Reverend Jen Miller (also known as Saint Reverend Jen, Reverend Jen, and Rev Jen) was born Jennifer Miller on July 24, 1972 in Silver Spring, Maryland - though she sometimes
claims she was born in Middle Earth, Maryland. A striking figure easily recognized for wearing elf ear extensions, micro miniskirts, and go-go boots, Reverend Jen is a flamboyant, wildly prolific, and influential figure in New York City's downtown art and performance scene, roaming the late night performance clubs of the Lower East Side with her pet chihuahua, Reverend Jen, Jr. (aka JJ), reading poetry, putting on plays, and illuminating film and video projects. Across media, she often works in defiantly "low art" forms - open mic cabaret, street corner performance, public access television, tour guidebook, puppet show, music video, blog, animal portrait painting - creating flamboyant and hilarious satire and parody, whose formal and political wisdom vastly exceed the norms of her chosen forms.
Art Star
The self-described "Patron Saint of the Uncool and Voice of the Downtrodden and Tired," Reverend Jen is
de facto
leader of the "Art Star" community. She adopted the term "Art Star," to describe a circle of p
oets, comedians, storytellers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, nudists, and other creative individuals orbiting the Lower East Side – some of whom were
street performers before Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's "Quality of Life" campaigns
criminalized their creativity. Through events, she has incubated their talents and cultivated their community for roughly a dozen years.
Like Reverend Jen herself, many of these performers use nicknames or pseudonyms, such as Faceboy (her mentor and closest collaborator), Master Lee, Red Alert, Big Mike, Brer Brian, and Chuck Funk. Moby, the pop musician,
also is an Art Star; he has hired
Reverend Jen to “open” for him, and he also commissioned her to
direct a music video for him. He is perhaps the most commercially successful of the community.
Imagery
Across media, Reverend Jen frequently utilizes much of the same imagery. Frequent images include
trolls,
elves,
chihuahuas, unicorns, monkeys, Q-Tips,
Budweiser beer,
Teletubbies,
Subaru Brats, and
Woolworth department stores.
Troll Museum Curator
Reverend Jen herself lives on the Lower East Side, in an apartment / art studio that also serves as the "Lower East Side Troll Museum," a by-appointment-only museum featuring dolls and other troll-related ephemera. Beyond troll exhibits, The Troll Museum includes non troll-themed paintings, wigs, chihuahua paraphernalia, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. Tours are free, but visitors are expected to leave a donation; the suggested donation is $3000.
By day, Reverend Jen often works at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located just minutes from the Troll Museum.
Ordained Minister
Reverend Jen is indeed an ordained minister. Several years ago, she enrolled by mail with the nondenominational Universal Life Church, which ordains anyone who applies. They now have a website, and you too can be ordained
at this link. Or possibly
this link. It's not obvious which link is more legitimate.
Such openness yet ambivalence toward institutional indoctrination and prestige resonates with the avowed openness of the Art Star movement. Through the Universal Life Church anyone can become a reverend; similarly, Reverend Jen has claimed that anyone can become an Art Star just by proclaiming they are one.
Reverend Jen is co-founder of a religion called
Hal, the Religion of the Uncool, which is based on the
Hal Bible, and speculates about
a land called Halitonia.
Open Mic Hostess
Reverend Jen is host of the "Anti-Slam," a cabaret style "open mic" on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The Anti-Slam ran weekly for twelve years, wandering across several venues, until fall 2007, when it was one of several long-running shows extinguished by the rapid rise and even more rapid collapse of the club Mo' Pitkin's. However, in early 2008, the Anti-Slam flickered back to life as a monthly event, taking place on the fourth Wednesday of the month, at the Bowery Poetry Club. The Anti-Slam has served as a first audience and testing ground for essays and poems Reverend Jen would later publish elsewhere; the Anti-Slam has also been a fertile casting ground and laboratory for stage and video productions by her and others.
At the Anti-Slam, all performers receive the score of a perfect "10." After each performance, Reverend Jen shrieks out "Judges!!?", to which the crowd is invited to respond, in unison, "TEN!" The perfect ten was one of the event's founding principles, a satirical gesture against the competitive downtown poetry slam scene, particularly as practiced at the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe. Meanwhile, such universal assignment of institutional success - which neutralizes the power of institutional success - coheres with the open ambivalence toward institutional prestige as similarly demonstrated by Reverend Jen's ordination and the openness of the Art Star community.
Reverend Jen has written about the origins of the Anti-Slam in her book "Sex Symbol for the Insane;" the origins also are recounted in
this essay (though please note that the Anti-Slam no longer takes place at Mo Pitkin's, which is closed).
Costumed Performer
Reverend Jen has often performed in silly costumes. Professionally, she has been a Christmas season elf at a prominent department store; a frog at the Central Park Zoo; and a dominatrix at an underground sex club. Without being paid, she has also dressed up as "Whitney Le Blanc: NYU Hooker," a former NYU student whose student loans have forced her to wander Washington Square Park soliciting incoming students; as a Rat to perform the original musical
Rats outside the Broadway theater where
Cats was running; and as
"Doo-Doo, the Fifth Teletubby," who attempted to entertain children at a prominent New York City toy store. Whitney, Rats, and Doo-Doo were all characters created in part for the
"Toolz of the New School" troupe; the
Rats and "Doo-Doo" performances both culminated in security guards' threats to call the police. Reverend Jen also dressed up in camouflage and a pink tutu as part of the "Dance Liberation Front," which issued
press communiques and mounted demonstrations protesting Mayor Giuliani's enforcement of the "cabaret" laws, which criminalized dancing across New York City except in a very small number of locations. And, most prolifically, she has dressed up as the superhero Electra Elf. More on that in a moment.
Following several failed attempts to become a "VJ" or "Video Jockey" for MTV, Reverend Jen sent
a colorful, hand-written lettter to the President of MTV. In that letter she suggested MTV pay more attention to the elderly. Later, she had
other failed projects with MTV.
Columnist
Reverend Jen writes the
"Diary of an Art Star" column for
Artnet.com; previously, she wrote the
"I Did It for Science" column for
Nerve.com, and the "Urban Elf Report" for
Flaunt Magazine.
Reverend Jen also writes, edits, and publishes the sporadically published
"Art Star Scene (A.S.S.) Magazine." She has written columns on topics including "The Great Sea Monkey Conspiracy."
Book Author / Puppet Show Creator
Reverend Jen is author of several books, including
Reverend Jen's Really Cool Neighborhood (also the title of an episodic theatrical sitcom she occasionally presents, cabaret style), and
Art Star: Adventures of an Underachieving Visionary.
Reverend Jen's Really Cool Neighborhood (the book) also includes the script for a puppet show called
Les Misrahi, a satirical puppet show adaptation of
Les Miserables, which Reverend Jen staged before her landlord's offices. Several other books - many handmade - are collected by, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Film and Videomaker / Superhero
Reverend Jen has been involved with many film and video projects (in many of them she wears silly costumes). She is star and writer of
The Adventures of Electra Elf and Fluffer, a video series she created with Nick Zedd about a superhero and her sidekick dog (played by her and Rev. Jen, Jr.). Reverend Jen also wrote
Lord of the Cockrings, in which she starred as "The Elf Queen."
Lord of the Cockrings is, of course, a racy parody of the
Lord of the Rings books by J.R.R. Tolkien that contemporaneously were being adapted by Peter Jackson (originally,
Lord of the Cockrings was presented as a play at the Surf Reality theater on the Lower East Side; video recordings of that production are available, but they should not be confused
with the adapted version recorded by Zedd). While racey,
Lord of the Cockrings is not the hardcore pornographic work its title suggests; nor is
Electra Elf and Fluffer (the word "Fluffer" has pornographic connotations).
Reverend Jen has also been involved with numerous other video productions, including many shorts that she wrote and in which she starred; she also has a significant presence in the documentary
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, about a family of Art Stars who perform music accompanied by slideshows. Her most frequent collaborators have included Faceboy, Kat Fitzgerald,
John Ennis, Tom Tenney, Victor Varnado, Jason Thompson, and the O'Debra
Twins - all current or former Anti-Slam regulars, several also past members of the "Toolz of the New School" troupe.
However, again in a characteristic avant-garde embrace of the creative moment and ambivalence toward commodification, Reverend Jen's works on video have not been particularly well archived, catalogued, and promoted after they were created. Nonetheless, Reverend Jen's habitual collaborator, the internet and video technician Tom Tenney, has recently
begun cataloging Art Star community videos recorded in the 90s and 00s at such venues as Surf Reality and Collective Unconscious, where Reverend Jen was a major presence. Meanwhile, drawing on Tenney's monumental works and also on other accumulated videos,
Ray Privett is drafting an essay about
The Adventures of Electra Elf and Fluffer.After the formal end of the weekly Anti-Slam, and as production of Electra Elf and Fluffer slowed down, Reverend Jen began a new series. Borrowing a title from her own previous book, and with familiar wit, iconography, and embrace of low art forms, Reverend Jen inaugurated the "live action TV series," Reverend Jen's Really Cool Neighborhood. Produced episodically from time to time at the Bowery Poetry Club - often as part of the new monthly Anti-Slam -
Really Cool Neighborhood tells tales of exploitation, poverty, and good cheer from "a magical land called the Lower East Side." In 2008,
The Village Voice called the series the "best off-off-off-Broadway Musical Theater event."
Businesswoman
Reverend Jen has recently attempted more sustained commodification of her work. With Jason Thompson, she established the company "Idiot Man Child;" together they self published Reverend Jen's book
Art Star, envisioned as the first of many collections of her poetry, prose, and scripts.
They also plan to sell perfume.
Audio
Jennifer Blowdryer interviews Reverend Jen about going to FAO Schwartz dressed as
Doo Doo, the fifth teletubby, and performing her musical
Rats outside the theater where
Cats was showing. In the second recording, she interviews Reverend Jen and Robert Prichard about the Dance Liberation Front. Both recordings are from Blowdryer's
"86ed Stories" podcast, featuring tales of people being thrown out of bars, nightclubs, museums, schools, etc.
