Episode 318 - Coop
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuckineers?
Marc:What the fucknicks?
Marc:What the fuckaholics?
Marc:What the fuck comedians?
Marc:How did I miss that one?
Marc:How come it took me so long to get to that one?
Marc:What the fuck comedians?
Marc:It's perfect.
Marc:Someone just sent me that yesterday and I seem to have been overlooking that.
Marc:How is that fucking possible?
Marc:Did I mention that on Saturday night, this Saturday, September 29th?
Marc:I'll be in Ferndale, Michigan at the Magic Bag Theater doing the Mark Maron thing, I said, speaking about myself and the third person.
Marc:You know Mark.
Marc:You know who I'm talking about, Mark.
Marc:He'll be doing that show there in Ferndale, Michigan.
Marc:Magic Bag, September 29th.
Marc:What else have I got for you?
Marc:On the show today, Coop.
Marc:Chris Cooper, not the actor Chris Cooper.
Marc:Coop, the painter, poster artist.
Marc:Man of many talents.
Marc:Fetishist.
Marc:I don't know if I can call him that.
Marc:Would I call him that?
Marc:God knows if you look at his shit.
Marc:You got to believe something's going on, man.
Marc:He did all those great devil girl posters.
Marc:He's doing the big canvases.
Marc:Did the hot rod sticker for me.
Marc:A legacy of Big Daddy Roth and Robert Williams.
Marc:Him and Frank Kozik used to have a place where they did their badass silk screening.
Marc:That kind of art defined the 90s rock and roll in a lot of ways.
Marc:I'll talk about that in a second.
Marc:Let's get to other stuff.
Marc:Primarily being, I'm a little concerned about my girlfriend, Jessica.
Marc:I think she has a World of Warcraft problem that I knew she enjoyed it, but I didn't know until the commercials started coming on television and she started to itch and sweat like some sort of crackhead.
Marc:that she had a world of warcraft problem and i was like i know these symptoms she's got she i don't know if there's a program for that or what but i'm concerned about a relapse she's paying a lot of lip service to maybe getting involved in in that again and dropping words like grinding and portal and i don't know things i don't understand and it's just uh i'm very frightened i might lose her i might lose her to the world of warcraft if anyone can give me any help
Marc:she'll be all right i think she'll be all right art that's what we're doing today folks we're doing art is that okay with you i'll try to put coop in context for you i mean i have always been driven towards art my mother was a painter i was brought up with art in the house i was brought up uh being taught that art was important at some point i thought i was an artist i was very young to think i was an artist but i was pretty sure that when uh when i was shooting photos
Marc:Back in the day in high school and my high school got one of the nicest dark rooms in town that I was doing some pretty fucking important modern artwork.
Marc:I was doing the big work.
Marc:I was doing things that could compete with anybody.
Marc:I was very entranced and amazed at the works of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Warhol.
Marc:I was a huge Mark Rothko fan.
Marc:My mother used to drag me back east every year for some Whitney Centennial or is that what it is?
Marc:Biennial or...
Marc:or some retrospective.
Marc:It was always part of my blood.
Marc:I was taught that art was important, and I believe that it is.
Marc:pow look out i just shit my pants that's just coffee back to art there was no art in what i just said pure sales pitch as i got older you know i got into poetry but i was always amazed at people that can paint i was always amazed with as well as i got older with dark arts not only the dark uh illustrative arts or painting arts or photographic arts but literally magic and mysticism was completely engaging to me
Marc:I knew there was a world somewhere just outside of my reach that had tremendous meaning and evil power.
Marc:I think what really completely blew my mind wide open was
Marc:when I was in high school was the photographs of Joel Peter Witkin.
Marc:Just mind-blowing.
Marc:I don't know if you're familiar with him.
Marc:Go do some research.
Marc:This shit will fuck your head up.
Marc:You'll time travel.
Marc:You'll feel dirty.
Marc:You'll feel elevated.
Marc:You will enter the darkness.
Marc:Some artwork is a portal into something that you cannot understand.
Marc:You may not understand it when you see it.
Marc:I'm feeling that way about the master.
Marc:I discuss that.
Marc:On Monday, I have no idea what that meant, but I'm going to accept it as art.
Marc:And perhaps I just haven't unlocked the portal yet that it's supposed to take me to.
Marc:Sometimes you don't understand it.
Marc:But I remember back in the 90s.
Marc:I became fairly fascinated and intrigued with poster art.
Marc:I became sort of fascinated and intrigued with Charles Manson.
Marc:I became intrigued with all the alt presses, all the zines that were coming out, especially ones that gravitated towards morbid fascination.
Marc:I just dug it.
Marc:I don't know why.
Marc:I think it made me feel something that I hadn't felt before.
Marc:I was intrigued with the work of Frank Kozik.
Marc:I own several of his poster art.
Marc:I was intrigued with anything that had anything to do with the devil.
Marc:You know how it goes.
Marc:There was a period in my life where I couldn't get on stage if I didn't have a skull ring on my pinky finger and a skull on my T-shirt in some form or another.
Marc:And there was a whole generation of artists that were trying to sort of define themselves as artists.
Marc:They were sometimes called outsider artists.
Marc:And that's a pretty broad category.
Marc:That was a world that I wanted to understand.
Marc:And then I got turned on to the works of Joe Coleman.
Marc:A painter.
Marc:Worked in New York City back in the day.
Marc:But Coleman did amazing sort of compulsive, obsessively detailed and obsessively articulated and well-painted canvases of completely mind-blowing shit.
Marc:Robert Williams.
Marc:was also among that crew.
Marc:And I went to see an opening of his at the Shafrazi Gallery in New York.
Marc:I just became completely jacked by all of these, like Robert Williams was a direct descendant of the Hot Rod artists of Von Dutch, Big Daddy Roth.
Marc:And a lot of these artists have fought long and hard to be established artists as opposed to just seen as illustrators.
Marc:And Coop is a direct legacy of Robert Williams, of Big Daddy Roth, of Von Dutch.
Marc:That is the world that we're operating in on this episode.
Marc:And I found it to be a completely fascinating conversation.
Marc:He's a great guy, and I think you'll dig it.
Marc:You just got to get in the groove of it because art's fucking important.
Marc:Don't fucking forget that.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Let art punch you in the brain and hope to God that it stays punched.
Marc:I also want you to know if you're still listening to this wonderful, illustrious intro that tomorrow is my birthday.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I'm just putting that out there.
Marc:I don't want to.
Marc:I don't want to feel like I deprived you of that information.
Marc:Tomorrow is my birthday and I will be 49 years old.
Marc:Not making that up.
Marc:49 years old.
Marc:It's no reason for me to lie about my age.
Marc:I'm sorry, mom.
Marc:I know that you don't like when I say my age publicly, but it's the truth.
Marc:It doesn't mean that you're any older than 33.
Marc:It doesn't mean that.
Marc:It just means that I'm 49.
Marc:Now let's get into some radical art talk with the artist Coop.
Marc:Real name, Chris Cooper.
Chris Cooper.
Marc:Anything in here worth anything?
Marc:Boy, I have no idea.
Marc:Now, you know what's funny?
Marc:Chris Cooper, the artist, is in the garage.
Marc:Coop.
Marc:Coop, they're called.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Devil Girl Coop.
Guest:That's, well, yeah.
Guest:Lords of Acid cover.
Marc:Was that the mythic one?
Guest:That's the thing that everybody still seems to remember and know, which is kind of sad because I got to be honest, that record, I don't think I've ever listened to that record.
Guest:Ever.
Guest:Just not my kind of music.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Also, they kind of ended up ripping me off, so... But that's, you know... Fuckers.
Guest:There's that great scene in the Robert Crumb documentary where he shows the slide of the Cheap Thrills cover and says, like, oh, yeah, the record label gave me, you know, $3,000, and then it sold at auction for, you know, $200,000 last year, and I didn't get anything, like...
Marc:Has that happened to your shit?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, my friend Eddie Gordetsky, that's one of the- The great television producers.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Eddie Gordetsky's name is on every television show since 1982 or so.
Guest:Yeah, pretty much.
Guest:He said, you never make money off the thing that makes you famous.
Marc:Oh, that's interesting.
Guest:Which is kind of true, I think.
Yeah.
Marc:But I hold on to things.
Marc:What was funny is, when we first became friends, and the first time you came to the house, I had some other posters out here, and they were facing one way, but they were Kozik posters.
Marc:So I'm like, I better turn those around.
Guest:No, that's okay.
Marc:I don't want Coop to get pissed off.
Marc:And then I have this Kozik.
Marc:But you guys were friends.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I'm trying to figure out how to frame you as an artist, because I know that everybody who listens to this show has probably seen your work on something.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:There was a period in time where rock art and rock posters, post the Fillmore posters, there was an evolution in rock poster art and rock sticker art that I think you were part of in a big way, a definer of that.
Guest:Well, I mean, how I got started in it was, well, I moved to California in 1988, I think.
Marc:From where?
Guest:Oklahoma.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was very young.
Guest:I was 1920.
Marc:You just had to get out of Oklahoma?
Guest:Yeah, basically, I had a friend who I knew from the music scene in the Midwest, and he was going to move out here to take care of his grandfather, who was ill.
Guest:And he said, hey, you can come out and sleep on my couch, and maybe we'll put together some kind of silk screening t-shirt business or something.
Guest:So I come out here.
Guest:and I was there for a little while, and then his wife decided, well, you know, maybe I don't want this creep sleeping on my couch.
Marc:This creep from Oklahoma?
Marc:This bearded weirdo?
Guest:At that point, I had to get a real job, but I almost immediately started doing record covers for Greg Shaw, who had the Bomp Records label.
Marc:They re-released all the Iggy stuff.
Guest:Yeah, and he was an interesting guy.
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:Well, he just was this really... I mean, he's a really cool guy.
Guest:I mean, really responsible for... I mean, in the 70s, you know, he did this magazine called Bomp that was sort of...
Marc:I think I have a, someone gave me like a big book of the Bump magazine.
Guest:Is that possible?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I wonder if it was him himself.
Guest:Who knows?
Guest:It might have been.
Guest:Oh, fuck.
Guest:But he, like, and he used to have, he had a label.
Guest:He used to have this building over on San Fernando Road and you'd go in there and it was like this history of LA rock and roll.
Guest:Like...
Guest:Just, it was amazing.
Guest:And, you know, he had, somebody told me that he had one whole house that he didn't even live in that was just full of his record collection.
Guest:And, you know, he was sort of responsible for the whole sort of 60s garage rock revival.
Guest:I mean, he put out like all of the, there was a series of compilations called Pebbles that...
Guest:And I mean, that was the thing I was really big into when I was still living in Oklahoma was the sort of 80s garage rock revival of like all those 60s bands, like the Nuggets compilations and stuff.
Marc:Well, it's interesting.
Marc:Like when at that time, like I know that people don't remember that there was a time where, you know, if you were into something, especially something esoteric, you couldn't just get it on the Internet.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So for you, a kid now in Oklahoma, to be into this shit, I mean, you had to wait by the mailbox, right?
Guest:Yeah, well, there was a whole little weird world of, yeah, you know, that's something like people now, you try to explain to them like what it was like before the internet to sort of pursue your interests.
Guest:And for somebody who's in their 20s, they don't even comprehend it.
Guest:You feel like an old man talking about driving the horse buggy.
Guest:Because basically what you did was you corresponded with people via mail.
Guest:And, you know, so you sometimes talk to people on the phone, but mainly it was just mail.
Guest:And you did stuff like trade cassette tapes, trade, you know, there was a whole world of like what was called mail art that is not Tom of Finland, like M-A-I-L art.
Guest:And...
Guest:What would be considered male art?
Guest:What it was was people would just make art, like collages, paintings, or even things that were more sort of conceptual and weird, and just mail them to somebody else.
Guest:And then that person would mail them back some other weird piece of art.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a lot of, boy, so much sort of underground culture from the 70s and 80s up into until kind of the birth of the Internet era all came from that.
Guest:Like, well, I mean, a long time ago, you had Peter Bagg on here.
Guest:And, like, I started corresponding when I was about...
Guest:14 this guy named dale crane moved to tulsa from he used to work for fan of graphics right the comic book and through him i ended up getting connected with their uh uh gilbert jaime hernandez who did love and rockets yeah peter bagg who at that time was doing a book called neat stuff that was even before hate which yeah you know was kind of the real big thing and
Guest:Dan Klaus, who had just published even before eight ball, just published Lloyd Llewellyn.
Guest:And so I'm 14, 15 years old.
Guest:I'm I'm corresponding with these guys.
Guest:I'm sending them artwork there.
Guest:And, you know, at that point, they were probably happy to have anybody pay attention to what they're doing.
Guest:So they actually took me sort of seriously.
Yeah.
Marc:What kind of art were you sending them?
Guest:Just, you know, really just kind of that beginning embryonic sort of... Like I was still very heavily influenced by, you know, Mad Magazine and like Ed Roth and Crumb and all of those things that I sort of eventually...
Guest:And assimilated, I guess, and made into something that was my own.
Guest:But that but yeah, that whole world was just boy, it doesn't exist anymore.
Guest:You know, it's because now it's like everybody's because of the Internet and Wikipedia.
Guest:Everybody's an instant expert.
Guest:Like, they hear a name of something they don't know, and then they just, they look it up on Wikipedia, and five minutes later, they're on a message board telling somebody else that they know nothing.
Marc:But, like, when I was a kid, I just remember, like, there was time in between things.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I'm not sure what, and it also, there was time for things to sort of evolve into something.
Marc:I mean, you're talking about, you know, what became the resurrection, I think, really, or the evolution of underground comics in, what?
Marc:the early 80s yeah is that when that started sure because all those cats up and uh you know with fan of graphics and then you had there was a crew down here in la that was doing it and then you always had spiegelman in new york but it was this whole cultural event that was sort of coming around with uh you know like you said the garage resurgence and that and a lot of the post-punk metal stuff and all this stuff was happening but it all happened with really obsessive kind of art nerds and music freaks who were just uh you know sharing shit
Marc:Well, there was that whole kind of zine culture that doesn't exist anymore.
Marc:Like Murder Can Be Fun.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know that guy?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And there was, like, I caught the tail end.
Marc:I was sort of in that.
Marc:There were zines of every kind everywhere.
Marc:And that was all had to be done through mail order.
Marc:And there was something great.
Marc:Like, occasionally, you know, I get fans who do zines.
Marc:And, like, even me, they send it to me.
Marc:I'm like, oh, Christ, what year is it?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like...
Marc:The saddest part about all that, about the creativity that went into self-publishing and doing art the way you're saying, is that there's really no place for it anymore.
Marc:I'm not condescending to it.
Marc:I appreciate the effort, but it's almost futile because the counterculture that feeds that is gone.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But vinyl's coming back.
Marc:I mean, there is hope.
Guest:Well, I mean, there's, you know, my friend Sammy Harkam, who, he owns the store family, and he's also a comic, a cartoonist, and also a publisher and editor.
Guest:He did a book, well, does a book called Kramer's Ergot.
Guest:that's kind of it's the raw of this era raw spiegelman terms of being the dominant sort of really influential anthology of work and he he's doing zines right now that's like his new thing that he's into and he's getting all of the other cartoonists that he knows to make little zines of just you know whatever interest it's nice to hold the artist
Guest:It's nice to have the piece in your hands.
Guest:Well, and I think, you know, this is actually something I was thinking about on the way over here because I drove over in my hot rod is that, you know, part of, I think part of what's happening with the digital age and, you know, what you mentioned vinyl earlier, this is another part of it, is that
Guest:People want things that are real.
Guest:They want things that hands of touch.
Guest:They want things that have a physicality to them.
Guest:And also things that maybe might last.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, and that's it.
Guest:With integrity.
Guest:We are one EMP pulse away from losing the last 20 years of culture because it's all on a hard drive somewhere.
Guest:And, I mean, anybody you know who is a musician or an artist or who does anything digital will tell you about, oh, yeah, I had a hard drive blow up and, you know, I lost something.
Marc:I lost probably my masterpiece.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:My masterpiece is gone.
Guest:Or you just lost some shit, but it's the same thing.
Guest:But, you know, and, I mean, also to me as a collector, like, I mean, you know, I have a house full of books.
Guest:I have a house full of records.
Guest:I have...
Marc:Japanese toys.
Guest:Japanese toys, everything.
Guest:I'm sort of an accumulator, so of course I appreciate that.
Marc:Accumulator, that's a nice word for a cataloging hoarding.
Guest:Hoarder, yeah.
Marc:An accumulator.
Marc:Well, let's go back for a minute because there's something about, because I was brought up in New Mexico.
Marc:You were brought up in Oklahoma.
Marc:What part of Oklahoma?
Guest:Tulsa.
Guest:I was actually this small town called Bigsby that's outside of Tulsa's.
Marc:So there was really a feeling like New Mexico is a little different.
Marc:And I was always sort of connected to the East Coast by my family.
Marc:So I was going to art exhibits and things with my mother.
Marc:But in Oklahoma, you're sort of stranded out there with a very specific culture.
Marc:Now, you kind of gravitated towards Big Daddy Roth and towards Hot Rod culture, which was really a Southern California thing.
Marc:But it still preceded you in age a bit.
Marc:So when you were a kid, I mean, what was your family life like?
Marc:I mean, were you brought up by religious fanatics?
Marc:Were you near an Indian reservation?
Marc:Were there rodeo riders in your family?
Guest:Well, no, no.
Guest:You know, the funny thing is my father was a, you know, he had a lot of jobs.
Guest:He was a photographer.
Guest:He was, for a while, he edited the, actually, the reason we moved to Bixby was he became the editor of the small paper that was like the town newspaper.
Guest:And, uh, you know, so he was sort of the weird creative oddball person in his family.
Guest:Like he, I, he did a, like, I remember he had a, he did a little eight millimeter film when he was in high school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was, that was just this weird, crazy, like, I don't even know what his reference point was for making it, but it was like weird sort of blackout humor and violence and, you know, uh,
Guest:It was very interesting, and I think there was definitely, you know, I got something from him in that respect.
Guest:But, I mean, my parents were very, you know, very supportive, always were.
Guest:I mean, I have, like, really kind of almost a ridiculously wholesome home life, you know, growing up.
Marc:So they were okay with you being an artist?
Marc:It wasn't like, you know, I got to get out of here, I'm going to be working in an oil field?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, they were very, always very supportive.
Guest:And, you know, when I decided to move out here, I think they were a little bit like, well, I don't know about that.
Guest:But ultimately, I think they just kind of had the attitude, well, you know, go do it.
Guest:And, you know, you can always come back and get a real job if you have to.
Marc:So you got out here, and who'd you seek out first?
Marc:That was the bump job, or what?
Marc:Well, you know, because... And what was your portfolio like?
Guest:What'd you have in it?
Guest:Well, my portfolio was, well, you know, when I was still living in Tulsa, I was doing work for bands.
Guest:Like, I started basically doing professional work when I was, like, 16 years old.
Marc:Posters, tickets, stickers?
Guest:Yeah, well, like, I met...
Guest:I met a woman named Michelle Vlasimsky, who at the time was the girlfriend of Wayne Coyne from Flaming Lips.
Guest:And she booked bands in Oklahoma.
Guest:And she had a club in Oklahoma City that a lot of the bands came through and played.
Guest:And, uh, she, you know, I'm this dumb 16 year old kid and I'm like, I want to do flyers.
Guest:So I started doing flyers for like the flaming lips and other bands that came through town.
Guest:And then I, I had friends in bands that I started doing artwork for.
Guest:And, uh, and then I did, I had, I had these friends in Missouri that there was this band called the Royal Nonesuch that was like one of these sixties garage rock bands.
Guest:And,
Guest:And I just started doing everything for them, like record covers.
Guest:I did little comic books for them, all this crap.
Guest:I ended up going on the road with them, touring with them, which was for somebody who's, you know, 17 years old from Oklahoma to go drive all over the country.
Guest:And, you know, that was the first time I went to, you know, New York, Boston, Chicago, you know, all of the, you know, East Coast big cities.
Guest:And so I had a lot of connections already when I moved to California, and that's how I got hooked up with Greg Shaw.
Guest:And from him, probably the single biggest connection that I made at that time was this guy named Long Ganjan, who had a record label called Sympathy for the Record Industry.
Guest:He still does.
Guest:And he's a character, but he...
Guest:In what way?
Guest:Well, just he looks like... He looks like a biker.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's... You know, he was, like, probably one of the first people I ever met who was, like, fully sleeved with tattoos.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, I mean, this is back in, you know, 1988.
Guest:And... But he...
Guest:He's just one of those guys.
Guest:He's just got great taste.
Guest:He finds things before everybody else does.
Guest:He's the first guy who put out a White Stripes record.
Guest:He's responsible for that, among other things.
Guest:I think he was the first person who put out a whole record.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I did a ton of work for him.
Guest:I did probably...
Guest:at least 50 covers for him and I did ads for him and I sort of was sort of the visual style for his label for quite a while and through him is how I met Frank Kozik and at that point Kozik had just moved from doing like sort of photocopied posters to doing his first silk screens and
Guest:And he had set up his own company with a partner.
Guest:And he met me and he said, oh, you know, your artwork's really good.
Guest:You need to be doing rock posters.
Guest:So I started, this would probably be 92 years.
Guest:i think now when you when you approach this though did you have a template in your head i mean were you a fan of of what's his name griffin and the film or posters or whatever or the the sort of legacy no you know the funny thing is i mean of course i was familiar with that stuff and i knew what it was and i mean as a fan of like 60s music i appreciated it but i think at that point my template was
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I just sort of was doing whatever I wanted to do.
Marc:But did you want to be a fine art painter?
Marc:Did you want to be a cartoonist?
Marc:Did you not have the ideas to do panels?
Guest:Yeah, see, at that point, all I wanted to do was make a living making artwork.
Guest:And I didn't even really have... Although in 1993, I did my first solo art show at La Luz de Jesus.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah, a long time ago, Jesus.
Guest:But I I don't know.
Guest:That's the funny thing is like now, like you look, I look back on it and it sort of seems like it all makes sense.
Guest:But at the time, I was just kind of making it up as I went along, you know, and like even with the posters, the aesthetic evolved because it.
Guest:It evolved out of necessity.
Guest:Like, for an example, all those posters are hand-lettered.
Guest:And now people look at that as a very... You know, that's a very strong part of the aesthetic.
Guest:But the only reason I did it was because I literally couldn't afford to go to a graphics house and spec type and have them, you know, printed out.
Guest:And, you know, I just... It was cheaper and faster to just hand-letter the things.
Guest:Because, you know, at one point I was doing probably...
Guest:at least two or three posters a month you know designing them drawing them doing the separations printing them the whole you know schmear and you know you had a time limit obviously because you have to have it done before a certain date so you can actually use it to promote the show and it all happened really fast and
Guest:a lot of the time i was i mean you know god i was so much more productive than i am now well what was your big break because i mean i recognize your style and you know and really you know at that time you and kozik were the defining forces yeah of rock art you know what would it be the late 80s early 90s yeah i mean i i you know kozik was a big influence you know because i i saw what he was doing because as a technician or as an artist
Guest:Well, kind of both, because I think like what it what it was was I looked at what he was doing, because what he was doing was he was just sort of mining that underground culture that we were both familiar with.
Guest:And he was taking things that were familiar at that point, only familiar to us and a few, you know, the hip people, which is like things like, you know, Betty Page, you know, the old Ed Roth art, the old artwork from EC Comics.
Guest:Manson, you know, the transgressive imagery and and mixing it all together.
Guest:And, you know, it was the beginnings of that sort of appropriation culture that now is that's the dominant aesthetic of our time.
Marc:It was almost like a mashup.
Guest:It was a visual mashup.
Guest:But at that time, there weren't that many people doing that.
Guest:And so I was taking that as a guide, but instead of appropriating artwork from other sources, I was more sort of appropriating the ideas and rendering it in my sort of cartoony style.
Marc:Well, that's the difference.
Marc:He's a collector of images, and you seem to be
Marc:more of a visual artist.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, or an actual drafter of images.
Guest:Yeah, well, you know, I come out of that cartooning tradition.
Guest:I mean, that's why, like, you know, all those people that I became friends with when I was young, like Dan Klaus, you know, that's a very strong influence on me, you know, visually.
Guest:Because, I mean, like, for example, not just his own work, but as a pen pal with him...
Guest:You know, he would send me things like he would send me cassette mixtapes of just weird, obscure music, you know, right.
Guest:And and videotapes of of crazy movies and and just other artwork that like he was influenced by.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, what would you call that time?
Marc:Because I came up, I mean, I'm a little older than you, but I remember it.
Marc:There was this weird mixture of Garage, Tiki, Serial Killer, Camp.
Marc:There was something happening in the late 80s.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Mondo Video.
Marc:like all kinds like it was that was really what defined um the cultural shift in art and film and everything that we're still seeing now and now it seems there's sort of a regression going back to to sort of straight up nerd shit when it comes to comics and all this stuff that had some grit to it and some edge like that came out of the underground comics and then like once media became more available and all these collectors started there definitely was a definition uh to it like an apocalypse culture which i have right there and you're a
Marc:That book, on some level, kind of functions as a Bible for that time, along with a lot of other stuff that was going on.
Guest:Well, you know, I was going to mention, you know, the other big thing that happened very early on, like I'd say 91.
Guest:I mean, I was friends with Adam and a big fan of his publishing.
Guest:Ferrell House Publishing.
Guest:There was this other guy named Charles Schneider, who I was one of the first people I met in L.A.
Guest:because he went to school with Dan Klaus.
Guest:And when I was moving to L.A., Dan Klaus said, oh, you need to hook up with my friend Charles Schneider.
Guest:And Charles is like, he's one of those guys that...
Guest:And he's had a huge influence on people.
Guest:Like, not a lot of people know who he is, but he's touched so many people with the things that he was sort of a cheerleader for and a fan of.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:Well, I'll give you a perfect example.
Guest:He, for years, had wanted to do a book called CAD that was going to be a collection of...
Marc:Oh, that was the other thing.
Marc:The research books were also part of this.
Guest:Well, yeah, and that's another friend of mine, Boyd Rice.
Guest:But what happened was Charles wanted to do this book that was sort of a compendium of 50s and 60s men's magazines, like just that whole aesthetic.
Guest:And, you know, martinis and tikis and, you know, the girly pinup art and all those things.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So what happened was we put this book together in 91, I think, called CAD.
Guest:It was a combination of reprints of old material and new things done in that same style.
Marc:And Boulware did that stuff, too.
Guest:He did that, you know, Jack Boulware did a little bit.
Guest:for this whole cocktail culture thing that happened.
Guest:The man show and everything else.
Guest:And it's funny because we didn't make any money off of it.
Guest:I mean, Adam didn't make any money off of it.
Guest:You know, it's one of those, it's like the Velvet Underground, you know, not to compare myself with the Velvet Underground, but it's one of those things that like, you know, what the saying is, you know, not many people bought the book, but everybody who bought it went off and did something on their own.
Marc:In my mind, the repercussions of that, of CAD culture, I could give a fuck about.
Marc:And on some level, tiki culture is a little more interesting to me because there's a bit of a weird primitive menace to it.
Marc:But what I've been trying to put together, and I think you were on the pulse of, and I think that you sort of live in it, but neither one of us live in it as much anymore, is that...
Marc:There was a time where there was a real darkness to the stuff that was being on Earth.
Marc:That there was a celebration of serial killing, of Manson.
Marc:There was a celebration of pushing the edge, literally, with these zines.
Marc:I don't know if you remember, do you remember Exit?
Marc:There was like four issues of Exit.
Marc:And I found those in a garbage can.
Marc:I mean, these were big magazines.
Marc:I don't remember the guy, Petros was the guy who put that out.
Marc:Now, like those- George Petros.
Marc:George Petros.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like those, and they were big magazines, like the size of the old Raw magazines that dealt with some fucking, you know, some of the montages in there and some of the collage work was like, you know, brain bending to me.
Marc:You know, it dealt with Hitler.
Marc:It dealt with the Beatles.
Marc:It dealt with Manson.
Marc:And then you had some of, you know, Sotos' writings on that became dubious in terms of the pedophilia content in them.
Guest:Well, and this goes back to, well, another avenue, which is, well, two different avenues, which is Boyd Rice.
Guest:Boyd Rice, a lot of the stuff, the research, Incredibly Strange Music and Incredibly Strange Movies, that basically entirely came out of his head.
Guest:That was his taste, you know, was what those books were based on.
Guest:And then the other thing is Jim Goad.
Marc:You know, who did Answer Me Magazine.
Marc:I have those, too.
Marc:Answer Me Magazine and the Nose Magazine out of San Francisco with Boulware.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Answer Me was great.
Marc:There was only, what, four issues?
Marc:Four issues, yeah.
Marc:And I have those in my storage unit.
Marc:And they were provocative and they were morally fucking questionable.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And they were taking chances, you know, around what one can and can't publish.
Marc:And none of that shit fucking matters anymore.
Marc:And I don't think a lot of people.
Guest:Well, you know what?
Guest:I think it is.
Guest:I mean, you got to remember, you got to think back to what was going on at that time.
Marc:Goat's piece on Andrea Dworkin is fucking devastating.
Marc:It's hilarious and fucking wrong.
Guest:Yeah, no, no.
Guest:And Jim was very much about being transgressive, but being transgressive in such an erudite, smart way and crossing every T and dotting every I and getting all his facts straight that you couldn't argue with him.
Marc:You could disagree, but you couldn't argue with it.
Marc:But the outlet for all this stuff that we're talking about was still this mail-order culture.
Marc:It was still that, you know, we've got to drive to go see this guy.
Marc:I've got to write to that website or that address to get these magazines.
Guest:But I think it was even before websites, I think that the Internet, there are two things, I think, that made everything change.
Guest:The first thing was, of course, the Internet.
Guest:And you know what?
Guest:The second thing was 9-11.
Guest:I mean, you know, there was such a profound... Because before 9-11, like, you know, there was a very influential book that came out shortly before called The End of History.
Guest:And his argument was, and you know, it was that after communism basically fell apart, there was... I think there was a feeling in a lot of people's minds, like...
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:We've you know, we're not going to have to worry about like a nuclear war anymore.
Guest:We're going to have this like everything's going to just turn great.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I think that was what a lot of that culture was a reaction to was like, no, it's not turning great.
Guest:It's still fucking sucks.
Guest:And what happened was 9-11 sort of shook a lot of people out of that.
Guest:And for good and for ill, people saw, oh, yeah, the world still is a fucked up dangerous place.
Guest:And, you know, a lot of things have come from that that have been very bad.
Guest:some things have come from that maybe have been good you know but i i not to say that it's a good thing that the fucking world trade towers got blown up but i i just mean that i think it made people more aware of the reality of the world that they lived in right america wasn't just this place where you could be totally safe but but the thing was is that there was a time where you know that budge wire uh you know video was going around we had to
Marc:To find those videos, to find that Mondo video shit, or to gross ourselves out and sort of embrace this morbid fascination in order to feel alive.
Marc:I think what the internet did, and certainly 9-11 many years later, was that the search and the possibilities of fucking your brain up with weird ass shit is no longer that special.
Marc:And I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, because I look back on that shit, and I don't know why I was so fascinated with that stuff.
Marc:Do you?
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, I don't know how fascinated I was.
Guest:That was one of the things that sometimes I sort of, the whole serial killer thing, at a certain point, I was kind of like, well, you know...
Guest:Serial killers, I understand why that's compelling to you because you're looking at somebody who's willing to go somewhere that you can't or don't want to go.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But at the same time, those people are fucked up in the head and they're evil.
Guest:I mean, evil is sort of fascinating, but I don't know that I want to identify with it that much.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And boy, I don't know.
Guest:It's crazy to think about it now because I well, and part of it is you get older and you just think differently.
Guest:You know, I mean, I know that there were things that when I was, you know, in my 20s that you would see some.
Guest:Well, you know, like talking about Answer Me, you know, you'd see like, you know, those the covers.
Guest:And I mean, you know, I did a cover for him, but.
Guest:Which cover did you do?
Guest:Well, I did the cover for they did a compilation of all four issues.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the image on the cover was Jim and his wife, Debbie, dressed as LAPD, beating the shit out of some hipster guy that was holding a copy of Answer Me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which was, at that point, their sort of ironic comment on the way that they had been so accepted by doing something that they wanted to horrify and shock people, but instead they became cool, you know?
Guest:I mean, you know, think about, too, like...
Marc:He's a little tough to deal with because he's bordering on sort of white supremacy sometimes, isn't he?
Guest:Well, he wrote that book called The Redneck Manifesto.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, part of what he's about is sort of confronting people with shit that they don't want to think about.
Guest:And that is one of those issues that...
Guest:people still don't... People don't want to confront racism, and people don't want to confront the feelings that they... You know, the darkness that they have inside them, you know?
Marc:Right, well, that's it.
Marc:That's more specific, because I'm still trying to put my finger on why it was so romanticized by a very small sect of nerds and artists, is that because it's Nietzschean, and a lot of them were hung up on Nietzschean, too, that, you know, this sort of moral ambiguity that is the human brain...
Marc:That, you know, embracing even the most extreme, you know, it's not it's not so much like like Hitler freaks in terms of like, you know, I want to be a Nazi.
Marc:But like, how did that happen?
Marc:Where did that mindset come from?
Marc:Like on some level, can you look at Manson as somebody who like really took freedom to the nth degree or leadership and cult shit and all that stuff like that's in apocalypse culture?
Marc:The reason it's interesting is that it's human.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that there's this festering, horrible darkness in all people.
Marc:And then when it manifests itself, even in a criminal way, it's inherently fascinating.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I think that what happens now culturally and even on TV is everything becomes pathologized.
Marc:And obviously people who break the law should be subject to the law.
Marc:But still, you know, instead of seeing somebody as completely sick, I think one of the questions that apocalypse culture raises and also Jim Goad raises is that, you know, is it sick if you just write it down?
Marc:Is it sick if I do something from the point of view?
Marc:an American psycho, you know, that kind of stuff doesn't seem to have a place in culture anymore.
Guest:No, well, that's true.
Guest:And I do think, you know, this is one of those things like, you know, you could start going down the road of talking about reality TV where it's like now you're almost rewarded for your pathology.
Guest:And...
Guest:But you still pathologize.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, that's it.
Guest:And you're given an out.
Guest:Like, well, I'll give you a perfect example.
Guest:I was dealing with a very bad personal situation.
Guest:And somebody suggested I read this book about narcissistic personality disorder.
Guest:And they said, you know, because this is what you're dealing with.
Guest:You're dealing with someone with a narcissistic personality disorder.
Guest:And I started reading the book and of course, you know, it's like that thing you read it and you're like, oh my God, this is exactly what I'm dealing with.
Guest:This is exactly what I'm... And at a certain point, I just put the book down because I said, hey, you know what?
Guest:Maybe this person does have narcissistic personality disorder, but that doesn't excuse that they're a fucking asshole.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, it's like...
Guest:It's like, yeah, I don't want people to say, oh, well, you know, I'm sorry that I got drunk and wrecked your car, but, you know, I'm an alcoholic.
Guest:It's like, well, okay, you might be a fucking alcoholic, but you're also, you're an asshole and you wrecked my car, you know?
Guest:It's like, take some fucking personal responsibility for being an asshole, you know?
Guest:Right, right, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I know what you mean is that sort of pathology of like,
Guest:Well, it's not my fault.
Guest:I have a disease.
Marc:No, you're just a jerk.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And also like there's a sort of empathy afforded them.
Marc:And there's also that sort of not schadenfreude, but sort of like, well, I'm glad that's not me thing.
Marc:But I think with me in addressing like your art or any of this stuff, because my sense of self was so fragmented growing up that I always looked at people as being in earnest.
Marc:Even when I look at some of your earlier art and some of your art now, when I look at Devil Girl and I look at some of the photographs and stuff, I'm like, holy fuck.
Marc:Every night, Chris Coop must be just dangling in bondage and getting spanked.
Marc:Not as much as you would think.
Marc:But that's the thing, and that's on some level, that's what art serves, is that these are fantastical imagery.
Marc:These are images of desire, of sexuality in a certain way.
Guest:And I'll say that with the devil imagery, when I started doing it, there was a very specific point to it for me.
Guest:Was that a game changer, though?
Marc:I mean, like, was Devil Girl, like, because that's like... Oh, yeah, no.
Guest:Well, I mean, you know, that smoking devil image that's gone everywhere all over the world.
Guest:You know, that's something that I had no... I did that in about 30 minutes because my friend was doing a line of Zippo lighters.
Guest:And he said, I want...
Guest:You know, there were four or five artists doing it and he said, I want you to do something.
Guest:And I said, well, what do you want me to do?
Guest:And he said, well, you know, do like maybe do a devil.
Guest:So I did this drawing of a devil smoking a cigar.
Guest:I really didn't think twice about it.
Guest:I, in fact...
Guest:I didn't have time to get a photostat shot of it, so I just sent him the original art and said, here, you know, do this.
Guest:And the original art was lost for many years until finally he got it back from Zippo, who had, like, folded it and put it in a manila folder.
Guest:So I still have the original art with a big crease through it, but...
Guest:I had no idea that was going to end up being like my sort of like, you know, rat fink, like my thing that everybody would instantly recognize.
Guest:But I sort of realized that the thing that what that represented to me was it represented this idea of not hedonism, but...
Guest:The idea of you should do what the fuck you want to do.
Guest:You should enjoy yourself.
Guest:There was so much in our culture telling you that anything that you want to do, anything that you enjoy is bad and bad for you.
Guest:And if anything, that mentality has only gotten worse.
Guest:And that was what those images represented to me.
Guest:That was what the, you know, the sexy girls.
Guest:And I mean, because to me, that devil that I always draw, I always thought he looked kind of like a used car salesman or like a carnival huckster.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that was sort of what he represented.
Guest:You know, there's two sides to it.
Guest:Because to somebody who's resistant to it, it represents like a con man.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Somebody trying to trick you into doing something you shouldn't do.
Guest:But on the other side, it also represents a voice telling you, well, no, you should do what you, the things that you enjoy and that make you happy or what you should do.
Guest:That's how you should live your life.
Guest:And you shouldn't be hung up on what someone else is going to think of your.
Marc:Conventional standards of, of, of kind of organized morality or organized culture.
Guest:If you're into getting tied up and getting your ass spanked while you're wearing a cocktail dress or whatever... Do it.
Guest:You should do that when you're not out on the road driving your semi-truck.
Guest:It's like you should have whatever...
Guest:You know, it's a very... Well, and you know, part of it is I met, you know, I became very good friends with Anton LaVey in the last few years before he died.
Marc:The inventor of the Satan... Church of Satan in America.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:And, you know, he wrote the Satanic Bible.
Guest:He wrote a book called The Satanic Witch.
Guest:And he was an amazing, fascinating guy.
Guest:Like, he...
Guest:Well, he grew up in that whole era that I love, like the 30s, 40s, and 50s.
Guest:lived a very interesting life.
Guest:He was a carny.
Guest:He played keyboards in burlesque houses.
Guest:He worked for the police as a crime scene photographer.
Marc:But also like Anton LaVey and American Satanism in general and the Satanic Bible is completely misunderstood.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:No, totally.
Guest:And I mean, the thing is like, that was the thing when I met, the reason I met him was I had several friends who were friends with him and were involved in the Church of San Francisco.
Guest:He lived in San Francisco at the time.
Guest:I was going up to San Francisco once or twice a month to do poster stuff because that's where Kozik was based.
Guest:So my friend said, well, I'm going to set up an invitation.
Guest:You're going to go over to his house.
Guest:You're going to go to the black house.
Guest:You're going to meet Anton LaVey.
Guest:And I'm like, okay, that's awesome.
Guest:So I go over there and, you know, not really knowing what to expect.
Marc:What was your sense of Satanism at that time or sense of him?
Guest:Well, I mean, I knew, I understood philosophically what he was about.
Marc:Because he read the book?
Guest:Yeah, but I didn't know if he was going to be, what I didn't expect was his charm and sense of humor and his ability to laugh at himself.
Guest:I mean, he was just, he was like that really cool, when you meet some really cool, interesting old man that just has this life, this history that you just want to plug into and explore as much as possible.
Guest:satan as well well yes exactly and i mean well like as an example the first time i met him and went to his house we ended up spending about two hours talking about country and western music and hank williams is that what you would expect of that i mean you know most okay well then you're a lot more informed than most people but you know what what would inevitably happen is i would go up there
Guest:It got to the point where I was actually, my wife and I were actually like staying at his house.
Guest:Your ex-wife.
Guest:Spending the night at his house, yes.
Guest:And he was a night owl, you know.
Guest:We wouldn't even see him until like 7 o'clock at night.
Guest:And then we would just stay up all night.
Guest:He would do things like in his kitchen, he had a full set of keyboards.
Guest:And we would just sit there and drink coffee and talk and he would play music and go off on all these random subjects that we would discuss for hours.
Guest:And he was one of those guys he knew about everything, just had an amazing encyclopedic knowledge of the most obscure things in the world.
Guest:Like what?
Yeah.
Guest:anything i mean really literally anything like i still remember one night he started talking about gospel music and he started playing playing gospel music and singing in this you know he had this great voice he had this he had the kind of voice like tom wait's wishes he had and he was playing these you know these old gospel tunes and singing in this all and he started to kind of adopt this almost kind of drunken
Guest:phrasing like he was some creepy old lecher who just sobered up enough on Sunday mornings to make $10, you know, playing the organ at the church.
Marc:So had you done The Devil Face before you met Anton LaVey?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that was part of the reason why my friends sort of wanted to introduce me to him was they said, well, you know, he'll appreciate your artwork.
Guest:And, you know, he was a big fan.
Guest:And that's why I ended up doing an actual, like a recruitment poster for the Church of Satan, which is...
Marc:Well, let's explain that because, like, you know, the way that Christian culture characterizes Satanism is that these are people that do rituals and they sacrifice things.
Marc:And, I mean, I think there was some fairly basic witchcraft involved with LeVay.
Marc:But the idea that there is some sort of offerings, live or otherwise, that's primitive culture.
Marc:But philosophically, American Satanism, LeVean Satanism was about doing without wilt.
Marc:It was an extension of the Crowley thing.
Marc:And that if you're not harming other people and you're protecting yourself, fucking the sky's the limit.
Guest:Well, he understood basically what the philosophy is about is that man is an animal.
Guest:Man is not this exalted being that is above.
Guest:Man has animal urges.
Guest:And you need to acknowledge that and respect that if you want to be a full, complete human being.
Guest:And, you know, even with the rituals that are part of the Church of Satan, you know, what that was about was the idea.
Guest:It's psychodrama.
Guest:It's about the idea that
Guest:You know, what the Catholic Church understood was that when you perform, you know, you have this dark room with light streaming through, you know, colored glass, and there's a guy with an incense burner, and he's chanting in Latin, that it creates this state of mind that...
Marc:leaves you open to suggestion.
Marc:And it's also a certain transcendence from the animal.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And he understood that what appealed to people about the idea of a black mass, doing something blasphemous, ritualistic and blasphemous, is that it allowed them to escape the programming that they had grown up with and
Guest:And release their real nature.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like they weren't actually, you're not actually, the goal isn't to, you know, call up a demon or something.
Guest:The goal is to release.
Marc:To fuck your wife so you can have his kid.
Guest:Yes, exactly.
Guest:The goal is to release the demon that's inside you, you know, so to speak.
Guest:And he, you know, he was a student of human psychology that, but the psychology of the carny, like he understood that from that world.
Marc:The sideshow banner.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He understood like what people, what, not what people say appeals to them, but what actually appeals to them.
Marc:Morbid fascination and unleashing desires that are repressed.
Guest:And that was, you know, again, that goes back to all that we've been talking about thus far.
Guest:It does seem to define a little bit of what we're talking about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he, I just, I really enjoyed talking to him.
Marc:Did you do any black masses?
No.
Guest:Well, I'll tell you, the most ritualistic thing that I ever did with him, which was really, truly magical, was he, in his basement of his house in San Francisco, he had constructed over many years this place that he called the Den of Iniquity.
Guest:And what it was, was it was a representation of a sort of seedy 40s film noir, like a roadhouse or a bar.
Guest:And he had constructed mannequins that were customized mannequins.
Guest:There was like a drunken sailor and there was like a drunk woman at the end of the bar that he modeled after his ex-wife.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a bartender behind the bar.
Guest:And it was all perfectly... I mean, it was staged like a movie set.
Guest:And he had a Wurlitzer organ with a Leslie speaker, the spinning speaker.
Guest:And an old Wurlitzer 78 RPM jukebox.
Guest:And...
Guest:And for years, he wasn't using it.
Guest:It had basically become a storage space.
Guest:And I kept telling him, I want to see the den of iniquity.
Guest:I want to see the den of iniquity.
Guest:And finally, one night we went up there and Blanche, his wife, said, well...
Guest:You know, we wanted to do something special, so we've been cleaning up the den of iniquity and we're going to go down and we're going to spend some time down there.
Guest:So we go down there and it was like, well, he was all about this idea of like a...
Guest:An artificial environment.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like in that way, he was sort of a sort of a precursor of the, you know, what we talk about now is, you know, cyberspace.
Guest:But you went in and you really you did feel like you had traveled into this other world.
Guest:And then.
Guest:He sat down and he started- It's a theme park.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Well, and he- Carnival ride.
Guest:He always said that Disneyland was one of the most satanic places on earth because it was that complete environment that made you feel a different way when you went inside.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But he sat down at the organ and started playing music, started playing in basically 40s, 30s, 40s sort of standards, like the kind of music you would hear in that situation.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was, it really was this magical, evocative thing.
Guest:And, you know, later, we, my ex-wife and I had gone, we'd gone back to our hotel at like, you know, four o'clock, five o'clock in the morning.
Guest:And we literally couldn't go to sleep because we were just so charged up by the experience of this.
Guest:And, you know, that's real, you know, that's magic.
Guest:That's a real magical thing.
Guest:There's no...
Guest:There is no demons involved.
Guest:There's no, you know, it's just you're making your head.
Guest:Perception shift.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I think that's why so much of that is misunderstood Crowley and the like that the idea that there are there's very powerful forms of magic.
Marc:And, you know, a lot of it happens, you know, on television, a lot of black magic.
Marc:Oh.
Marc:is a lot of the technology we're dealing with.
Marc:But the idea of human ritual, not human sacrifice, but where people behave in a ritualistic way, what you're summoning is a shift in perception.
Marc:And you're creating a ritual space.
Guest:And to speak to that as it relates to my own work, is that something that I took away from him in my work, is I realized...
Guest:How much of what I do as an artist is ritual?
Guest:And I mean, that's true of all artists, whether they're aware of it or not.
Marc:It's also called craft after a certain degree.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And also that I realized that what I do is, I mean, art is creating something from nothing.
Guest:And that's magic.
Guest:That is really literal magic.
Guest:And once I sort of made that connection in my head, I started to fine-tune what I do with the idea of it's the most important thing when you're making art, when you're creating, is to put yourself into the proper frame of mind to do that.
Guest:And once you sort of clue into that and make that part of your creative process, it just—it makes everything—things really do happen magically.
Guest:And you also have to—
Guest:train yourself so when you can take advantage of when those kind of things happen when something just appears to you out of nowhere that you can grab it and do something with it right and that's that's kind of the biggest thing that i learned from him like the most affecting thing that i learned from him is that
Guest:You have to I think the thing like when people talk about all these things like, you know, magic and I mean, I don't believe in any of that.
Guest:I don't believe in that is the idea of there's I'm a very materialistic person.
Guest:I believe that, you know, this is where we are.
Guest:We're we're living in these bodies.
Guest:The bodies decay and die and we go away.
Guest:That's all there is.
Guest:But, having said that, I've had experiences in my life that are not necessarily explainable.
Guest:And, you know, the creative process is a big part of that.
Guest:And you know, because you do the same thing.
Guest:Things come from nowhere.
Guest:You couldn't, if you had a gun pointed to your head, explain where they came from.
Guest:But that's part of being an artist, is when that happens, to grab it out of the air and make something out of it.
Guest:And...
Guest:So I think what Anton LaVey taught me is, or what I learned from him was to respect that.
Guest:And respecting that means you don't necessarily have to dissect it and figure out what it is.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Just when it happens, grab it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I think that's the...
Guest:I think that's where people get hung up on this whole magic thing.
Guest:And, and, you know, this is, this goes back to that whole, like, you know, you and I've had this discussion about people that are, that are really like hardcore atheists that like won't shut up about it.
Guest:It's like they have to nail everything down.
Guest:They have to, you know, everything has to have a cause and effect and an explanation and it has to be nailed down and there's no gray area.
Guest:There's, there's nothing nebulous.
Guest:And, you know,
Marc:Creativity is never good.
Guest:Yeah, you lose a lot.
Guest:I think you lose a lot that way.
Guest:And I think it's ultimately limiting and self-defeating to... It's like the difference between M.C.
Marc:Escher and Mark Rothko.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, that's very good.
Guest:I just think that...
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:It's so hard because I just think people don't understand what creativity is.
Marc:Right, sure, because you can describe, okay, well, that's serotonin, that's neurotransmitters, that's cortisol, whatever you want to go with.
Marc:to describe the process is not going to explain Devil Girl.
Marc:It's not going to explain why Mark Rothko can organize a canvas the way he does.
Marc:And I think that embracing that, because that is the gray area.
Marc:That's where logic and reason breaks down, and they just say, well, that's a symptom of this other process.
Marc:It's like, well, that's all of it.
Marc:Without that symptom, you get no progress.
Marc:So, you know, you can apply all the logic you want to whatever the process is.
Marc:But creativity is nebulous.
Marc:And, you know, sometimes it comes from fucking nowhere.
Marc:And if it wasn't for that unlimited imagination of people doing magical things, we would be nowhere.
Marc:So fuck you and your control freak bullshit.
Guest:Yeah, that's I just don't think you don't have to believe in God or believe in some higher power to appreciate that sometimes things come from nowhere.
Guest:And, you know, that idea of trying to... I just... Sometimes I just wish people would just shut up and get out of their own way.
Guest:You know, that is just the big... And I mean, you know, everybody... And out of mind, too.
Guest:Yeah, yes, exactly.
Marc:And they would like them all to get out of our way as well.
Guest:Everybody just, you know, seems to not be... That is the biggest lesson I've learned as an artist is sometimes...
Guest:Like I finally, after being seriously painting for almost 10 years now, that I finally learned to just shut up and get out of my own way.
Guest:And when an image pops into my head and I'm, you know, I'm organizing ideas for a canvas that...
Guest:I don't, you know, because my old thing used to be like, well, you know, I want to do a painting that's about this.
Guest:And I have to, you know, what elements will sort of represent this?
Guest:And I finally, finally have reached a point where I can just sit down and say...
Guest:An image pops into your head and you go, oh, I like that.
Guest:And then you wait for something else.
Guest:And you wait for something else with the understanding that somewhere down the line, it's going to make sense to you.
Guest:Even if it makes no fucking sense right now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And boy, that's a hard, oh, that's such a hard thing to learn to just shut up and let it happen.
Marc:And wait.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, it's funny, too, because once I learned that, because I always used to have a problem where if I wasn't.
Guest:really motivated to do something I would just sort of be it's a lot easier because once I finally learned that it's a lot easier for me to just turn it on and off now like like if I have a job I need to do like a commission job
Guest:I just sort of know, yeah, I'll be able to do that.
Guest:And, you know, this reminds me.
Marc:And also you're a guy that's got a brand.
Marc:You are Coop and people have expectation out of you.
Marc:That's one, I think, one of the probably the bigger struggles you have to deal with is being a graphic artist and somebody who deals in art that is specifically used to brand things.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That the transition to fine art is not an easy one.
Guest:But it also helps me because I think having an experience of being a commercial artist for many years, I know what works.
Guest:I know what grabs people's attention.
Marc:Yeah, sure, the craft is in place.
Marc:But you come from, in this segment, if we could, without taking the journey from your cartoon roots and the people that influence you, it seems to me that in talking to you between LaVey
Marc:and sort of being on the pulse of a period in time that Robert Williams was probably the second biggest influence.
Marc:Oh, totally, totally.
Marc:If you could somehow put together this sort of Big Daddy Roth, Von Dutch to Robert Williams post-hot rod culture or new hot rod culture and how that kind of...
Marc:informed you, but also this sort of struggle to be what they call an illustrator and of a certain ilk to making that transition to fine art acceptance.
Guest:Yeah, well, I still don't know if I've made that transition, but I mean, Robert Williams is...
Guest:Genius yeah, oh genius and I really you can't underestimate how much of an influence he has been on me because I mean he's literally one of the first people I met when I moved to LA and Immediately like I of course, you know being a dumb kid I show him the work that I'm doing and he was really he gave me good critique and advice which immediately like had a huge impact and
Guest:And he, well, first of all, I mean, okay, if you just look at what he personally has done as an artist, and you also look at what he's done as one of the founders of Juxtapose.
Marc:The magazine.
Guest:The magazine.
Guest:He blew the doors open like without him.
Guest:I would not be showing paintings and fine art galleries because he he almost single handedly created an art business that did not exist, that basically was not available to someone doing representational art.
Guest:And I mean, and there are other people like Billy Shire at La Luz de Zeus also.
Marc:Yeah, there's that weird area between people that were considered illustrators and outside artists.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like the outside art business where you sort of like collect the random art of people who are not categorically artists but seem to be freaks in their own right doing weird shit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then you've got all these cats that come from where you come from and where Williams comes from.
Marc:Williams is an incredibly competent painter that was primarily seen as an illustrator.
Marc:But when you look at his canvases and the way he's also a satirist.
Marc:So throughout most of his paintings, you're seeing some element of fine art or some element of understanding kind of attacked and eviscerated.
Guest:And, you know, there's a there's a I'll tell you what that comes from.
Guest:I mean, and this this is kind of what we were heading towards is that like that a big part of that is that sort of outlaw hot rod culture that Bob grew up in.
Guest:And, you know, that to to a lesser extent, I'm also involved in and what it comes from is, you know, it's a it's a working class blue collar thing.
Guest:And, you know, you have to kind of go into what the history of hot rodding is, because.
Guest:Do you own a hot rod and race a hot rod?
Guest:Yes, that I built, yeah.
Guest:And starting in the, like, 20s and 30s, there were these young guys who would take Model Ts, Model As, and try to make them go faster.
Guest:And they would do things like, you know, simple things like take the fenders off, you know, and then they would do more complex things like cast aluminum, you know, overhead valve heads that would go on this flathead four-cylinder motor.
Guest:And there was this whole sort of wellspring of creativity in Southern California in the 20s and 30s with all these guys.
Guest:And then World War II happened.
Guest:All these young guys got sent away to go to war.
Guest:And what happened was they learned skills, you know, because these guys all got... Machinist skills.
Guest:They all got put into the motor pool.
Guest:They all started working on tanks.
Guest:There's a great story about Wally Parks, the guy who created the NHRA.
Guest:He was serving- What's that?
Guest:The NHRA National Hot Rod Association.
Guest:Hot Rod Association, okay.
Guest:When he was serving in the Pacific during the Second World War, they took a flathead Lincoln motor out of a Sherman tank and put it in a Jeep.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I mean, that's hot rodding.
Guest:That's hot rodding right there.
Guest:But what happened was all these guys came back from World War II with skills.
Guest:They came back to Southern California where the aerospace industry was booming.
Guest:So they all got jobs where they learned even more skills and had access to equipment and materials that they never had access to before.
Guest:And then they all took all of that, went back out on...
Guest:Back out on the dry lakes, out on the streets, and they built what became this gigantic industry.
Guest:You talk about the NHRA, that's drag racing.
Guest:Multi-million dollar, probably billion dollar industry.
Guest:All the aftermarket stuff for cars that still to this day is huge, huge industry.
Marc:But at the core of it, you had working class people who were taking sort of an American standard and blowing it open.
Guest:And also, because what they were doing was sometimes on the fringes of lawlessness and sometimes outright lawlessness, is that you also have that underground mentality that's outside of conventional society.
Marc:You got to race at one in the morning.
Guest:And that sort of sneers at the squares, the guys who don't get it.
Guest:And from that, you get Von Dutch.
Guest:Von Dutch was this amazing, creative individual.
Guest:He was really more of a bike guy.
Guest:He was really more into motorcycles and cars.
Guest:But he striped cars.
Guest:And that was how he made his living.
Guest:But he was the first guy, up to that point, pinstriping was like coach work.
Guest:You just followed the lines of the body panels.
Guest:He was the first guy to go...
Guest:Well, I'm just going to do this crazy freeform thing.
Guest:And, you know, I'm going to take this nose of this race car and I'm going to paint some crazy fucked up monster on the front of it.
Guest:And, you know, you can trace from him.
Guest:Obviously, he was looking at things like Hieronymus Bosch and Basil Wolverton for influence.
Guest:But from Von Dutch, you get Ed Roth.
Guest:And Ed Roth was the guy who brought that outlaw, hot rod kind of fuck you mentality to all the, you know, nine-year-olds of like 60s America.
Marc:Through Ratfank.
Guest:And from that, you know, it all starts to spread out more.
Guest:And also you have like Stanley Mouse, who Stanley Mouse, you know, there's of course always the argument whether Stanley Mouse or Ed Roth came first, and I don't really stand anywhere on that.
Guest:But a great story about Stanley Mouse is I was talking to Wayne Kramer from the MC5 once, and he's a cool guy, but...
Guest:He told me a story about being in high school with Rob Tyner and they sold Grit.
Guest:So they would go door to door trying to sell subscriptions to Grit, that shitty newspaper.
Guest:And he knocks on a door one day and the door opens and it's Stanley Mouse.
Guest:And this is like 1962 probably.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Stanley Mouse is like, well, it's like me meeting Wayne Kramer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:This guy's like a god.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so they, you know, they started going back to his house and like, you know, wanting to hang out with him.
Guest:And you think about that cross-pollination of like, you know, the MC5, like, you know, legendary rock and roll band.
Guest:And, you know, they're like totally influenced by this like crazy hot rod artist who draws monsters.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, all the things, the threads start to come together.
Guest:But to get back to Robert Williams, you know, Robert Williams...
Guest:moved out to LA from Albuquerque because he was hanging out with all these sort of outlaw hot rod guys.
Guest:And he knew like, if he kept, if he stayed there, he was going to end up in jail basically.
Guest:So he moved out to LA.
Marc:I didn't know he was from Albuquerque.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He, well, he was from, uh, Montgomery, Alabama originally.
Guest:And then he moved with his mother to Albuquerque and,
Guest:And so from Albuquerque, he went to LA and he was working various kind of shitty jobs that he hated.
Guest:And he went into the unemployment office one day after he got fired and they said, well, we've got this crazy, this crazy guy in Maywood that needs an art director.
Guest:There's this guy, this guy named Ed Roth.
Guest:And, and, you know, he knew who Ed Roth was cause he was a hot rod guy.
Guest:There's like, you know, give me that job.
Guest:So he ended up becoming Roth's art director and,
Marc:What was the job as an art director?
Marc:Because Roth was generating the Rathink.
Guest:Yeah, most of that stuff Roth didn't draw.
Guest:There was a stable of guys, the most notable of which was Ed Newton, who did that defined style that you think of when you think of Ed Roth.
Guest:The monsters and the Rathink, yeah.
Guest:The chrome and the smoke and the drawing I did for you.
Guest:But Bob...
Guest:And again, you know, Bob went from that to becoming, you know, one of the Zap comics guys, like one of the premier underground cartoonists of that era.
Guest:So, of course, then you also have the cross pollination with the guys who were doing poster art in San Francisco in the 60s, one of whom was Stanley Mouse.
Guest:So, you know, it all kind of winds back in together.
Marc:And what was Stanley Mouse iconic thing?
Guest:Well, you know, he did – well, he did – his early stuff was very much in that style of – Griffin was the eyeball, right?
Guest:Yeah, Griffin did the eyeball.
Guest:Mouse was doing – when he started – well, he sort of evolved into that sort of airbrushed –
Guest:uh style of like like a lot of like futuristic stuff like 70s album cover art right you know there's that whole sort of all that stuff goes together and it's all this sort of like i said this it's it's outlaw hot rod culture but at the basis of it and this is where i'm finally getting back to what i was starting to talk about is
Guest:An appreciation of craft and ability.
Guest:Because the thing with hot rodding at its basis, what it all comes down to is you have to be able to do something that shows a provable result.
Guest:You have to learn craft to make something go faster.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And to make it look bitching, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's where, like, you know, the paint and the pinstriping and the chrome and all that goes from.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, and you know, this is something I say like when I do talks at art schools is I always say, you know, because I have a lot of friends who build cars, who paint cars, who design cars, all that stuff.
Guest:And I always say, you know, the hot rodders have the most subtle and refined aesthetic sensibility of any artist that I've ever spent time with.
Guest:And
Guest:The only thing that art school teaches you is how to articulate that.
Guest:You either have it or you don't, I think.
Guest:And I mean, you can learn it and maybe hone it and make it better.
Guest:But if you don't have that eye, you don't have that eye.
Guest:And hot rod guys, like you, you look at like a car that, I mean, a car with a crazy metal flake panel paint job and pinstriped.
Guest:And the thing is when you're building a hot rod or you're building a custom, all you're doing every step of the way is you are making decisions based on aesthetic criteria.
Guest:And you have, in order to make that thing look good, you've got to be really good at that.
Guest:And you've got to understand it.
Guest:aren't able to articulate it you have to know how to do it because if you don't know how to do it it shows if you got if you know because like the biggest thing like the biggest thing people always say to me about my hot rod is they always say you know that car has a perfect stance which means you know the way the body the the angle that the body sets at relating and the way that the the
Guest:to the shape of the fenders and how they set inside the fenders and how the car just looks when it's setting still.
Guest:And that is something you can't... Like, you can't teach somebody that.
Guest:Like, you just have to be able to...
Guest:You have to be able to look at the car and know, I need to do this size of wheels and tires.
Guest:And this is how far the tire needs to be tucked inside the fender to make it look bitchin'.
Guest:And that's art.
Guest:That's what art is.
Marc:But I think what's amazing about everything we're talking about here and amazing about the legacy that you come from and just hearing you talk about hot rods is that not unlike...
Marc:jazz or stand-up comedy sure this is a fundamentally american art form oh totally and and the interesting thing about the fine art world when it comes to someone like you or or or robert williams is that so much of the attitude of it is a fuck you to the rest of the history of art yeah and and not in a warholian way not you know i mean warhol played with american ideas of commercialism and repetition and uh
Marc:And he turned art on its head in a different way.
Marc:But, you know, in a more aesthetic that the hot rod aesthetic is not a nihilistic aesthetic, but is uniquely American.
Marc:And what I see with you and certainly I think what you gleaned from Williams, and especially in the way Williams, you know, takes his...
Marc:his foundation in satirical cartooning is there's plenty of williams canvases that are big fuck you to organized art to organized art teaching to you know what people interpret as art and that's that that satirical nature and that rebellious spirit that comes from hot rodding and from underground comics in this country uh you know is still what's struggling to establish itself as a unique american art form that is accepted internationally
Guest:Well, you know, that's the thing.
Guest:Like, the last time I talked to Bob about any of this stuff, we sort of, we had a conversation sort of similar to this.
Guest:And, you know, one of the things he, because I said, I said, you know, I feel like the tide is starting to turn.
Guest:Like, a good example is the guy who's running MoCA now, Jeffrey Deitch, very cool guy, and he gets it.
Guest:Like he understands like what Robert Williams is doing is important.
Guest:And Robert Williams probably, I would say second only to Ed Ruscha is like the most prominent artist in Los Angeles and a, and is a very good representation of LA.
Guest:Like he is an LA artist.
Guest:Like, you know, he's, that's what he's about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Jeffrey Deitch gets that.
Guest:And he's I think he's doing all that he can to make people who don't get it in the art world understand that what's going on right now in this scene in L.A.
Guest:is very important.
Marc:Or what actually, sadly, went on 15, 20 years ago.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But I think he's finally making people understand that you ignore that at your peril.
Guest:And so I was having this conversation with Robert about this, and he said, well, yeah, I think it is changing.
Guest:I just hope it happens while I'm still alive.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And also you had a conversation about him about how people lack courage in taking risks with vulgarity.
Guest:Well, and that's something, you know, we discussed that.
Guest:Because, you know, Juxtapose, you know, he started Juxtapose.
Guest:And Juxtapose has, you know, it's like Frankenstein's monster.
Guest:It's gained a life of its own.
Guest:It's now the, I mean, for 10 years, it's been the best-selling art magazine on the newsstands.
Guest:More than Art in America, Art Forum, anything.
Guest:So, but as it always happens when somebody becomes... But this has a lot to do with tattoo culture as well and neo-primitives and whatnot.
Guest:It sort of becomes what was once sort of a way to join together.
Guest:Like, once anything becomes big enough, it involves its own rules and it starts to...
Guest:But like you, you have people that start to just get influenced by juxtapose.
Guest:And so things start to become a little bit inbred and, you know, in certain areas, I think that's starting to happen.
Guest:And I mean, the strong stuff's always going to come to the top, but, uh, you know, that's the thing.
Guest:Bob is like, you know, I, we, one time we were talking about an artist who shall remain nameless.
Guest:And he said,
Guest:that's just pussy art and you know he didn't mean pussy art like vagina he mean pussy art like it's wimpy it's it's it's worthless you know it doesn't have it doesn't have anything that affects people and you know he and i both that's something we feel is that you know a piece of artwork you know it needs to confront you with things that maybe you're not cool with dealing with you know what what what instead of re instead of just reinforcing your perceptions about how fucking cool you are
Marc:Well, what was that story you had about the British Museum in that?
Guest:Oh, well, okay.
Guest:Well, and this is directly related to the pussy art comment.
Guest:My gallery put on a big show at the Bristol City Museum.
Guest:Now, this is where Banksy had his sort of big defining show that really kind of broke him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they were going to do this big group show with all of...
Guest:the artists that they represent.
Guest:And I mean, it was the who's who of sort of the cream of the crop, everybody.
Guest:And they asked me to be in it, which is great.
Guest:So I said, well, you know, I got to, I got to really, I got to step up my game here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I'd done this drawing a few years earlier and it was a drawing.
Guest:It was basically rat fink, but because I started thinking about what, what, you know, rat fink when it, when it happened in, you know, 61 or whatever, and,
Guest:Like, that's something, you know, your kid came home from school with, like, a Rat Fink shirt on, and you're like, what the hell is that?
Marc:Well, let me ask you something.
Marc:In terms of, like, reusing these images that were not created by you, I mean, how does that fit into the... Well, I mean, that is a whole other discussion, because I think there...
Guest:I think each artist has to make their own decisions about what they do.
Guest:I mean, and I think with me, the way I use this, because what I did was I said, well, you know, that rat fink, it's like this weird hairy thing, and there's like this mouth with teeth, and it's almost like a vagina dentata thing.
Guest:There's something going on there beyond...
Guest:There's something weird there.
Guest:And I started, and then at some point I was just sitting at my table and I started drawing like a rat fink with like, the head was like this horrible, nasty looking like a vagina.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With a like, God, with a tampon string hanging out of it.
Guest:And I was, and I, it was one of those things you draw it and you go, Oh God, that's so fucking wrong.
Guest:And then you go,
Guest:That's what I want.
Guest:I want something that's that fucking wrong.
Guest:And so this drawing had been kind of laying around.
Guest:And when the show came up, I said, ooh, maybe that's going to be my painting.
Guest:Maybe that's going to be my pussy art.
Guest:That's going to be my statement on all this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I mean, the painting just sort of happened.
Guest:It went probably the fastest, smoothest of any painting I've ever done.
Guest:And when I was done, I was like, okay, I fucking love this painting.
Guest:So...
Guest:I sent the photo of the painting to my gallery.
Guest:I sent an email.
Guest:I didn't hear from him for two or three days.
Guest:And I'm like, okay, this is going to be good.
Guest:So I finally hear from him and they're like, well, I don't know if this is going to be... We love the painting, but we don't know if this is going to be... And I just said, stop right there.
Guest:I said, okay, I'm going to write something for you.
Guest:And I'm going to explain what this painting is about.
Guest:And you're going to send this to this museum.
Guest:So I sat down and I wrote this masterpiece of bullshit.
Guest:I mean, it's not bullshit, but I started talking about, like, there's a very famous painting by Gustave Courbet called Origin of the World.
Guest:The pussy.
Guest:Point of view, pussy.
Guest:It's a painting of a pussy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At a certain point when I was painting the painting, I realized that's what this is about.
Guest:This is like my origin of the world.
Guest:And not just in the sense that it was a vagina, but it's rat fink.
Guest:And for the world of art that I'm in, that is the origin of the world.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I also felt like Rat Fink had become this sort of safe... Like it had become so... A cartoon.
Guest:It didn't have the menace anymore.
Guest:It would be on a lunchbox.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I said, you know, I need to make a statement on that as well.
Guest:And I wrote this whole thing about...
Guest:Manet's painting of Olympia that when it was shown there was an uproar.
Guest:And now you can go to a museum in Paris and see Origin of the World hanging on a wall.
Guest:There's probably postcards you can buy.
Guest:And so that's what this essay was about.
Marc:Origin of the World didn't have a tampon hanging on a wall.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:But so what ended up happening was they sent all this stuff to the museum.
Guest:The museum came back and they loved it.
Guest:They're like, oh, this is so brilliant.
Guest:We're going to have a giant fanny hanging on our wall.
Guest:That's what they call, that's their term for that.
Guest:So everybody really dug this painting and I was very happy with that.
Guest:And most importantly, Robert Williams saw it and he was like,
Guest:And I mean, and for somebody who praise does not come easily from Robert Williams, he on several occasions has said, yeah, I really like that.
Guest:I like that pussy painting.
Guest:That's a good painting.
Guest:So, you know, that's like, you know, you can't ask for higher praise.
Marc:Well, there you go.
Marc:So, so, so you made it.
Guest:I did make it.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Painting a filthy painting.
Yeah.
Marc:I think that's a good place for us to close it down.
Marc:Sounds good to me.
Marc:Thanks, man.
Marc:Cool.
Marc:That's our show, folks.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:I love talking to Coop.
Marc:We hang out and we get places.
Marc:We travel, man.
Marc:We go into it.
Marc:That's our show.
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Marc:Who's on?
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Marc:Also, please leave a comment.
Marc:Try to be pleasant.
Marc:You can be pleasant and an asshole.
Marc:I've known very many pleasant assholes.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:You know who I'm talking to.
Marc:Alright, what else?
Marc:Is that it?
Marc:Are we good?
Marc:We're doing three this week.
Marc:So look out on Friday for Lauren... I'm going to pronounce it like it's French.
Marc:Lauren Bouchard, creator of Bob's Burgers, co-creator of Home Movies.
Marc:Great talk.
Marc:Alright?
Marc:I'm not fasting today.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:I'm a bad Jew.
Marc:The only way I can feel a connection to God is when I'm defying him, so I'm eating.
Marc:I'm eating today.
Marc:Shalom.