“Hyper subtle sexual ego”

An Interview with Street Performer Kalan Sherrard

Kalan Sherrard is an artist living in New York City.  He performs a nihilist puppet show on the platform of the Metropolitan G Station, and has appeared on America’s Got Talent, the Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and on the cover of NY Mag next to a headline “SUCKS TO BE US.”

A friend recently chatted me:

people are into kalan

people are into being into kalan

is what i mean

and that is more interesting

to me

because i am surfacy

and sad

#libra

tell everyone how important kalan is

how rare he is

how soon nobody will do this

[my girlfriend] is obsessed with him now, after that video on gothamist

asked how i’d feel if she had sex with him

We all went to college together, in Ohio, where Kalan arrived as a skin-and-bones Seattle busker kid.  He quickly became a campus meme, tall biking around the quad and pulling stunts like vomiting beet juice on the library on-ramp.  My friend from LA called him gross. When I graduated, I didn’t think twice about never seeing him again. But we’ve bumped into each other a few times since: in New Orleans, during Krewe de Vue, he offered me some chicken wings he foraged from the pavement under a cop car.  In Seattle, he took me to a sex shop, purchased a plastic dildo called Ram-bone, then left me for the night to go dive in what he called a “sex dumpster” outside Half Price Books. He brought me some discarded Kierkegaard paperbacks the next day. 

In early April, we met near Washington Square Park. Though he was arrested for public disturbance a week prior, within a few minutes of our meeting Kalan took off his clothes outside a CVS and changed, on the street, into his batman-themed underwear toga costume—basically a skin-suit with giant styrofoam tumors and a motorcycle helmet proclaiming “Violence” on one side and “Euphoria” on the other.  He then climbed atop the cab of a parked truck and read through a megaphone a page of poetry to a crowd of NYU passersby who’d quickly gathered with cameras drawn.  

We sat down inside Think Coffee, where Kalan spoke about his puppet show performances and about busking in general.  A few days after the interview he posted on Facebook: “help me learn Orcish. i will only speak to the police in Orkish.”

—Peter Nowogrodzki

I. BOMBING LIFE BACK TO THE STONE AGE

KALAN SHERRARD: Should I do the balloon thing? 

THE BELIEVER: Oh, sure. 

[Kalan blows into a balloon, then fellates the mouthpiece as it deflates.]

KS: Sometimes it’s...