Tao Lin is a prolific author, editor, and sometime Gawker rabble rouser. The Stranger calls him “a revolutionary.” 12th Street: You have two collections of poetry out, one novel, a collection of short stories, and […]
Everyone Wants A Swallow Of Fall
Friday, October 17, 2008 After my doctor’s appointment, I got on the train. (I had a biopsy done on my neck and now I must wait three days for the results.) I don’t want to […]
Shane Michael Manieri – The Bread and Circus is Not Dead
Shane Michael Manieri has started our live readings with his poem, The Bread and Circus is Not Dead You can get to the Radio Section by looking at the links at the top of the […]
Plumbing the Issues
My interview for this week fell through so I thought I would just touch on a few issues that have recently been making my hairline recede even more than it already had before this election […]
Rape Kits, Pitbulls, and Libel; Just Another Normal Day With John Reed
Last week 12th Street was considering its public stance. We did an interview with an author who is no stranger to controversy. John Reed, author of Snowball’s Chance and organizer of next year’s 9/11 Toga […]
12th Street is Accepting Submissions!
12th Street’s print journal submissions period is officially open, and this year it runs from October 15th- December 15th, 2008. That gives any undergraduate enrolled in The New School the opportunity to share their best […]
Pop Culture, Mad Libs, and Lingo: An Interview with Elisa Gabbert
Elisa Gabbert is a poet, editor, and collaborator extraordinaire. From “Smoking Villanelle,” written with Kathleen Rooney: The situation was not without charm but I’d never, ever do it again. There must be a better way […]
Writers And Tightrope Walkers
Writers and Tightrope Walkers A few nights ago, I went to the movie, Man on Wire, a 2008 documentary film, directed by James Marsh. The film follows tightrope walker Phillipe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk across […]
Will You Shut Up And Listen To Me?
Perhaps you saw the clip of the angry old man addressing John McCain at a Republican rally in Wisconsin this week. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ykBr3SO6sg) “I’m mad!” he growled into the microphone, posturing with one hand firmly on […]
Comic Oil
East Village comic and writer Chris Sifflet touches on the essentials, including politics, the future of crappy celebrities, Steve Fossett, and what it would be like if Sarah Palin didn’t look like Sarah Palin.
12th Street: At 12th Street we work to promote literature as an engine of democracy, with fiction, poetry, and non-fiction as “oil” to that engine. Where does stand-up comedy fit in?
Chris Sifflet: I heard Jerry Seinfeld talk, after George Carlin’s death, on Larry King. He was talking about politics and how comedians tell the truth, and he said “comedy is a little truth and a whole lot of lies.” I think now, especially in New York, comedy has kind of taken a shift. I only go for honesty. When I first started it wasn’t about that, now I’m totally honest, I talk about stuff that actually happens.
12th Street: So you swing more toward the non-fiction realm?
CS: Yeah definitely more toward non-fiction.
12th Street: Do you think stand-up fits in with poetry?
CS: I do think it fits in with poetry, I think it fits in with music too. Poetry and stand-up are very much aligned. The both can be improvised: poetry slams, things like that. It just depends on the comic.
12th Street: What would you be doing if you weren’t a comedian?
CS: I’d be a nurse. My mother was a nurse and my Dad’s a doctor. My parents would have conversations at the dinner table, you know, my Mom would be telling my Dad, “Oh yeah, I opened a man’s chest today and grabbed his heart and had to pump it, and then his eye starting spurtin’ blood, so I had to close that, but then his nose started bleeding so I had to close that.” So it was basically like a cartoon where she was plugging holes and blood would keep spraying out somewhere and it hit her face. That was, like, every conversation she’d talk about. Like removing light bulbs from people’s—
12th Street: Okay!
CS: And that was everyday, man. So that’s partly where my humor comes from. The very dark, graphic conversations my mother would have with my Dad. Strangely enough though my Dad’s afraid of blood.
12th Street: Your Dad’s a doctor—
CS: He faints when he sees blood.
12th Street: So what kind of medicine does he practice?
CS: Internal Medicine.