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Interview: Sean Kelly of Spanganga by jamie flam In October, 2001 Sean Kelly of sketch comedy troupe Please Leave the Bronx had a calling.: turn a nondescript storefront nestled between the highly visible Beauty Bar and a not so highly visible liquor store in the Mission into an inexpensive haven for some of the city's brightest artists, performers, and producers to shine. Mission accomplished. But even after a succesful three year run in which they housed hundreds of performances, art exhibitions, and even shot a movie, Spanganga is gearing up to close its' doors for good. Lunchboxing met up with Sean to talk about what ultimately led to the decline of one of the city's most treasured art spaces, his history and future as a comedian, and the state of the arts in San Francisco. Tell me about Please Leave The Bronx. When did you form? When and where did you perform? What was the goal for the group? Please Leave the Bronx formed out of a group called the Johnny Kats in 1998. The writers in that group included 4 of the 6 members of PLtB's caset. We'd written about 20 sketches and had found a successfull formula for writing at least a sketch a week: Drink a bottle of whiskey, fight about the premise, characters and plot then write the sketch, then fight some more. We were stoked. But the 13 person strong improv / sketch troupe had only done 1 show totalling 3 nights. So, as writers we took off on our own to perform what we'd done. The original crew was Melinda Whitehouse, Dave Chambers, Chris Liebel and myself, along with one performer who didn't write named Lindsey Brown. We added one more writer/performer, Jon Fast after our first show. We named the group by coming up with several names then we called phone sex lines and asked the girls which name they liked the best, we did our first show two weeks later in Popcorn Anti-Theater I was under a pile of garbage when the crowd arrived and had poured Boones all over myself. As far as writing our main goals were to avoid what we saw on tv, things like the generic game show skit, the sit-com skit or news cast skit. As far as performance, we wanted to do as many shows as was feasible, get drunk and maybe get some writing jobs. We'd take anything, any stage time that was offered to us, a sketch on a moving bus in our underpants, one of the Sister's of Perpetual Indulgence Easter performances, the steps of some private residence in Marin ... anything. We lasted about two years and wrote about 100 sketches and did about 100 shows including stops in LA, New York City and lots of Seattle. The best part of that whole ride, besides the alcohol induced paranoia, was some Scandinavian guy asking me for an autograph before one of our UCB shows in New York. He had no idea who I was. I signed a flyer anyway. What is your overall background in comedy/performing? I started early. My parents were musicians and I walked on stage during their set at the New York State Fair when I was 3. I was in several punk bands, sang backup for one of the women who wrote for Gloria Estefan, ran a recording studio and label in Miami, but always wanted to do comedy. So I went on auditions, wrote my own stuff and waited for something to happen. Nothing happened that way, plus I used to drink a lot so nothing went anywhere. I finally caught a break with the Johnny Kats then stabbed them in the back by splitting the group in half. I guess that's show biz. Where did you grow up/go to school? I grew up in New Orleans and Miami and went to the University of Miami for creative writing. Isaac Bashevis Singer and James Michener were on the writing faculty there, but by the time I got to the higher level courses, they were no longer lecturing. Miami was a fucking warzone and made me appreciate simple things like eating and breathing quite a bit. It was also the funnest place ever. When and why did you come to SF? '95. I got flown out for a tech job. I chopped up a piano with an axe and drank Chinese Whiskey that cost 25 cents at my going away party. What was the comedy scene like in SF when you guys started doing shows? When I came to, meaning stopped drinking myself into a coma every night, the Holy City Zoo was already closed, most of the indie comics had already moved to LA and things were pretty slow. The Mock Cafe, run by Mike Spiegelman was where it was at. There was BATS and Killing My Lobster. BATS has a somewhat provincial structure to it which guarantees you're gonna be stuck doing and scene' in a class room for months / years before getting stage time. And the Lobsters ... well, I shot my mouth off at one of them a few times and that was that. Did you ever see sketch comedy as a means of making a living? Do you still? Hell no. Anyone who has made a living at this is a lot funnier than I'll ever be. Comedy from what I remember is just fun. Making people laugh is fun. I don't buy all that bullshit about people needing immense compensation for art. Just as long as the crooks aren't getting it instead of the artists. Even people who are long-term successes can end up hungry from working in show biz. The tech industry will always pay more than being a comic -- a lot more. And just who would I be entertaining if I was to make such a living? College students who get the in joke for a few years before they run off to the burbs to breed? Fuck that. We've seen what showbiz does to genius time and again. So what do you do to pay the bills? I usually tell people, 'I hook up computers and make them work good.' The long answer is I'm a Database Administrator and Information Technology Director at a Wall Street Analytics Firm. We call stock market analysts on their bullshit. I work with a lot of people smarter than I am, which is cool. Sounds cool. So was opening a space something to temper your creative side with your practical side? When did it open? I opened Spanganga in October of 2001 with the goal of having a permanent home for PLtB. But we weren't getting along, so we ended up disbanding shortly after I opened the space anyway. I had a chip on my shoulder and wanted to throw up a big 'fuck you' to allthe non-profit spaces in the citythat wouldn't rent to comedians, who treated comedians like they were the scum of the earth, who wouldn't even take our phone calls when we could sell out a venue. Now those spaces are in trouble because much of the funding has dried up and they'll rent their state of the art non-profit stage for about $50 more than Spanganga -- even to comedians. Times have changed. What were your other original goals for Spanganga? Did you see having a gallery and theatre space side by side as something novel and marketable? I wanted there to be a place for people that had the balls to lay out a couple hundred bucks to get a crowd in and have some fun doing shows. The gallery was an afterthought. My friend Abner Nolan, also from Miami, was starting to have some success with his photography and we thought it would be cool to have a commercial gallery do things that most commercial galleries would never do. Abner scored a lot of press. I still think of the gallery as more as a museum annex than a retail space. Most of the art was interactive, was interacted with and if it sold, it sold to the other artists in the show. There was a lot of challenging material in the gallery over the last couple years. I'm proud of it. But, it wasn't what I intended. I just wanted a stage and had spare square footage for the gallery. My planning style was and still is to just go for it, when 'it' gets defined can and usually is after the start of the process. I had no grand vision, no plan except to get people to do stuff. Grand plans for the arts and artists should be left up to the blowhards and the geniuses. Describe some of the acts have you had throughout the stay Spanganga. Which have worked the best and worst? The most successful stuff we've done are the movie adaptations and having all the Bay Area sketch groups at one time or another. Yuri Lane's beatbox pieces were a big, big hit and he's moved on to DC, New York, Chicago and everywhere else. The Tentacle Sessions, Spiegelmania, some of the movie nights and the sex parties have also been successes. I still feel like the best thing that I had no involvement in was an event called Splitsville where a prominent couple in the SF Art Scene (Katy Bell and m.i. blue) broke up in front of an audience of about 100 people, including their closest friends. They read emails from their first few weeks all the way through to the end and then took questions about the break-up from the audience. It was very, very sad and mind blowing at the same time. Wait a minute, back up. Sex parties?!? We did two play parties at Spanganga. One was called Splosh, it wasfood-based. We had about 120 people attend Splosh 1 and Splosh 2 and it wasvery messy, dangerous and fun. It was the kind of event that turned everyoneback into a kid again. Whether people had a lot of sex or not was up tothem, that area was separate from the giant food fight and pudding writhing.The other party is called Darkness Falls and still goes on. We basicallyturn the lights down very low so people have to just go for it without theflirting and the cruising. I see. ANYHOOOOO... Who have you seen as your major competitors? How has the landscape of spaces like Spanganga changed sinceyou opened up? I'd consider Spanganga a suckier, dirtier version of The Marsh. The Marsh still provides a stage in the Mock Cafe for anyone ballsy enough to try comedy for FREE two nights a week. The Marsh consistently has high-quality comedy without the two drink minimum. Venue 9 and the Exit are also completely rad. Other than those spaces Spanganga has no competition. I mean what are we competing for anyway, who can go bankrupt first?!? Business-wise, The Climate Theater now hosts several of the acts that I'd prefer never to see again. Which is a win-win for everyone. You were originally triple (?) the size. Why did you give up all the extra space? We gave up the large part of the space because it was impossible to get the city to give us an under 300 occupancy even though we had egress. And, I was losing $5000 a month waiting for the permit process to finish. The SF Building Department is more interested in code compliance, which is their right. And the SF Planning Commission is a political and administrative clusterfuck and has been for some time. The idea that San Francisco is an easy city to start and keep an art space running is false. The Board of Supervisors attempted to protect families from getting kicked out of the Mission en masse and as colateral damage made it very, very difficult for new businesses to move into many types of commercial property. I had to sign up to run for supe and mayor to get any sort of approval. It's a shame. People want peace and quiet but they also want the cache of the arts. Well the arts are noisy. So what led to the realization that it was time to close shop? Was it a personal decision, or is it a statement on the current market? The final final was a combination of things. First, was the realization that any month that either Helena Nolan, Jim Fourniadis or myself took a break from producing show, I'd end up owing an extra $1000 of rent out of mypocket. It was only a matter of time before each of us ran out of gas producing 4 month long shows a year. To me that meant that there weren't enough rentals. Why was that? Simple. Many, many more venues are now up for grabs for pocket change. That's a good thing. More venues means more opportunity for people to take their first step. It also means I didn't have to be the one venue anymore. Second, the endless string of phone calls and emails got to me. Third and most importantly, my inner circle of friends have been clamoring for some new art, performance, or whatever from me. They want to see a new project that isn't the space and I want to give it to them. They also want to see me happy and running the space is emotionally taxing. I can't have a full-time day job and run Spanganga and do new stuff under Spang's current configuration. So this space will close and I'll take some time off to do my thang. And maybe open a workspace and start a theater company with some of the actors from the productions Helena and I have worked on together. So what's your own thang? What are some projects you are looking forward to working on? Auditions, writing, working out, rocking out and possibly my first vacation in 4 years. Right now I'm working on a one-man Misfits set and writing a story about this crazy woman I used to sing back-up for in Miami. I'm also reading a lot to get the idea machine running. Knowing what you know now, would you do Spanganga all over again? What lessons did you learn from it all? Who knows. If someone said to me: "You could have Spanganga or own your own home" It would be tough to refuse the home. My personality has been been altered completely by the project. I never thought it would be this successful. I also never thought it would be financially debilitating. I'll never forget the firemen chainsawing the back wall out of the space to save a cat on Dateline or Splosh or many of the things we did. I learned that people, especially artists, need a lot of special care and validation. I learned that I am not the person to give them such a thing. I learned I'm impatient with people that don't have their shit together. I learned just how much work I can squeeze out of myself in any given day. Did you enjoy having a space in the Mission? Do you think Spangnaga would have lasted as long in a different part of the city? Yes. I love the Mission, it's as close to home (Miami) as it gets, but a lot safer, if you can believe that. People comment on how dangerous the Mission is and it always leaves me wondering what kind of privileged life they had as a child and then I get jealous. Besides, I wouldn't have been able to afford to move into a space anywhere else in the city that had connections to BART and MUNI. So who's taking over the space now? I don't know. Given the state the Mission is in, I'd guess a Dollar Store or a Check Cashing Store. I'd be stunned if it was anything else. And I'm sure the city isn't going to do something crazy like make it easy for something culturally uplifting to go in there. That's too bad... Still great weather though, yes? It's pretty nice. Girls are out in their skirts. Spring is here. |
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