Penny Arcade Making Better Transcript
(music) Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.
Chris: Well, Francis, this is episode seven of Making Better, and we’re featuring Penny Arcade.
Francis: Yeah, Penny is someone that I’ve loved listening to for many years. I think the first time I ever heard her was at Saint Mark’s Church on New Year’s eve, which is when—used to be like so many of greatest Beat artists and other poets would be there reading for the New year, and you’d kinda get the sense of where the world was at by listening to them all, and Penny really stood out. I remember at the time thinking, who is this person? And I’ve followed her through the years, and her performances and I find her take on the world extremely well-thought-out and visionary, and I think people will really enjoy her.
Chris: I agree. I think this is one of my favorite episodes so far, and it’s not often you get to talk to a real 60s radical anymore.
Francis: Not only that, but someone who was the type of a radical where they didn’t have to sort of apologize a lot for the naivete of their youth. A lot of what Penny has believed, she’s believed most of her life and I guess history’s borne it out.
Chris: So without further ado, let’s get on to our interview.
Chris: Penny Arcade, welcome to Making Better!
Penny: Oh, OK, hi! (laughs)
Francis: Hey Penny,
Penny: Hi, Francis
Francis: …I’m so exciting to spend some time talking with you now, and I think it would be great for our listeners if we could just start a little biographically…and maybe you could talk about where you came from, and …
Penny: OK. I’m first-generation American, I’m the first person in my family born in America. My mother’s family, who I was mostly raised with, are from Baslikata*, which is the Appalachia of Italy, it’s one of the very, very poorest parts of Italy and it’s a place where the people were fundamentally sharecroppers. So I come from people who were slaves not in the 17th century, but in the 20th century. The vast tracts of land were owned by the nobility, a nobility that did not live anywhere near where these lands were. So I have always been anarchic. As Judith Molina once said to me, “Penny, you’re an optimist, because you’re an anarchist, and all anarchists are optimists.” So yeah, do I think that the world could be a better place? Yes. Do I think that that’s gonna happen? No. Why? Because of human nature, and we’re living for the past, seriously, 30 years with the commodification of rebellion. So all these people who have 27,000 tattoos, they all have the same tattoo as everybody else, ‘cause they all want to be different like everybody else. They were gathering down at Occupy, and eating french fries from McDonalds. There’s a real schism in the intellectual life of Americans. Americans are not political people; they have a culture of being political, which mostly at this point buys down to buying Che Guevera t-shirts for their four-year-old children. This thing that everybody’s waiting for to happen, that’s really really bad, that everybody’s afraid is gonna happen—it’s already happened. OK? It’s already happened. So, for me, I don’t believe you can change the world, but I do believe you can change the world around yourself. I came up through the 60s, I was involved with Yippie!, which was the Youth International Party with Abby Hoffman. I was involved with Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers with Ben Morea, that did preach armed revolution, and at that point, in 1968, 1969, there was a radical left in this country. There hasn’t been a “Left” in this country, honestly, since when? Since the 60s. There’s no Left in this country. People have a lot of fantasies about their political involvement, but they don’t want to take a really hard look at what the real situation is, and the real situation is, take it to the streets. Listen, the last big demostration we had in New York, which was the one where the infantilized women with their little pussy ears—there were three cops at that demonstration. That’s how worried they were. Three cops at the whole demonstration!
Chris: In the old days, there’d be three cops just watching me.
Penny: Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, I think people are walking around, everywhere I go I hear people talking “oh, they’re talking truth to power, I was just talking truth to power this afternoon.” These people are seriously narcissistic fools. I mean, you don’t talk truth to power and win.
Chris: Nobody wants to go to jail.
Penny: Wells they definitely don’t want to go to jail, they also don’t want to be hit in the head. And the police do hit you in the head, you know.
Chris: I’ve personally been arrested 24 times in civil disobedience actions, so, I know the routine.
Penny: But we’re living in a period where there is such a fanciful idea that people have, that they’re being pro-active, meanwhile, how many states are already ratifying anti-abortion? And then everything’s fragmented, so culturally, what you might call the Left, is completely…
Chris: …people like Bernie Sanders, and AOC…
Penny: No, but what I’m even talking, I’m talking more about whether it is minorities, women, or what are now called “queers,” it’s all been micro-sliced. There is no coalition. And you cannot achieve anything without coalition. So, you have the Black Lives Matter people, which I try to connect them with class issues—they could care less about class issues. You know, everybody’s got their own thing, like all the gay people who are so ill-informed that they don’t realize that if we lose Roe v. Wade, we lose LGBT rights, because the ACLU wrote the gay liberation, I don’t know what you’d call it…contract, let’s call it, on the back of Roe vs. Wade, as unnatural acts. So that they used the unnatural so-called act of a women getting rid of a fetus from her own body, and they had it cover the unnatural so-called unnatural acts of same-sex sexuality. But people are oblivious to these things, and so people are only interested in their own little plot, happily digging away in their own little plot, whereas the right wing forms coalition with anyone. As long as you hate the rights of other people, you’re welcome to coalesce and be part of the coalition with the right. I mean, but you know this is not just happening in America, it’s happening world-wide, and we have been warned about this, not just since George Orwell, but all the way back to the beginning of the century with Brave New World. And people have not listened, because people don’t listen until it happens to them. I tried to do housing activism in this neighborhood of the Lower East Side in the mid-90s, and there were like twenty-seven million 20-year olds with multiple piercings and tons of tattoos lined up in the cafes of Avenue A…you couldn’t get them to one demonstration. But the second that they’re about to be evicted out of their building, suddenly they become interested in housing rights. And all of these things are the same, it’s the same thing with feminism. You know, the MeToo movement supposedly created this burst of flower of feminism, but feminism does not mean that you care what happens to you and your eight friends, it means that you care about what happens to all women. And the failure of feminism has always been the way women betray women, and women continually betray women.
Chris: The feminist movement started that way, with Sojourner being kicked out and Helen Keller being kicked out, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton being kicked out, all for raising issues of race or..
Penny: Right. …and class. Race and class.
Chris: Helen Keller was social justice.
Penny: Right. I don’t really know where it’s gonna go, because everything’s so fragmented now, it’s not like you’re gonna get any kind of real group of people…I mean, everybody wants Trump impeached, I’m like, Trump is not the problem! Pence is the problem—Trump has no values. Pence has tons of values and they’re all evil. We’re living in a world of disinformation, we’re living in a world of fragmentation, the promise of the internet failed…
Chris: I don’t think we can entirely conclude that. I think it is failing right now, but we don’t know where it will be in five years…
Penny: OK, but what I’m talking about is, the idea was that people would be connected. And the result is, that you used to be able to get more information from just walking down Avenue A, about what was happening in this neighborhood, than you can get now, with all of the social media that we have. Because of the algorithms and because of human nature. People want pleasure, people do not want to do anything that is uncomfortable. And when I talk about the failure of the internet, baby, fifteen years ago, if I was researching something, and with my clever mind where I could come up with multiple, multiple multiplying, over and over and over, every single one of them a closed door that you come to that’s another www-dot-zi-doc-dot something, that leads nowhere. There is a real failure to the internet, because the internet is not free. The internet is owned, and it is manipulated, and I’m not a programmer and I’m not a tech person. But I know, I’m a user, and I can tell when it’s impossible to get anywhere with the internet compared to what was going on before. And about five years ago, I was at the McDowell, doing a McDowell residency, and there was a wonderful young woman whose name I’ve forgotten now, who is a worldwide web activist, and she presented a program to, I don’t know, 40-50 artists who were gathered at McDowell, talking about what was really going on with the internet. Those people could care less—and these were supposed to be, you know, really investigative, artistic minds, right? And at the end, very very very, the talk was over and I just raised my hand and I said, “excuse me, how many people in the world are doing what you do?” She said, “oh, being activists for freeing the world wide web?” I said, yeah. She goes “oh, there’s probably about a hundred and fifty of us.”
Chris: We had Richard Stallman on the podcast as a guest, and he’s the leader of that movement.
Penny: Ok, so the point that I’m making is, the next thing that she said, “do you want to know how many people are employed by the forces of evil?” she said, “try five hundred thousand.” So the balance is really off. So before you can do anything about anything, you’ve got to face the true, real facts. You know, which means not just as a group, but individually. How far am I willing to go? What would I do? How much do I care? And I care about the working poor. I care about immigrants without papers. I don’t give a fuck about middle class people. As when the Matthew Sheppard demonstration happened—I can’t remember what year that was—and lots and lots of nice, well-meaning gays and lesbians went to the march and had their candlelit march, and then they were all completely freaked out when police on horseback started stampeding into them! You know? They were like “we don’t want a police state”—guess what? It is a police state! I’m not Miss Optimism here, but I am all for facing reality, and for what can we do, and I’m not sure about what we can do.
Francis: Could we talk about your life as an artist a little, too, because there would be a lot of people who aren’t…
Penny: Yeah, who aren’t familiar with my work. Like, everybody.
Chris: You’ve gotten to work with two of my heroes–
Penny: Yeah? Who are they?
Chris: Andy Warhol and Quentin Crisp.
Penny: Oh. OK, that’s interesting. Very, very diverse people.
Chris: But they were both profoundly interesting to me, so…
Penny: Yeah, well…everyone has their taste, don’t they? Right. Andy was a very interesting person, not that anybody could really experience really how interesting he was, because he was very introverted and alienated, I guess is what you’d say. He was a strange man in many ways. And Quentin Crisp was also a very odd person. I was very close to Quentin Crisp and I knew him very, very, very well, and he had an extraordinary intellect that, because of his—well, really, his belligerence—I mean, he really couldn’t hide what he was. For people listening who don’t know who Quentin Crisp was, he was an effeminate, gay Englishman who, at the end of his life, achieved a great deal of fame, one could say, because a film in the UK in 1975 brought the question of homosexuality into public discourse for the first time. It was called “The Naked Civil Servant,” and it was played on PBS, so it was not only in the UK and Europe but also in America. And Quentin became quite famous in his early seventies, and he was a brilliant, brilliant man. He was an aphorist, which means a person who comes up with one-liners, and an organic intellectual. He was quite, he had quite an extraordinary brain. But he was also very limited, because most of his life he was delegated to a very, very narrow social milieu. Because he was so effeminate, and because he could not hide what he was—as he said, “every closet door I knocked on, they said ‘not in here.’”
So, at any rate, my work, I started doing theatre…actually the first theatrical thing I ever did was, I somehow in 1967, when I was seventeen and first came to New York, I ended up with the Hog Farm. And the Hog Farm was a very famous commune in the 60s that roamed around America in busses, and they’re the people who fed everybody and did all the triage at Woodstock, so they’re famous for that. And I somehow knocked into these people as a homeless street kid might, in 1967, and they had a gig at the Electric Circus, which was a big performance place that catered mainly to Long Island teenagers and kids from the boroughs. And they were hired to be, like, professional hippies at this event, and I found myself unwittingly standing next to Wavy Gravy, also known as Hugh Romney, who in the 50s had been a pretty successful stand-up comedian, and then with Ken Kesey and these other west coast psychedelic people, he became Wavy Gravy and started the Hog Farm. And unbeknownst to me, I was standing next to him, and I guess he got this idea that he should put somebody up in the air over the crowd of kids who were dancing--Sly and the Family Stone were playing on stage—and he said, “we’re going to pick you up and we’re going to sail you over the heads of the people,” and I was like, “OK.” And I guess he chose me because I was small, and I went sailing over the heads of the people, and I think I’ve always had good instincts, I understand systems, so I tried to be very entertaining as I was sailing through the air, you know, not just be a lump of coal. And I ended up on the stage with Sly Stone and started dancing, and looked over at Sly Stone who was like, giving me super-dirty looks, like GET OFF THE STAGE, and I probably did the first stage dive in rock and roll history! I dived into the audience, and they sailed me back over the heads of all the people ’til I got to the very end and was dropped off. So that was my very first performance, and then not long after that, I was introduced to the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, which was the original glitter-glam rock’n’roll political theatre of the 60s that influenced everything from Hair to Rocky Horror to David Bowie. And the New York Punk scene—which I hate that term, “punk” because punk means somebody who challenges you to a fight and doesn’t show up—so I just was never “punk,” I’ve always been an outsider. Or in the 60s, when we didn’t want to be hippies, we said we were “freaks.” So there were freaks and hippies. So John (Vaccaro) who started the Playhouse of the Ridiculous really tuned in to the darkness that was in America that “Hippy is dead”—that was 1968, and they had a big funeral for the Hippy is dead in California, and also in the East Village, that was the fall of 67—either the fall of 67 or the fall of 68—was when Groovy and Linda were murdered in the East Village and then everything turned very dark. But Vaccaro was already—he was older, he was probably close to 40 in the late 60s—their manifesto is, “our situation is beyond the absurd, it is absolutely ridiculous.” So they were looking at the world as a place that had gone beyond the absurdity of Ionesco and the other people who were looking at modern life as a real degradation of the human spirit. And his theater was extremely political, he was the first person who had a rock’n’roll band onstage, and a lot of the people who came out of the Playhouse created what was called the first Punk scene, which was people like Ruby Lynn Rainer* and the Rednecks and Wayne County, who became Jane County, and he influenced the Dolls, the New York Dolls were influenced by Vaccaro…the Stilettos, which started with Elva Gentilly* and Debby Harry and then morphed into Blondie. So that’s kind of the milieu I come out of as a teenager. So if the theater that I was involved with in the 60s was about tearing down the fourth wall—between the public and the people on stage—then I grew up to tear down the other three walls. So I have made my own work since 1985, I started making my own work when I was 34, after performing for 16 years in other people’s work. And my work is political humanism, investigating the human condition, what it means to be human in 2019. My relationship is with the public, as opposed to with critics or with arts administrators, and it’s quite a miracle that I’m able to do my work all over the world, given that i make a lot people nervous. Not the audience so much, but certainly the gatekeepers, which is why most of your audience has never heard of me. Let’s put it this way: I’m not on Fresh Air, you know what I mean?
Francis: So would you consider yourself a performance artist, a poet, a…
Penny: Well, I am first and foremost a poet. And for people listening, there’s many ways of being a poet. So I didn’t write poetry for a very long time, because I was very insecure. I still have a great deal of lack of self-confidence and lack of security emotionally. I know it doesn’t sound, I don’t sound like an insecure person, but you can be a really smart insecure person. So I believe what I perceive. I’ve spent years honing my mind, through reading and argument, and listening to people who are smarter than me, and being around people who kicked my ass and didn’t let me have soft ideas. I live every day as a poet and always have since I was a child, meaning I go where the day takes me, and my investigation is into my place in the world, my place in this life. And originally I fell into being an experimental theater actress, that’s what I did with the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, that’s what I did with Andy Warhol. Andy asked me to become a Warhol “superstar” in 1969 and I was in his film, “Women in Revolt.” I found the Warhol scene really boring…
Francis: Why?
Penny: Why? Because it was boring! It was boring, it was like a lot of..you know…people act like the Warhol scene was like some kind of a French Foreign Legion that you joined—I mean, there was all kinds of people there, and it was mainly about how they looked. You know? And a lot of really crazy people who wanted a lot of attention for absolutely no reason. So Andy wasn’t discerning, he was neither discerning nor loyal. You know, people would come and be around and he’d have them be around, and it could be anybody. I always say that about the Underground, people always say, “oh, I wish I could be part of the Underground, I’m just not cool enough”—but the Underground’s not about being cool. It’s about being willing. People who were interested in those particular kinds of activities that were going on gravitated to a scene like the Warhol scene, and people tried to, you know, be part of it. I did not try to be part of it. Andy chose me from the Playhouse of the Ridiculous because he wanted people who were performers but who weren’t crazy. So that’s a real problem, not being crazy, if you’re an artist, because a lot of people are really crazy, and I’m not. I’m a very, very grounded person. I don’t think being an artist is special, OK? A lot of people want to be artists because they think it’s special. They think it’s going to set them apart from people, but I just don’t see it that way. And just like I don’t see being gay as being special.
Francis: I personally feel like the vocabulary of politics right now—it makes it impossible to have a really meaningful conversation and figure out what to do. Because in my mind, left-right politics, all that, especially when you get people who go to college and they want to be a lefty and they read all this old 19th Century stuff, and everything—but I feel like we’ve kind of come to this point now where there’s power that is held by very few people, you know the resources and the potential to affect that power, the potential to use technology and resources for the betterment of most people instead of very few, we never get that conversation going because we’re using all this old terminology, and it’s not…
Penny: i agree with you. I agree with you. Because most of it’s really poseur, you know? It’s not really people who really want to do anything. I mean, people call me an activist all the time, it’s written about me—I have never called myself an activist. An activist is what your community calls you, and they call you that usually after decades of selfless, anonymous service. And people just go around calling themselves activists, you know, it’s like you’re not an activist. An activist is somebody like Carmen Febone* who for like 60 years fed the poor on the Lower East Side and nobody knows her name. That’s an activist, you know? But this is the thing, it’s the gentrification of ideas. [tweeting in background] That is my bird clock, by the way. So a different bird will sing from time to time. [tweeting] That clock belonged to John Vaccaro, who passed away about, I don’t know, about six, seven years ago, and I inherited that clock, which means I have to think about Vaccaro every time it chirps. Someone was asking they were calling me an activist in an interview yesterday, and I said I’m not an activist. I think if I was a real activist, when I was in Zanzibar two years ago and I realized that they needed schools for the children there, and they needed fresh water in the villages, I would have stayed there and I would have made that mission my mission, because it was right in front of me. I’m not an activist, but I am a helper in my community. People know that when they have a problem, they can come to me and I don’t extend my help only to people I like. So in that sense, I am active.
Francis: [Do you agree] we’ve been revolving around the concept of inclusion, and how every everything is…I like how you used that term “micro-split..”
Penny: micro-splicing…
Francis: micro-splicing and, it’s so true that there’s all these little causes and they’re not connected…
Penny: There’s no coalition. The 60s worked because there was coalition. Now, you think that the powers that be don’t realize that coalition is dangerous, and so why not have all these little micro-spliced groups? And then what do you do with the college students? Because throughout history, it’s been the young who have led change in the world, because young people are always idealistic. And now all those kids, all those young people—if they’re at all interested in anything, which a lot of them are not, a lot of them are just operating in some kind of Kardashian reality—but the rest of them are all split up into little different groups. They’re either into Black Lives Matter, or they’re into the MeToo movement or they’re into trans rights or they’re into gender-fluid-queer-something. No…people do not come together to fight the common enemy.
Francis: Which is…?
Penny: Well, I would say it was that democracy was an experiment that failed. It never happened. We had more or less democracy at different points in this country’s history, but we never had a full functioning democracy. And I think that what really happened that people don’t look at is, the only trickle-down that ever happened was the trickle-down corruption at the highest levels of government and commerce, that happened with Halliburton and with Enron and all of these terrible scandals that we had in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, where honor, justice, honesty, all of these values no longer have any meaning in our culture. What has a meaning in our culture is, getting over. Did you get over? You got over? We respect you. Did you get the money? We respect you. We’re speaking right now from the Lower East Side, the East Village Lower East Side of New York, which, you know, in the 60s up to about 1983, there was a really big difference between uptown and downtown. People who lived downtown were usually aligned with left politics, they were anti-war, they were anti-rampant capitalism, they were for clean water, clean food, free sex and…meaning the freedom to choose…and it was a very big difference to uptown. And then around 1985, this started to change, and all of a sudden the values of downtown changed. So you would have a performer like Taylor Meade, who was also a Warhol superstar, but Taylor Meade came to New York in the 40s, he was a poet, he was aligned with the Beats and he was a very, very, very funny comedic actor. Well, he used to perform with Bill Cosby and all those famous comedians in the 50s, and when Bill Cosby would see Taylor Meade, who didn’t have a pot to piss in, Bill Cosby would sit down and have a talk and a drink with Taylor, and nobody thought, “oh, there’s Bill Cosby, he’s a multi-millionaire. There’s Taylor Meade, he’s poor.” Nobody would think that way, because the values didn’t include that. Nobody cared—so you’re a millionaire, so what? You had to have more going on than celebrity or money. That was an actual intrinsic value in the downtown art scene. That’s gone now. They’ll do a flip for Taylor Swift or for any other, you know, psuedo-celebrity—and I say “psuedo-celebrity” because to be a celebrity is different than being famous. To be a celebrity is to be celebrated for being able to do something. Taylor Swift is not rock star—Prince was a rock star, Taylor Swift is an insect. But the world has changed, and people don’t want to face it. So as you’re saying, Francis, that we’re using outmoded language, political language, the truth is that just everyday contemporary language is completely in a crisis where you can’t say anything, only certain people can use certain words…
Chris: And we need to remember fifty different pronouns…
Penny: Right. Exactly. And this is all—it’s just fascinating to me, because people think there’s some freedom in this. And the reality is that in the 80s, there was this huge politically-correct movement, which was the same thing. You couldn’t say “queer,” you couldn’t say “dyke,” you couldn’t say all these words or all these words you couldn’t say. And that was coming from the right wing. And now it’s coming from the supposedly the left. But I’m always, like freaking out when people talk about the Left, because what Left? You know, there is no Left. There’s nothing radical going on in America. Really, Trump got into office because of the abdication of the centrist middle class from the working class. The working class in this country is flipping out. Of course they’re going to go fascist. That’s what they do. Nobody cares about the fact that you cannot put food on the table for a family of four without both parents working two jobs. I grew up, my father was put in a mental hospital from a beating he received at Ellis Island when I was three, and I was raised by my mother and grandparents. And my grandparents were very elderly, and my grandfather worked til he was 78 years old, as a ditch digger for the city of New Britain, Connecticut, and my mother was a sweatshop seamstress. When I met Robin Morgan in 1967 at the Yippie hotline—Robin Morgan, for those of you who may not know, is a famous feminist, she was one of the original high-profile feminists in the 60s—and she invited me, Abby Hoffman gave her the other side of the storefront, and she started WITCH, which I do not remember what it stood for, but Women-ITCH, whatever it is, google it. They did the big demonstration against the Miss America pageant in 19…I guess it must have been 1968. I went to one of these meetings, she invited me to one of these meetings she was having, and I looked around the room and all of the women who were there—there were about eight women—most of them I knew as being the girlfriends of leftist political guys, including Robin Morgan. And Robin Morgan was telling me, “women don’t want to be housewives.” And I was looking at her, and I’m like, “my mother sews 70 hours a week in a sweatshop, she’d love to be a housewife.” I would have loved to have my mother at home. Are you kidding me? My mother would come home, and we couldn’t talk because she was exhausted from sewing in the sweatshop. So, you know, this privilege that accompanied a lot of these people’s ideas, you know I’ve always preferred the underclass. At least you can be direct with them, and you can be forthright and honest. I think the biggest problem that we’re facing right now is that it’s impossible to communicate with anyone. No one is allowed to stumble through ideas. In contemporary neuro-science, we know that you learn to form ideas by talking. You know, it used to be thought that first you were thinking, and then you spoke. But actually now it’s understood that you speak, and through speaking, you form ideas. And that’s the important reason for having a vocabulary, because the larger your vocabulary, the more expansive your thoughts can be. But right now we’re living in a time that is getting just narrower and narrower and narrower as far as expressing ideas.
Francis: Did you read Victorian literature? They were so elegant. Their vocabularies were immense compared to ours.
Penny: I know.
Francis: And, you know like…
Penny: I mean that was part of being seen as an intelligent person, was having a vocabulary. You know, I do my bit, I go to universities, and I talk to the kids. A lot of times they’re angry with me, and I say, “yeah, you’re angry with me,” I said, “but in 30 years I’ll be dead but you won’t have any water to drink.” You know, there are dark periods in history.
Francis: This is a dark period.
Penny: Yeah. And they usually last, like, 30 years.
Francis: It’s been at least 30…
Penny: Yeah…(laughter)
Francis: I remember I saw you at Saint Mark’s Church one New Year’s Eve, and you did this bit about the Age of Aquarius…
Penny: Oh yeah.
Francis: And how, everyone thought it was in the 60s but it turns out that it’s not for another 30 years or something…
Penny: Yeah.
Francis: ..or maybe it’s coming?
Penny: Well, I mean, the thing is that…look at what we’re living with. Monsanto. In what Kardashian world would anybody ever have thought, with the history of famine on this planet, that making seeds that only last one cycle is a good idea? Who thought of that?
Francis: Why is that even legal?
Penny: But it’s insane! It’s completely insane. When I was in Tanzania, last year, I met three biochemists, and they were telling me that in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, all GMO things are illegal. Because they’ve already lived with famine. They’re not falling for that. But look at what’s happened in America, the greatest of America once was that we could feed all the people who lived here, and that there was free education for everyone. And we are losing both. It’s staggering. I mean, in my lifetime—I’m gonna be 69 years old in another month and a half—and I never would have believed. This is something even with the paranoia the 60s, we could have never come up with this scenario.
Francis: No.
Chris: We were so paranoid as hardcore punk radicals, we were constantly…you know, we’d be hanging out at Frank’s house trying to figure out who among us was the CIA plant and everything like that…
Francis: Oh, there was definitely a couple.
Penny: Yeah.
Francis: They were the ones that interrupt constantly, and you know, like derail you, make sure you can’t accomplish anything…
Chris: I don’t think we were important enough for the government to worry about.
Penny: But the thing is that you still wouldn’t have been able to come up with the scenario that we’re currently living in. The thing that’s interesting is, I was in Australia during the presidential primaries, before the primaries. And one of the Australian political papers asked me to write a personal view of American politics. And I knew that Trump was gonna win. And nobody…everybody wanted to…”how did you know Trump was gonna…”
Francis: Yeah, how did you know?
Penny: It was..you know, it was as clear as the burning cross on your lawn! It was what America wanted, it was the unspoken America, that that’s who they were aiming at. The America that thinks Trump is a successful businessman. I mean there’s something wrong with this world—they can publish, and promote, and say, that every single business of Trump’s has gone under, and you’ll still get a whole bunch of people going “he doesn’t to be in bed with the government, cuz he’s rich.” Americans are super-stupid.
Francis: Do you know what’s coming after him? Some Democrat or…gets in office and realizes that he totally gutted us financially. And then they’ll say, well, we have to responsible, we’re going to have to do some austerity again.
Penny: Right. Well the austerity should come from the government itself. Stop paying all of these retirement benefits of hundreds of thousands of dollars for all these people who’ve been Senators and been in the government. The whole thing makes no sense, none of it makes sense, and it’s not…it’s not something that can be fixed. So if it’s not something that can be fixed, the way I see it is, like, reminds me of how I felt on September 11th. On September 11th, when the plane went through the second tower and I was watching it from the roof here, and I knew that the plane was gonna go through the second towe—which all the people on all the roofs around me somehow didn’t know. And I kept screaming, it’s gonna go into the tower, and people were looking at me like I was crazy. I thought, OK, now we’re gonna get New York back again, ‘cause nobody’s gonna want to be here. And instead what happened? It became the go-to place. So what will happen is, there will be a series of cataclysmic natural events, that we already know, that our government is not prepared for any emergency. We saw it with Katrina, we know nobody’s minding the store. During Katrina we watched it on television for days. Like, OK, you can bomb the shit out of Yemen but you can’t drop bottles of water and food into that…
Chris: The Superdome.
Penny: That’s right. There’s something really wrong. I mean we already know that Americans can’t work. Americans have lost the capacity to work, right? They took all the jobs, and then…so we have several generations of people who have never had to really be able to do something. I mean, we are dependent on Mexicans and on people coming from Eastern Europe and places where people can still ..make things. I mean, I brought a pair of shoes—there’s a shoemaker on Second Avenue, and I had this pair of shoes that I bought in Scotland, and they had—they were real witch’s shoes, and the toe turned up. And I used to tell everybody they were flat when I bought them and then I put ‘em on and the toes turned up—and I had had them in San Francisco, in a theater that was very damp. And the platform, which was made out of foam, disintegrated. I went everywhere with these shoes, I tried so many different places; I brought them to England, I brought them to L.A., I brought them everywhere looking for someone to fix them. And I was up in Woodstock and this woman said to me, “by the way, if you ever need a shoemaker, there’s this great shoemaker in the East Village on Second Avenue and Third Street.” I thought that was the oddest thing that someone would say to me, so I went there with the shoes. I put them on the counter and I said, “Can you fix these?” And he looked at ‘em, he said “100 dollars.” I said “done. When will they be ready?” He said “in one week.” The next day I get a phone call, “they’re ready.” And I go and pick them up at another shoe store, on First Avenue, and the guy brings me the shoes and they look brand new. I said “oh my god, you fixed the platform!” Remember, this is like an Arabic shoe with the toe goes skyward, right, it’s like round and up. And I said, “oh you fixed the platform,” and he said “what?” I said “you fixed the platform.” And he goes to the back and he comes back with the old platform. He had built a new platform. I looked at him and I said, :Are you from Uzbekistan?” And he said, “Why do you know that?” Because only somebody from Uzbekistan would still know how to make a shoe. Not just repair a shoe, but he made the shoe. I mean it was so outrageous, but this is what we find, that we’re losing really basic skills. I mean, New York City—you know, this is not a great place to get stuck if something really bad happens. Where’s the food? You know, we already know, like the flooding that’s in this neighborhood. They’re selling multi-million dollar apartments in Miami Beach, yet everyone knows that within 15-20 years, Miami Beach is not gonna exist anymore.
Chris: I’m currently sitting in St Petersburg, Florida and my house is at 35 feet, so I’m rooting for climate change so I can sell it as oceanfront property…
Penny: Well, there you go. But you see what I’m saying—we’re not facing, our leaders are not facing, the reality. I’ve said for a long time that what we need is a million-child march, because it’s the children who are going to inherit all of this.
Francis: Well, there’s that Swedish woman…
Penny: Yeah, the girl. Yeah, she’s fantastic.
Francis: Yeah, she’s…ok, she might be one little glimmer of hope, optimism, that generation…
Penny: Yeah.
Francis: ‘Cause eventually the kids are gonna be like the 60s again, where they’re gonna say, you know, if you’re an adult, we’re not interested in what you have to say, you’re…
Penny: Well not only that, it’s just the betrayal is tremendous.
Francis: Yeah.
Penny: The betrayal is enormous, because this is what bothers me—what is wrong with these oligarchs who are not even interested in the welfare of their own spawn? Right? They’re going to suck all the value out of the planet…
Francis: They have compounds that they’re gonna, you know, run to when the shit hits the fan…
Penny: Oh yeah, in Uruguay and stuff. Yeah. But it’s funny, because like I don’t know what they think. I mean, it’s like just the concept of a gated community—who wants to live in a gated community? So let’s get back to, now, what can be done. So I really am in the business of Being and Becoming, that’s what I’m trying to always evolve, and I’m a big promoter of authenticity and individuality for people. And that’s one of the ways that we can help ourselves…
Chris: One of the recurring themes on the podcast, from a lot of our guests, has been making small changes and, you know, if you get millions of people to make small changes suddenly it’s a big change.
Penny: That’s true. People stop using straws and plastic wrapping and…I’m here with an iced coffee in a plastic container, and I realize, oh, I should…I bought my stainless steel straw, you know, and I should take my stainless steel canister to get my iced coffee. I agree, small changes. But when it comes to what’s going on in the government and the failure…see, one of the things I’m most angry about is, I’m angry with the House of Representatives and the Senate and the Congress, because they are not protecting us from what’s going on in the White House. How dare…how dare the White House sell off our natural resources, our state parks, our highways…and these things aren’t even publicly known. You just get dribs and drabs of that information. We have Democracy Now! is one of the few news sources where you find out what’s actually going on…it’s a very sophisticated government. Corruption and evildoing are not new inventions. These were understood all the way back to the seventeenth century. So there are safeguards within our government to protect us from people taking advantage…and yet Trump has been able to have his own offspring as—what are they called?
Chris: Senior advisors…
Penny: Advisors! They’re doing all kinds of business, on the back of Americans—it’s like nobody’s minding the store. We’ve all been in that position, we’ve all been in a position where, all of sudden something goes wrong and there’s a free for all. And we’re like…well….we shouldn’t really be doing this but…I’m taking this. I’ve been there, I think most people have. And that’s what’s going on in the government.
Francis: So a question that comes to me a lot lately is, what can people who find reverence and beauty in nature, what can we do to…how do we interact with people who don’t have that? I just see it as something that potentially…
Penny: I mean, that’s…this is like the million dollar question, because if people have no respect…I mean…there’s Chris Tanner’s mother. Chris Tanner is a painter in the East Village, and his mom lives in North central California, and she has been an ecology person as a Congresswoman, etc. for 60 years. And she is seeing right now all of the things that she helped put in place be overturned. If it’s happening in California, where people care a little bit, like nobody cares here. I don’t know, I don’t know what the answer is. But I think that the card that holds the change is going to be an ecological disaster card. Something’s gonna come from the outside that’s gonna lay something down. And I don’t know what that is, but…that’s my sense. It’s…there’s not going to be a change because of the good wishes and well meaning of people. It’s gonna be in response to a crisis.
Chris: We’re bumping up against our time limit, so…
Penny: Yeeeah! We did good.
Chris: I’ll just ask you the same question we ask every guest: Is there anything you’d like to promote or pimp or tell people about that they should go see?
Penny: Well, everyone can go to my website, which is PennyArcade.tv—you can write to me, anyone can write to me who would like to write to me, at mspennyarcade@gmail.com. Invite me to your town—I like doing my work in different cities and meeting different people, and you’re all welcome any time to write to me with any of your problems, I can solve all your problems…my problems I’m not so good with, but other people’s problems are a piece of cake. Stay in touch!
Chris: Well, thank you so much.
Penny: Thank you.
Francis: Thank you.
—END