interview with tenton willey

On Friday February 11^th I sat on a couch with comedian Trenton Wiley to discuss the nature of the universe.

Yes, we’ve already started. I’m recording this.

So, interview…interview guy. This is going out to the world: If anybody wants to buy some bus tokens, I have about two left that I’m selling for a dollar a piece. I have some sunglasses that I’ll sell for a dollar. I’ll do whatever, I guess. I’ll make you a drawing for money. I’ll perform at your venue for money. I’ll carry things, like move your couch. I’ll have sex with old ladies.

Are you still doing that?

Not right now. She’s all the way in Chicago. That’s so far. I was in Chicago for a while.

For how long?

For like a year and a half.

Will you be going back?

I’m going to visit during the summer. But not completely. Now, if a monkey didn’t make this…I don’t know who else would have made it.


[http://www.flickr.com/photos/24813922@N04/2594759920/]

Copy that link. I’ll post the picture.

Copy image URL. Ok, so what kind of questions are we going to ask each other?

Comedy questions. You do comedy. That’s your focus, right?

I have this wicked cool show on Vimeo. Type in Clapping Club.


The Clapping Club Presents Hair Camp from Don Takano on Vimeo.

The name of the show is Clapping Club. You click on the link for Clapping Club and you’ll see it. It’s about a vegan Venus fly trap, so he’s a cannibal in that paradox, a cool sunflower, and a Christmas tree in a wheelchair with Down Syndrome named Job. And they go to Hair Camp and the leader of Hair Camp is a beehive who enslaves them to give cats the Heimlich  Maneuver all day and then they cough up little hairballs that the beehive uses as wigs for the bees. I made a movie with a dead cat called Gummo 2. 

Gummo 2 from Don Takano on Vimeo.

I used the cat as a marionette, it’s about how he has to go catch birds to stuff in cuckoo clocks eighteen hours a day. So he runs away from his foster dad-dog and meets a bulimic calendar who vomits the past and that’s the plot. And, I got this wicked sick show once a month at the Mudd Duck.

On what day?

February 23^rd is the next one coming up. And holy shit, that place gets packed. Like the last time I think there was probably close to five or six hundred people, it was really bumping and everyone who goes is really awesome and its donations only. Last Wednesday of the month. DJ Baglady is playing there. He just went on a big sold out tour around the Grand Cayman Islands. So he’s pretty good. I’m so big, I once, when I lived in an apartment complex, it was seven floors big, I did a floor tour. I got to play on all seven floors. Every single floor somebody agreed to let me do a show in their apartment.

Were you well received? Which floor was the best show?

The floor that I lived on, the third floor was the biggest show.

Did you go from seven-six-five, or one-two-three?

 It was whoever would let us next. Sometimes we couldn’t get a show in that week and we’d have to wait a little bit, but I mean, this was in New York City, people are busy. Flip-flopping, doing everything, scratching, scratching behind their ears just to survive.

So the third floor was the best show?

Oh ya, it was good. Well there’s this guy Daniel Lloyd who lived on the third floor. I was good friends with Daniel Lloyd until I brought him to a show and people were smoking weed out of one-hitters. And he got really paranoid and thought everybody was doing crack because he’s never done any drug at all and he stopped being friends with me because he thought I was friends with a bunch of crack addicts.

What does Daniel Lloyd do?

He works with computers. He’s a geek. What else does he do? He meets girls on OKCupid.com and then he awkwardly hangs out with them.

He does? People do this?

Ya! Lot’s of people go on OKCupid dates. You never have?

No. Have you?

Oh ya, always very terrible. I just got a text message, I’ll read it. It says, ‘no problem. tell me what you think.’ So…you know, I get tons of text like that all day. Constantly. Constantly.

Do you want to give out your number?

Ya my numbers 773-408-6149. Send me any type of text like that. I’ll tell you other types of texts I get. All day I get crazy texts like that. I also get texts like this, someone says ‘Who’s dis?’. I got a text saying stuff like, ‘too sleepy, my darling, and doo soon.’ It was doo like poop but I know she doesn’t mean poop because she’s old. I got this awesome text that said, ‘Oh it’s cool. I would have went out to the Hollywood Hotel open mic but I was too tired.’

You did an open mic at the Hollywood Hotel?

No, no.

Did you go to one?

No, I watched Minority Report. It’s not as good as I remember it in middle school.

That makes me not want to see it because I have very good memories of it and I want to maintain those good memories.

Why fool yourself?

Because I can.

Why not be involved with the harsh reality of the world. 9/11 was an inside job, Minority Report isn’t as good as I thought it was since middle school. It’s ok, I mean the plots pretty cool and it’s all future looking, so that’s pretty cool. He ran a lot in that movie. He ran a lot. He was pretty good at running from the cops, I’ll give him that. I’ve never ran from the cops before, have you?

No.

I tried to hide from the cops once.

Where did you hide?

I hid, it was in a dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty spot. And we just hid in this big room full of all these big metal broilers or machines of some sort and the whole floor’s covered in dirt. But they sent out a SWAT team, a bunch of dogs, and people with automatic weapons.

Did they get you?

Ya, they got us all. We went to jail for the night. Just for drinking in a squat.

Now what does that say?

Our society’s crumbling.

Trenton interviews his dad from Peter Slank on Vimeo.

My friend Rob and I made up a squat team for a show about squatter-punk-anarchist-cops. That would be good. Well it’s really there’s just two, there’s just these two anarchist cops that they live inside of a dumpster that when they jump in the dumpster it’s a  whole  big warehouse and one of their enemies is a store manager that stops them from dumpstering and their police headquarters is inside of a squat and the boss is always like ‘You dropped three forties last night, blew up two trains that you hopped’ and everywhere they go they hop a train to get there, even if it’s across the street.

So they’re in Chicago.

They’re everywhere. They can go anywhere a train can go. Actually, one episode they’re just going to wake up on the moon and not remember how they got there. And the whole moon is going to be covered in graffiti.

I don’t want to give away the ending.

No, can’t. The community service they do is people have to tag things all day.

That’s what they give out to people, as cops.

Ya, for community service.

That’s very forward.

Ya, they’re good. They break apart schools and marriages and institutions. That’s good. So what else? What else is interesting to know about somebody? How many languages I know?

How many languages do you know?

I know English. That’s it. I know a little French ebonic Braille.

French ebonic Braille?

I know a little French ebonic Braille. Braille French ebonics?

I think ebonic goes first. Ebonic French Braille.

Ya. I’ve been kind of obsessed lately with the thought of a blind person finding out that a basketball is full of Braille and learning some inner truth about the world that nobody knows.

Maybe only James Naismith knows. He’d know, the guy who invented basketball.

Was he blind?

I’ve never met him, he might have been blind. I’ve never heard that he was blind. But, like I said I never met him.

Well, if he let people know he was blind the secret would be out, people would know how to solve the world. But we’re living in such a society where blind basketball teams not existing is pretty ignorant and I think that’s the level of enlightenment we have to reach before we’ll know what the message is, what the true Bible is on the ball. What do you think?

I’m a skeptic and I can’t really deny that as a possibility. It seems like an interesting possibility, and I don’t know Braille either. So as an ignorant person I’m open to it. If anybody on the internet out there knows Braille and has a basketball please let us know.

Anybody can read my book, it’s called Don’t Be Blind From The Truth, and it’s just about opening up your eyes to the reality of this truth. It’s not like knew Braille, though. Basketballs were invented a long time ago. Like Mayans used to play basketball.

Beekeeper And I

Trenton Willey | Myspace Video

You’re also an avid story developer, screenwriter, tele-screen

 Ya, ya, ya. They’re very convoluted and confusing but that doesn’t matter.

What’s the over-arching theme or  trend or motif? Do you have any?

No, they’re just weird I guess. The psychedelic moment. Like when I did stand up at the Mudd Duck everyone in there was black except for my friend Mike and this girl Yonaly that came with him but everyone called her ‘The White Girl’ because she was white by association and after every joke I told this one woman went, ‘Now that’s a psychedelic moment!’ That was pretty awesome.

What else do you have coming up?

Oxymorons are good, I like puns and oxymorons. Excuse me, I’m going to blow my nose on some mummy wrappings. This curse I have just keeps getting worse and worse. The more I blow my nose on these mummy wrappings. We have a mummy and it’s been lasting a long time. Plugs? You were saying?

Ya, if you have any shows coming up.

Ya. At the Mudd Duck. February 23^rd there’s a show at the Mudd Duck. And I guess I’m supposed to, I’ll hit on a lot of people at a show at The Actors Gang on the 1^st of whatever next month is. March?

March, ya.

This interviews about aliens, right?

Yes.

This couch I’m sitting on is where I get to talk to a lot of geeks that know everything about science and aliens. So they know the truth, that if you don’t believe in you’re obviously closed minded  because you’re not thinking like the people that sit on this couch and this is the couch where people…when you sit on this couch all you do is you think about aliens and pyramids. And like I said, we had two mummies over last night. We get them.

How do they get in? The front door? Do they just walk here?

We have to order them. Mike knows people.

What do you do with the mummies?

We put a stick in its mouth and a stick in its ass and use it as toilet paper. We’ve smoked some mummies. Sometimes we invite people over and they think they’re eating pasta but they’re eating mummy. See it got to the point, I don’t have a passport, but I’m a pyramid dealer because Mike has a passport. He hooks me up with the pyramids wholesale. I don’t know how he gets them so portable. He found a way to defeat gravity. How did they built them to begin with?

I don’t know do you know? I’ve always been taught that they just build them with slaves.

That’s impossible. It’s impossible.

I’m willing to accept that it didn’t happen like that.

Ok, because we saw a crane try to pick up a pyramid block…couldn’t do it. How many slaves is a crane? Lots of slaves. Like twenty thousand?

How do you think they pyramids might have been built?

Either the Egyptians defeated gravity somehow or aliens did it. Or aliens told the Egyptians how to defeat gravity. Or an earthquake could have built it.

Could have the stones gotten heavier? Like, their density of the blocks?

Oh. I don’t know. See that’s realistic thinking. That’s kind of realistic. Do you think anyone’s ever sunk in quicksand and ended up just landing in a different city that nobody knows about?

Ya, I think that has happened.

Like a crazy super underground city.

You mean like in Sonic the Hedgehog when you could travel down in the quicksand and you were in the underground coin layer?

I don’t remember that, but yes, exactly. Except the people that live down there are really weird looking because of their not getting any sun. There could be anything down there. There could be underwater aliens, there could be under-cave, underground aliens. There could be space aliens.

I bet we’ll find a lot of that stuff underwater.

What kind of stuff can we find?

I’m saying like a sunken spaceship. Because if you were to crash land an alien spaceship on earth it would probably land in water and we haven’t really explored much of the ocean.

Can’t we just remove one of the oceans to investigate it? Like shoot an ocean into space. Earth has so much water anyway we don’t need that much water. What can we do with that water?

If you put it in space the salt maybe can separate from the water.

And then we can bring it back and it can be drinkable. We’d get a lot of the way to many species that are already living there that look gross and are slimy and dumb. So I think we should do that. And we can help with overpopulation. We can move super cities there.

It’s really fertile land I bet, the ocean floors. It would be really warm down there.

So how can we make a super-bathtub to move a bathtub into space?

You’re going have to make some sort of straw. It might be a vacuum type thing where you just suck the water up into space.

Last night we recorded a bunch of video of a lot of people hanging out that have been on fire for a long time, like years. They have their own club, of people who have been on fire. And they found out that the way to get rid of the fire was by wind cubes picking them up. Now what do you think, how do you make a wind cube? Like, you can put water in a freezer to make an ice-cube. How do you make a wind cube?

A wind cube? I think you probably have to get a box, like a steel box chamber, and spin the air inside it long enough to teach the air. Maybe you put some water molecules in there and zap it with electricity to keep the turns square, and you train it to do that for a while.

If you put a fan in a box, that’s kind of like a wind-cube. I’d really like to see that. If we put a bunch of wind in a cube and we filmed putting it in a box and making it like that, we can make it so you can spin around the wind and add zappy electricity to make wind cubes that you sell…we could make a commercial of your selling wind cubes. I’d like to see that.