Each Friday, thousands of New York City’s culturally curious eagerly await one name, Jeff Stark, to pop up in their inbox. Jeff is the editor of Nonsense NYC, listing the city’s best odd, underground events. After arriving from San Francisco six years ago, Jeff joined The Madagascar Institute, “a Brooklyn art combine,” responsible for some of the riskiest and most memorable parties, art installations, and guerilla street events in the city. He is also a member of Dark Passage, an exploration group in unusual urban games. Formerly a rock critic for San Francisco Weekly and the Arts and Entertainment editor for Salon. Jeff now works in “the alternative economy,” living off a collection of odd jobs.

How did you get started in NYC underground culture?

First of all, let me say that I’m uncomfortable with the term “underground” but I acknowledge it as a useful shorthand for this thing that we don’t really know how to describe. How did I get involved? I used to be a writer in San Francisco and was also an enthusiastic audience for a lot of underground culture. There are so many people doing weird, wacky, wonderful things in San Francisco, so much so, that as an audience you were a useful member of that group. When you move to New York, you think of all this great history, –Warhol, punk, the early-nineties dance scene — and you think you’re moving to this underground Mecca. Being from San Francisco, I was ready to become an audience member, but I couldn’t find this culture anywhere. I’m sure there were things going on, but what I loved in San Francisco was not happening at that time, or it wasn’t happening in a way that was networked at all. So I realized there is no role for an audience member in New York. There is only room for producers of culture. If you want to be a part of underground culture you have to make it here. So I met up with groups and then started my own projects to help facilitate that culture.

What was your first experience with the New York Underground?

More or less my first experience at a public event was when I began hanging out with this woman named julia/”>http://www.newyorkunderground.org”>Julia Solis, who was doing Dark Passage. She told me, “This other group I’m with, Madagascar, is doing an event on Halloween night in the East Village. Show up at the corner of Rivington and Ludlow at exactly midnight and don’t be late, or else, we’ll all probably be arrested by that point.” It was exactly what I was looking for. I showed up at the corner. A marching band walked by. It turned out that it was the Hungry”>http://www.hungrymarchband.com/hungryhome.php”>Hungry March Band. I followed them. People instantly blocked the street off, put cardboard barriers on all the car wheels, lit a soccer ball on fire, and they all started this extremely choreographed, uniformed version of a flaming soccer game. It lasted about five minutes until the first sign of police. Everybody whipped off their costumes and disappeared into the night.

What’s the gutsiest event the Madagascar Institute has done?

Probably the gustiest thing we’ve pulled off was something called “The Feast of St. Madagascar,” which was a fake religious procession where we headed off and overtook another fake religious procession, and sort of took over the parade. We marched around the East Village with a giglio, a large platform with a saint on top of it, trying to outrun the cops. In a flash of the coast being clear, a fuse was lit on the platform, and the whole giglio erupted with fireworks. The Hungry March Band was playing. There were hundreds of people in the street. It was this incredible rush of we were getting away with something that was clearly very illegal. The fireworks turned into a fifteen foot blaze, a huge bonfire thing, and for a brief period in time, there were no cops around anywhere with the guts or resources to challenge us. When the fireworks ended, we put out the fire immediately and walked away from it.

Dark Passage has also pulled off some daring stunts.

The first Dark Passage event that I went on was actually called “Dark Passage,” after an old Bogart noir. It was about six weeks after I moved here. I found myself dressed up in full forties clothing, engaged in a mad treasure hunt that ranged from Manhattan to Brooklyn and back again that ended with a sit-down dinner for forty in a live subway tunnel.

Have you had many problems with the police?

In a way you don’t have to plan an ending because you know the police will come and end it for you. We’ve also had some great luck with parties and some horrible luck. Madagascar had parties that were approaching to be the greatest party that would ever be and the police shut it down at three am. One of the most crushing ones was a New Year’s Eve party where the police showed up at 11:30pm, maybe 11:15, and shooed everyone away, leaving them stranded in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn without a place to go at midnight. That was pretty upsetting.

What do you think of the Night-life Task Force?

I hate the Nightlife Task Force. They’re like a sworn enemy of culture, and completely in-bed with the New York Nightlife Association, which is a criminal conspiracy against good nightlife in the city, or at least against a free and democratic nightlife. It’s a group of people who spent a hundred-thousand dollars each to grease the wheels of city politicians and get from it cabaret permits and who now go out of their way to make sure that nobody else can get them, making their cabarets more valuable. They’re fucking sinister.

What made you start-up Nonsense NYC?

It’s an inexact replica of something that was really useful to me, and to a culture, in San Francisco, called laughing/”>http://www.laughingsquid.com”>Laughing Squid, or the Squid List. This list was, and continues to be, what I use every week to find out where to go, what to do. It was the place for all of the weird stuff that didn’t fit in the listings of the weekly alternative newspapers that I was a part of. What was great about Laughing Squid was that I watched as it was born and as it became a regular feature in that community. It ended up facilitating larger audiences, cross collaborations, and bigger projects. When I moved to New York and was looking for the local Squid List, I couldn’t find it. I just decided that I was going to start a list and went and told all these friends of mine. I got about fifty email addresses. When we began, it didn’t have a name, didn’t have a format, but I told these fifty people it was coming. I did this and then people told me, “Why didn’t you look at Pogo’s list, at Extreme New York, the Burning Man list?” All of a sudden I found out about all these lists, but I’d already told people about it and sent out a couple issues, so I couldn’t back out. As I kept on doing it, I realized that I needed it to do something the other lists couldn’t do. What I decided was my list would become a meta-list. I could take all the information in, put it all together and digest it into one weekly list and the collection of it would be a useful thing.

How big has the list grown?

I don’t say how many people are on the list, and I never have, except for the first fifty. The reason why is that in the beginning I wanted people to take me seriously. I wanted people to think it was worth their while to send an email to let me know that their party was happening. Now I don’t tell people how many people are on the list because I want to make sure that people continue sending me their events without fear of inviting too many people.

Have you ever been tempted to make money off this?

It’s not exactly that, but I do the list every week. It takes eight hours every week. I no longer steal that time from my job. Now, I steal that time from myself. There have been moments where I have thought there is a clear value in this, maybe there is a financial value, and I considered and accepted an advertisement. It ran for two weeks in the “Wishlist” section. It was an advertisement for a guy’s moving company. He paid me $100. He was going to pay me $200 for four weeks. I gave half to my partner and kept the other half. I felt so weird about it that I had to cancel it. My position on it is officially that I won’t say that there’ll never be advertising, or that I’ll never try to make money off it, or that it won’t ever be a commercial vehicle, but it’s not going there anytime soon and it’s not really the point. It’d half to be in a low-impact way and I don’t know how that would be right now.

What’s the most memorable NYC event you’ve seen?

The chengwinhttp://www.chengwin.com”>Chengwin> events have been mind-blowing to me. These events involve two eight-foot tall puppets. One is Chengwin – half chicken, half penguin and one is Chunk – half chicken, half skunk. They meet on the streets of New York to do battle. Those events have included a Million Chengwin March, a wedding between Chengwin and Chub (half chicken, half dove), a Chengwin quarter-mile marathon, which shut down Houston Street, a home football game where the homecoming parade shut down Broadway in Soho on a Saturday afternoon with a marching band. Also, some of the Madagascar events I’ve loved are the street events like the Running of the Bulls, which was a reenactment of the Bulls in Pamplona but with puppets and art cars and decked-out bicycles and people in costumes dressed like bulls chasing everyone else down the streets. The Condiment War in Dumbo, where four different art collectives met up and fired specially constructed weapons of the entire contents of their refrigerator doors into each other. the/”>http://www.fluxfactory.org”>The Flux Factory Projects, as basic as their proms, or as complex and weird as their treasure hunts through the Lower East Side. There’s also the Rubuladhttp://www.nonsensenyc.com/features/rubulad.html”>Rubulad> parties and complacenthttp://complacent.org”>Complacent>. But there have been so many tremendous projects over the last few years that it’s hard to single any of them out. What’s next?