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In a grimy elbow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, inside a warehouse gym, Jordan Michael Iannucci meanders through training and weight-lifting equipment, deep in thought.
“This would be a perfect stage,” he says, stopping at the boxing ring. “This would be so great.”
Iannucci wants to throw a gonzo concert in the gym, possibly setting up the bands in the ring. He looks around at the weight machines and decides they cannot be moved, which he says “makes it way funnier.”
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“I’m also thinking, ‘If I were to do a show here, it would sound like shit.’” Having booked and promoted nearly 500 shows since 2010, he might have an accurate hunch.
Courtesy of TSU
“First thing that’s going through my head,” he says, “is there’s no way I’d be able to do a show that makes money — even if I don’t have to pay a rental fee, even if I’m doing it just for fun. Zero chance I could make money. There’s not a lot of standing room. The amount of tickets you would have to sell… There’d be so many people in there that it would just, by default, be a bad show. There’s no place to put the speakers where every place somebody would stand would sound good.”
These are the kinds of considerations Iannucci takes when throwing such events. He wants to pass whatever wisdom he’s garnered on. In that spirit, he recently founded an organization called Temporary State University. TSU is a nonprofit corporation that teaches the next generation of punk kids in NYC how to throw DIY shows in a way that is “fun, fair, and safe.” It sounds simple, but Iannucci says doing this kind of thing takes a lot more consideration than just a space and some sound. TSU wants to make sure this tradition continues.
“I just want people to not feel like getting involved in art is a bad idea,” he says. “I also don’t want them to feel like if they do it and move on with their life, that means they failed in some way.”
Courtesy of TSU
Among the smattering of DIY music spaces and “legit” venues he’s booked are a handful of unconventional sites. For example: In 2013, he helped book Grimes and Cadence Weapon to DJ in the bodega venue Living Bread Deli. He’s booked critical darlings and cult favorites alike, everything from zonked-out experimental to playful avant pop to straight-up punk rock. Guerilla Toss, the World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, Titus Andronicus, DIIV, Beach Fossils, and Eartheater are among the hundreds of bands he’s booked. In the last few years, he’s carted a massive PA around with a generator to throw shows under bridges and in parks; he did 16 events at Mafera Park in Queens.
“We forget this, but parks are public spaces, and we are the public,” he says. “We are allowed to use parks. Same thing with libraries. In America, we just feel so disconnected from the public owning or being entitled to anything.”
Some other of Iannucci’s ideas for shows: one where the only people in attendance are the parents of the performers; one in an empty parking lot near the New York beach, in the middle of winter; one at the Jon Bon Jovi truck stop in New Jersey.
“I get a box truck,” he says, “turn it into a stage, drive out there, and everyone just sits in their cars and watches somebody play in a giant truck stop. This is something that I think I could possibly make happen.”
He adds, “But it’s also, like, I don’t drive.”
Courtesy of TSU
By trade, Iannucci is a bookkeeper. He was also the financial manager for (and resident of) storied NYC venue/arts collective/living space Silent Barn. The closing of that space, which dragged on for much longer than anyone involved would have liked, had a profound effect on Iannucci. Though he admits most such spaces are largely transitory (hence the double pun of Temporary State University), he still shoulders a lot of guilt for Silent Barn’s closure.
“When I think about the pandemic, it starts in the spring of 2018, when Silent Barn closed,” he says. “That is really when time stopped for me. I feel like if you take Silent Barn and look at it, it is an example of why somebody shouldn’t do this. If you were just to take my personal story, it is a story of it failing, and it’s significantly damaging my life. I want to correct that very badly.”
Iannucci describes the ideology of success in such art spaces: Many believe that unless something becomes a new institution and survives indefinitely, it fails. “A bad logic is we go into all of these projects assuming that they need to become institutions that go on forever and never close or else they’re failures. That is what we think of as success.
“Part of trying to fix the Silent Barn problem is trying to do something that teaches people the point of this isn’t for you to do it forever,” he continues. “It’s not even for this organization to exist forever. The point of this is to figure out how to institute the process of being a creative person in a larger creative community in your life.”
Being a member of the new venture includes rental use of a PA system, at no cost to the user. But rather than simply loan out sensitive gear to any person who’d like to use it, members must attend three mandatory workshops that cover the logistics of booking, promoting, and running a show. Iannucci posits this will weed out unserious or irresponsible people while arming them with some baseline of knowledge for such endeavors.
Courtesy of TSU
Years ago, Iannucci helped curate and distribute the now-defunct Showpaper, a free one-page broadsheet that listed all the underground shows in NYC weekly. Showpaper inspired the new, similar venture called GUNK, a monthly risograph, and more regular Substack, of upcoming shows made by Hannah Pruzinsky and Ceciliana Sturman, both of the band Sister. They reached out to Iannucci for advice on how to run their new zine, and ended up working with him on TSU. GUNK just celebrated its first anniversary.
“The biggest kick is honestly meeting Hannah and Ceci. Hannah was really the first person to tell me, ‘This is a good idea, and you should do it.’ And Ceci seconded it big time. Since Silent Barn closed, I just shut that box of my life off totally.”
TSU recently had a 12-hour marathon show, at the Ridgewood, Queens space called Party Connection, to raise funds and celebrate the launch of the new venture.
“It really wasn’t until that show happened last month that I felt like I hit the play button on my life again,” he says. “Because of how much I had changed. I just hit pause on my life for years.
“All I’m doing is teaching people how to do shows,” Iannucci continues. “I don’t think it’s any more than that. But it’s important to me because it’s the only thing I can think of doing that teaches other people how to use the muscle of building something together. I don’t know how to solve anything politically. I don’t know how to influence anything in the world. Literally, all I know is how to do shows.”
For more information, or to donate, go to temporarystateuni.tumblr.com.