{"id":69044,"date":"2014-04-01T15:30:30","date_gmt":"2014-04-01T19:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=69044"},"modified":"2014-04-02T14:55:11","modified_gmt":"2014-04-02T18:55:11","slug":"heres-pie-in-your-eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/01\/heres-pie-in-your-eye\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s Pie in Your Eye"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pieing for fun and profit.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"pietoface\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI used to throw pies for a living.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story usually elicits a good chuckle or two. It\u2019s the perfect gambit when dinner-party conversation lags\u2014a legendary prank executed long ago in my rascal past, a kind of April Fools\u2019 joke.<\/p>\n

But what my audience never knows is this: they\u2019re talking to a guy who once commanded a hit squad of domestic terrorists that carried out a slew of public attacks in broad daylight and got away with it.<\/p>\n

Well, mostly. An enraged crowd of Trekkies nearly stomped me to death after I\u2019d boldly gone and pied William Shatner, their beloved Captain Kirk, at a Star Trek convention. But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself. <\/p>\n

While I abhor pointless violence, I have long believed there are some people in this world who deserve to be smacked in the face with a pie. Vladimir Putin, for example, or my girlfriend\u2019s ex-husband\u2014anyone for whom a well-aimed pie could serve as a rebuke and a corrective measure. The legal code may define it as a violent act\u2014when comedian Jonnie Marbles pied Rupert Murdoch, he earned jail time for assault\u2014but to my mind, what motivates the striking thrust is not violence but idealism. Che Guevara once said, \u201cThe true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.\u201d I say the tart\u2019s trajectory is often guided by faith in humanity\u2014or at least a sense of humor.<\/p>\n

Popular belief has it that the pie-in-the-face gag (a word derived from the Norse gagg<\/i>, meaning \u201cyelp\u201d) originated in the silent-movie era. Performed by the slapstick director Mack Sennett\u2019s Keystone Kops, Fatty Arbuckle, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, and various imitators then and since, the stunt seems uniquely American. What better enforcer of the democratic dogma than a tossed pie? A gooey face is an instant social equalizer.<\/p>\n

Of course, the self-important have always been targets for a takedown; even if pieing is a predominantly American phenomenon, the puncturing of pomposity is universal. I\u2019m reminded of certain graffiti left behind in Egyptian tombs by workers who remarked on the pharaoh\u2019s resemblance to the buttocks of an ox.<\/p>\n

The French have a word for it, of course: l\u00e8se-majest\u00e9<\/i>, \u201cinjured sovereignty,\u201d an ancient crime from the Roman era, still on the books in such countries as Turkey and Thailand. Even in the Netherlands, a man was jailed in 2012 for calling Queen Beatrix a \u201ccon woman\u201d and a \u201csinner,\u201d and demanding abolishment of the monarchy. Royalty has always deserved, short of the guillotine, the pie.<\/p>\n

The first incidence of political pie-throwing occurred in 1970, when politics overshadowed everything. Nixon ruled, the Vietnam War dragged on, and the previous decade\u2019s legacy of political assassinations carried over into a new decade of surliness and pugnacity. In the early days of May, antiwar protesters filled the streets and the National Guard shot four students dead on the Kent State University campus.<\/p>\n

Capitol Hill on May 13, 1970, was not in a joking mood. Thomas King Forcade<\/a>, head of the Underground Press Syndicate, was testifying before a meeting of the President\u2019s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, originally convened by Lyndon B. Johnson. Forcade cited forty-five publications around the country shut down or persecuted by authorities on charges of obscenity. He concluded his testimony with the cry, \u201cThe only obscenity is censorship!\u201d Then he drew a cream pie he\u2019d somehow smuggled in his briefcase and launched it accurately into the face of commission chairman Otto N. Larsen, the head of the University of Washington\u2019s sociology department. Wire services carried the photo worldwide.<\/p>\n

Forcade\u2019s epic pie-toss was the first known instance of pastry as a political weapon. Nothing less than domestic terrorism \u00e0 la mode, it was a kind of violence that inflicted smiles: Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies scattering money on the floor of the Stock Exchange; an armed, uniformed squad of Vietnam Veterans Against the War roughing up tourists in the U.S. Capitol and threatening to add to their \u201cbody count.\u201d Guerilla Theater, we used to call this tomfoolery, and as the original Boston Tea Party did, it helped fire up a revolution.<\/p>\n

Forcade was a buddy of mine. We conspired on a wide range of joint ventures, so to speak, involving pot, publishing, politics, and mayhem, including the creation of High Times<\/i> magazine. An unusual intellect as well as a pioneer of Colombian imports, Forcade was an avid fan of the sci-fi genre. One of his favorite novels was Agents of Chaos<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Written by Norman Spinrad, Agents of Chaos<\/i><\/a> posits a naive revolutionary group sometime in the distant future; they fight the Hegemony to bring democracy to the solar system. But the rebels and rulers contend with a third force, the unpredictable Brotherhood of Assassins\u2014aka the Agents of Chaos. Fearless, cultish followers of the philosopher Gregor Markowitz, the Agents are guided by his Theory of Social Entropy. \u201cEvery Social Conflict,\u201d according to Markowitz, \u201cis the arena for three mutually antagonistic forces\u201d: the Establishment, the anti-Establishment, and Chaos\u2014the pervasive tendency for everything to screw up.<\/p>\n

Forcade was on the side of the screw-ups. He saw Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, left and right, as part and parcel of the same Establishment; he wanted to be the Third Force, subverting the whole shebang. In Agents of Chaos<\/i> he found his guiding principle, and, aided by illicit pharmacopeia and a manic-depressive condition, he acted it out. As a result, he was shunned by the left, hounded by the FBI, and frequently irritating to his closest friends.<\/p>\n

Goaded by the political zeitgeist, I was determined to create my own Agents of Chaos, a cadre of trusted comrades who could be called upon to rise up and act decisively, who would know how to infiltrate difficult locations, carry out a plan of action, and escape into the night. Partisans to fight off Nixon\u2019s gestapo after Tricky Dick\u2019s inevitable coup d\u2019etat! But clandestine groups required too much secretive energy. Instead, I decided, we would train openly, using pies as a front.<\/p>\n

Taking a businesslike approach, we created a brochure offering a menu of attacks: Squirt Gun Ambush, Seltzer Bottle Blitz, and the classic Pie-in-the-Face, with a choice of flavors (chocolate cream, lemon meringue, etc.). Fees began at a basic $150, with upward adjustments depending upon the difficulty involved. Their anonymity guaranteed, customers signed a contract authorizing the hit. Payment was 50 percent up front, with the remainder, plus expenses, due on the successful conclusion of the mission. For an extra fee we provided photographic evidence. A small advertisement in the Village Voice<\/i> got us started; a bit of PR pulled a mention from Voice<\/i> columnist Howard Smith. Agents of Pie-Kill took off.<\/p>\n

\"REX<\/a>

David Frost getting pied on live TV. That\u2019s me with the big fro. The woman next to me is the actress Adrienne Barbeau. I pied her.<\/p><\/div>\n

At first, our ranks counted two: me and my then-girlfriend. Call her Agile Accomplice. She\u2019s the one in thigh-high leather boots who jumped out of a taxicab in front of the Buffalo Roadhouse patio, just off Sheridan Square, waving a couple of water-filled pistols, dousing a client\u2019s cheating boyfriend. (He was dining al fresco with his new sweetie.) It was she who shoved a cream pie in David Frost\u2019s face on live network television, a hit contracted by the show\u2019s producer. She possessed a certain pie panache.<\/p>\n

When business demanded more agents, our first recruit was a sturdy young man named Aron Kay. He was a Brooklyn-born disciple of A.\u2009J. Weberman, the so-called Garbologist, infamous for digging through Bob Dylan\u2019s trash. Kay used to act as a sort of bodyguard for Weberman\u2014his awesome girth and bulk were perfect for fending off Weberman\u2019s critics, mainly fanatical Dylan fans. I taught our willing cadet the proper procedures: reconnoitering the location, surveilling the target, rehearsing the moves and plotting alternate escape routes. Within days of joining Pie-Kill, he was in the field, armed and dangerous\u2014as long as he didn\u2019t eat the pies.<\/p>\n

At its peak, Agents of Pie-Kill\u2019s roster numbered half a dozen agents. We pulled in a fair amount of cash revenue and inspired imitators worldwide. Time<\/i> called us \u201cthe biggest fad since streaking.\u201d Every day the news would report someone somewhere getting a pie in the face. Our own Agent Kay scored headline-making hits against the conservative pundit William F. Buckley and antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly.<\/p>\n

Things got out of hand when Pat Halley, a Detroit affiliate acting pro bono, smacked a pie into the kisser of the fifteen-year-old self-proclaimed Perfect Master Guru Maharaj Ji. As reported by Walter Cronkite on national news and around the world, God had been hit in the face with a shaving-cream pie! <\/b><\/i>The Guru\u2019s acolytes retaliated, putting Halley in the hospital with fifty-five stitches and a permanent plastic plate in his skull.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t long before we noticed Agent Kay had switched to autopilot. He couldn\u2019t stop throwing pies at people: Watergate operative Gordon Liddy, New York City mayor Abe Beame, Senator Daniel Moynihan, and even rock poet Patti Smith. The list goes on<\/a>. Agents of Pie-Kill had created a monster<\/a>. And suddenly, the times were a-changin\u2019 once again: Nixon was gone, the war was over, and a peanut farmer was president. Time to close the patisserie.<\/p>\n

The subversion of our radical agenda\u2014to what was, at best, a lighter moment on the evening news, and, at worst, a business model for the service industry\u2014was politically pathetic, it\u2019s true. But \u201cthere\u2019s no success like failure,\u201d as Dylan says, capturing the ambivalence of the postsixties era, \u201cand failure\u2019s no success at all.\u201d So it goes on. In the wilds of Canada, Les Entartistes, a Canadian bunch specializing in politicians and financiers, was still tossing tarts into the late 1990s. More recently, Confeiteiros sem Fronteiras has been active in Brazil, lobbing pies at rich rainforest despoilers. The pitcher A.\u2009J. Burnett, during the Yankees 2009 season, deflated scoring teammates with pies in the face as they touched home plate. Lucy Liu and Jimmy Fallon mutually pied each other last year on late-night TV.<\/p>\n

My own exploits would fill volumes. The full story awaits scholarly research in the Pie-Kill Archives, recently acquired by Yale\u2019s Beinecke Library<\/a>. I will probably never launch a pie again. Nor will my former associates: Agile Accomplice has gone off to pursue targets with a sharpened pen. My cadre has withered away\u2014except for Aron Kay, who, at sixty-three, weighs a reported 366 pounds<\/a>. He is too well recognized to wield a pie effectively, and is under doctor\u2019s orders not to consume any more of them.<\/p>\n

The terrible truth is that far more serious agents of chaos have run the surprise-attack business into the ground. Things are so tight now you couldn\u2019t fling a cupcake without running afoul of Homeland Security or Moms Against Bullying. On some level, the prankster has been pranked\u2014the joke\u2019s on us. As a veteran mischief-maker, I would say that April Fools\u2019 Day in America is over.<\/p>\n

But then again, you never know.<\/p>\n

Based in LA,\u00a0Rex\u00a0Weiner\u00a0is a cofounder of the Todos Santos Writers Workshop<\/a> and the Hollywood correspondent for<\/em>\u00a0<\/i>Rolling Stone Italia<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pieing for fun and profit. \u201cI used to throw pies for a living.\u201d The story usually elicits a good chuckle or two. It\u2019s the perfect gambit when dinner-party conversation lags\u2014a legendary prank executed long ago in my rascal past, a kind of April Fools\u2019 joke. 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