea to spare the chicken's life. Another shifting moment, bringing an audience member to interrupt the show. Lucy, along with Ann-Liv Young eventually escaped, courtesy of Ms. Young, her videographer Michael, and a getaway car waiting outside.

The next act started when an argument exploded between two audience members, who moved down to the central staging area and expounded, in Shakespearean English, the accurate process to live a passionate life. It was entertaining, if a bit too pretentious. My lady and I liked the part where both gentlemen chomped down on raw cow heart, only at the insistence of each other. After the argument, it started to rain inside the church, and a group photograph was called for, so the crowd reassembled themselves outside and all posed, shiveringly.

There was still the noise band and mimery to follow the intermission, but we had experienced enough moments of suspended comfort, and besides, I had worked all day while fighting a cold. It was a fast, long walk to our apartment where a warm bed and hot tea were waiting to soothe our souls. Following burlesque necrohiliac stand-up and naked lessons in sexual physionomy, after the almost-slaughter of a chicken and consumed raw cow hearts, tea and sleep will do just fine.

Lost in History vol. 67: New Yorkers Go to Hell and Back (by Way of Pennsyltucky, and a 50 lb. Cheeseburger)

Flux Factory did it again. For the second installation of Going Places (Doing Stuff), Flux brought a busload of New Yorkers deep into the heart of Pennsyltucky. Can you imagine 35 funny-looking preposterously dressed, multilingual New Yorkers stuffed onto a yellow cheese bus and dragged into the depths of coal country? Would you believe that they had a hell of a time (literally) exploring an abandoned Pennsylvania town bursting with underground coal fires? You bet your sweet ass they had a blast. We would know — we hosted the first Going Places (Doing Stuff) Adventure to Staten Island event a few weekends ago, and we sure weren’t going to miss this one.
Sponsored by Flux Factory and led by artist (and PA native) Douglas Paulson, the whole idea behind Going Places (Doing Stuff) is as follows: throw a whole bunch of strangers onto a yellow cheese bus. Give them a vague idea of where they’ll be headed, how long it’ll take, and what provisions (bathing suit, nominal cash, water, whiskey) they’ll need. Take off. See what happens. In the last (which was also the first and only) Going Places (Doing Stuff), we spent the day on Staten Island, visiting a bunch of religious, spiritual and historical hotspots throughout the whole length of the island — and it’s a big goddamn island! This time Doug Paulson took the group to his home state, and then through and beyond Pennsylvania to the difficult-to-describe but easy-to-find Pennsyltucky (a pejorative yet affectionate term to describe the rural parts of the state of Pennsylvania, excluding the Pittsburgh & Philly areas.)
Departure was scheduled for 9am at the southeast corner of Bryant Park this past Sunday, and took off in classic NY fashion — half an hour late. The cheese bus was stuffed with peoples of all stripes — Germans, French, old(er), young(er), Mainers and Californians, native NYers and two-week greenhorns. After making the rounds and introducing ourselves, we learned about our adventure. First, a PA swimming hole. Then Centralia — host to underground coal fires burning for thousands of years and massive sinkholes in the streets. Afterwards, if we were lucky, the biggest hamburger any of us had ever seen. The stakes were pretty high. And only three hours til our first hop-off.It didn’t disappoint. Waiting for us in the wilds of Pennsylvania was a swimming hole with a 30-foot jumping rock. Visualize the hysteria when a whole busload of New York art freaks offload a bus stacked to the brim with delicious picnicking foods (queso blanco, apples, cucumbers and stuffed grape leaves) and drinks (water, OJ, vodka, the aforementioned whiskey) and descend on a rocky beach with soft water and a bitchin’ jumping rock. You bet it was spectacular. Picnics and rock-jumping ensued.
Another hour or so onwards and we got to Centralia, in the central part of western PA. Centralia, founded in 1866, was a major coal mining town until the 1960s, when it was discovered that most of the land directly underneath the township was aflame, thanks to rich deposits of coal. Various efforts to extinguish the eternally burning pits were met with failure, and as sinkholes opened up underneath residents’ houses and feet,, the federal government essentially left the place to burn itself out. In the 1980s the Feds relocated the over 1,000 residents to adjacent counties and bulldozed the land. As of the last census, Centralia has seven residents left, and practically nothing to show visitor — except for wreckage strewn-fields and improbably bizarre vents of coal steam issuing up from holes in the ground.
It was impossible to look upon the trash and rubble-strewn lots and imagine houses standing upon them. Even more outrageous was clambering down into the lots and sticking one’s face into a sticky hot vent of coal-fired steam hissing its way out of giant slabs of anthracite. Another unbelievable sight: an abandoned highway, carved off from the surrounding roads because of giant fissures that opened up in the middle of the double yellow lines. Unreal. We finally found something stranger-looking than us.
After two hours of exploring Centralia and taking more pictures of abandoned landscapes than normal people would put up with, we were tired and hungry. And we had to get out of Dodge and back to the city proper. But it was nearing dinnertime, and we certainly couldn’t pass up the opportunity to stop at the Clinton Station Diner in Clinton, New Jersey and consume the Mt. Olympus — a 50-pound hamburger.
That’s 25 pounds of beef, 25 pounds of cheese, tomato, lettuce, ketchup and bun: 50 full pounds of guilt and glory. With a dozen people chowing down, we couldn’t even finish half the thing. Rolling back onto the bus, there were 35 nutty NYers who had reached their fill of the world outside our city. If the real world consists of smoldering underground coal fires and 50-pound burgers, then I’ll take Manhattan.

Lots more pictures, of swimming holes, smoking crevasses and 50 lb. cheeseburger demolition can be found here on my Flickr set!