1. It's ridiculous (and therefore, I hope, memorable).

2. It references Hank and Larry, who believe that every performance art piece should be given a title that simply says what the piece is about. Example: "Slap My Face With A 2-Pound Trout." See? Lovely.

3. My first boss (who is now a billionaire) gave me this marketing advice: "The best name for a thing just tells people what it does." Maybe he was on to something.

You'll also find plenty on art process, outsider art, gallery culture, the avant-garde, capitalism, sensationalism, and gentrification, among others.

I wanted to write a performance art novel that a performance artist might write—what it's like conceiving and performing and collaborating with fellow artists who have made performance art the organ by which they see, reason, communicate, and solve problems in beautiful states of always-becoming-performances in the world. It's what binds Hank and Larry as friends, and gives their lives value; it's how they make their world intelligible, with nothing passing but through their performance art spectacles. The novel also shows how a civilian might become like that—be transformed into a fully engaged performance artist—which, for me, makes the book the first performance art künstlerroman, capturing a freshly hatched performance artist's primordial emergence and maturation—his becoming.

San Francisco was a hotbed of performance spaces in the '80s—you had La Mamelle/Art Com, Galerìa de la Raza, Museum of Conceptual Art, the SF Art Institute, and the SF Museum of Modern Art.

Also, crime was up, with aggravated assault, robbery, and vehicle thefts hitting a new watermark statewide for the decade. Built in 1958, the gloomy, double-decker Embarcadero Freeway allowed pockets of crime to flourish by providing cover for drug dealing, robbery, and prostitution. The Tenderloin and Polk Gulch neighborhoods, which were home to many of the city's health and human services, suffered a shuttering of legit businesses, leaving drug addicts, sex workers, methamphetamine dealers, and other hustlers to run the streets. SF was rife with people suffering mental problems, thanks to cuts in public funding that resulted in drastic reductions of available hospital beds and the unintended release of dangerously mentally ill patients...

...all of which made for a lively backdrop for a little kidnapping and performance art.

Most über-creative people I've met arrived there by first getting broken along the way; creativity followed as the psychical byproduct of putting themselves back together again.  People like that know something primordial and empirical about creation, destruction, healing, and expression, which are all things ordinary language can't always embody. To solve this, performance artists often create their own signs and symbols...their own idioms...languages...even whole new organs of expression adequate for what needs to be conveyed, the result of which may sound crazy to people unacquainted with brokenness. Learning to comprehend a performance artist's language can be a terrifying journey into (temporary) madness.

As for the performances in the book, some came from my own solo or collaborative work, some were created specifically for the book in the same way I'd choreograph a live piece, and others were inspired by the genius of others. Which others? It's hard to say. After doing and watching so many pieces over two decades in theaters, galleries, cafes, and alleys, the details begin to blur....  Did that jelly-covered performer pause to eat her hat before climbing onto her horse—or was it after? Unfortunately, they've all run together—overlapping movements that've blobbed into one mega-monolithic performance art piece in my head with a long and idiosyncratic list of potential contributors. So, to all of the performance artists who helped breathe life over the years into this book's amalgamated performances: thank you.

Also, the "spreadsheet programmer" who vexes Hank and Larry at work with his "spreadsheet programming" was likely a user of Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS, which featured named cells and macro capabilities as early as 1984.

Back in the 1980s, we all communicated via modems over phone lines, as there was no commercially available Internet yet.  In the novel, the "high-speed modem" used for transferring data was probably similar to a Hayes Smartmodem 2400, which fetched a whopping $549 in 1985 and offered a notable speed improvement over previous 300bps and 1200bps versions. At 2400 bits-per-second, the new Hayes could transmit about 20 pages of text over a phone line in a blistering 3-4 minutes! I worked a newspaper route so I could afford one.

A few years later, I saw Darryl Hannah do a performance called "Put Out The Fire" for Robert Redford in the 1986 movie, Legal Eagles. YouTube has a clip of it. The piece was created for the film by performance artist Lin Hixson. I don't know how it's held up with time, but to my 14-year-old brain, Darryl was positively gripping—she haunted me for months.

Thematically, I lean toward the internal—psychology, the unconscious, dreamtime, perceptions of reality, altered states, magic, madness, signs & synchronicities, memory, transformation, sin, guilt...and how these all converge with our daily lives.

I work a lot with text, found sounds, piles of crazy props, chance happenings, and audience interaction. I like speed & energy, lowbrow grime, exaggerated movement, being surprised, personification, physical risk, emotional tension, calling attention to the mysteries of minutiae, and works that are site-specific, incorporating the odd features of a performance space.

In one recent piece, I came out on stage wearing nothing but tighty whities, sucked a 6-inch worm out of a tequila bottle, slid several straight-razors down my underwear, did a Mexican hat dance (the razors cut me, but only once—not bad!), played with a hole in the gallery's tile floor, filled my underpants to the brim with shaving cream, then submerged a buzzing electric razor into the cream while yammering on about what it means to be a man in today's America. That's not too crazy is it? Hello? Where did everybody go?

Louis-Ferdinand Cèline Hunter S. Thompson Franz Kafka William Faulkner Samuel Beckett James Joyce Ernest Hemingway Miguel de Cervantes Albert Camus Walt Whitman William Burroughs Anthony Burgess Charles Bukowski Robert Ludlum J. G. Ballard Philip Levine Sigmund Freud

Jacques Derrida Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari Jean-François Lyotard Walter Benjamin Bobcat Goldthwait Elaine May Larry David Stephen J. Cannell

 
...And artistic influences might be:

Bas Jan Ader Rudolf Schwarzkogler Fluxus Joseph Beuys The NEA Four The Kipper Kids The Shrimps Cy Twombly Robert Rauschenberg Marcel Duchamp André Breton Salvador Dalì Luis Buñuel

Jack Smith Maya Deren George Kuchar Kenneth Anger David Lynch Vincent Gallo Crispin Glover David Cronenberg Harmony Korine Christopher Guest Frederick Wiseman Richard D. James and John M. White, my performance art mentor

 
...plus all of the artists with whom I've performed or collaborated: Nate Dryden, Clay Young, Gary San-Angel, Michael Mufson, Beth Stinson, Lee and Christy, Jude and Lindy, "Electric Shoes" Tim, Todd Ivers, "Honey Wall" Valerie, "Stilt Heels" Beth, Erin Feder, Jacki Apple, The L.A. Live Art Forum, Randy Hostetler, Deborah Oliver, and too many more to mention....

I'm also a fan of Damien Hirst, who's worked with animals in formaldehyde for decades.

We'd set up each scene, put the actor in it, describe in as few words as possible what the actor's character was like, and what she or he might be doing there, and then set the actor and crew free to improvise within that little universe of possibilities. Each action was inspired by the actor's imagination, which was inspired by a generalized description of the scene, which was inspired by my fallible recollection of the book.

Shooting took three months, weekends mostly, in San Francisco and Los Angeles. We shot on a Nikon D7000, plus a wind-up Bell & Howell 35mm Eyemo motion picture camera that chugged along like a sewing machine at 24 frames per second. Used by newsreel reporters in World War II, as well as by Stanley Kubrick in his 1955 noir film, Killer's Kiss, the Eyemo gave us 20 seconds of shooting per wind-up on 100-foot rolls of Kodak 250D film.

Complete trailer credits can be found here.

After putting together some concepts in a ridiculous collage, I wanted to get Bill's body position just right, so I stripped naked, wrapped my ass in plastic wrap, and shot a bunch of selfies I pray will never see the light of day.

Using those pictures as a reference, the Bill illustration was then drawn by Alex Madrigal, a genius concept artist & beer connoisseur in Seattle. You should hire him! You can see more of his work at www.alexmadrigal.com

Larry: Paul Rudd, Bill Hader, Johnny Knoxville, James Franco

Hank: Shia LaBeouf, Giovanni Ribisi, John C. Reilly, Steve Buscemi, Ben Stiller, Jeff Daniels, Zach Galifianakis

Bill: Ed Helms

Mouse: Emma Stone, Lili Taylor, Juliette Lewis, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Christina Ricci

Stark: Joe Don Baker, Val Kilmer, John Goodman, Wayne Knight