Date: 29/05/23
Location: Ruigoord Fiery Tongues Festival.
Attendees: Jordan Zinovitch (interviewee), Ana Collins (interviewer).
JZ: I met Ira through Hakim Bey, through Peter Wilson. The Moorish Orthodox Church was investing two new bishops to go to India to proselytize.Ira and I were both invited for different reasons to go to this investiture. It was in New York on Amsterdam Avenue. Peter had been trying to get me to Iraʼs birthday parties and things but it was always that I would drive them over and drive them back…and I always felt like I was getting hustled. Peter and he were pretty tight.Anyhow Ira and I snuck out of the investiture.
It was a bunch of old men in fezzes. You know it was like, be with the Shriners. Even although they were cool and all of this. The Moorish Orthodox Church is important for Counter Cultural work in New York because it really was revolutionary in the sense that it opened space for interracial interaction and all kinds of…it was very important in the late fifties and sixties in New York.
But anyhow, we went outside for a cigarette and Ira and I started talking. So he did Iraʼs usual thing, you know asking, “Well have you done anything interesting?”
I said, “Well no, probably not…but I was in Dharamsala. I was studying in the Tibetan library and archives in 1977 I guess.”
After a session I went up to a meditation retreat in the Shivala range. You had to climb up to this retreat. On the way up I stopped at a Shiva temple that he knew, I canʼt remember the name of it. There was a Sadhu there and he was really stoned, you know, smoking a chillum constantly and they were burying him alive in a pit. The pit was eight feet deep probably at least. You just watched him disappear. They were leaving him an air hole but there was no pipe or anything. They just buried him. You could hear him chanting mantra and the smoke was pouring out of the hole.
AC: So he was still chuffing on the chillum down there after being buried alive?
JZ: (laughing) Yeah! Anyhow, I went up and I did my retreat and I came back down and he was still there. He was still buried in that hole.
AC: Sensory deprivation, deep in meditation…
JZ: All of this and so when I told this to Ira he paused for a while and then he said, “Youʼre a fucking lier.”
I said, “What?”
He said, “Nobodyʼs ever seen anything like that but me!” and from then on we were friends.
We met and we hung out and we did this and that. So we were friends and it was surprising. He and Hans Plomp and I essentially share a birthday and there was ten years between us. Ira was the eldest and Iʼm the youngest so they treated me like a younger brother. It was remarkable because they just opened the world to me in a lot of ways that I hadnʼt imagined. At Autonomedia we had a pretty counter cultural crowd. But this was an art crowd that was different from a political crowd.
But the story that I wanted to tell you…do you know who Robert Jasper Grootveld was?
AC: A Dutch artist?
JZ: Yes, among other things. An important bipolar radical presence. The key to understanding magic centre Amsterdam is Robert Jasper Grootveld. I asked Ira once how he knew Grootveld and he said to me, “Well, I was in India, and I had been hanging out with the sadhus and I realized that if I could learn some sleight of hand and magic, I could really have an impact.”
AC: On the Western World?
JZ: No, on the sadhus! So he came back to Amsterdam to learn…sleight of hand, magic..
AC: Like Sai Baba does with all that mystical manifesting of ashes?
JZ: Yeah, Yeah. Ira came back to Amsterdam. I donʼt know how often heʼd been to Amsterdam. I donʼt think he knew Simon Vinkenoog then at that stage. I think heʼd come back because he knew Amsterdam a little bit.
AC: I read that he first came here in 1964 when he was living in Morocco but heʼd come to Antwerp to get the Gnauoa magazine published.
JZ: This time he was coming back from India. He didnʼt really know anyone at that time as far as I can tell. So through some series of coincidences he met Robert Jasper Grootveld. It was winter. It must have been February, sometime close to our birthdays…
AC: Bitterly cold in Amsterdam.
JZ: Bitterly cold, everything frozen. The canals, everything frozen. So Ira met Robert Jasper and Jasper said, “OK, you can stay with me.”
Now Robert Jasper Grootveld was a noted transvestite. So Ira said, “I went to bed, the floor was frozen, ice, solid ice. I was freezing to death in this bunk. I shivered my way through the night. I opened my eyes in the morning from half sleep and these long legs in sheer stockings were coming down in front of me and behind them came a tight skirt and behind them came Robert Jasper and he had high heels on and he skated across the frozen floor and disappeared out of the door.
AC: Fabulous apparition.
JZ: It was shortly after that when Ira and Simon Vinkenoog became friends. But Robert Jasper was not an easy person to interact with. But he and Ira, well Ira wasnʼt always an easy person to interact with either. They got along pretty well. Iʼve never heard anybody talk about Robert Jasper, his living space.
AC: With such intimacy, to experience him in such a personal way.
JZ: Yeah, Yeah. Just totally unconcerned. OK well he was going somewhere and he was in full drag and off he went. Welcome to Amsterdam. See you later!Ira was so matter of fact about it. Iʼve never shared that story with anybody. Ira and I talked about it a couple of times. But you know Iʼve spent a long time studying Robert Jasper since and I met Robert Jasper before. These books Iʼm doing are really heavily influenced by him. But this was sort of Iraʼs introduction to Robert Jasper.
AC: Do you think that the Northern European sensibility of artists such as Robert Jasper informed and influenced Iraʼs work?
JZ: I think that wherever Ira was, in my experience, and we travelled a little bit together, he just made himself at home.
AC: He was very adaptable?
JZ: He was a chameleon. He would take on the colors of what was around him and incorporate it. He had a talent for that. Becoming part of whatever was going on where he was. I experienced it several times. We had the wonderful time of doing the book where I had enough money and I had five months and I said to Ira, ok…now Ira could be really irascible. I said, “Iʼve got five months and Iʼve got a pocket full of money and we will do this book of your prose pieces.” Because we hoped to publish it at Autonomedia but we couldnʼt get the quality of the photographs. His photographs were too refined for us to reproduce at our budget. But I said “Ok, we got this time and we like one another. As long as this is fun, Iʼm here. But the minute this stops being fun, Iʼm outta there.”
AC: Iʼm gone!!!
JZ: So he was on his best behavior and we had so much fun. It was one of the joys. Iʼve had a lot of good experiences but it was one of them. He was such a delightful man. He always treated me with respect. Always watched out for me.
AC: Looking out for little brother.
JZ: I havenʼt heard anybody else that I know say that he treated them in that way.
For me, I guess he was that big brother. This is it. He liked our relationship. I never lied to him and he never lied to me.
AC: Your relationship was very direct and clear.
JZ: It was clean. I think he enjoyed that. Especially at that period in his life when he was having health problems and other things. He wanted some simplicity in his life maybe.
AC: Something straightforward.
JZ: Whereas before he might have preferred a bit more complication. He might have poked me a bit more at different times.
AC: He loved to wind people up it seems.
JZ: But he never did to me.
AC: So with the book project, the prose book that you have edited. It was a project which was undertaken in the last years of Iraʼs life?
JZ: Yes, we finished it then. Michael Rothenburg was going to take it to Yale. Apparently Yale was interested but eventually they rejected it. He took it to Stanford. Stanford was interested and then rejected it…Iʼve gotta go…