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| Dear Readers, Not so long ago, in another New York, was a magic place called Mother, created by Chi Chi Valenti and Johnny Dynell. Its gold-painted door on a dark, cobbled street in what was still the meat-packing district, was a portal onto other worlds and other times. Wonderful things happened in that place. It’s where Jackie 60 lived, and the night called Click + Drag, where the scents of extreme fetish and untried technology swirled around powdered wigs and Edwardian frock coats and boozy old drag queens. When we met Rob Roth at Click + Drag, the night he founded with Chi Chi Valenti and Kitty Boots, with Abby Ehmann as its co-producer, he was standing against a wall dressed in white, looking in every way like the Little Prince of Saint-Exupery. We came to know him as a kind of art magician. Rob belongs to a movement that transcends time, its members living in all different periods of history, none of them able to do anything but make art and often at great sacrifice. He’s a true son of New York, born here, and part of its history. Out of necessity, he is good at finding stuff in the streets to use for his work. He drags heavy objects home and turns them alchemically into glorious theater. Sometimes he performs on stage. He’s old school in a new world and uses new technology for a very old purpose. He sees the beauty in ruin. He fills sketchbooks with landscapes from his head. He makes it all look effortless, but it isn’t. When he works he doesn’t sleep and works in a zombie trance until the work is done. And once more, it almost is. Besides being the very first Goodie online, he's also our Featured Guest this month, and there you can see stills from his current project Screen Test. We are delighted to introduce Rob to all of you who may have not yet met him. Peace,
ROB ROTH Tell us about your beginning. My parents met in the Catskills one summer in the 1950s. My father was a drag racer, and it was classic: he was a bad boy, and my mother was the beautiful, good girl he could bring home to Mom. My mother was a nurse and she gave that up to be a housewife to my father. I was the first born, on December 18th, 1968 in Queens, New York. I have two younger sisters.
My father was still in the NYPD academy when he got the call that I was born. We lived in Woodside, Queens until I was four or five, when my father decided to move us to Rockland County, on the other side of the Hudson and near the Tappan Zee Bridge and Nyack. It’s about as suburban as you can get and that was my demise. Was there no little old town attached? Well, there was Nyack, which was always a favorite
place for me to go, and Tappan, which had the 76 House where Benedict
Arnold plotted to spy. It was rich in history. I still go there
sometimes on the bus. Where did your grandmother live? She lived in Washington Heights and from her apartment you could see the top of the George Washington Bridge. She used to tell me the story of how her father—my great grandfather—helped put one of the lights on the GW Bridge, so every time I would go over the bridge I would look at the light on the top and think how my great grandfather put it there. One of the big lights at the very top?
Yes. My mother swears that he was too drunk to have ever done anything like that. But I believe it. The GW Bridge has always been my favorite bridge because of my history with it. That bridge is also the way I would go to see my grandmother, because we would take the bus from Rockland to the GW Bridge Terminal. I’ve been taking that route my entire life. Something that my grandmother remembers and constantly brings up, is one day when we were in the GW Bridge Terminal, they had a Chock Full o’ Nuts restaurant where they had the cream cheese and walnut sandwiches, and they had counters and swivel chairs. I remember being in there, and she gave me a napkin and a pen while we were waiting for our bus. I was about five, and I drew a picture of the bridge. The way she tells it you would think I drew the Sistine Chapel.
Did she save it? It’s framed! She gave it to my mother, and my mother kept it all these years. My grandmother still talks about it! If I say, “Nannie, I did a show at this place called PS122,” she’ll say, “I remember when you drew that picture of the bridge on that napkin in the Bridge Terminal! I was speechless! All that detail!” Remember how funky the trains were back then? I remember how exciting it was to take the subway because it was so crazy and loud and full of graffiti. On the C Train, which we used to take from my grandmother’s at 175th Street all the way downtown, you’d feel like you were going to die! It was shaking all over, the tracks were squealing and sparks were flying and there was graffiti on everything and all the windows were open in the summer because there was no air conditioning then. Oh, it was so exciting for me, it was like being on a roller coaster! How old is your grandma now? My grandmother is about 89. She totally has her wits about her, but finally I am noticing that she is getting old and it upsets me if I think of it. What does she think of it? Oh, she can’t wait to die! She’s a very, very devout Catholic. If I say, “Oh, Nannie, that ring you have, I have always loved that,” she’ll say, “Do you want it when I die?” She has little things in bags with people’s names on them! She’s very practical. I tell her I don’t want to talk about it. I say, “You can’t die! You can’t leave me with these people!” She never forces any belief on me but she’s very devout. I know it’s useless to talk about abortion and things, but there’s no reason to talk about these things with her. But what’s funny is that way in the back of my mind I think, I should just shut up, because if she’s right and I find myself up there, it will be like getting into a club. I’ll just say, “I’m on Fran Barrett’s list. Plus one.” And I’ll be in like that, because I know she is on the guest list. She has had such a hard life and never, ever have I met anyone so kind and loving. I don’t remember her ever complaining, and it never ceases to amaze me. In my family, she was the one where everything she said was positive encouragement. She’s the special one. Did you tell her that you wanted to be an artist? I didn’t have to tell her. I did that napkin and she wouldn’t shut up about it! Surely the Catholic part of your childhood must have rubbed off on you somewhat. The parts of Catholicism I’ve always loved
are the architecture and the ritual. It is really theater, the Catholic
Church, and it is really quite gay when you really look at it, because
it is so over the top! When I was very young and they’d say,
‘This is the blood of Christ,’ and get into the whole
blood ritual and drinking it, I would get a little weak-kneed because
I had a weird thing about blood. So every time I’d feel a
little faint. But I was also strangely attracted to it in a kind
of vampire-like way. It’s as Goth as you can get. When did you start coming into the city by yourself? I started coming on my own in my teens. I was lucky enough to catch the end of what downtown meant in the very early ’80s. I’d go to the Village and shop in what were still real thrift stores.
You could get a pair of shoes for $2. Things were still really cheap, and the East Village was still full of all those blocks of bombed-out, burnt-out shells of old tenements, like the South Bronx. And funny enough, that was where my father was a cop, in the South Bronx. When I was about 17, Nyack had a photo contest. One of the categories was photo essay, and I told my father I wanted him to take me to the South Bronx so I could see where he worked every day. My father and I had a rather rough relationship. But he did it. He took me all around the South Bronx, and I mean, the full-on South Bronx with the burnt-out buildings, he introduced me to a pimp and people he’d arrested seven or eight times, and they’d say, “Oh, hello Officer Bob!” I took pictures of the burnt-out buildings, the pimp, some kind of drug dealer guy, and I developed them myself. And the funny thing was that I won. I won $500, which to me was huge! I didn’t even go on the day they awarded the prize. I went with a friend down to the city to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My mother and grandmother went, and when I won, my mother went up and got the award. She said that all the other photo essays were of flowers, and then there was mine. Nobody knew how I was able to go in there and take those pictures. But my father introduced me to them all. That’s the funny thing about my father. He never didn’t encourage me to do what I was doing. I don’t think he ever really understood it. I think it was always very, very difficult for my mother and father to understand that I would be okay doing what I wanted to do. It’s only in the last five or six years that they’ve finally stopped asking, “When are you going to get a real job?” What was art school like? I went to Pratt in ’87, and I lived there in the dorms and all over that neighborhood, Fort Greene, which back then was very dangerous. I was mugged and people were shot, there was always somebody murdered; one student was shot in the chest, then the next semester one was shot through the eye, then a girl was raped in the main building. It was a rough, rough, rough neighborhood then, but I learned a lot at Pratt, from crazy old art teachers who were maniacs. The old fogies I liked. The more insane they were, the more I learned from them. What was your mugger like? A crack addict. It was when I was a club kid. We’d dress up in ridiculous outfits with platform shoes and shorts to the knees with striped socks and carry a lunch pail. I had a Fat Albert lunch pail, I’ll admit it. Chi Chi Valenti said, “You didn’t! Aaaaaaargh!” Oh, Chi Chi and Johnny hated the whole lunchbox thing! Well, I was a real club kid, and it was the heydey for that. We used to go to Michael Alig's outlaw parties. I’m glad I got to see it and experience it. We would take the G Train, all dressed up for those parties, from Brooklyn and back again, drunk. The subway cost a dollar, so you could go out all night for two dollars. You’d buy your two tokens for two dollars, you’d get to the Tunnel Club, or wherever you were going, and you’d get in for free. This was the end of the ’80s decadence. You’d have an open bar for two hours. You’d be smashed, dance all night, then get back on the subway with your token. Sometimes we’d buy cheap beer to drink on the train. The invites that came for those parties were so elaborate. There would be boxes of candy with the information on the candy, and once I remember getting plastic tools. When did you first go to Jackie 60? One of my best friends met a total flaming homosexual Italian ex-priest from Brooklyn named Eddie. His mother had sent him to seminary, and he was such a queen. He would always say, “Jackie! The House of Domination! You gotta go!” The first time I walked through the doors, I thought, “ I’m home.” It had all the clever ideas and themes and performances, everything I’ve ever wanted to do and was interested in, and it was so legit, it didn’t seem forced or stupid, it was so real and the place was so tiny! I had found what I was looking for. And from then on, the rest is history.
How long did it take you to befriend Chi Chi and Johnny? Not very long. I’ve never been the most assertive person. I do approach people I find interesting, but it’s not easy for me. Especially with someone like Chi Chi! Can you imagine? So I said to myself, okay, I’m just going to take a deep breath and approach this woman. The immediacy with her was that I had an email address, which was very rare then, in about 1992, in that world especially. We started emailing each other and I pitched an idea and we did it.
What was the idea? It was “InterJackie.” I was working for AT&T on this interactive television trial, right before the internet really exploded. It was a whole campaign of stuff, that didn’t even exist, around what the future would be like, with interactive TV and picture phones and video phones, and it was all fake. But they were doing trials in Chicago, and I was designing these things to make them look like they were real. Chi Chi was fascinated with all that. I said, “I want to do this in the club.” They were doing “CyberSlut” nights that were technology-themed with robots, and I said I wanted to do one of those and call it “InterJackie.” So we made a “MistressMaster” tool where you could make your own dominatrix. The whole thing was absurd and ridiculous, but it worked. We were one of the first clubs to have a website, and I designed it. The invitation cards for Click + Drag were each one a work of art. One of Rob’s nights was called Gibson Girls, but instead of the early 20th Century style of Charles Dana Gibson, Rob’s Gibson Girls were of the future world of William Gibson's novels. The image he used for the whole night was of Debbie Harry, a regular misfit performer at Jackie herself. She and Chris Stein liked what Rob did so much they decided to ask him to design the art for their new Blondie record, NO EXIT. Rob had just escaped dying and was in the hospital hopped up on morphine.
I’d had appendicitis in Mexico, on vacation with Chi Chi and Johnny, and we all thought it was food poisoning. I went scuba diving, but I was hunched over. It took more than 24 hours to find out what was wrong with me when I finally came back and went to the emergency room, because Mexico was such a red herring. I felt like I was slowly dying. If it had burst, they said, I would have been dead in thirty minutes. If it had happened when I was scuba diving, they would have thought I drowned. No one would have thought it was my appendix. Rob was so happy after Chris asked him to do the record art. He was blissful on the morphine, he hadn’t died and he’d make static magic for Blondie when he woke up. Later he thought he dreamed it. He ended up doing all of the art for the next two Blondie CDs and huge video installations for their tours. He’s done equally beautiful work for Theo, including videos and CD art. He works constantly, more recently spending a lot of time in Berlin with Big Art Group. What is Big Art Group? It’s Caden Manson's theater company that does truly new theater with heavy use of videos in the stories. They tour all over Europe and that has brought me somewhere else. They’re so supportive, in the way that Chi Chi and Johnny gave me that seal of approval at that point in my life and really left me free and loose to do anything I wanted. I’ve been very lucky. I think that I’ve always had good instincts, and I’ve had a sort of divining rod drawing me naturally to where I’m supposed to go. There are people I know who are very successful now and I see how they’ve been so driven, knowing exactly what they were doing, whereas with me, the wind somehow takes me where I’m supposed to be. I’ve always known that I had to go certain places and work with certain people for a long time to learn what I wanted to be. I like to learn from the scenes that I somehow end up in and I just end up where I’m supposed to be. I’ve always been happy that I’ve ended up working with who I’ve ended up working with and befriending.
I only work with people who I admire and like. I can’t work with anyone whose work I don’t like, and that, I think, is my problem in a way. I don’t know if I could do good work if I didn’t like what it was. I’ve loved working with Debbie and Theo and Chi Chi, people who I’m inspired by. They bring out what I need. But that’s also why I feel that I’m never going to be what most people consider “successful.” What is it about Theo that you most appreciate as a muse of sorts? With Theo I get everything that inspires me to create. Music, performance, a strong iconic female and most important, she trusts my vision and understands what I’m doing, especially with the body projections. Technically she really understands what to do. It also helps that she is such an open and calm person. I tend to be a bit more hyperactive so it’s a good balance. I always admired her from afar and eventually we worked together when she performed at Click + Drag.
When you work on video projects such as what you’re doing for Screen Test, do you ever find yourself not leaving the house for long periods? With this project I’m spending a lot of time, sometimes all day, without leaving the house. But because I have to shoot video and have meetings with potential collaborators (lighting, choreography, set, etc), I do get to go outside. If I don’t go out and get some kind of physical activity I tend to go a bit crazy. I love riding my bicycle. That really helps my head. So I try to make myself do that. I love working on the computer and what I do, but for me it’s not the most natural position.
Rob has the good fortune of having Todd Thomas designing the costumes for Screen Test. Todd is an exceptional designer: he’s designed and made by hand the most stunning original costumes for Debbie Harry. He too belongs to another era of artistry, able to keep delicacy and finery at play while being overtly outrageous at the same time. His work is exquisite and lends itself beautifully to Theo’s marvelous character.
We know that you outdid yourself with finding what you needed for this set. Would you tell about the hospital trash? I was walking past Bellevue Hospital after taking pictures of an amazing, huge building they have been tearing down over the summer on 40th Street (the old Con Ed building) and somehow I managed to eye a shiny piece of metal sticking out of a dumpster in front of some medical facility. I jumped up on it and looked in, and there was this perfect surgery bed. There were a few, in fact. One thing I really wish I’d gotten was some kind of metal child's crib that was oval in shape and looked like a metal cage. It was so creepy and strange. It looked like something from an old medical journal for rabid infants. As I was looking in the dumpster, a guard came out of the building and asked what I was doing. I told him that I was looking at the bed, and he started giving me a hard time, saying that I had to have permission from NYU medical center or something like that. So I just smiled and said, “Okay, who do I talk to? Where is that?” All the while thinking of how I was going to sneak the surgery bed out of there. It was in the garbage! Since when do you have to ask permission to pull stuff out of the garbage? I think he was just bored and looking for something to happen. I ended up renting a van and going with my friends Dax and Jan to take it the next night. It was so hot and we forgot to wear gloves so it was a bit disconcerting when there was a mysterious yellow gel on Jan. We were also sweating profusely. I sometimes wonder what the hell I’m doing in these situations. What did you do with it once you had it out of the dumpster? I ended up driving it up to my parents place in Rockland County and leaving it behind the garage. The whole trip it was rolling all over the back of the van and making a big thud sound. At some point the surgery bed will find its way back to the city and into some mysterious doorway of PS122 on 1st Avenue in time for the opening of Screen Test on November 28, 2006. As long as we’ve known Rob, he’s worked on things until the very last second, all the while worrying that he won’t find the right meat hook or filament bulb or black and gold tights, and all along he’s found ruined buildings, derelict locales and deserted warehouses full of beauteous obsolescence in which to take pictures and videos. Real fire, cracked mirrors and rust are just as good as paint. But little by little, the city is losing its derelict quality. Eventually, there won’t be dumpsters full of sinister old hospital beds. Rob feels it as keenly as any artist, but he keeps a certain optimism. Perhaps it’s his grandmother Fran Barrett’s legacy. What do you think is happening in this city? I think what happened was that during the Giuliani period, they ousted the artists because they couldn’t afford the rents. The rents went up with all the “Sex and the City” girls coming in to go to NYU, all these people re-did apartments and then charged three times as much, and all the artists left. When that happens, scenes die. Those people with the money don’t create scenes, they buy them. They go to things and want to be there, but they don’t create anything. So when the scales are outweighed and the people who make the scenes can’t afford to live in them, when the people who make New York New York are gone, then there is nothing happening. But even at its worst New York is still my favorite city and I think it will always be. If you watch that Burns documentary about New York, it shows how everything is cyclical. There were moments like this in the past, and New York will come back around.
See Rob's Featured Guest page for more.
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