I didn’t even know these pictures existed– I found them accidentally while digging through the external hard drive, hunting down weird crap from ages gone by. I’m not sure why their quality is so atrocious.

They are from a performance of a canto in Dante’s Paradiso. It was for a class at NYU. I had talked Sam Tregar, author of the rivetingly titled Writing Perl Modules for CPAN, into helping. Sam was supposed to wear a goofy white mask and scream through a megaphone, but earlier in the day, we were walking around Gramercy Park and there in the trash was a homemade hat. Attached to its top was a placard reading KOSHER 4 EASTER. Sam, a Reform Jew with nothing but hatred towards the Jews For Jesus contingent, fell in love. I think we took it to my apartment and disinfected it with Lysol.

I’m in the second picture wearing an ape mask and playing the banjo. I had bought the banjo a year before on eBay for about $99. What kind of banjo do you get for $99? One that will never, ever, ever stay in tune. So I stuck a pickup inside and ran it through a fuzzbox pedal and then through a deathmetal pedal. This was all connected to a big amp. The only sour aspect of this whole performance was that the amp never got turned up loud enough.

The next year, I took another class with the same professor and we read The Decameron. Again a performance was a required assignment. Sam helped out with that one, too– he wore his wife’s viking halloween costume and played bass through a broken effects board. This time we made sure the amp was deafening. Sam let me borrow a big lobster pot which I wore on my head. I bought an aluminum garbage can and made a breast plate of its lid and spent the whole performance alternately bashing my chest or the can with a hammer while screaming about The Sea. Through a distortion pedal. By the end, the can was about half its original size, and I believe that I had bruised my chest somewhat seriously. A big highlight of this particular nightmare was the special guest appearance of Kaia Wong of the awesome band Mixel Pixel, who had a boss electric violin that looked like a Romulan warship. She was also wearing many, many mirrors tied to her body. She played the fiddle part to that terrible song “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and I think had a death metal pedal.

Sadly, no pictures of this exist, but I swear it happened.