I was happy to accept an invitation to write a guest post for Joey Skaggs’ Art of the Prank Blog. Skaggs is at the forefront of modern day hoaxsters, and I have long admired how his work goes beyond comedy and firmly into the realm of art. I first encountered his work in 1994, when a television news reporter breathlessly reported that a new Korean restaurant in New York would serve dog meat. As reported on one of the local news broadcasts the owners of Kea So Joo restaurant issued an all points bulletin inviting area animal adoption shelters to donate their “unwanted” dogs. The dogs would be painlessly euthanized and turned into edible foodstuff. You can read a full account, Dog Meat Soup, at JoeySkaggs.com.

Having seen the television news reports in 1994 describing the Kea So Joo scandal I never happened to tune in again at a time when a retraction might have aired. I might still believe the story today if, some years later, I didn’t happen to attend an event at the Bowery Poetry Club in which Skaggs gave a presentation about some of his hoaxes, the dog meat caper among them.

Skaggs’ accounts of his hoaxes are organized under the headers “Hook”, “Line”, and “Sinker”. The “Hook” might be a fake press release he sent out to newspapers or a performance art piece he did on a city street. The “Line” would be a set of links to evidence of reactions people had to the “Hook”. These reactions typically reveal the gullibility of the media and general public in believing in and angrily reacting to patently ludicrous material with no questions asked. The “Sinker” is a set of links to media coverage of the aftermath, with the hoax revealed as such and Skaggs explaining his point in all this.

Reading through much of his accounts I couldn’t help think how perfect yet unsettling it would be if the press clippings on his website were themselves hoaxes, and that Skaggs had created hundreds of images for newspapers that never existed and stories never written. I even went as far as looking for a couple of these pieces on websites with online archives going back many years, to verify their veracity. They checked out, of course.

My story at the “Art of the Prank” blog is about my “Summer of Softee”. It is a relatively succinct account of how I bewildered millions (possibly) by letting social media do what social media does, and make my LinkNYC/Mr. Softee shenanigan look like a much bigger deal than it really was. There is way more to the story than anything I’ve posted yet, but it can wait. I am waiting to see if a documentary film project on me is going to come through, after about 2 years in the on-again/off-again making. Watching the 2017 film documentary about Joey Skaggs — Art of the Prank – has me thinking about what would go in to a similar film about me and what could stay out.