The creation of the current TAFT club project known as “Johnny Rave Dr. Wacko” has its origin back in the 1970’s including a production that Yianni Stamas developed in 1978 called CRiSTALyME when he was 16 years old.
CRiSTALyME is a multimedia stage show, the name of which is referred to in “Johnny Rave Dr. Wacko”. Multimedia and media are both very important concepts to Yianni.
In “Understanding Media”, Marshall McLuhan writes:
“To prevent undue wreckage in society, the artist tends now to move from the ivory tower to the control tower of society.”
Yianni Stamas has had two major arts mentors in his life who shaped him as an artist.
The first is graphic artist Suzanne Charlton who was a family friend and an important creative collaborator of Yianni’s when he lived in Halcyon, California in the 1970s until 1980 which at the time had a population of approximately 100 people. Shortly after that Suzanne moved to Los Angeles and became a key part of the early days and origin of Taft Club.
And Yianni’s other mentor is writer/educator August Coppola, who Yianni helped develop a cinema arts education program at Zoetrope Studios in Hollywood California from 1980 to 1983.
Sadly both of these extraordinary human beings have passed.
It is because of mentoring by these two people that Yianni came to realize that his multifaceted approach to creativity that involves all areas of performing arts and media arts could be described as multimedia that has its roots as far back as ancient times.
It was Suzann who taught Yianni at 14 about figures in the history of arts and philosophy such as Marshall McLuhan the media theorist who contrasted the “ivory tower” with the “control tower,” urging artists and intellectuals to leave academic isolation and engage actively in shaping the media environment.
From August Yianni learned about how it is vital to continually make art, and never stop doing so. A memorable insight from August, and one Yianni thinks about as well as does every single day, has to do with the power of writing, and how it is easy and low cost to do because all you need is a pen, paper and creativity!
A key thing that Yianni learned from Suzanne was to have a sense of humor in your work and not to be afraid of exploring the abstract and absurdist. One thing that both Suzanne and Yianni found to be hilarious was over the top marketing, especially along the lines of building up the images of pop culture stars.
Yianni had come up with a rock star character named Johnny Rave in one of his films that later with some added video material became known as the feature length project “Son of Johnny Rave” and now the TAFT club production called “Johnny Rave Dr. Wacko”.
The creation of the character Johnny Rave was for Yianni and Suzanne a tongue in cheek inspiration to create marketing materials and merchandising to move out of the ivory tower into the control tower both in theory and maybe even reality. Yianni had been in a Thespian club for the two years while in high school until he was 16 and then graduated. So the idea of it being in a club was a starting point.
By late 1981 the generally quite random concepts for a club included Truth or Consequences New Mexico Club (a bit long, but Truth or Consequences is the town Johnny Rave lived in, in the movie) or Halcyon Club (which is where Yianni and Suzanne lived before Yanni moved to Hollywood) or Taft Club (which initially was because they thought Taft (later TAFT which stands for “True Art For Truth”) was an interesting name for a town”.
The concept that was pursued in early 1982 was to make T-shirts and other rock star type merchandising for what was called Taft Club.
Yianni went on to form an actual Taft Club – TAFT later standing for “True Art for Truth” – in 1982. This informal arts group for creative collaborators is still thriving today.
And all these years later there still remains the big dream for the TAFT club group that one day they will finally get personalized 3D membership cards for all members of this collective, plus a sustainable way of doing so. Early attempts at achieving this back in the ’80s were not successful which is because at that time the only option taking 3D photos was a new camera that did not really work very well, at least not for Suzanne and Yianni.
TAFT club initially started as a way for Yianni as a writer/director/actor of independent arts projects in film/music/theatre to collaborate with his friends who are actors, musicians and dancers initially on the backlot of Zoetrope Studios as well as a small California town called Taft in a community college science classroom that doubled as a video studio.
Actors, musicians and dancers who Yianni wrote scripts for and directed and acted in as well as collaborated on writing songs with in TAFT club projects in the 1980s include actor Nicolas Cage, songwriter and music producer Corey Dee Williams and director/choreographer/dancer Doriana Sanchez.
And now all these years later Yianni lives and works in Inwood Manhattan, an area in Manhattan NYC that is in the Northern part of the city, which is where TAFT club has been based since 2006 and where Yianni both in person and remotely continues to creatively collaborate with TAFT club members.
Some of these TAFT club members were a part of the original 1982 group as well as others who became TAFT collaborators in the 1990s plus those who were initiated into TAFT club more recently.