A Tacky Manifesto
Written by Frank Moore, in the late 1970s / early 1980s during the time we were performing the Outrageous Beauty Revue weekly at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco.
Writing manifestos is a serious thing. And getting too serious is what makes art boring and dying. My friends and I were bored with just about everything four years ago … bored with polished rock music which was killing itself with Pledge was … bored with going to plays and in the middle of love scenes seeing underwear and tights … bored with the sleazy plot that said everything must fail and everyone on the common sex must hide in browns and greys … bored with seeing good Bay Area bands such as the Tubes, Leila and the Snakes, Country Porn fade before our eyes from the cancer of not trusting their erotic humor, etc…etc.… leaving T.V., punks, leftist satire and robot Broadway girlie shows to the etc.… we were bored with the passive/reactive etc.… tired of hearing that audiences can’t handle all-out, no-holds-barred shows … don’t rock the boat, give it to them in small, safe doses, well-paced. We rejected that mentality. We started doing what we wanted on stage instead of complaining that nobody was doing it for us. That is why we started doing the Outrageous Beauty Revue … since you wouldn’t accept the real fact that we started, and do, the show for fun … fun ain’t art. Fun is self-exploitative … if not just plain exploitative … so try this … the show is very French … throwback to the French Surrealists, especially the Dadaists. Back to French cabarets at the turn of the century with that ugly but sexy midget … or was he just short … up to American beserk before it died from sleaze and sogging drabness … onto the hippie-yippie 60s. Yes, the boring 70s goaded us on to doing the show after doing avant-garde intimate plays which maybe forty people saw, after doing the costume-parades and the erotic tests. I wanted to do an all-out show with bright loud colors, a show which trusts that people can handle feeling without being cuddled by the lowest common shit polished clean with the rationalism of intellectualism. I wanted a show that leaks out off stage into the audience at odd moments … so that someone would find himself being switched from being an onlooker to a sex-pot with no blouse. I wanted to make the audience feel, not think. I wanted a zany show with crazy characters … characters we always had within us … Ethel with her giant pubic area made public … the money macho sexist kind of a guy, Spurt … all for fun. I wanted to be innocent, and playful and above all unpolished. The unpolished bucks the system. We spent about two years trying to get musicians to understand that we wanted to be unpolished. We never succeeded in that crusade. We finally had to learn to play ourselves … play music, that is, to get that innocent unpolished feeling. Hard to get, that innocent feeling … requiring a certain wacky control … we have found that if you put people onstage without that wacky control and tell them to do their fantasy, they lose control … and the result is an uncomfortable hyperness with tints of sleaziness or violence. But the people in the show have this uncontrollable control, this discipline of playfulness. Warm, loving close, wanting to be together. So we get dressed up, made up, and play. We will never do mushy, low energy, romantic love songs, crying over spilled milk. Just sexy teen-age urge songs … just emotionally patriotic songs … just evil songs that literally rip your guts out in a gentle way. Just all those tacky songs of the 50s and 60s … feel … see that tit peeking out the bright green dress, it’s a three-ring circus of tack in which you can see everything … 9-month pregnant almost nude sex-pot … a spastic rockstar in a wheelchair … anything … because that’s who we are … boring? A few times. We sometimes are that when things go dead … that doesn’t happen much. But that’s life. Offended? Freaked out, shocked? … Great … Don’t like to see someone eating chocolate pudding, raw meat, and worms? O.K. But at least you did feel … and take it from me, eating beets, mashed potatoes and strawberry jello all blended together is far worse that eating worms … see what I do for my art? It’s an art of sharing and risking … not of attack … even when dizzy-brained Diane scolds a naughty punk. We are all in the show together, everybody … and that puts more responsibility on us as artists. Little things like no in-jokes and elitism. And we want to see your tits and play with your hair and dress you up … or undress you.
It is art. Might be bad art … whatever that is … But it turns some people on … so it may be even good art. Fancy that! And the underlying feeling that we are dumbly trying to broadcast is if we can be rockstars and sexpots … you can too … or whatever you want to be … even a great art critic who comes up with a better definition of what art is.
I swear that everything I have said here is true … some things are truer than others … but you have to do some work.