Getting With The Program: Q & A With The Spook Lights

Curvacia VaVoom: Well, I just happened to be obsessing on this very idea the day that I met SCARY MANILOW. We started chatting, after he petted my invisible dog, Mert. I could tell just from that that he was someone I REALLY needed to become friends with. He made some off-handed remark about wasting his whole day off playing pinball and traipsing around town with an ass pocket of whiskey wearing a tattered shirt and broken shoes. I made an off-handed remark, being sarcastic about my recent views on “getting with the program.” So I looked at him pseudo-disdainfully and said “You need to GET WITH THE PROGRAM.” He immediately jumped onto what I was saying, and we began talking about what a REAL program would be like. This reinvention of a outsider world that would embrace both of us and our collective interests seriously happened within the first forty minutes of our knowing each other.

Rae Bourbon

I don’t believe in the national religion of romantic relationships or “love at first sight” but that very moment sizzles in my mind to this day as a burst of passion. I was not remotely interested in meeting another person, much less a male lover, or in sharing my life with anyone and collaborating on creative projects as an extension of amour, but I knew I was attracted to this other person who crossed into my own universe, and damn if that person didn’t drive me MAD WITH LOVE.

To further emphasize the outsider universe of the Planet Sleazetopia or THE PROGRAM: our cat Ruby was an aging and abandoned little alley cat, howling on the streets and mourning for love. She was an outsider in the regular world. But in our house SHE’S THE MAYOR OF THE PLANET SLEAZETOPIA!!

Half of our records were thrown out in alleyways, covered with mildew in rotting covers. But in our house THEY ARE THE SOUNDTRACK OF THE PROGRAM. That overgrown lot over there, with all the weeds and broken glass in it, has been labeled a “community eyesore.” But in The Program, it’s an EXOTIC WILD GARDEN and OUTDOOR BALLROOM for me and SCARY MANILOW. That abandoned building, the one with a sign in front of it that says it’s a future renovation project for corporate office space? Here, right now, with us it’s a SILVER SCREEN for ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM through the medium of SHADOWS AND MOONLIGHT.

Scary Manilow: Curvacia and I have always been aliens, living in our own individual headspaces, completely isolated from the people around us. The fact that we met is nothing short of remarkable; I’ve never encountered anyone that I’ve been able to relate to so completely. Our universes merged into a single, all encompassing psychogeography, and that was that.

On one of our thrift odysseys, Curvacia discovered a record by RAE BOURBON, a drag-queen from Kansas City (who was later found guilty of having her landlord killed—he had her dogs impounded and put to sleep when she couldn’t make rent, which is a horrible thing to do—sounds like he got off too easy, if you ask me), and on the album cover was the phrase FOR ELDERLY DELINQUENTS. And those words really spoke to us; we totally adopted them as our code.

For one thing, in the most literal sense, both of us ARE ex-teenage delinquents (and frightfully PROUD of it, I must say). . . and living in Lawrence, Kansas is enough to make ANYONE feel elderly—it’s a small, midwestern college town, where the average age is 22. By the time you pass 30, you might as well file for Social Security and strap on an adult diaper. It can be mentally frustrating, if you let it get to you, but I’ve always secretly longed to be a crotchety old fart.

Glen or Glenda

So here we are—a couple of aliens with a Program, two elderly juvenile delinquents adrift on Planet Earth. The idea came to us that Sleazetopia was a planet of teenage hoodlums, and we were exiled for aging beyond juvenalia. And all of the things that make up the Program—our garbage treasures, our love of throwaway culture, our secret passages through town—this combined, interpersonal mythology of ours was a result of us studying human culture, trying to assimilate, to fit in. Of course, it’s IMPOSSIBLE for us to fit in: the aspects of human culture that appeal to us most are the very things that the staus quo chooses to discard, from old educational filmstrips and sleazy rock-n-roll instrumentals to whatever crazy old lamp or scrap of flashy fabric catches our eye.

Our cat Ruby—the Program’s official mayor and mascot—was a throwaway pet that we adopted after someone else chose to abandon her. Most of our furniture and housewares came from the alleyways near our home. Even the pop icons we worship—people like Korla Pandit, or Doris Wishman, or Pedro Infante—pop culture has, for the most part, left them all by the wayside. We kind of feel like it’s our duty to rescue these tossed off bits of so-called rubbish, piece them together as best we can, and present them back into the public consciousness.

The mainstream has become so whitewashed and homogeneous that it has no choice but to spill over into the underground. We’re sick of suffoctaing down here in the world’s boring, monochrome sewage. The only way for us to fight it is by forcing the Program on an unsuspecting (and unknowingly eager) public—hopefully we’ll inspire other like-minded aliens to come forward with programs of their own and this tide of banal horseshit can be reversed once and for all.

Click to read more from The Spook Lights on. . .

Elderly delinquents
Low-budget movies
What’s wrong with Hollywood?
Horror movies and what’s next on The Program

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5