His mission: reconnecting culture and art. His medium: everything from cooking to comedy. And he’s here to entertain you. Robert Farid Karimi, whose spoken word has featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, took a brief moment between belly laughs to talk orange juice, Monty Python and poems about mosh pits.
Rubber-faced poet/actor/artist/cook and Iranian-Guatemalan humourist: how on Earth do you find the time? And how do you fuse them all together?
It’s about this idea that you are who you are and all these things intertwine. I use my poems to take the ideas I’m thinking about and make a kind of orange juice concentrate: my ideas in concentrated form so that when I need them for bigger projects, I can add some more water to them and ‘Poof!’ they expand. I see myself as a performative cook and it’s all just ingredients. I can take the same ingredients and feed you an appetiser or I can feed you a whole meal. It’s all about the amount, the mixing, the experimentation: that’s how it all comes together.
Excellent splicing, Sir. Now, let’s dial the clock back. You’re a rather exotic creature: Iranian-Guatemalan. How much does that influence what you do?
A lot! I’ve been travelling Latin America and Asia for the past two months and what started that quest was how people perceived me. No one ever perceives me as Iranian-Guatemalan, or as American. People still have to think about what I am. In Bali, people thought I was from Bali until I opened my mouth. If I was mute, no one would ever know. I’ve always had to shape shift; I never quite fit in any culture. Rather than lament that – that’s what my teenage years were – it’s more about the gift it is and the power it is to have a consciousness of many cultures. In that comes a way to dance around things. I did a night of storytelling and poems and someone said: ‘How can you do a political poem, then do a sex poem, then do a poem about being in a mosh pit?’ That’s me! That’s my life!
Hold on a second: a poem about being in a mosh pit?!
Yes! I’ve been through disco and I went through hip hop and punk rock and they all represent a certain sensibility. Music has always been very important to me. I’m from the area that birthed The Dead Kennedys, for God’s sake. In the 1990s I realised the mosh pit was the best metaphor for identity because it’s complicated. It’s collisions and that’s exactly what’s going on globally.
What’s your most outstanding mosh pit memory?
I was in LA and I was knocked on my ass and these two women picked me up and were like: ‘Let’s keep going!’ It’s like being in the ocean: you feel like everything’s going to take care of you. I remember the first time I just went for it – just wanting to get hit, wanting to collide. In the weirdest way you want to collide and then when you do, and you’ve done it a few times, you just bounce. It’s a really good feeling. I always liked to get on the inside. I even had an earring get stuck on this bass player’s guitar while I was moshing, which was very painful. That’s why I don’t wear earrings any more.
You’ve performed in a few unusual places, too: grocery stores, backyards…
I believe the majority of the human race doesn’t go to the theatre any more. We’ve done cooking shows in grocery stores, where we do a man-on-the-street sample table and there’s the host of the cooking show right there, feeding you and making you laugh while you’re shopping. I’ve dome poetry readings in people’s backyards. It’s trying to find different ways to bring it to the people. I’ve done a poetry reading in a hotel bedroom where all the poets were on a bed and the crowd was around us. [Laughs] My favourite performers could take it anywhere. My favourite was whispering a poem into someone’s ear.
That sounds a little risqué.
But it’s not! Poetry and performance are out there, but how do you create intimacy? How about four of you get together and you just tell it to them, like a conversation, or whispering a poem in someone’s ear while they look out over a skyline and you describe to them the entire skyline in a haiku? I’m trying to blur the division between audience and performer. At Angkor Wat I was amazed at how many intimate moments are lost. I would love to get a group of poets together and have them make poems about Angkor Wat and then for people to be read these poems while they’re looking at the temples. Are you familiar with Monty Python?
I’m English. Cut me and I bleed Monty Python.
Monty Python had this great sketch where it was a static view of the horizon and people walked past and said silly things every few minutes. I kept wanting that to happen because it would have been hilarious and it would have woken up the tourists. They were just so slumbering, as if they were viewing the temples the way they’d view the TV, in such a passive way. I want to bring back interactivity so that the artist is the spark for human-to-human interaction and reduce passivity in art as much as possible.
Live wire. What did you grow up wanting to be?
[Laughs] I wanted to be a comedian, but then I met all these stand ups who had really horrible lives. I also have a really low tolerance of cocaine, so I couldn’t do as much as they did. [More laughter] I could do the weed, but not the cocaine. But I really love physical comedians: I study comics and I study laughter. It’s very hard for me to sit down, too.
Who inspires you?
Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor: those kind of comics because they were very physical performers. If you look at really good Richard Pryor stuff – there’s an audio tape not many people have heard in which he does the entire Romeo and Juliet in prison. He’s in a Santa Monica nightclub and plays every role of inmates doing Romeo and Juliet… in a prison.
Holy crap!
Holy crap indeed. That’s awesome! A lot of my other inspiration comes from music: watching people like Prince and Freddie Mercury, people who could really take the room. And all the great San Franciscan poets who inspired me while I was growing up. That’s what I strive for every night: that I can create a relationship with the audience so that, if nothing else, we know we danced together and that dance together was memorable.
So what can we expect on Thursday?
A remix of different pieces of mine put together. It’s like a VH1 storyteller’s night: I’m going to tell a story while I tell a poem. There’s a very famous Iranian comedian in the UK, Omid Djalili, and he’ll tell a story then sing a Smiths song or Eye Of The Tiger. I’m going to do something like that but the song will be a poem. Sometimes the song will be a song and sometimes the audience will have to sing in order to get me to go on.
WHO: Robert Farid Karimi
WHAT: Rubber-faced poet/actor/artist/cook and Iranian-Guatemalan humourist
WHERE: Java Arts Cafe, #56 Sihanouk Blvd.
WHEN: 7:30pm May 2
WHY: See ‘what’