For a little while I used to run the Billboard Liberation Front‘s website (INB4: no, don’t even bother asking. I have no idea how to reach them anymore. The Old Man is long since retired, and I stopped talking to everyone else I knew through the BLF maybe 15 or 20 years ago. Maybe try contacting them through their site.)
Anyhow, funny story, for maybe 5 or 6 years after I stopped associating with them, I still was getting cc’ed on their website’s comment form submissions, which nobody paid any attention to anymore. In late 2007, a request came through from an arts organization in Belgium, asking if the BLF would come give a lecture at a “Culture Jamming” arts festival called “The Game Is Up”, thrown annually at the historic Vooruit Art Center in Ghent, that year’s theme being “Art For Sale”, a cross-eyed look at art and consumerism.
So, as a joke, more out of a boredom and needing a moment’s entertainment than anything else, I wrote back, saying while we’d love to help further the arts in a developing nation (yes, I led off by insulting them) but that we were a bunch of broke artists ourselves, so if they wanted us to come speak at their festival, they’d need to pay our airfare to Europe and back, provide us lodging while we were there, and, for a speaker’s fee, we would require a pint of fine Belgian ale. Just for a goof, I googled the festival for a couple of the names of people they’d already got to speak there, none of whom I’d ever heard of before, and said that I’d always idolized them, and all in all probably had a grin plastered across my face for the entire minute and a half I spent on it before forgetting about it.
Well, I had not stopped to think that they’re in Europe, where society actually funds things like arts festivals rather than making you tapdance for it. So imagine my surprise when we got another email from them a few weeks later, saying they had the budget to fly three of us from San Francisco to Ghent and back, would put us up for a week there, and would provide us each a pint of fine Belgian ale… they just needed to know where to send the check!
Fast forward a few months, and myself and two gentlemen who called themselves “Milton Rand Kalman” and “Blank DeCoverley” were winging our way to Europe for a week of hijinx, art, eating uitsmijters for breakfast, and to deliver a lecture we were in no way qualified to give, all on the Belgian government’s dime. I booked us to fly in and out of Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, about an hour from Ghent, so we could see Amsterdam while we were in the neighborhood, too.
There were some amusingly awkward moments, such as when, almost immediately on our arrival, the festival organizer told me, “wait here!” and then disappeared for a few minutes, to return with an artist I’d pretended in my by-then-forgotten original reply to them to idolize, to give me what she obviously assumed and had planned to be an eagerly anticipated introduction to an artist apparently of some reknown but whose name I’d in truth picked at random off their website. I played it straight, and I think the general hubbub of a weekend night in the main lobby of an 11-day-long arts festival provided adequate cover for my momentary confusion.
Plus, besides the art and history and other benefits of a free trip to Europe, we got to hang out with outrageous theatrical anti-consumerism activist performer Rev. Billy of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, who was at the festival to give the main talk, right after ours on Saturday night of the festival, and who was, by the way, when sitting around a pub table with him, every bit as both friendly and jaw-droppingly hilarious to talk to as anyone who’s caught one of his shows might imagine. Actually he was funnier in private, in quiet conversation he made one or two screamingly funny but absolutely filthy offhand remarks, worthy of a George Carlin or a Lenny Bruce, as hilarious as anything I’d ever heard him say on stage but which never would have been at home in his act.
So: we got a week in Europe under made-up names, gave the talk in masks, the government of Belgium paid something like $3000 for it plus whatever our beautiful accommodations in the historic Faja Lobi guesthouse cost them, and nobody there ever even found out our names! Good times, for sure… If anybody from that event happens to run across this page, like the wonderful festival organizer Eva De Groot or the million other involved people whose names escape me after all this time but who helped make it otherwise indelibly memorable—hi guys, this is the real me. We had such a great time, thanks for it all!
Only upon writing this up now, 15 years later, I’ve found a post mentioning our Vooruit talk at “Art For Sale” on the long-running blog of Régine Debatty, who introduced us that night.
Bonus photo, just for fun: The only direct evidence of my association with the BLF, a photo from a 2000 SF Chronicle article about the Billboard Liberation Front, in which the photographer managed to snap the shutter when I was 3/4 obscured by someone else… I didn’t even make the caption:
