Peripherus Max: Another Blogspot of Overcaffeinated Ennui

For the last several weeks, I have been helping Kelly Kuvo digitize and upload her massive library of underground art videos to YouTube. As you may remember from previous blog entries, Kelly serenaded Alton and I inside a recording studio in the Capitol Records Building earlier this year with a song called "Go Away, Thank You." But, she’s most famously known for her involvement in two of the most righteous punk bands EVER - The Scissor Girls and Sweet Thunder - and her jaw-droppingly surreal interventions on Chicago’s public access TV station in the 90's. I don’t know how to begin to describe her video work other than to say click here. A world of absolute artistic hope, shambling beauty and d.i.y. situationist ethos awaits!

Kelly explains: "What you are about to see are zero dollar budget Cable TV shows intended to force a couch potato fat ass average Chicagoland non-artist type of person to flip the channel after watching them for 5 minutes. I imagined that they’d surf through 100 other channels of million dollar budget productions and then wind up watching another 10 minutes of my production and ultimately wonder what the fuck is up with this show that doesn’t make any sense or lead anywhere!"

The fact that you’ll be watching as a captive internet audience sort of undermines the righteousness of the original site-specificity of these pieces. But whatever! Enjoy out of context... and watch this blog in the coming months for a special surprise, related in a way that I can’t divulge yet, alignments of stars pending.

"The gigs were already happening at Starbucks Astor Place before we performed there. Two guys, David Muldoon and this other guy Derrick, both really young guys, like, at least 19, were booking music and performance nights at Starbucks... usually a miscellaneous group of acts, very low key and typical for a "coffee house" setting, you know, like, poetry readings and a stand-up bass player. They called the night Derrick and Dave’s Experimental Stages. Originally, in July 1998, before I even knew about gigs at Starbucks, Casey Spooner and I were looking for a new place to rehearse and perform on Ludlow Street in the East Village. David Muldoon’s roommate, an older man in his 40's whose name I can’t recall... he booked acts at the Piano Store and The House of Candles. They’re storefronts that used to sell pianos and candles, but now function as theatres with rehearsal space in the basement. Anyway, those spaces were booked up or something, and we were looking for a space and a gig immediately, so the Piano Store guy was like, "Well, my roommate books gigs at Starbucks if you’d like to perform there. They pay you to perform and even pay for your flyers." Casey and I thought about it for 3 seconds, and then said, "That would be awesome!" But instead of being mixed up with all this typical random shit, you know, all the other acts on a typical Starbucks gig lineup, we wanted to take over the whole night! We’re a bunch of crazy artists with plenty of friends who also perform, so you know, we COULD take over the whole night! I asked Dave if we would be able to do that and he said, "Okay, but the pay is $250, and as long as you don’t mind sharing that... that’s all we have to pay for the night, and it lasts from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m." And we were like, "No problem!" So we got our own PA and mics and gave Derrick and Dave the art for our flyer and they printed up the flyers for us. We ended up doing 3 of those nights over the course of the next year. Starting on Thursday August 27, 1998, we took over Starbucks for a night. The first night was the best and weirdest and most unpredictable... then the second show was on February 12, 1999 and it was the biggest, fanciest and loudest. The last show was on August 27, 1999, which was a mellow fun ending to the whole thing. The very first show was a fiasco because half of the people in our band Sweet Thunder loved it, and the other half hated it. We had technical problems that made our performance go sour and the people who hated it, they didn’t get the joke of us being there in the first place. I think they felt stupid playing at Starbucks, they didn’t WANT to be a joke, plus, we did it karaoke style, singing along to a very low-budget recording of our music without playing our instruments, so that was a whole new way of performing for us which caused a lot of stress, so Sweet Thunder pretty much broke up that night. But once the word got out that it was a good show, we worked out the differences." Kelly Kuvo, from a phone conversation with Aleksandra Mir, November 12, 2000.