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REV-99 (Big screen projection of improvized television. Audio Video performance) "Rev-99... bizarre architects, attempting to construct a saturnalian collage in which the not-sense assumes sense in its own precise and detailed logic ... strong intensity totally improv."---Kathode, Rome ----------------------- "(Rev.99's) new experimental improvisation exists as a document of cultural jamming."---Mark Corroto, All About Jazz ----------------------- Big Screen media chos & resolution. It's a work in progress, in progress. accident and composition, exploiting third world tech & sugarcane = carbon/nation. The future isn't bandwidth in Montana, a lab with a bandanna or banging anorexics; it a mess. It's more fun.---"SPOOKEY SPLOOGE"
The "GET UNDERGROUND" article: Freddy’s Bar in Brooklyn is a Mecca for artists and writers with no stomach for hipster poseurs or overpriced drinks. One television above the bar is often different from the standard sports or news that crowd most bar televisions. At least one TV at Freddy’s is usually showing video art. The videos, a breakneck collision of images, holds and breaks patterns and is quite captivating. Bar patrons will stare at the screen for extended periods of time and get lost in the strange visual landscape. That visual landscape is usually the work of Donald O’Finn, who works as the manager of Freddy’s. Every other Wednesday the backroom of Freddy’s plays host to Rev. 99, a visual and musical performance by a diverse team of artists and performers that came together about a year and a half ago. If Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Sidney Bechet rose from the dead and started directing the evening news, the result would look somewhat like Rev. 99 (and be a big improvement on the evening news). "Rev 99 is best defined as a big screen projection of something approximating live, improvisational TV," says O’Finn. "It’s like jazz for your television." O’Finn started his career as a painter and painted for 20 years. "I was pathetically serious about it," he says. Then he quit. "It wasn’t fun anymore. It was always about getting big shows and trying to get into galleries. I was having fun with video." "I always sucked the glass nipple of TV as a kid, and again as an adult," says O’Finn. And so he became a video artist. He came to collaborate with the rest of Rev. 99 through a culmination of coincidences where many artists who dabbled in both music and video were introduced to one another. Chief among them, credited with being the founder of Rev. 99, is 99 Hooker. 99 Hooker ("First name: 99; Last name: Hooker") credits several sources for the development of his taken name. He says that when in Boston he lived on 99 Hooker Street, and that the name seemed like "the great fake American name." 99 Hooker, (whose real first name is reportedly John), usually goes by simply "Hooker". This has led to confusion when being his company is reported by second-hand or third-hand sources ("…and so this church mother in Arizona said ‘I heard Glenn was in New York with a hooker!’"). Hooker has performed widely as a musician. Glenn, a friend and fellow musician who was a self-appointed heckler in the audience at Freddy's, played with Hooker in a band called ‘Happy New Year’. "He’s the best sax player I ever played with," says Glenn, who played the drums. He described an inventive set up Hooker used for his saxophone that included a wah-wah peddle and an equalizer. "He had this thing figured out where he didn’t even have to blow into the sax," and managed to wrest quality jazz from the instrument. "I came from a musical side and Donald came from a painting and video side," says Hooker, who also writes poetry. "I realized that TV was my form." Making art out of the images people are bombarded with every day is also part of the group’s motivation. "What do we do will all this stuff that’s been dumped on us?" asks Hooker rhetorically. Rev. 99 has both a musical and audio/visual component. It’s audio/visual component will be coming out with a DVD this summer. The musical wing Rev. 99 has two CDs out. ‘Brother’ Russell Scholl was ordained as a minister in the American Fellowship Church via the U.S. mail. He registered with City Hall and is legally a minister in most states. He has performed weddings, including Hooker and his wife Kathy Coogan, a nursing student and Rev. 99 member. Brother Russell performs Rock, Gospel and Bluegrass music with a bands and acts as the originator of many of the video clips for each Rev. 99 performance. "I’m an obsessive maniacal collector of cultural data," says Brother Russell, who stays up late to tape late night TV and swoops upon video stores going out of business to expand his trove of compelling images. "I have an obsessive compulsion and I’m collecting all the time." Along with Donald O’Finn, Ross Bonadonna is one of the final filters for what appears on the big screen at a Rev. 99 performance. Bonadonna runs a recording studio not far from Freddy’s. He came to the group by knowing Hooker through their musical connections and had done video art of his own before joining Rev. 99. Brian Griffin generates the first audio sounds for the performance. He matches samples and sounds with the video images and sends his sound to Ross, who incorporates it into the final piece with Donald’s final version of video. Griffin plays drums in a jazz band called Smit-Haus. Rev. 99 is usually about six or seven people, and some members come and go as their schedules and other commitments allow. "It is sometimes a somewhat amoebic ensemble," says Brian. "We’ve had a live dancer that comes and goes and a DJ," says Hooker. Rev. 99 does not usually perform over the summer, as Hooker and his wife live in California during the summer months. Members make it known that Rev 99 is a stand-alone performance group and doesn’t want to be made into a group that fills in a background for other groups. The times Rev. 99 has worked with bands, its usually been on projects the members support. Rev. 99 performed abbreviated sets at Southpaw for a Lurch benefit and at the Brooklyn Lyceum as part of a festival with a several bands. Other video artists show their work in dance clubs and become incorporated into the dance club scene. That’s not in the cards for Rev. 99. "Freddy’s is our home," says Donald. "It’s an odd place. It suits us well." It is time for the show to start and the members of Rev. 99 take their places. People file in from the main bar with their drinks to watch the performance. Hooker stands and welcomes the audience. "The first piece we’re going to do is in honor of our president," he says. The audience does not need to be told that the show will not be an endorsement of George W. Bush. Brother Russell works his way through several stacks video tapes. Several monitors that the group uses are visible to the audience. The final product is projected onto a big screen. "Improvisation is all about process," says O’Finn. "We try to display the parts so people can see the process." A big screen that has been set up flashes images of war, news clips, bits from old horror movies, commercials for toy guns and war toys, live video of the audience and patrons at the main bar, streaks of light, and other images that meander from the quotidian to the bizarre. The audience can see monitors that sit on the group’s control panels and that are suspended from the ceiling or attached to the wall. Griffin sits hunched over a keyboard, ready to produce a variety of samples and sounds. Whereas a lot of video art is cleverly blended montages taken from other sources, the Rev. 99 team blend images on the screen and create source images themselves with video cameras. Coogan positions herself beside the giant screen and has a small camera that she points at different images: a logo for the KISS song ‘Love Gun’, pictures cut out of newspapers, objects that were made to look larger than life. She also has a string of Christmas lights hanging near her and moves the camera back and forth in front of them, creating a dizzying streak of colors. Anna Ehrsan, a sculptor, is assisting Rev. 99 this evening and wanders the audience and the rest of the bar pointing the camera at patrons, neon signs, and other pieces of bar and city life. During the set, the music softens and Hooker gets up and delivers a monologue as images keep streaming behind him. He recounts his experiences as a Greenpeace fundraiser in Boston and his meeting a woman whose son was a traumatized Vietnam Vet. The woman’s son had loved animals and had contributed to Greenpeace, but was too damaged from his experiences in war and had recently committed suicide. It is a moving monologue that gets warm applause, particularly as the U.S. is now two days past its unilaterally imposed deadline for Saddam Hussein’s exile from Iraq. The performance moves on to its second piece. It is not as war-centered as the first in terms of images. Hooker delivers another monologue, one that encourages people to fight for things worth fighting for but decries killing people. The official Rev. 99 set is over. Donald thanks everyone for coming and says that the group is just going to jam for a while on their own. All applaud, but no one leaves. Like an audience being treated to captivating jazz, everyone stays to see what they do. They serve up another audio and visual session, and the group retires for a while to smoke and have a few drinks in the main bar. The Rev. 99 group and audience members enter the bar proper to find that the war on Iraq has started. An evening of artistic television ends with the thoroughly uninspiring visage of George W. Bush delivering his justification for going to war. Already bombs are falling in Iraq. It adds an even more poignant edge to Rev. 99’s performance. The mood in Freddy’s is somber and the President’s comments are not enthusiastically received. "This is not Rev. 99," says Coogan. "We have nothing to do with this asshole."
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