Photos by Chad Laird, Chris Millstein, Issac Tacaca, Morgan Blair, Timothy Saccenti, and Mark Shue
Some Favorite Memories from Monster Island
by Andrew Deutsch
• Making New Year shirts with Maya Hayuk at Kayrock Screenprinting;
• Recording Fireball’s first record “Blessed Be” shortly after people moved into the building. That record sounds so fucked up. I’m guessing a huge part of that is due to how energized people felt in that space. It was still not built out.
• Being a part of the Brad and Barry Holiday Show. Getting to do the inaugural “Sexy Chimney” dance.
• Cats
• Performing with “Papa Crazee & Friends”.
• My birthday party where Maya organized a group gift of my first iPod. I felt lucky & like I was on the Jetsons.
• Being in a band formed for one month - the Monthers. Members included Wolfy (from Kayrock screen printing), O.J. and Carly Rabalais (from X-Ray Eyeballs). Choice cuts included “Jam on Toast” and a cover of Home’s “Lost It”. I played drums.
• Cameron Michel & Vashti Windish.
• Enjoying a sweet offer from Rachel and Erik at Secret Project Robot to store my belongings there. This was just one example of supportive things everyone involved with the space seemed to do.
• Any of the multiple Holy Jolly Sabbath’s held there. Mulled wine, Black Sabbath records played in sequence, and an upside-down Christ- mas tree with 666 lights on it. A favorite winter holiday. The one where Arthur Arbit knocked over the candle sculpture scared the shit out of me. I can overreact, though. It doesn’t take very much.
• The block party where it was pouring rain all day and inside monster island was hazy and steamy. • Positive Future Prophecy Posse with Wolfy and Maya Hayuk.
• Watching Oneida play in the Ocropolis (in the basement at Monster Island).
• Animal Collective in the Monster Island basement.
• When Etain would visit and makes everybody happy with her smile.
• Golden Triangle show at Secret Project Robot.
• Watching movies & video games projected on the side of the tanks across the street from the building.
• Having a movie night I hosted at Secret Project Robot shut down because the police thought there were too many people there. There weren’t. They were just being bullies.
• Amen Dunes at Live With Animals.
• B-B-Q.
• Raul de Nieves.
• Participating in Maya’s “Paint Pour” that coincided with the space’s closing. It was beautiful.*************
FAT BOBBY (OF ONEIDA AND PEOPLE OF THE NORTH)
Mighty Robot was amps stacked and leaning, flimsy stage bouncing, sound board smoking with Barry or Fitz or Jeremy throwing hands up and muttering/yelling, bodies packed so tight that the stairs up from the street were an extruded flesh brick dimly rippling with the distant thrum of some vicious band that either would or wouldn’t be around next month, and if you could slip out onto the roof to the left you might get some air to breathe, but otherwise you just had to trust the smoke and the beer and the sweat to keep you safe until you pried yourself out onto the southside streets at 3:00, worse for wear but better for life.
Secret Project Robot (mark 1) was everything to everyone, Ocropolis in the basement below, Kayrock above, the Monster Island complex a buzzing hive all the time, but the things that matter most to me were sitting in the Robot bar with Leah, Bloody Steeler fan, watching the Super Bowl, staying friends beer after beer even though the Pack-
ers beat the Steelers, just a few of us chilling and screaming – and also a Saturday allnighter in June, a 10-hour Oneida set in the bag, bobbing slowly at that little tiki bar to Bruno’s reggae 45s from midnight to 4:00, bodies sprawled, passed out in chairs and on the floor of the performance space, waiting till dawn for the last O set, the only time we ever played Absolute II, and the sun clawed its way under the steel roll gate, the room packed at 5:30 AM with people opening up, closing down, and waiting for pancakes. The pancakes were gone by the time we finished the set, but I’m not mad anymore. My piano is buried in the rubble of Monster Island, probably a heap of wood, wire, felt smeared across the old Flux Factory basement floor, pentagram from the inaugural Holly Jolly Sabbath at the root of the whole thing.
SPR 2 – Bushwick – a monument to persistence and the real statement that this is our lives, not just a thing we did once – Erik and Rachel’s dedication made whole and public in their dogged chase after art and community, Oneida hidden away this time in the backest of back rooms, behind the stage, behind the times, and behind the eight ball.
There are so many things that happened there. It provided a place for some of my favorites to be comfortable and uncomfortable and angry and stoned and confident and above all, productive. Of course, a part of me wants to cry about it ending but it didn’t, really. It just relocated. The way places like this need to relocate. Because of The Man. Which fuels the fire. Repeat. So I’ll just cry about having to walk more when I’m going places. Then I’ll realize I’m getting more exercise walking so much. Then the endorphins kick in. Then the tears just vanish. Then bulging arms bust out of either side of my heart and start flexing, because I’m so healthy.
Where some Monster Islanders relocated (I’ve missed a bunch of stuff)
• Much of the energy has moved to Bushwick at the new Secret Project Robot. Oneida, Raul, Live with Animals and Erik & Rachel went there. They’ve moved into a space with a beautiful yard, so the warm months there are great.
• Maya Hayuk (who had a studio upstairs and curated the murals on the building) opened a new studio building near McCarren Pool called the Center for the Advancement of Contemporary Art (CACA) that provides studio space for tons of bad asses. My Egyptian New Year Birthday party (held with 3 others who share that birthday) was nuts.
• Vashti from Live With Animals opened a second hand boutique called Worship in Bushwick. They have great parties as well. • Kayrock’s screenprinting studio is in Greenpoint; Mollusk Surf Shop moved around the corner.
• Todd P started 285 Kent before Monster Island closed. He’s gone on to Trans Pecos in Ridgewood.
THE PFPP
"I think the best thing that came out of Monster Island for me was this (the PFPP) poster. It’s ideology pursued by a small group of us after it’s creation with the intention of proliferating it’s spirit was the best thing I have from that dysfunctional clubhouse."
- Wolfy / Kayrock Screenprinting