I’ve known Jim Fourniadis since we played music together in those desperate years we experienced right out of high school. We were both sad figures, for whatever reason makes someone look at life that way.  But we used that desperate sadness to write music together, as much for the cathartic spiritual cleansing, as for the creative purge.   Eventually Jim moved on to the East Village, and via Flynt Michigan, to San Francisco.  Along the way he formed The Rats Of Unusual Size, and became the heart and soul of that amazing band, that is a story unto itself for another time.

While In San Francisco Jim transformed his vast creative energy into the Dark Room Theater .  I get a lot of email from people trying to sell me things to make my cock harder, to make my lover, love my cock longer. And I get a lot of email begging me to let them make me rich.   I also get a lot of email from machines dressed like woman, and coming on to me.  So when I get one of the weekly mails from the Dark Room, I breath a sigh of relief, for its pure proof that among the shysters and the shylarks, there’s something real out there deserving of our attention.

Glubdub :
Where did the idea for starting the Dark Room come from?

Jim Fourniadis:
Well I had just moved to California, from Flint Michigan, it's a long story, and I was having real trouble getting involved in the local music scene. In fact I was on the verge of giving up when Chicken John Rinaldi, an old friend and notorious huckster/performance artist, hooked me up with a gig managing a small black box, mufti-genre performance space called Spanganga. I hadn't acted since my days at film school or done live theater since high school, but I soon found myself more at home in that place than I had in 10 years of playing punk rock. When Sean Kelly, Spang's guru, decided to chloroform his space to concentrate on being a play write, I picked up the reigns, and the Rolodex, and moved around the corner and opened The Dark Room. In a way we  were pretty lucky because we skipped the first 2 years of opening a new place. I knew all the clientele from managing the place and they suddenly needed a new place to rehearse and perform, it was perfect.

GD:
Who did you start it with?

JF:
I began it with several colorful characters. First off was my beloved wife, Erin Ohanneson. She also was not expecting to be a theater person. We met during my first production, while still at Spanganga, a stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. She was dating my co-writer/director and childhood pal Marcus Solomon at the time. Since she had worked on film doing both sets and props as well as costuming(she did the work on the Station Agent) She naturally wanted in on our production. She blew me away right from the start. Funny, smart and gorgeous. Knowing my pal Marc, I was pretty sure he would screw up his relationship with her so inviting her to join the team was a win/win  situation. I think our eventual romance fuelled the spirit and character of our early productions and helped shape our character as a "Mom and Pop" fringe theater. Our other partner in crime from the Spang days was Lighting director/producer chick Ty McKenzie. She helped us avoid becoming too square.

Together we staged a theatrical blitzkrieg, mowing down any sensible rules that might inform our activities. In Short order we tackled adaptations of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Zippy the Pinhead, The Twilight Zone, Clue, The Princess Bride, Young Frankenstein and Duck Soup, to name a few. The Greatest thanks, however, must go to the woman who twisted my arm to get involved in the space from the beginning, Heather4 Macalister. You see I would have remained loyal to Sean Kelly forever, so I rebuffed this woman's first propositions to get involved in her space. Eventually, though, fate interceded and Sean gave us notice. Heather was delighted at the turn of events. Erin and I arrived to find a place that was in shambles, but Heather knew we could turn it around. In fact Heather was stubborn in her belief in her vision, and woe to those who came to a cross purpose with her. It finally took cancer to silence her, but not before she fought a valiant battle. In the end her physical condition took precedence and she had to leave the theater she so lovingly massaged into being. I still miss her.

GD:
How did it evolve?

JF:
Well I'll be honest, my patience for committee is fairly low. The first people in our collective were kind of your classic, rule by consensus hippies who held up any action by filibuster. I believe in democracy, majority rule. We argued our name for a month and a half. We finally settled on Mission Impossible, and then our resident valley chick decided that she didn't like Tom Cruise. I finally convinced them that the "Dark Room" implied some trendy satanic subtext. It was maddening at first, but eventually do nothings like her become weirded out by a flurry of activity. In short order we began producing shows and the place became very busy, and one by one the shlubs fell away.



Soon the performance/art crowd became fond of us. I think the regular theater crowd kind of took a dim view of our preoccupation for nostalgia and popular culture. If you had ever heard my band, The Rats of Unusual Size, we skewered popular culture while still professing affection for it. I always considered what we do as a bit like the old Friar's Club celebrity roasts. They would rip each other to shreds, insult after hysterical insult, and you would congratulate those who zinged you the hardest. It wasn't just all in good fun, it was how you showed you loved each other. Now a days when we do bad movie night, which is kind of our live version of MST3K, we will show flicks like Warriors, and fucking love that movie, but man is it easy to cut that shit up!! Bad doesn't mean bad, I guess it just means "you ought be ashamed of yourself....well done!"  So a lot of the Burning Man and Cacophony Society types seemed to get it, and their early support gave us the freedom to take chances and do stupid shit just because we thought it was funny.

I stumbled upon Tobias Stretch's work while digging through Youtube looking for videos to include in our Glubdub Cinema .  He had just finished his video for Radiohead's Weird Fishes, which was an amazing piece of film in its own right, but Tobias' body of work including Illuminant and Woodsong was equally as impressive.  Tobias has a unique approach of combining whimsical puppets and and the sprawling beauty of his natural surroundings, and the result is a fantasy world of animation carved from the green hills of lush grass, and the swirling blue skies of real life.

Photo from Woodsong

Photo from Weird Fishes

Photo from Weird Fishes

By Derek Rinaldi

I think the year was 1988 and my friend Jerry and I were taking a trip out to Rockford, Illinois for a skateboard contest.  We knew a bunch of other friends were already on tour of the mid-west and were stopping there on the way back east to New York.  Our flight arrived late in the evening and it was still a bus and a cab ride from Chicago O’Hare Airport to this somewhat remote part of Illinios.
 
 
Once the contest was over, we decided that we’d forgo our return flight home and hop in the van.  The plan was to hit a few other skate spots and hit Six Flags in Ohio on the trip home.
 
Well as they say, they best laid plans are,,,,blah blah blah
 
Bad idea #1
 
The van breaks down and in a town call Des Plaines, Illinios somewhere about 1 am.  Yes Des Plaines, the thriving metropolis that produces some of the auto industries’ finest fuses.  The same hot spot that shuts it’s tired eyes about 9 pm each evening, yes the entire town, and all 58, 989 of it’s residents.  Needless to say, that getting towed to a gas station that would have a repair shop that just may open in the morning was a challenge indeed.
 
The part we needed to get the van running was something simple.  My lack of any mechanic skill or knowledge, whatsoever, prevents me from having a name for this part.  But, if we could find one, we’d be golden.  So, the new plan was to break up into groups and comb the surrounding neighborhoods for a van like ours and ‘acquire’ this part.

 
Bad idea #2.
 
Des Plaines sits adjacent to Chicago.  But unlike it metro brethren, there is no wind.  So in mid august on a good night, you may be lucky that the temp cools to a chilly 90 degrees with 100 percent humidity.  Not exactly pristine conditions for a van full of 11 sweaty, smelly skateboarders who are at least 12 hours away from the shot at a truck stop sink, let alone a shower.
 
Most of us decided it would be much more comfortable sleeping on the sidewalk than inside the van, at least there was a chance for a slight breeze.
 
Then it dawned on us.  Jerry and I still had our return flight that we hadn’t missed yet.  So, somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, we called a cab.  We gathered our things hopped in a 10 minute cab ride to Chicago O’Hare airport.  We arrived just in time for the flight
 
If you looked close enough from the plane’s windows you could almost see the van, still parked in that lot.  With a crew of sleeping skateboarders scattered amidst the open doors and sidewalk.  Like kids on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa, they hoped a mechanic would arrive the following day and would be baring the gift of repair to send them on their way.  Ahh, the dreams of children.
 
 
Within 4 hours we were back in New Jersey, sleeping in air-condition homes.
 
The tour van made it back to New York 2 days later…
 
…We’re all still friends.