Brooklyn-based artist and performer Guy Richards Smit talks about:
Moving to Williamsburg in the early '90s, and living in Bedford Stuyvesant now while having his studio in Williamsburg, after growing up in Manhattan, and how he avoids having those cliché conversations about 'how much things have changed…"; the tenuousness of living in New York, especially as an artist, and how he doesn't like being tied down with home ownership, etc., so he could leave town at a moment's notice (in his fantasy) if necessary; living across the street from Morningside Park, which during the time he was growing up was "terrifying;" his forays into comedy, starting with being the 'funny guy' for survival in his neighborhood, through open mics and eventually doing satirical comedy as the character Jonathan Grosmalerman (a name that may have come from his take on comedians as entertainers as being "gross;" his time as the lead singer of the band Maxi Geil! & Play Colt, and how being a performer has paired with being an artist alone in the studio; navigating the murky waters of the entertainment industry in order to try and sell his alternative sitcom (which includes references to painters); the difference between 'eating shit' as an artist and 'eating shit' as an actor or screenwriter; and the Williamburg artists of the mid-'90s who inspired his Jonathan Grossmalerman character.