CHI CHI VALENTI - A NY NIGHTCLUB EMPRESS
20TH CENTURY BIOGRAPHY
The familiar blonde figure of Chi Chi Valenti (The Empress) greeted
Tuesday (and later Saturday) visitors to a certain Meat Market nightspot
in New York City for most of a decade. From her perch in one of the
last outsider neighborhoods in New York at the door of a club called Jackie 60 and
later MOTHER, she was
less an innkeeper than the conduit to a tiny nocturnal world quite
apart from the rest of the city. Celebrants on any given night might
include a 68-year-old construction worker who had just begun to
cross-dress, members of a local computer hacking club, the
fetish-dressed designer Thierry Mugler, and a diminutive butcher known
in the Meat Market simply as Shorty.
The club itself was "little, dark and different", a laboratory for producers,
performers, nocturnal arrivistes and all of their Next Big Things. Here ideas
were hatched (and sometimes snatched) years before even the sped-up media
"discovered" them. The jewelbox-like proscenium stage boasted one of New
York's richest performance rosters: birthing acts like the Duelling Bankheads
(hilarious twin drag Tallulahs) and the dance series
MARTHA @ MOTHER. It also gave
big-stage veterans like Debbie Harry and Laurie Anderson a place to connect with
an intimate audience again.
Valenti and her husband and collaborator Johnny Dynell have moved on
now, as most of the artists have, from the over-gentrified
neighborhood, but their work goes on, at their
websites mothernyc.com, the drag performance site queenmother.tv and
The Motherboards, free and active forums on all aspects of NYC nightclubbing and
alternative life.
Here, their devoted following world-wide checks in about upcoming events in
a myriad of venues, including those
staged by Valenti's production company, The Jackie Factory.
Twenty-three years ago, when Valenti's particular odyssey began at the door of
the groundbreaking Mudd Club in lower Manhattan, the handmade nightclub
was not such a rarity. It was on Mudd's gold-painted stairs that she
met Dynell - the DJ, showman (in the manner of P.T. Barnum) and Jackie
60's gifted graphic designer. They began to create late-night
performances at venues including the emigre art-theater enclave Squat
Theater, Danceteria, The Kitchen, the short-lived Times Square pleasure
palaces Peppermint Lounge and Bond's, the ballroom of the Jane-West
Hotel, and many more.
As clubs grew increasingly commercial in the mid and late eighties, Valenti
sought to propagandize among magazine-reading youth worldwide. Her nightlife
features for publications including Annie Flander's Details, I.D, Interview and
The Village Voice were aimed for the very public that a decade later would visit
her clubs: "All who have grown up restless, in a thousand sleeping cities." She
wrote what she knew - the emerging club cultures in New York. Her specialty was
introducing new hybrids and insular sub-subcultures, most notably the Voguing
Houses of Harlem (her cover feature "Nations" in Details in 1988 helped to push
the culture to national attention) and the S/M fashion underground.
These heavily opinionated works began to leave the sphere of journalism
entirely, often taking the form of essays, then becoming increasingly
poetic. Valenti first moved into free verse in 1990 with her club
manifesto Take Back The Night, and began to evolve a spoken-word
performance style, moody and music-backed, that fit the romantic work.
A year later, she decided to stop theorizing about the night and start
reinventing it.
With husband Dynell, the London fetish designer Kitty Boots, and a young
choreographer/dancer named Richard Move, Valenti began to shape the weekly party
Jackie 60 in late 1990, at Nell Campbell's nightclub, Nell's. Four months later,
the team moved the just-born Jackie to it's home in the Meat Market.
With it's meticulously researched themes, female-dominant aesthetics, pansexual
crowd and world-class performances, the weekly slowly and surely began to build
audience, in it's riverfront, then-seedy corner of the world.
As the decade moved on, the creative explosion in and around Jackie
mushroomed. Valenti's monthly Verbal Abuse reading series, a midnight poetry
soiree that helped spark the early-nineties spoken word renaissance, gave birth
to her literary zine of the same name.
Two hit dance records bore the
unmistakeable live Jackie sound (featuring the club's "Jackie MC's" and the late
diva Donna Giles, discovered at the club by master mixer David Morales.)
Jackie's Playhouse, the club's theatrical wing, consistently staged a
half-dozen original plays and adaptations a year (including a half-dozen penned
by Valenti and Michael Musto, like the seminal "Cokewhore" and
"Presswhore.")
A long-time computer enthusiast and enthusuastic virtual communitarian
(especially on The Well,) Valenti found a way to marry dual worlds with
"Jackie Hackers", a series of live club interpretations of
computer-inspired themes, begun in 1992 with "Cybersluts", a
collaboration with Boots and The House of Domination. The spoken word
"son et lumiere "The Cyberslut Is Tireless", set over Giorgio
Morodor and "O Fortuna", is still one of her most performed works and
the word "cyberslut", coined by Valenti for the piece, is now a wildly
familiar phrase, for better or for worse, online.
It was a utopian time for online computing, which had all of the
excitement of the early, underground club scene and the same sense of
like-minded spirits connecting. As a self-described "glam nerd",
equally comfortable installing false eyelashes or RAM, Valenti was a
minority within a minority. She met another of her breed, the young
media maestro Rob Roth in 1993. They began to collaborate on a body of work
called Interjackie, which included primitive
online chat from a freight elevator at the club (1993-6), the
interactive "Mistress-Master" and "Jackie Videophone" interfaces in
1994, participation in the 1995-6 "First Night In Cyberspace" online New
Year's Eve events, and the original design of the "Interjackie"
website in 1995 (which became mothernyc.com in 1997.) Their partnership
continued for five years at the seminal cyber/fetish party Click + Drag, where they
pushed the lines between live and virtual club experience.
In 1996, Valenti, Dynell and their merry band of collaborators had outgrown
the once-a-week time slot and their limited production facilities. Backed with
little but good wishes, stubborn will, and the extraordinary generosity of club
friends, the couple
bought the run-down premises on West 14th Street where Jackie "lived", and
tackled their greatest challenge to date: to apply what Village Voice writer Lyn
Yeager has dubbed "Jackie Family Values" to a full-time nightclub. MOTHER
opened in fall, 1996 after only a month of renovation, with a special edition of
Jackie 60 dedicated to their fellow obsessed showman Busby Berkeley.
For four years till its closing in June 2000
MOTHER was a full-time venue where
others learned the rarified art of creating untried and imaginative club
nights, while The Jackie Factory team (now joined by Pyramid Club
co-founder Hattie Hathaway) continued to create their international
night life landmark anew every Tuesday. The venue also housed several
Jackie 60 offshoots (born of a single theme or series at Jackie) - Click
+ Drag, Martha @ MOTHER and Heroes, an early Eighties monthly. It also
housed New York's only Vampyre/Gothic Weekly, Long Black Veil.
In 1999, Valenti announced -in a formal abdication speech - that
the weekly party would close at century's end -December 28, 1999 - a
fitting ending to a club experience that spanned (and
helped to define) a decade. The last year of Jackie 60 Tuesdays was
filmed by director Jack Gulick for THE JACKIE MOVIE, a documentary focusing on
the club's performers and regular audience. Valenti and Dynell continued
to run the Meat Market venue for an appreciative crowd, but their heart
was clearly in more experimental work than the increasingly gentrified
Meat Market could support. The pair closed the beloved clubhouse on June 29, 2000
with a massive all-night bacchanal called MOTHER'S END.
A 21st Century bio is coming soon to this site. For Chi Chi's projects and writings online, visit the links at right. For more on her upcoming NYC events, visit mothernyc.com
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2007 PROJECTS
NIGHT OF 1000 STEVIES
CURRENT NYC NIGHTCLUBS
VERBAL ABUSE MAGAZINE
THE MOTHERBOARDS NYC
MOTHERNYC.COM
WRITINGS
WRITINGS ONLINE
NYC NIGHTCLUB LINKS
NIGHTCLUB GALLERIES
NYC EVENTS GUIDE
JACKIE 60
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