Nick Shiflet isn't as whacked as you think he might think he is.
Shiflet - a.k.a. The Shifter, a.k.a. Cookin' Kitty, a Capitol Hill-based artist with an hour-long show on public access television - says he vacillates on the subject of his own weirdness and idiosyncrasies.
"I go up and down thinking I'm strange," he says with just the hint of an ironic smile. "Sometimes I think I'm weird, and sometimes I just think I'm a normal person and everybody must think this way."
This from a 41-year-old man who shows up on television wearing a skintight cat suit, drinking gin and tonics and munching pine needles right off the tree.
There is something deeply Pacific Northwest-ish about Tacoma-born Shiflet, a 1989 graduate of the University of Washington school of art. Northwest in the sense of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, with a little Tom Robbins and David Lynch tossed into the psychic salad. With his piercing baby-blue eyes, mix-and-match thrift-store wardrobe and unruly thatch of long salt-and-pepper hair, the Shifter's appearance is ingratiating and disarming, charming and confrontational - a combination of childlike unselfconsciousness and screw-you defiance.
Like a postmodern Popeye, Shiflet seems to declare: I yam what I yam, and that's all that I yam.
Stanford Wilson, a multimedia artist who has known Shiflet for 12 years, says he's inspired by the guy's spontaneous, offbeat brilliance. "He's just an amazing genius," Wilson says. "Pretty much anything he says or does, no one's ever said or done it before. It just pops up all the time when you're hanging out with him."
Shiflet and Wilson have collaborated on several Super-8 projects. Wilson counsels patience for the slow passages of Shiflet's TV show: "It's impressive how many [shows] he's done, especially with no budget. Sparks of genius show up."
Enter the cat suit. "Shifterland," which airs Mondays at 7 p.m. on cable channel 29/77 (Scan TV), is only the latest in a more or less continuous series of art projects Shiflet has conceived and executed since ditching the school of business halfway through his sophomore year at the UW.
Shiflet isn't sure whether he signed up for art classes because he liked the other students in those classes, or vice versa. Either way, he'd found his calling. "Art school was super fun," he says. "Too fun."
There were odd jobs, including one on the line in a plastic-injection-mold factory, which he quit when he went to a gargantuan, freeway-clogging Gulf War rally in 1991. In 1995, Shiflet started working part-time at Café Allegro in the U-District - a job he still holds. Having the flexibility to pursue his extracurricular projects is one reason he's stuck around so long pulling espresso. "I definitely don't want to work full time," he explains. "I'm not built for that. It's not an option."
Shiflet thinks the social side of his job - the longstanding coffeeshop caters to an eclectic crowd of students, professors, hippies, intellectuals and old-timers who have been showing up since the joint opened in 1975 - has had a big influence on his work, especially his newfound ease in front of the camera. "I love talking to people," he says. Some of his friends tell him, jokingly, that his ego is growing by the day, and The Shifter concurs: "I'm a camera slut," he says with a wide grin.
Painting was his primary focus in school and for a time afterward, though he quickly found he had a knack for the kind of working-class, labor-intensive projects that largely defined the do-it-yourself ethos of the West Coast punk movement.
He also has a collection of metal- and aluminum-work clocks, some built ingeniously onto the face of a circular saw blade, that he's been making for the last decade-plus (www.shiftersclocks.com); he does silk screening the old-fashioned way, one shirt at a time (episode 8 of "Shifterland," called "Cookin' Kitty's How to Silkscreen," is an intricate, step-by-step tutorial punctuated by dancing and, of course, gin and tonics); and there are abstract video installations and musical compositions.
More recently, Shiflet completed a draft, years in the making, of a screenplay entitled "No Dumping Allowed." It's a dyspeptic dystopia set in a future United States where citizens are implanted with a microchip that allows and monitors their excretory functions while at the same time brainwashing them to be more ravenous consumers - a classically skewed and hilarious Shifter setup.
Much of Shiflet's art involves working with his hands - the kind of work that makes calluses and gets dirt under the fingernails. "I can totally tinker," he says, adding that ever since he can remember he's been in the habit of figuring out how things work by dismantling them and trying to put them back together. "My ratio of repairing and fixing things has gotten way better, because I know what things not to try to fix."
Such negative capability is part and parcel of Shiflet's drive to experiment with new forms and techniques. He lists the "holy triad" of his personal belief system as "art, exercise and love." And his advice for developing new aptitudes: "You just got to think a little bit and read instructions."
A self-declared anti-grammarian - his speech is strewn with double negatives, malapropisms and non sequiturs that loop back like a snake trying to eat its own tail - Shiflet says he's more interested in the doing than the talking about it. "I don't got no art language," he says, "and I have no interest in having it."
As with so much public access TV, a viewer stumbling for the first time upon "Shifterland" might find herself thoroughly confused, disoriented. A typical episode, if one can speak of such a thing, will revolve around a basic idea or project. Some take the form of a how-to (cutting one's own Christmas tree from a you-cut lot, for instance), while others evince a more documentary approach, such as when The Shifter visits a comic book convention. Within this guiding structure, however, all manner of chaos can ensue: one rambling, impromptu monologue during the tree-cutting episode leads, by some ineluctable logic, from talk of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King to ax murderers and horticulture, to the redneck-phobic John Boorman film "Deliverance" and pig fuel.
"Shifterland," according to its creator (and writer/composer/editor/star and sometime cinematographer), is unscripted save a few key ideas and images Shiflet hopes to get across, many of which he will forget in the heat of the moment. Structure is not its strong point. Rather, "Shifterland" exhibits a kind of bawdy and bizarre populist energy, a loose-limbed appeal that can be hypnotic. As the host and tour guide of this unlikely universe, Shiflet - with his hiccupy, offbeat monologues on this, that and whatever - displays a surreal, childlike imagination that sometimes tilts, unsmirkingly, toward the truly strange. The humor can be as unsubtle as Tom Green, or layered and implicit as the best standup.
"My whole TV show is I got three or four friends to help me, but I do everything else," explains the self-taught Shiflet, who allows he may be something of an auteur (just don't ask him to spell it). "In general, I don't collaborate. I guess I must be a control freak."
Until he started doing it, he hadn't ever considered doing a television show. So what made him think that anyone out there in TV's vast wasteland of cable viewers would watch him prance around town in a cat suit while pursuing the random snap of his own synapses? "Nothing made me think that," Shiflet says, adding that "one day, for whatever, I said, 'Let me check that out.'"
Nonetheless, the whole process has been a blast for The Shifter, who received $1,500 from the city's 4Culture grant program to get the show started. "It's been super awesome," he says. "I didn't know that I could do this. It's pretty intense when I think about it. I'm just up there being myself doing stuff."
But in his own way, he takes the show very seriously. "Oftentimes, there's a part of my brain that's thinking about my show," he explains. "I've got a buttload of ideas, I gotta tell you. I've been making all this stuff. It's going to help me show people what I can do."
Shiflet currently is producing the first season of "Shifterland" on a yearlong contract, and though he hasn't entirely made up his mind about a second season, he admits he'll probably keep going. It's the sheer rush of creative adrenaline that makes him don the kitty suit again and again. Shiflet admits the whole shebang is highly addictive.
"When I get done filming," he says, "I have to physically return to the world."
PPC associate editor Rick Levin can be reached at editor@capitolhilltimes.com.
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