Chris O'Brien is someone who I have known for quite a long time. He grew up around the corner from me and he's the kind of guy who always pops in and out of your life. He's always got a million creative things going on and doesn't seem to realize it. I'll ask what he's been up to, he'll reply "Nothing much," then a minute later will tell me how he penned a screenplay while wondering the Colorado trails by himself. Here's a look into what drives him.
- Why don’t you give us a little background on who you are and what creative endeavors you're behind.
Hey Rory, thanks for having me! My name is Chris O'Brien. I think one of the weird things about growing up on Staten Island is it's taught me to be hesitant in calling myself something like "writer" or "artist" or "musician." I dunno, but the working class person in me still makes me feel like those are things only rich folk can call themselves. That's probably not the best outlook, but one that makes it hard to call myself any of those things without feeling like a hack. I do do a bunch of sound and a/v experiments under the name Composite Beast. I've got a radio show with that name on MakerParkRadio, which is kind of a way for me to continue my quest of hunting for and archiving new music, found footage, strange audio clips, and other meaningless miscellania going. I also do this project called The Richmond County Field Recording Society, which is kind of a larger ephemeral multimedia project, which includes re-issuing The Journal of Anomalous Events on Staten Island, which is a zine.
- How did you get into comedy? How do you think that led you into what you
are doing now?
Comedy was something I was toying with in the early 2000s and never really had the confidence to focus on it. Then I started taking classes at UCB in 2015, around the time my mom was dying of cancer. I was witnessing her transition into the afterlife and was thinking about how I could live closer to my most authentic self. I know that sounds kind of new-agey or self-important, but that experience made me reevaluate my goals and identify the thing, which was comedy, that I had avoided out of fear. I kept taking classes and trying stand-up. I don't really consider myself a comedian, per se, that's it's own world and I still can't really figure out the rules and the pecking order and I find trying to learn any aspect of that makes me feel pretty frustrated and downright toxic. For me I think comedy serves as another way to write, which is what I'm primarily focused on in one way or another. You know, writing traditional fiction, which I've spent a few decades now doing, is a labor of love, you do it alone, you send the stories out and hope they work, which they usually don't in the eyes of whomever's acceptance you're trying to gain. Improv and stand-up are kind of the opposite, you are getting immediate feedback, you know if something has legs or if it sucks immediately, which is something that is so important for an attention starved person like myself.
- How did the collaboration with Richmondtown develop?
Richmond Town kind of plays a major part in the backdrop to my personal historiography. The first time I was bit by an animal was over at the duck pond there when I was a toddler, maybe my first memory. Then in my tweens and early teens I was an apprentice there for several years. I would dress up in mid-1800s clothes and learn things like basket weaving, leather making, and tinsmithing. It was like a psychedelic experience, it's like softcore time travel or something, it was also the first time I realized there are alternative ways to learn about history.
My friend Ray is the events coordinator over there and he asked if I wanted to do a show. I started doing this really fun and sometimes wild variety show called Ghost Tales, first outside by the tavern and then inside the courtroom. We've had a lot of fun doing that show and I feel like each one has gotten increasingly more interesting, funny, and technically good. It's really taught me how to, and more importantly how not to, produce a show. A lot of the work I do for Richmond County Field Recording Society comes out of Richmond Town and I've been lucky enough to use the buildings for places to do audio and video recordings, along with several makeshift writing nooks in various buildings on the campus.
- How/why is making and creating a part of your life?
I feel like most of my adult life has been me trying to make amends with myself for being creative. I've struggled to accept that I need some type of time each day working on ideas in some way that have come from inside myself. We do a lot to kill creativity in our culture and I think creative people internalize those messages and think their work isn't legit because it doesn't make money or garner status. I think if you've got a brain that is telling you to make stuff, you need to or else you're in for a long journey filled with unrealized, often miserable, frustration. That doesn't mean working on your projects will make that any better, but you'll have moments where all of that anxiety dissipates and you'll experience some real joy.
- How do you develop your ideas? What is your creative process?
I think for me the trick is to just do work. If I'm spending too much time developing ideas, or kind of mapping them out, then I'm not moving towards bringing them to life. I used to spend hours and hours, like every day for a good part of a decade, in bookshops, odd thrift places, record stores, and lots of bars thinking about all of the stuff I was going to make. And then I realized that was a creative way to not be doing those things. That wasted time thinking about my projects and not doing them hasn't done me well and it's why I often feel kind of behind some of my more successful friends. I think making stuff is like going to jiu jitsu or the gym: it kind of sucks to get going, you get your ass kicked and humbled while you're doing it, but you feel better for having shown up.
- Do you think this creative mindset helps you adapt and deal with the world?
My biggest struggle has been to juggle having some type of a work life (I am a teaching artist in schools and still maintain my teaching license in order to teach writing) and still have the energy to work on the things I feel I need to. I don't look at myself as a hobbyist at this point, and in order to really do the work I want to in order to eventually work as a TV writer, or whatever I've got my goals set to, it takes up a decent portion of my time. Understanding that the world doesn't always value the idea of a 41 year old dude making dumb videos, bad blues music, radio collages, and writing strange journals and a tv pilot about the afterlife has been hard for me. The world we live in isn't set up to accommodate that type of life, but once I accepted that and understood no one really cares what I do, I feel kind of free. The positive thing I'll say is this, once you kind of accept that this whole experience of being alive is some type of weird, cosmic, joke and that being too serious deeply impairs our ability to fully enjoy it, you are doing better than the majority of folks who really think the universe is being held together by themselves and themselves alone.
- How do you think creativity can help the world today?
Well, on a kind of global scale all of the problems we have, particularly the rapid decimation of the earth and its ecosystems, will need to be solved creatively, so there definitely needs to be more a focus on developing creative habits of mind everywhere from early childhood curricula to the halls of power. I think adapting a somewhat creative mindset on an individual level allows for people to become more flexible intellectually and emotionally - thinking creatively allows us to realize it's okay to fail and to kind of go back to the proverbial drawing board. It teaches one the grit they'll need to cope in an ever changing world.
- Now we grew up in the same neighborhood and were involved in the HC/Punk scene in Staten Island in the late 90’s early 2000’s. I think I was talking about this with you but I think this had a real effect on us. Do you agree? What do you think?
Oh, man, that's really something I could talk about forever. I mean, I think we were really lucky to grow up in the Staten Island we did. It had real graffiti crews, gangs, authentic guidos and guidettes, a skate culture, miscellaneous weirdos and freaks, and of course Our Music Center, and that was in just our neighborhood alone! It was a real place -- it was the perfect mix of small town strange and big city chaos for a kid like me who wanted to endlessly explore.
I started coming around the music scene in around 1994 because I was always looking for adventure and people who were doing different things. I wasn't going to drop out of high school and tour with the Dead, so hanging out at DIY shows on Staten Island was the closest I was going to get. There were a lot of weird and wonderful bands around. It was cool to watch people grow as musicians, but what I really picked up on was the underlying ideas and ethics of making stuff for yourself outside the confines of anyone's expectations. Like, it isn't sufficient to think: this place sucks, there are no rock clubs or record labels. People like Farag, Freedom, and Bricks **(Editor's note - These were people who helped organize shows on Staten Island at that time. See Miracle Drug or Freedom Tripodi for more info) were really good leaders in the sense that they weren't okay with the "That's the way it is" mentality and they worked using their own time and money to change that, to make something that wound up being meaningful and informative to a lot of people. I think being part of that and getting to see it up close has really served as something that's guided me towards a lot of the stuff I devote my time to.
- Why do you think Staten Island has the reputation it has?
I honestly think that it makes people feel better to shit on Staten Island, whether they are living in another borough or are brought up here and are eager to leave. I've been both those things and I don't see the value in continuously putting down an already culturally depleted place. I think when you look at Staten Island as a place where all of the people operating the machinery that make this city work live, you can garner some empathy towards them. I mean without the folks of Staten Island the garbage wouldn't be picked up, your kid wouldn't be taught, the cat wouldn't be rescued from the tree, etc. It's a working class place and people who are focused on making a living, on surviving, and who have the (often incorrect) impression that they earned their keep, aren't going to be like, uh, Noam Chomsky or something. What I can say is there is a kind of individual decency here, after you get past the gruff exterior of some of your typical Staten Islanders, that I've never really experienced in my somewhat extensive journeys around America. I think getting stuck on who your neighbor votes for as a metric of how cool the place you live in is kind of a self-defeating and somewhat childish way to see the world, which I think people do when they talk about Staten Island. But I would trust these people with saving my life, which seems like a more practical metric to judge people by.
- I feel like there’s a shift happening here, do you? What do you think is behind it?
Yeah, I feel like a lot of things are happening that would completely blow my mind when I was a kid growing up here. That's the way I decide whether something is cool, would it have opened up a new portal of consciousness when I was like a 15 year old looking for purpose.
There are a couple things at play. For one, people are working together to make things that the community can appreciate. That brings people out of their hovels, it lets them find their tribe, or whatever the term is. MakerParkRadio is a great example of that. Tom and Kristin had this idea, they didn't even know if it'd work, and I think when she first threw it out there fifty or so people were signing up to have a show. That was almost 4 years ago I think and now MPR has something like 100,000 unique listeners each month.
The other thing is I feel like the, uh, normalization of artistic communities, it's just more acceptable now, not "weird," to kind of go out of the mainstream, or whatever you perceive the mainstream to be. I think when we were growing up that wasn't the case, you had to really hunt to find the subcultures, whether it was like graffiti culture, or hardcore culture. Now all that stuff is in your pocket and you can find like minded people in your own community. That's big and it's allowed people to link up and work together towards bigger things that they wouldn't be able to pull off had they not known of the other person.
- What’s up next for you?
I'm currently finishing the next issue of The Journal of Anomalous Events on Staten Island. This issue will be from 1983, so I'm trying to get the design right. I am also installing a kind of large scale diorama of the RCFRS office inside an old outhouse at Richmond Town. It's going to be really cool, somewhere in between a lunatic's cabin and a small mid-century newspaper room. It will be done by spring and will double as a curiosity to visitors, along with a recording booth for special events.
I do this show online where I write an 80s B Movie every month and it's read live by actors and then they improv the end. I just keep writing and hope something sticks and that people will enjoy it. I also do Composite Beast every Friday night on MakerParkRadio.
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