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Jeff Stark
Photograph: Scott GleasonJeff Stark

This man is your passport to New York City's secret side

Meet Jeff Stark, ambassador of NYC's most exciting, leftfield and hush-hush events

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Yes, New York City is being developed and gentrified faster than you can say Luxurycondosburg, and it’s tempting to think that once-glorious Gotham has turned into a big, shiny tourist attraction. But scratch beneath the gleaming surface and tap in to the really good sources and you’ll discover a secret city—one that exists beyond the norm, beyond the guidebooks and beyond even Googlemaps. Secret New York is glittering with hidden treasures—from parties to theater and art, all of it wild and unregulated—if only you know where to look. And guess what? We're making it simple for you. Enter Jeff Stark, an ambassador of all things secret in New York City. He’s an artist and playwright whose free weekly mailing list, Nonsense (nonsensenyc.com), has become indispensible to adventurous New Yorkers over the past decade. It’s an urban passport for those who want to spend their free time doing something extraordinary—and at the very least, fun. Peek at the city through Stark’s kaleidoscopic lens and the possibilities of going out in New York are limitless. So start spreading the news—just keep it underground.

A lot of New York's secret events are theatrical. Interactive productions like Sleep No More are huge now. Why is experiential theater on the rise in NYC?
I think it’s definitely a response to black box theater getting pushed as far as it could go on one side, and then Broadway pushing all the way to the other side. And experiential theater, or immersive or whatever you call it, fits in the middle and it fills this need that we have to experience something together. I think it’s a human need, based on the fact we’ve been doing it for millennia. And then there’s the possibility that it’s a reaction to all of the disconnect that’s built in with staring at screens all day long. You stare at screens and make all your plans and talk to everybody through that medium. Like, man, you just need to be in a real place, you know?
 
Do more secret happenings occur here than anywhere else?
I don’t know that that’s true, I was just in LA and they’re in the throes of that for sure. I think that everybody wants to be in on a secret. I don’t think that there’s anything that’s particularly New York about that. I would say there are more just because there are more happenings going on here than anywhere else [Laughs].
 
How did the Nonsense list get started?
I had moved here in 1999 from San Fransisco, and there was a San Francisco list of strange happenings called the Squid List—which turned into Laughing Squid. When I got here I was looking for the kinds of weird things I could on Squid List, and there wasn’t that, so I decided I should just start my own. It wasn’t necessarily that I was looking for the secret stuff, I was looking for the stuff that didn’t have a name, that didn’t fit into categories. The stuff that wasn’t going to be in The Times. Just because people wouldn’t know where to put it. Because, what do you call a party that happens in the middle of the street with a battle with two battling half-chicken half-penguin puppets? It wasn’t exactly about secrecy, it was about wanting to find something different.
 
Was there a core group of you organizing these things?
Yeah, on the first day we had 100 subscribers. It was everybody that we knew, that was the first list. And I would say there was a community of people. The idea with Nonsense is that it was for people who were going to organize their own events. It was in order to be able to share what you were doing, and to help find an audience of other people who were creating stuff. It’s a participatory list. We’re not looking for events that are about you buying a ticket and sitting in a seat. We’re looking at events that find a way for you to be a part of it. and then the explicit message is that you go to this stuff and you realize that you can create culture just like everyone else.
 
So Nonsense started with 100 people and now it’s….?
Larger! [Laughs].
 
You don’t want potential posters to freak out about the size of the list?
That 10,000 people are going to show up to their kitchen. That’s the kind of stuff that goes on Nonsense. It’s not just parties, it’s events that literally happen in your apartment. Theater pieces for one person. I want the people that are producing that to not feel like their stuff’s going to get overrun or blown up.
 
Can something stay secret in NY?
I don’t know if something can stay secret but it can be very hard to pin things down. And it’s also really easy to put yourself in a position where just to know the secret is enough. Rather than to actually experience the secret. That’s the reason why we subscribe to Time Out, and the reason we subscribe to Nonsense, the reasons we read the listings at the front of the New Yorker. We can’t go to all that stuff. But we want to know. And to think that somewhere there might be a speakeasy going on inside of a water tower—it makes our city more magical. The possibility that we are surrounded by secrets. It makes our city more exciting. And you don’t neccesarily have to go to that water tower. You might want to, really badly. But it’s still exciting knowing that it might be there, or that it happened.

Do you have any favorite secret events?
Oh yeah, anything that Wanderlist Projects does, I’m always interested in what they’re doing. They take big risks. And they really care about their audience and they go into places that no one else goes into. They were part of the Watertower speakeasy. They did a game in the Domino sugar factory about two months before it was knocked down. They have done wine tastings on abandoned islands. They’ve done musicians playing inside of caves. They go to really, really out there places. And they do it with a lot of guts and precision.
 
It seems like your projects are about the joy of being alive?
Absolutely. I do these events that are in pretty unusual places. And for a serious explorer, like a Steve Duncan kind of guy— he’s a really hardcore urban explorer guy. He’s been in every sewer tunnel in NYC. He’s climbed all the bridges. He’s one of those adrenaline guys.  That guy sees everything, goes to the furthest reaches. I can’t even imagine the stuff he’s seen. I’m not really interested in that sort of adrenaline ride. What I’m interested in is finding these places that are a little bit more accessible, very beautiful, generally off-limits a tiny bit. And then bringing people in and creating something around those spaces. I like narrative. I like community. I like theater. I’m interested in those. And for me there’s a real connection to the joy of living, in all of that.
 
There’s a thing that’s not cool about this sort of “secret” thing, and it’s when secrecy is somehow confused with exclusivity and a “premium experience”. That is not interesting to me at all. I would love for everyone to see my play. I think that my play is really great [laughs] and I’m so impressed with all the work that people have done, and I want everyone to see it, I want to tell the world about it! But. I have a really small audience for a really good reason. I can’t have more people on a boat – the boat will sink! Or, if I’m doing something in a tunnel that I’m not supposed to be in, I can only take 40 people at a time because if we take 100 people at a time we might get caught.
 
Have you had to turn people away?
Oh yeah sure, all the time. Like, the speakeasys in the Watertower, which was not something I did, but they could only have 8 or 12 guests at a time inside of that thing. It’s the functionality of it. Exactly. That’s a function of the event and not a planned scarcity, like a VIP room. You know.
 
Which is also a phenom in big cities…
Correct. Right, and sometimes that thing is confused and occasionally I’ll have people chasing down my events in the same way as they’d be chasing down access to a VIP room. And it makes no sense to me.
 
Like Stefon on Saturday Night Live.
Totally [Laughs]. That’s just not the intention at all. It’s really about being small and being secret for a function. I think it should be said that the reason why a lot of this stuff is secret is because we’ve had these bully mayors, you know? That have turned NYPD against culture and joy and life [Laughs], and made it incredibly difficult for anybody who wants to put people together in a room to share an experience. I can’t think of all of the parties that I’ve been to that’ve been busted and shut down. I’ve been to jail for opening beer for people. And all of this is done by these crazy crackdowns that have been happening now for 20 years.  And so the secret thing is a function. We’re not just doing it to make it hotter or more exciting. We’re doing it because we want to create something beautiful and fun and unusual and different. And not be shut down by over-zealous cops. For no good reason. Maybe DeBlasio will set a new policy, they certainly have not yet. The cops are slow to respond to top-down management, so we’ll see.
What would make life as a secret promotor less stressful?
One thing that could change right away, we could have a policy that allows dancing to happen in New York City without having a permit. That would be great. You can get shut down for pretty much anything. They shut you down, arrest people and write you citations, and then they don’t hold up in court, they’re just bullshit. But that happens three months later. Your party gets shut down and everyone loses their time and investment, they don’t get their stage time or to show their film. And you do that enough times and you burn people out.
 
Would these events still be fun if they weren’t secret?
I think New York offers enough adversity without cops arresting you for trying to have a party [Laughs]. There’s still enough obstacles in New York, like, finding a space where you can make something happen. Being able to pay the rent! Making sure that the train is going to run that night.
 
Do you think that the gentrification of New York poses a threat to the artistic fertility of these projects?
Yeah absolutely, there used to be a time when there was no such thing as a warehouse party that would cost more than $20, as recently as 2009. And now the standard is $50-$60 bucks. Bang On is a good party [but their] lowest price is $45. It’s because they have to find these places that are so expensive and pull the correct permits, there are so many more obstacles for them. I’m not interested in going to parties that are $45, I wanna go to a $5 party! They do [happen] but they don’t happen at this scale. There was a period around 2005 when large parties were getting shut down non stop, and that was the moment when I got entirely sick of that and said, Alright, I’m not doing big parties anymore. I’m going to go to a place where no one will be able to see what I’m doing. And I’m gonna do these secret dinners. There’ll just be 40 people, it’ll be totally of the grid, no cops will even know that we’re there. You can’t hide 2,000 people, but you can hide 40. You can be small and secret and quiet. That was my response. That’s what artists do: we constantly respond to conditions. So the difficulty with rising rents, the difficulty with the police, the unknown of what the Deblasio mayorality will turn up – artists will respond to it and keep doing stuff, there’s no way around that. People have to come together.

What are some trademark Jeff Stark events?
[Laughs] I do the Secret Dinner series. There’s one that’s for 40 people and that’s based on a particular site. It’s a collaborative dinner, like a potluck, so everybody has to bring an item, but they’re told what to bring, and then there are performances that are site specific to that particular place. We did one that was at the top of some abandoned grain silos. And we lowered down a singer into one of the silos on a ley rope and he sang an aria as he was being lowered down into the silo. So that his voice echoed up and you could hear him bellowing up from the silo. It was a totally amazing performance. And that’s entirely site specific and you just can’t imagine it happening anywhere else, you know? So then I also do the Secret Dinner Series that’s based on portraiture and it’s for two people. It’s a dinner I serve for two people in an extraordinary place, and I shoot photographs of them as I serve this dinner. I’m trying to capture something of the relationship between two people in an intimate moment.  In Subway tunnels, rooftops, abandoned buildings…
 
Tell us about Reese's Feces, their event is on Nonsense this week.
Oh yeah [Laughs, reads from press release] "Avant puppeteers… grotesque sounds… You may see or hear Puppies Hold Hands, Debris Bouquet…. Dress comfy and warm and bring a towel and picnic… don’t be late. Each set will be 5-10 minutes." These guys have been performing for like, three months. It’s just like, that is the essence of a secret event, is being pushed to a place where anything can happen. That sounds to me like it’s a bunch of dirtbags getting together and fucking around—but in a space where there aren’t rules, that’s where culture happens.

Follow @nonsense_nyc and @jeffstarked on Twitter, subscribe to the Nonsense NYC list at nonsensenyc.com

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