Duplex Planet

GREENWICH, NY - David Greenberger is living example of the adage that life is a sinewy path, filled with unpredictable surprises.

If you could send a message to outer space, what would it say? What do you think is the most meaningful invention of the 20th century? And how about ruminating on this question: What's more important - romance or food?

David Greenberger has been asking these types of questions and recording the sometimes ironic, often inspired answers from residents in nursing homes, people at meal sites and citizens at adult centers for the past quarter century.
Greenberger's newest book of illustrated conversations is called "No More Shaves."

After setting his designs on a career as an artist, Greenberger underwent a sudden change of direction in his artistic purpose.

''In 1979 I took a job as activities director at a nursing home in Boston,'' Greenberger said. ''I had just completed a degree in fine arts as a painter.''

Things changed, however. ''On the day that I first met the residents of the nursing home,'' he said, ''I abandoned painting.''

Greenberger became engaged in the way the patients expressed themselves. He began documenting their conversations and founded a ''homemade'' publication for their thoughts, which he called Duplex Planet.

To date, Duplex Planet has resulted in three books, a number of CDs, dozens of comics and more than 150 issues of the magazine. His work is a cross section of the often humorous words and thoughts of the elderly across America.

''There are two different kinds of humor that show up,'' Greenberger told The Saratogian in 1993. ''One is people saying something they know is funny, and the other is unintentional.''

Saturday, Greenberger is appearing at The Larkin in Albany. NRBQ's Terry Adams and bassist Pete Toigo provide the musical background.

''This weekend is the first in recent memory that we are performing in the area,'' Greenberger said.

Greenberger has collaborated with Adams, as well as with the band Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, for the last four or five years.

''For the past 10 years, I've been performing monologues with music scored in between and during the segments,'' Greenberger said.

He has appeared ''from Portland to Disney World, and all over the place,'' he added.

The project's growth has brought celebrity interest. Among the cast of readers and subscribers are filmmaker Jonathan Demme, musician Lou Reed and the late poet Allen Ginsberg.
said it is ''a shelter for the quirky,'' and Rolling Stone referred to Greenberger as a ''stand-up sociologist.''

Recently, a double-CD set has been released. ''The Duplex Planet Radio Hour,'' with Greenberger and Adams, was culled from shows the pair did for a series of radio broadcasts that aired on New York Public Radio.

Greenberger is also finding different ways of getting the message across.

''I've been doing a lot of artist-in-residence projects in various cities,'' he said, ''meeting people in the elderly community and working it into the monologue.'' Additionally, he continues to publish the magazine on a semi-regular basis.

"I have been doing this for more than half my life now - so this is me," the Greenwich resident said of his unusual career.

After graduating from a Massachusetts art school in the late 1970s, Greenberger took a job at the nearby Duplex nursing home. He began documenting his conversations with residents and published them in a small chapbook series he called "Duplex Planet."

From its humble paper-and-staple beginnings, Duplex Planet has grown into a cottage industry that includes a number of CDs, books and comics and a radio show.

The original series has grown to more than 160 issues, and Greenberger has received national praise along the way. The New York Times likened Greenberger to a modern-day version of Chaucer. Rolling Stone called him a stand-up sociologist. Creative filmmaker Jonathan Demme, musician Lou Reed and the late poet Allen Ginsberg have all been readers.

The multimedia crossover with other art forms and artists is a natural progression, Greenberger said.

"Duplex Planet' as the little magazine is at the core of what I do, and the closest to my heart. But I realized that I needed to bring it to people in different forms," Greenberger said. The result was an ongoing collaboration with musicians and illustrators.

"I like the collaboration process," he said. "I like how the conversations are framed. The music needs to be the architecture - the house - for the stories to really work. If the music is the architecture, then the story is the solo. Plus, I am continually trying to find things that challenge me artistically," he said, "as well as keep the damn thing afloat."

As a teenager growing up in Erie, Pa., Greenberger said he would carry around a small notebook to record conversations. He didn't realize until many years later that he was planting the seeds of his life's work. Eventually, he came to terms with his discovery, what Greenberger describes as a long-standing interest in "capturing through the written word the character of a person."

"I look for what comes out of the conversation. For example, someone will tell me about how a bird swoops by a window. (In that context), it's not a complete story, or one that they would usually tell, but there are things that I really like within it. They are like the paint, and I'm the one doing something with the paint," Greenberger said.

"Somewhere along the line, I found my own voice. I felt, 'this is me.' So I stopped painting and decided that this was going to be my art."

by Thomas Dimopoulos
The Saratogian, 2002-2003.