Photographers with a taste for seedy nostalgia and carnivalesque atmospheres, Stephanie Crabe and Christopher Mealie are truly unusual artists. Their passion for outcasts and preference for the outlandish will be familiar to readers of Between the Horns, but there’s even more to this singular pair. For one thing, they’re clergy in the Church of Satan. I visited them for a frank, insightful chat about their art, collections, and philosophy. Join us for a lurid lesson in the dark side of fun.
Well, first of all, thanks for having us over here.
Stephanie: No problem. Anytime.
Christopher: You’re only six trains away.
Stephanie: (laughs)
Stephanie: Three miles and eighty trains later, he arrives in Bayonne, New Jersey.
I was really looking forward to seeing your collections, because, of course, collections speak volumes about personality. And you don’t disappoint at all.
Stephanie: I hope I don’t. We actually have so much more, but it’s all in storage. In our last apartment it got a little claustrophobic. It was a little overwhelming. It was a lot like a store, because there were so many shelves. Especially in the kitchen. It was just unbelievable. Unbelievable. We’ve scaled down quite a bit in here.
Right. (Their dog gently chews on my thumb.) He just chewed on my thumb…
Stephanie: (laughs)
You both seem to share this playful and seedy aesthetic, and I’m wondering just how those affinities developed for each of you.
Stephanie: With me, especially with the Motel Bizarre aesthetic, that came out of when I was in high school. I lived in a place called Seaside Heights. It’s in New Jersey, and it’s a boardwalk town, much like Asbury Park, Coney Island, or anything like that. We didn’t have a lot of money, and most of my friends, their families didn’t have a lot of money, and when they got to be like sixteen years old they were mostly runaways. With Motel Bizarre, I try to capture where everybody ran away to, which was pretty much the motel. Like, your boyfriend either lived there, or you bought your drugs there, or you spent a heck of a lot of time – not only on the beach and on the boardwalk –
Christopher: Well, people bought their drugs there, you – (laughs)
Stephanie: Well no, I didn’t. No – I’m not saying that I did, but I hung out with some very – you asked about seedy aesthetics and, I mean… It’s like Lost Boys. When you grow up in that kind of environment, you just kinda hang out with the “vampires,” the weird people that hang around. I mean, if you’re drawn to that. Which I certainly was. I wasn’t gonna sit at home and just do my homework. I was gonna go out and I was gonna have fun. We always, always, always wound up in some ridiculous, seedy, bizarre situation, and it always revolved around a motel. That’s where that book came from. That’s where that aesthetic came from. When I went to SVA and I started working on my thesis, I started to capture that aesthetic. After I graduated and after some time off, I developed it into that body of work, because I’ve always been drawn to that. I don’t really know why. (laughs) It’s just something that I can’t break away from.
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| A photograph from Motel Bizarre, by Stephanie Crabe. |
Well, I guess Anton LaVey would call it – you know – Erotic Crystallization Inertia. You had your period of formation in that environment, right?
Stephanie: Right. Here you are, where I grew up from a baby to ten years old, in this nurturing kind of, über-German home, where everything was Catholicism, and I went to Catholic school and everything. Then my mother took me away and we moved down to Seaside Heights, where everything was just the carnival. It was just ridiculous, and to me, it was just a contrast. It was just like, wow! Look at the lights blinking! Look at the people running around in bathing suits! It was nothing like this. This was just very cold, and that was like a magnet to me. That’s where my draw to the seedy side of things came from. I know that for a fact. (laughs)
It’s great when you can trace it. Absolutely. And for you, Christopher?
Christopher: Well, when I was very young, I had a lot of influences in my family because it seemed like all of my aunts and uncles, my parents, my grandparents, they were all interested in different, unusual things, from classic movies to strange music. Music was very important to my father – he was a musician. My aunt was a punk rocker in the ‘80s, and all of her weird New York friends hung around with me when I was a young kid. So I was hanging around with these filmmaker types and these bohemian types when I was really young.
That’ll do it.
Christopher: Yeah – that had a tremendous influence. But at the same time, I think that there was something natural, also, about it. I got into all these things that most children weren’t really that interested in. Exploitation cinema, weird music, things like that. And I was born and raised about eighteen and a half miles from New York City, but I was obsessed with New York City from a very young age. I would use every opportunity to go there, and New York at the time was in its worst state of decay. It wasn’t the ‘70s but it was the crack late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which actually was the worst time. It was very violent, as you know, I’m sure.
Yes.
Christopher: I went to New York a lot. I was really drawn to the urban decay, and the unusual places in Times Square and the Lower East Side, and I was always interested in that kind of stuff. When I wasn’t in New York City, I went wherever I could that seemed to be evocative of a similar aesthetic of glamour clashing with something that’s decaying, or something that was beautiful once and is now being tread upon. Or something that is a vestige of what our culture celebrated once. Old movie theaters, carnivals, things like that. I liked things that had characters that were odd, and I would haunt old bookstores and old record stores, collecting things. I think that’s how it started. A lot of influence, but I won’t deny that I think there was a natural inclination to it.
Right. Beautiful. That really – I mean – (both laugh) I don’t want to say that explains a lot in a bad way, but it explains a lot in a great way, and I think that’s beautiful.
May I ask how the two of you met?
Christopher: Well, this is actually a good story, because we’ve known each other for a long time – before we were artistic partners and with each other. Years ago, I was dating a girl who lived in Jersey City. And Stephanie lived in Jersey City.
Stephanie: A few blocks away from –
Christopher: Two blocks away from where my girlfriend lived. Stephanie’s boyfriend used to come to my girlfriend’s house to hang out with her roommates, who were punk rockers. We used to all see each other on the train, but we didn’t talk – ‘cause we didn’t know each other – and one day I was on the subway train with my girlfriend. We got off at a stop, and there was a girl right in front of us, all done up, wearing stockings and a tight dress… (Stephanie laughs) And she was walking half a block ahead. But she left her house without realizing that she’d tucked her skirt into her pantyhose – (Stephanie cracks up) So my girlfriend’s snickering and pointing at her, talking about “the dumb girl ahead,” and “she doesn’t know what happened,” and laughing and I was laughing along with her, saying “Yeah. Yeah. She doesn’t have any idea.” And that was my first impression of Stephanie.
Stephanie: (laughs hard) Oh, it was horrible! I was mortified! You don’t know! Can’t you even imagine what that’s like? I walked from my house to Jersey City , onto the PATH train, off at 9th Street, and down onto St. Mark’s Place with my dress tucked into my underwear. (giggles) Can you im– and I was like, why is everybody staring at me, you know? I ‘m walking down 8th Street – you know – 6th Avenue down to St. Mark’s. The construction workers are looking, the hot dog vendors are looking – I’m like, “What is going on?”
Christopher: Especially the hot dog vendors.
(I laugh)
Stephanie: I didn’t realize. I thought I was gonna faint when I got – ‘cause I used to work at Trash and Vaudeville – and when I got to work, I thought I was just gonna faint. I thought, “I can’t believe it!” And I then I realized that’s why everybody was staring at me. And I remember them [Christopher and his girlfriend] snickering at me on the train! (laughs) I was wondering why they were snickering at me, and that’s–
So that’s your first impression of him. (laughs)
Stephanie: That’s my first impression of him – that he was laughing at me. Which is quite true to even today. (laughs)
Christopher: So years later, we ended up going to the same art school together.
Stephanie: That’s right.
Christopher: And we found that we had a lot of similar interests, but also similar disinterests in that we found the art school environment to be kind of stifling and stodgy. A lot of over-privileged people who didn’t have much to say and didn’t work very hard. So that’s when we became closer.
You both went to the School of Visual Arts?
Stephanie: Yeah. I was a year ahead of where he was, but somehow we caught up at a certain point. We were in thesis together. That was our first class together. We would collaborate on things. I would model for him a lot, and he would help me on projects towards the end. Motel Bizarre started in my thesis year of SVA. He helped a lot with the beginning, and we carried it on through to after we graduated.
Right. You’ve collaborated a lot and you do definitely share an aesthetic. So what, if anything, do you think separates or distinguishes you two aesthetically? Do you feel like you each have a different take on that?
Stephanie: I think so. I think that we’re very different.
Christopher: Yeah; we’re very different. We are. We appreciate each other’s work.
Stephanie: We help each other, I think. We critique each other. I trust him with looking at my work and I think he trusts me, but I know that he’s in a very different spot than I am.
Christopher: Yeah. Stephanie’s work tends to focus on the absurd elements of lower society, whereas my work tends to verge on being surreal. My work tends to be much more quiet. Hers is kind of like a raucous event going on, and I think mine tends to be more controlled.
Stephanie: Christopher does a lot of work in the studio, and I’ve never, ever – I mean, hardly ever – used a studio. I’m always outside, or in an environment. He’s actually recently busted out of the studio and started to go into environments, but still the work is really different. When I shoot it’s more like a happening. It’s kind of like a big party that everybody’s involved in. When he shoots it’s a very controlled situation, no matter where it is. He’s definitely the guy in control. Whereas when I’m shooting, I kind of let people go and film what they’re doing.
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| A photograph by Christopher Mealie. |
Christopher: I think that the take on the work is very different, too. And although it involves similar subject matter – like sexuality, pathos, desperation – I think that my work might be a little… there’s a darker subtext to it, while hers may be more of a celebration of people being desperate. Mine is kind of an unsettling – almost a nightmare. Whereas hers is never dreamlike or a nightmare; it’s an event going on. What you see is what you get, and it exhibits pieces of people that may not come out as often, but it’s more – I hesitate to say believable – but it’s more an event that you could see if you were actually hanging around these kinds of people.
Right. I think that’s very clear. It’s great. I’ve seen less of your own photography, Christopher, but I can see how that comes into play, thinking back to the work I’ve seen.
I’d like to talk about Motel Bizarre. You released it in 2007; it explores the classic neon-sign, mirrored-ceiling motel. I’m wondering what you feel your overarching goal was in that project, and what you feel you got from it in the end.
Stephanie: I really wanted to capture that specific time period that I spent kind of being – I wasn’t really a transient person, but I spent a lot of time with – like I said, we didn’t have a lot of money. We used to party in the motels, and we used to spend a lot of time in the motels, so I really felt like, if I was going to look into myself and see what was there and make a body of work, that’s what it was. It was about the seedy transient, because I spent a lot of time moving around. I spend a lot of time just not having any sort of focus, and I felt that I captured that in Motel Bizarre.
If you sat in a dirty motel and you looked at all the rooms, it’s just, any damn thing could be happening in any of these rooms at any point in any time. I spent many, many a night thinking about that while I spent time hanging out and partying in the motels. So I actually wanted to capture some of the things that went through my mind when I was sitting there and looking at the scuzzy pool, or when I was sitting there watching the rock ‘n’ roll band trash the room. I wanted to bring that back to life, and I think that I was successful in doing that.
And you know, where did I end? I could have kept going on and on and on. I pretty much ended when we got so tired of dragging the equipment and getting the models, and, it just – I finished Motel Bizarre when I felt like it was ready to end. Honestly, I could still keep going now, you know what I mean? It’s just an endless amount of things. But, I had to put it to bed at some point! (laughs) and I think that it said what it needed to say in the amount that it needed to say it in. If that makes any sense.
Absolutely.
Stephanie: I think it captured that feeling. The desperation and the transience that I experienced a lot in that time. It’s kind of a true story. I mean, you think it’s really fantastic, and it is – it’s played up, it’s cartoonish – but in reality, it’s pretty real, too. It comes from within me and events that I actually witnessed.
It certainly runs deep.
Stephanie: It does.
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| The cover of Motel Bizarre. |
Did you travel far for these scenarios?
Stephanie: Most of it, believe it or not, we shot here in New Jersey, down by Journal Square. There’s a road called Tonnelle Avenue. I mean, the funny thing is, if you were gonna look for these places again, more times than not you’re not gonna find them, because they’re gone now. It’s kind of weird. It’s very creepy to me, because right after I finished the book, some of them burned down, some knocked down their neon signs ‘cause they couldn’t afford to keep them lit. So a lot of it comes from Jersey City, but I think the farthest I went in that book is Las Vegas.
Christopher: Los Angeles.
Stephanie: Los Angeles as well. Yeah, I guess the farthest is Los Angeles. We went to Canada; there’s a Canadian shoot, done at Niagara Falls. And I guess L.A. was the farthest that we went for that. The farthest south was probably Baltimore, and Las Vegas. There’s a lot of Las Vegas in there. Mostly New Jersey, which is, you know, true to home for me.
Right. Excellent. Christopher, you wrote the introduction to Motel Bizarre, and it seems to alternate between American history of a sort and scandalous scenarios that seem fictional. It seems to fall somewhere between documentary and poetic in an interesting way. What was your process in crafting that foreword?
Christopher: Well, even though this was Stephanie’s project, I could relate to it because, as I said earlier, motels were intended as part of a specific American dream. They came around because, all of a sudden, people found themselves back from the War with money and a job and a car. They could travel, they could see the country, they could explore, they could enjoy themselves. [Motels] were for leisure, they were for vacations, but like so many other things from that time period and from other time periods in our culture, before and a little after, they went sour. They ended up being about the lowest common denominator. Just like how grand movie theaters turned to porn in the ‘70s, what could happen to a place that’s intended for a quick stay overnight while you’re on your way to visit the Grand Canyon?
What ultimately ended up happening was, that because there were so many of these places, especially in large cities, they ended up adopting hourly rates. Once you do that – you were just inviting the detritus of humanity and the worst types of people. They were intended for families to stay and enjoy themselves, but ultimately they ended up also being storage spaces for people on the run, and places for people to meet and plan things, and places for secret rendezvous for people who weren’t supposed to meet. To me that’s significant of lot of things about human nature, in that whatever’s created for good, or seemingly an advancement, there is always a side to it that can be used for devious purposes. And motels are a great example of that, because it’s almost as if, at this point, the word “motel” is synonymous with something ugly. Now they’re back to calling them “inns” again, and “hotels” and “rest spots.” The word “motel” has become kind of taboo, ‘cause people identify it with this “no tell motel” idea of gross things going on and cockroaches crawling and stains on the bed sheets.
George Carlin’s “Sleep and Fuck.”
Christopher: Right, right.
Stephanie: Yeah! Absolutely.
Excellent. The introduction and the photography both call to mind Anton LaVey’s essay “Summertime,” [from The Devil’s Notebook] in which he discusses this room – he called it a hotel room but it seemed like a motel room – that he purposely designed to be very seedy and even, I think, smell weird and having it raining outside, neon lights flashing. Did that inspire you at all?
Stephanie: No, I think that this came before I even knew about that.
Christopher: If I’m correct, I think he called that the Cornell Woolrich room. Which is one of my favorite authors. The idea is exactly the same, and I don’t think we were consciously considering that essay, especially since Stephanie had this long history before she’d read that.
Of course.
Christopher: But it’s totally the exact thing you were talking about. It’s the same thing, and I think LaVey had the insight to understand that these things that were beautiful also had aspects that were tawdry, that were also beautiful, that people didn’t want to acknowledge about humanity. People like to think that humans will become something greater, and he knew – and all people who can see things objectively know – that there’s things about human nature that will not change, that we’ll often regard as slimy or devious. And to embrace both sides of it is really to appreciate life. I think that’s what his understanding of his hotel room was.
Right. Of course, I didn’t think that you based it on that.
Stephanie: No, but that’s actually very good that you drew the –
Christopher: It’s the perfect conclusion.
Stephanie: It’s actually very good.
I get a similar feeling from reading that and from the book.
The foreword describes motel rooms as an inadvertent ritual chamber for the deviant and deranged in a way, and I feel that the book reclaims those rooms and turns them into stages for, I would call them, “All American Black Masses.”
Stephanie: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Christopher: (laughs) That’s great.
Even though a lot of it is kind of autobiographical, were the scenarios designed to stimulate, celebrate, satiate these base urges that are represented by motels?
Stephanie: Yeah – I mean, I wanted to keep the reader interested. There are certain T&A shots in there that are designed to keep you going. But I think that it’s still just evocative of the place. I think they go hand in hand, you know?
Those things that you experienced, and the way you’re presenting them, just happen to do those things.
Stephanie: It was in the design of the shoot, or it was in the design of what I intended to happen.
Mm-hmm. What was the ratio of choreography to improvisation?
Stephanie: I think everything, – between getting the models there, getting them on the correct page, getting everybody together, and being scripted – it’s very hard, especially in the bigger shoots. Say, the one with the cowboy and the four girls. It’s very hard to control all that. So what I tell everybody to do is, I give them their basic script, like: “You’re a stripper; you’re coming into this party. These are some lonely girls, here. Get excited, girls!” I direct, I think, like any director would, but I don’t specifically tell that girl to “Look at that girl,” or, “Make this face.” I let the girls or the guys do exactly – if he feels sexy, like wiggling his butt as opposed to pumping his arms up, then let him do that, because that’s what he’s comfortable doing, and that’s what’s gonna come through as the perfect thing. You know what I mean? If I’m forcing somebody to do something… I don’t like that. I don’t like stiffness. I think that with most, not all of the shoots, it comes out that everybody was really enjoying themselves.
Absolutely.
Stephanie: It doesn’t look too – I mean, it looks staged, it looks posed, but it doesn’t look very rigid. It looks like everybody’s just having a good time. And that’s exactly what I intended to have. Some of it looks a little forced, but I think some of my models were not as relaxed as they could’ve been. But some, it was very natural to them, and they took this opportunity to act out things that they probably wanted to act out.
Some of them, it looks like they took to it like fish to water, because…
Stephanie: Yeah – in some of the cases, I brought a fantasy into somebody’s life that, they were just waiting to have this fantasy happen, in more than one case. Like the case with the big, fat man and the little dominatrix girl. I mean, he was waiting all his life for that. And he died six months later, you know what I mean? So – I’m doing good things! I’m making dreams come true! He lived in a trailer. He probably wouldn’t have had this happen to him unless I came along: “Hey – do you wanna be in my pictures with this hot chick?” “Yeah!” You know? He enjoyed himself thoroughly. Everybody in that shoot enjoyed themselves thoroughly, and I think it came through.
I’d say yes.
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| A photograph by Stephanie Crabe. |
Stephanie: And I think that’s, to me, that’s when the shoots are very successful. When everybody’s enjoying themselves and doing what they wanted to do, and not forced at all.
Right. How was the book received? Have you gotten any unusual reactions to it? I mean, it’s an unusual book.
Stephanie: It’s a very positive reaction, from everybody that’s come to me. They’re not gonna – I mean, maybe they would come to me with negative reactions, but for the most part, it’s all been very positive. They go on the website, and I sell work off of the website, and it’s been good for me. It’s been very good for me.
Wonderful.
How quickly do you feel we’re losing these classic motels at this point?
Stephanie: Very quickly. At this point, I could drive you down the avenue where I shot most of this and you will probably not see anything that I know was there that’s in that book. It’s not there now. And that was two, three years ago.
That’s so quick.
Stephanie: This one [on the cover] still exists. And the only reason that the Moon Motel still exists is that it’s protected by that town as being a landmark. And I think everything else in there is gone. I’m serious! I think everything else, the rooms have been remodeled in most of the cases. We would go back to the same motel to use a room, and instead of paneling, it would be sheet rock. Instead of crumbly wall paper it would be something else. That’s this area; everything in this area is changing. You can’t keep that old stuff now.
Christopher: A lot of it has to do with corporate takeovers and, again, people’s reluctance to stay overnight in places that are sloppy. Crime has gone down in the past five to ten years, and not only that, but one of the biggest ways to make crime go down is to buy whole blocks of towns and just knock them down. So if you have a whole strip of motels, say a dozen of them, and a corporation buys a street or a bunch of them do, and you put fast food restaurants and new hotels that are considered respectable, you can basically get rid of all the blight. You can get rid of the drug dealers and the prostitutes and things like that. So I think it goes hand in hand, and that seems to be the future of getting rid of vice. Just buying an entire area and filling it with corporate places that are not these kind of traps for sleaze, for prostitution and drugs…
Blight flight.
Christopher: (snickers) Right.
Stephanie: It is blight flight.
But yeah – it’s something, how reducing crime really reduces personality, and it’s a weird balance that –
Stephanie: It’s strange.
Christopher: Yeah.
– weird dynamic, rather.
Christopher: And I’m not going to idealize crime, because we don’t like getting our pockets picked, and we don’t like to walk the streets and have a gun held to our head. But at the same time I do believe that there is some happy medium between a totally – what people are trying to turn the future into, a totally sanitary, safe, comfortable, lawsuit-free future – because it’s not going to exist. And by trying to make it happen, you’re just getting rid of the most interesting elements of society and of humans.
Stephanie: It’s like, you don’t like crime, but without it you don’t get all the cool stuff that goes with it, you know? It’s bad.
What a catch.
(Stephanie laughs)
Do you feel that the economic recession is doing anything to preserve or even revive some aspects of this?
Stephanie: No. As far as the ones I know of that existed down the shore, they were kind of ‘50s, kind of ‘60s-looking. I think the innkeepers knew that that was a turnoff to a lot of families. And then, since in the recession all of the families are staying close to home, means that every family in New Jersey is going to the Jersey Shore instead of Bermuda, so therefore if we put up sheetrock instead of paneling, we can get the families to come here instead of Cancun. Therefore, they’re putting out a little extra money to draw on that crowd – the family crowd. They’re actually calling them condos now, instead of motels. It’s very strange. It’s very creepy. I find myself, every day, just amazed by how things have changed. It’s very scary to me. (laughs) It’s very hard to deal with.
Mm-hmm. Wow. And, especially having grown up with it, that must make it deeper for you.
Stephanie: Yeah. It’s like, I find myself feeling like the old lady in the middle of the Industrial Revolution going, (elderly drawl) “If God intended for there to be telephones, he woulda made a telephone!” (laughs) You know? But I feel that way, in a sense! All my stuff is just being bulldozed, and I don’t really understand or know why. I mean, there’s condos going up everywhere, but are people actually living in them? I don’t know! I’m not sure! Is there a reason for it? I’m not sure!
I always assume that the lights that are on in the new condo buildings are just for show –
Stephanie: They’re on a timer or something. (laughs) I’m not sure. I don’t know what’s going on.
I don’t think they know either. Well, thanks for explaining this book. It’s really fun and, for all it’s fun, it’s more poignant than you would expect.
Stephanie: Yeah, I think people just think I created something for shock. I think people do approach it like that, and it’s really not. It’s like a personal poem to my existence. If you don’t know me, maybe you don’t get it, and I can understand that. And I think that’s why Christopher tried, in his introduction, to kind of tell my personal story in there a little bit. I mean, I guess it is meant to shock, but to me it’s a personal thing as well.
If you don’t mind, Christopher, I’d like to talk about Sex Cats.
Christopher: Sure.
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| The cover of Sex Cats. |
You released it in 2003, right?
Christopher: I think so.
(Stephanie laughs)
(laughs) You think so. Does it feel more recent, or more distant?
Christopher: It seems like a long time ago.
(Stephanie laughs)
Does it? I guess six years –
Stephanie: It’s kind of a long time.
It’s a collection of amateur, or largely amateur, erotic snapshots. What was your process in collecting and then publishing them?
Christopher: I started collecting vintage erotica – dirty pictures – when I was pretty young, and I used to go to bookstores and comic book stores that had odd magazines, and old periodicals. I collected things like Mad Magazine and horror comic books, and eventually I found they had these pictures, they had adult paperbacks with the funny illustrations. The old men’s magazines. What struck me about these when I first started collecting them was that they seemed so much more raw than pornography that I had seen from the time, which was more explicit. And despite the rawness, there was always this idea of – it was still steeped in femininity in that it had garters and stockings and lingerie and big hair and long gloves – but because it was almost illegal, because of laws at the time, there was a certain crudeness to them. And since that time – I guess we’re talking fifteen or twenty years ago – pinup photography and vintage erotic pictures have become idealized and co-opted and chewed up and spit out by our media, and people now see them as this kind of polite retro fantasy.
The burlesque revival and the pinup revival, in my eyes, has kind of idealized the entire thing, which is not in line with what originally interested me about this stuff. What interested me was that, yes, it was glamorous, but it was also kind of raw. There were bruises on the women, and sometimes they were a little heavier, and – it was much different than what you would’ve seen in Hustler magazine or any dirty magazine from the ‘80s or ‘90s or especially now. When you see depictions of that now, it’s an idealized fantasy. It’s something that’s a little too glamorized for me.
That’s what drew me to those pictures – that they were in these unusual rooms, and they were done by semi-professional people who knew how to operate the equipment, but there wasn’t much attention paid to composition or beauty lighting. It was on flash, unflattering, in small apartments in New York City, or hotel rooms around the country. Women who were probably on the climbing part of a ladder, who may have aspired to be stars at some point, who may have had some sort of celebrity, whether as a men’s magazine starlet, or even a bit player in movies. It was not something that women aspired to do.
There are other collections of vintage erotic photography, but I feel like your collection, your selection pushes it further. It seems more erotic than others than I’ve seen. I’ve seen some Taschen books that try to bring these images together, but they seem tame compared to what you’ve presented, and yet you don’t push it to uninspired raunch. Were there things for you to compare your collection to when you were putting them together for this?
Christopher: There were a few books at the time, though most of them focused on things like Bettie Page. As far as vintage erotica, when I was growing up, there were books – mostly from the ‘70s– that had very explicit pornography from the 1800s and 1920s, but I thought that the 1950s and the early ‘60s was a really interesting time because of this kind of – almost hometown glamour. Housewives with big hair who wanted to be sexy for their successful husbands. I think what set my collection apart from other collections that I saw was that I was really interested in the bruises and the cracked walls in the background, and the models who were not name models. The ones who may have been in the back of the bar, or falling off the barstool, and not the ones who everybody’s looking for. Everyone seemed to be looking for certain ones who became famous later on, or ones that were inordinately beautiful. No doubt there’s some very beautiful women in the book. I was also really interested in the ones who were, again, coming down the ladder of success, and they never quite made it up to the top. And I don’t mean that in a way that’s not genuine. I don’t mean that in a way that’s making fun of them.
Of course.
Sex Cats’ introduction has a format that reminds me of the Motel Bizarre introduction in a way, in that it goes into the history of it – I would call it furtive history – but also tells a story. I’m very curious about “Carl Miranda.” I mean, I have my suspicions, but I’m just curious as to what you… I don’t want you to just retell what you’ve written, but he seems to be the patron saint of the old Times Square, the way you depict him.
Christopher: Right. In a way, I was forced to create him, because – I think that an influence was Josh Alan Friedman’s Tales of Times Square. He, in some of his essays, creates an everyman of Times Square, based on a composite of people that he knew who might frequent that area. I’d gotten to meet a number of the photographers and some of the old women who were in these pictures, and a lot of it was happenstance, a lot of it was luck. A lot of digging over years.
And, for reasons of privacy, I didn’t want to single one of them out. Some of them asked not to be mentioned because, to this day – forty years later – they were still embarrassed of it, or they went on to something much better and they wanted to be identified for this great thing that they did. They didn’t want to be known as some back-room pornographer. There were crime connections to a lot of this industry – they didn’t want to be identified with that – and I created this character, like Josh Alan Friedman, as a composite of these kinds of men. All the ones I met were men. I wanted to tell that story as one that was symbolic of many of these guys who worked in the industry.
I’m glad I didn’t ruin any secrets that you might want to keep. There’s a lot of mystery involved in this, and that’s part of the charm.
How do you feel the images in Sex Cats relate to your own work?
Christopher: It’s very tenuous. I don’t consider my work to be erotica. It’s not meant to stimulate sexually, and my work tends not to be overtly sexual. But it does have elements in it that I consider to be specific to my work in that it involves glamour and tragedy. These women were trying to be glamorous. Some succeeded – maybe all of them succeeded to a degree – but there was also a kind of tragedy to what they were doing. Again, none of these women really wanted to do that. From everything I’ve read, all of these women, and the women who worked in the industry, came from troubled backgrounds. It was not something that women wanted to do.
That probably would be difficult to understand for a lot of young people today, because since the ‘90s, the adult film industry has become so far advanced that there are young women today who look up to women working in porn. There’s a status to that. There was never a status to posing for dirty pictures in the 1950s and ‘60s. It didn’t really happen. Arguably the 1970s – there were a few – Deep Throat started a lot of that. But from the ‘90s until now, it’s become a whole cottage industry. But in the 1950s, nobody wanted to do that. They wanted to become movie stars. Or they wanted to become stage stars. But that was it. And the road to both of those lifestyles was filled with potholes that most of these women fell in.
Certainly it’s not the image that the mainstream wants to project about the ‘50s. It’s quite the opposite.
Christopher: Right. I don’t agree with idealizing different time periods just because they become something that is far removed from you, whether because it was so long ago in your life or you never lived [through it]. It’s not genuine to pretend that it was a better time. I’m sure there were great things about it and bad things. Aesthetically, it’s true that I’m much more interested in most things prior to the 2000s, or pior to the 1970s even, but it’s not something that you can turn into a fantasy with striped straws and doo-wop music and this great heaven fantasy of everybody having fun. Everybody looks like Bettie Page and nobody gets gang raped.
Stephanie: Well, she did in the movie. (pause) Well, she did! (giggles)
Do you feel that anything is being produced today that kind of captures that balanced titillation from the mid-20th century?
Christopher: I think that there’s so much pornography now that people can probably find anything that they’re looking for. There’s so much of it online, in print, that you can probably find anything along the strain of ultra high-end to ultra low-end. As far as there being an equivalent to low-end cheesecake, not very likely. Not very likely. I guess an equivalent to that would be a husband taking naughty photos of his wife, or boyfriend with a girlfriend, but I don’t think that would seem to be true, because the conception of what is erotic has become so fraught with vulgarity. So I think that, if people are going to take quick digital photos of their lover, it’s going to have genital shots and things like that. Maybe I’m wrong, but if you’re asking about me personally, what I’m interested in, I can’t say that I’m specifically interested in any kind of publications right now. I think Hustler is a funny magazine. Leg Show was a really good magazine for years.
Because they actually use clothing as part of –
Christopher: I think that they tried to maintain an aesthetic that was not attempting to replicate something old, but was more evolving from something that was old.
Well, you’re not just an archivist. You’re also a photographer in your own right. Where can people find examples of your work?
Christopher: Well, I have a website: ChristopherMealie.com, and its… I work very slowly, so there will be more. There’s a few images there, but there will be more in the future.
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| A photograph by Christopher Mealie. |
Stephanie: He’s shot a lot in the past few months. He’s been working a lot more than usual.
Christopher: I tend to be very critical of my work, so I move very slowly. I show very slowly.
I’m very much the same way. I’m glad to hear that you’re working on stuff. Where else can we find your writings?
Christopher: (pause) Nowhere.
(Stephanie laughs)
Christopher: Well, I have the Sex Cats introduction and Motel Bizarre introduction, and there’s a book coming out called Laffs & Juggs from Underworld Amusements. That will also have a similar introduction with some of my personal experiences collecting naughty magazines. There seems to be a theme here. (laughs) But for now, that’s all the writing that I’ve had publicly published.
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| The cover of Laffs & Juggs. |
You’re both clergy in the Church of Satan. I don’t know how much you want to talk about that in this context, but, as a Satanic Magister and Priestess, how do you feel your work relates to your religious philosophy? I know it’s a pretty broad question, but… (laughs)
Stephanie: (to Christopher) You first, Magister. (giggles)
Christopher: Well , I think that Satanism…
(their dog barks from the doorway)
That’s the magic word.
Christopher: Yeah.
There’s specific things that define Satanism and that are Satanic, but at the same time, it’s been said that Satanism is like custard – it can’t be nailed to a wall. Meaning that, there’s a whole bunch of aesthetics and things involved with Satanism that different people are interested in, and I think that if there are any common denominators, sexuality might be one, but also the earthiness. The identifying that human beings are animals, they’re prone to violence, they’re prone to lust – breaking hearts – they’re prone to the carnival. And we don’t deny that.
We’re not people who are going to pretend that things are going to be better in forty years when everybody has a certain amount of something. Even the nicest person that you’ll ever meet, if they expect to get anywhere in their life, they’re going to end up stepping on someone else’s toes. And I don’t mean that in a belligerent way or a violent way. I mean that, just by the process of going through your life in a professional, friendly way, you will be depriving someone else of something that they want.
And that earthiness, that balance between darkness and light, and beautiful things and the cruelty in beauty, and the beauty in cruelty, is what my work is about. So I do think that there is a relationship between my work and Satanism. If it seems like that’s a stretch, it’s just because I don’t make work that is playing with the obvious depictions of occultism or Satanism. It’s not about blood or guts or demons or things like that. It’s more about the carnival and sexuality and pathos.
Those are very Satanic, so I don’t think it’s a stretch at all. That does clearly lay out that relationship.
Stephanie: Not to cop out, but honestly, that would be my exact answer as well. It’s really a celebration of the carnival, of the ugliness of beauty, of, you know –
Christopher: I wouldn’t say that Stephanie’s work is more impersonal to her, but hers is kind of a more explicit depiction of people behaving as people would.
Stephanie: Yeah; they’re more animal. Certainly.
Christopher: So our work is different, but her work is a celebration of that.
Stephanie: It’s a celebration of being an animal, really. I mean honestly. (giggles) It really is. And that is Satanic, so…
Indeed. So that explains the relationship to your religious philosophy, but do you have specific goals with your work , either of you? Not necessarily external goals, but even internal. Or long-term or short-term.
Stephanie: I just want to always create work. I don’t want to be the kind of person that stops. You know, no matter what I do, no matter where I go, I do not ever want to not be creating something.
One of those people who says “I used to…”
Stephanie: Whether successful or not, whether I’m not showing, if nobody gives a rat’s ass about my stuff, I still want to be making it. ‘Cause that’s always been what made me happy. I’m not saying it’s not for you –
Thank you. (laughs)
Stephanie: – because I’m sharing it with you, but I’ve always made my work for me, as me working through my stuff. As long as I’m doing it, that’s my goal.
You certainly haven’t gone the Henry Darger route, you know – (Stephanie laughs) – of accumulating all that work and not showing it at all.
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| Stephanie Crabe in August 2009 with her photographs in the gallery show Germophilia, which also featured work by Christopher Mealie. |
And how about you, Christopher?
Christopher: I would like to see my work become more successful in terms of professional gallery work and commercial ventures, but it’s not that important. I think what’s important is that I keep doing it. I believe that every artist who truly creates as an artist does it out of being possessed, or almost a desperation. It’s not something that you’re doing to become like Elvis or to be an instant celebrity. If you want to be an instant celebrity, there are better ways to go about it.
I create because I’m articulating something that I feel is unique. It’s a unique mixture of disparate elements. I believe that there’s truth in it, if only because it’s mine, but I’m interested in creating it and making better work. And the reason I say commercial success is because, very often, commercial success entails being able to keep creating your work and doing better work. But ultimately, any kind of external successes beyond my own satisfaction are just extra icing on the cake. I’m happy to keep doing my work and to keep pleasing myself with the work.
How do you feel each of you relates to the so-called art world? It’s clearly on a different priority level for each of you, but it’s something you both do get involved with, so how in it do you feel? Do you feel like you’re getting in there and kind of shaking things up, or do you feel like it’s more of a distant thing that you choose to get into here and there?
Christopher: Mine is very distant, and that’s largely because I’ve had professional involvement with every aspect of the art world, from gallery work to media. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that important for my work to go into those areas right now. It’s more important that I create work that is satisfying to me and strong enough for me to decide to put out there. So I’m pretty far away from it. I don’t put it out there as much as I should because my priorities are creating a strong body of work. And years are going by, but that’s not my main priority right now.
Stephanie: With me, I try to be out there as much as possible. Whenever I’m approached to show work or do an interview I always make myself available. When anybody asks for anything, I try to come through. So, even though I guess at times I do feel distant, I still feel like I participate.
I was going to kind of wrap it up by asking you what you each have in the works. But you say you work slowly, Christopher, and you’re taking it as you will, right?
Christopher: I think, actually, that my work has taken a big jump, because of the past three to five years. My work has been involved in the studio, where I create tableaus, I build situations with a model and props and walls, and I create an entire situation. It’s generally slightly surreal, it’s dark. There’s an air of sensuality about it, but at this point I’ve moved into bringing those feelings outside. I’ve begun working outside, and in that I think that it makes much more sense to create nightmares or realistic scenarios out of situations that people are more familiar with, situations that people have a context with. Instead of just identifying a picture and saying, “This is something you created.” It’s almost like the difference between looking at a painting of something surreal and actually seeing something unusual in front of you.
Not to make a direct comparison, it’s kind of like Lovecraft bringing horror to a local town – and Stephen King of course takes after that, but – you’re making the surreal more real.
Christopher: Right. Exactly.
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| A photograph by Christopher Mealie. |
And Stephanie, you’re working on Tuffies.
Stephanie: I’m working on Tuffies, which is girls pretty much beating each other up in different scenarios. It’s still gonna be outside, it’s still gonna be on-location, but I’m trying to break out… To me, it’s maybe like a middle kind of thing where I’m breaking out of the motel, and I’m still going to be in a situation, I’m still going to be on-location, but not necessarily within that scenario. Now I’m thinking of new stories that could be anywhere. They could be in bowling alleys, they could be in diners, they could be anything. The catalyst is basically angry women in a situation and what brings them together. And they’re duking it out in some way or another.
Is that at all related to a term that Christopher uses in the intro to Sex Cats, “roughies?”
Stephanie: Yeah. That’s exactly it. I was looking through an old ‘50s magazine, and they were advertising roughies. It was girls wrestling, little cards that you could buy of women wrestling. And I know that there’s a call for that in the world. I know that a lot of Japanese men pay to have two girls get together and wrestle. I actually know a girl who has been involved in that, and I was just like, “Well, that’s fun. That’s a good thing to do.” To get out of a room and into another – it could be anywhere. So I think the next one’s going to take place in a diner. There’s an old diner out in back that we’re gonna use before they tear that down. (laughs)
Right. Well, thanks very much for chatting with me about your projects. It’s been really great. I think of you as a Satanic power couple – (both laugh) – and I mean that in the best way.
Stephanie: Well, that’s good. Thanks for having us.
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