A punk kid who swears in the name of Georges Bataille, Todd Brooks, a.k.a Todd Pendu, is not your usual festival curator. Pendu is not another pampered trust-fund baby, transplanted to the Williamsburg garden of Eden. He’s been around the block, growing up in Fort Myers, Fla. and then squatting in Atlanta, making ends meet through panhandling and other less glamorous activities. Meanwhile, he kept himself ahead of the game, being in the forefront of experimental music as a collector and as a performer by playing in various hardcore bands and also by starting his own label, a first indication that his commitment to music was serious. Pendu arrived in NYC in 2003, and since then he has been nothing short of hyper-productive as the driving force behind the multi-branched Pendu Organization. Lean and with long, wiry hair, Todd Pendu strikes you with his ascetic figure straight out of an early Jodorowsky movie, which is not really a stretch, given that in the early ’90s he spent a few weeks living in a commune in the woods where he earned the name Satyr. His expansive entrepreneurial activity includes manning a record label, publishing books, performing live shows and curating festivals. Always looking how to push boundaries, earlier this year he released pornstar’s Sasha Grey’s foray into ambient noise as a 7-inch record, a little while before Steven Soderbergh made her name safe(r) for Google searches. No wonder Pendu’s tagline is “occultism, adhocism, eroticism,” underscoring its founder’s fascination with the mystical implications of art.
As a self-educated historian and self-taught artist, Todd Pendu can put to shame anyone with a fancy scroll of a degree when it comes to discussing continental philosophy and history. Being an employee of the Strand for some time enabled him to increase his wide collection of arcana, from which he’s compiling notes towards the publication of a book on the anti-establishment French group of the 1830s called Bouzingo, who “existed to be a thorn on the side of the bourgeoisie.”
His pronounced sentiments against authoritarian and corporate culture are turned flesh in the effort he began last year to create and sustain a true DIY festival of local artists in the heart of NYC. Unlike your usual press-badge fanfares (CMJ, I’m looking your way), his NY Eye and Ear Festival is predominantly a meeting of friends who want to discover new stuff without any preconceived notions or attitudes about what’s cool and hip. Last December the first Eye Ear brought together so many voices of the NY underground, you’d think Sonic Youth had gone down in a plane crash and you were attending their funeral. This July he ups the ante by expanding the activities and the artists’ line-up. Not only does the festival boast a diverse roster of groups from many walks of music, but it’s also promoting a sense of community by throwing in the mix record labels and filmmakers who all interact with each other.
For Pendu, DIY is not synonymous with amateur crassness, ephemerality or inability to plan for the future. Through his organization he wants to articulate a new vision for arts without any mediation from patrons and sponsors, and even though it’s an ambitious project, he’s taking bold steps towards the right direction. As the new blood of New York underground, he’s got a whole trove of ideas for the near future that would help shape the way we look at art and music. “Make it new” was championed by a generation of artists that sought to modernize the world through a radical break with the past. Todd Pendu breathes new life to this tired concept by avoiding the red herring of originality, and zeroing in on the real issue of how to make things now through a series of endless permutations.
