Shmushkin & The Anti-Shmushkinites

Andras Jones

Shmushkin & The Anti-Shmushkinites

It’s been a while since I posted the last piece on my friend Andy Shmushkin. That piece got a REALLY strong response. Frankly, the intensity and negativity of it baffled me and still does. My intention was never to open my friend up to ridicule and slander. Our collaboration must have a volatile element which is invisible to me. We do seem to attract passionate disapproval from some quarters. I wonder if the people who uglied up the comment section of the last Shmushkin piece know that they are part of a movement; The Anti-Shmushkinite movement. I should know. I invented it.

When it came time to follow up Punkin Lovin’ our team set to work on Christmas Cunnilingus (another song that Andy Dick had rejected as being “too gross.”) This time we added Anya Marina as a singer AND as an actress in the video. She and Shmushkin had an intense energy from the very beginning and she would do anything for him. I was jealous as hell but I was already suffering an embarrassment of riches in my intimate relationships. I was in an open-marriage with a great woman in Olympia and carrying on a totally public love affair with Lisa Jenio from the indie-pop cult band Candypants in LA. It was an arrangement that wouldn’t last for long but at the time it felt right to me.

I was freeloading in Andy Dick’s backyard trailer park, smoking lots of pot and trying to get my acting or music careers going again. The only thing I was working on that seemed to be getting any juice was Shmushkin so I threw myself into the project. Porn Mom, Hot Cross, Sarah Silverman, and Yeah, Yeah, Yeah (I’ll Call Ya) all come from this period and can be heard at Shmushkin’s MySpace page.

In an effort to keep the show going Shmushkin and I hit on the idea of starting the Anti-Shmushkinite movement; a group of big angry men who would belligerently protest Shmushkin’s shows for being “sexist.” This felt like a bold promotional and artistic move and we were very pleased with ourselves. We hired a couple of actors (David Ury and Michael Garvey) to lead the improvisation and they enlisted the aid of a few guys from their acting classes. There must have been at least one or two actors who took their role a little too seriously because the next thing we knew David and Michael had been kicked out of the group for showing pro-Shmushkinite tendencies. The protests continued and intensified. These protest were orchestrated from afar, it seems, by a northern Idaho survivalist named “Mad Duck Sully.”

In the old days, the Michael O'Donoghue days, this kind of intense dark comedy would have really inspired the folks at National Lampoon but that was the beginning of the Bush the younger years, the post-911 times. The corporate overlords got scared and deals started to fall apart.

I decided to take a break from Los Angeles and spend some time with my wife in Olympia. I’d spent too much time in LA and it just felt like time to be home. Shmushkin came up to Washington to stay with me and work on a script for a TV pilot. “I Hate Shmushkin” was the tentative title. It was about a bumbling gang of loveable Anti-Shmushkinites. We envisioned it as the first family sitcom about a hate group. We must have been feeling some kind of zeitgeist because there were elements of both “My Name Is Earl” and “Everybody Hates Chris” in our treatment. But ours was much darker and much more dangerous.

It was during this time that my wife announced she was leaving me. No reason. She was just done. I was surprised. My life got very dark for a long time after that and Shmushkin didn’t hang around. He’s a good guy but he lives for fun times and there just weren’t any to be had. Besides, the National Lampoon deal was falling through, Bush and Cheney were making life in America feel ugly, and Shmushkin was frustrated that I, his collaborator and agent, was falling apart. He had always said that he wanted to travel along the Mediterranean and one day he just up and left, saying that he’d come back when I could get him $10,000 a gig, or when the United States was ready for what he represented. I’m still not sure what he meant by that but he has yet to return, so we must not be ready for him.

Maybe we are. I don’t really know. I know I miss him and wish he was around some times. America is a fascist bore without him.

My intention was to publish this piece around the Christmas holiday to coincide with the re-launch of the Christmas Cunnilingus video on National Lampoon’s site but, at the last minute, the video was taken off-line. They said that it was “too crude.” It has taken me a couple of months to stop laughing.