Chicken John

"Chicken" John Rinaldi is a showman, musician, mechanic, one-time mayoral candidate, and author living in San Francisco, California. He is involved with the San Francisco arts community, as well as the Burning Man community, and was proprietor of the now-closed Odeon Bar.

Musician
Rinaldi has played on several punk rock albums, including seven albums for the band Letch Patrol and one for Joe Christ & Bigger Than God. He also played bass in the band Trash, Flash, and Money, which later changed its name to Right Said Fred. Over the course of his career, he's played in several New York City punk bands including Rats of Unusual Size, Iron Prostate, and Youth Gone Mad. In the 80s and early 90s he ran the company Vital Van (with Vital Music Records) and built connections roadie-ing for many other New York bands. More recently, he played in Los Angeles carnival rock band Don Knotts Overdrive and was musical director and member of The Odeon Cocaine All Star Band, featuring performers such as Harvey Sid Fischer, Mark Growden, Zoltan di Bartolo, and Jascha Ephraim.

Rinaldi was also the original guitarist of GG Allin's band The Murder Junkies. He shared his experiences with the infamously violent singer in the documentary Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, directed by Todd Phillips.

Due to an unusual agreement, he was Chris Spedding's only guitar student, and studied with him from 1989 to 1990.

His own band, Sissy, signed to Atlantic Records in 1992. However, after the death in October 1993 of his partner and bass player Chuck Clearwater, Rinaldi decided to leave professional music.

Showman
In 1994 Rinaldi conceived, organized, and became the ringmaster of Circus Redickuless, a nationally touring "punk rock circus" which ran for six years. It consisted of many members of the Cacophony Society as well as Chicken John's pet, "Dammit the Amazing Wonder Dog." The circus was the subject of a 1997 documentary of the same name by Phillip Glau. This film later won Best Documentary at the 1998 New York Underground Film Festival.

Rinaldi helped organize many Cacophony events in Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco in 1996, becoming involved in its own Cacophony chapter and the intertwined community of Burning Man. In 1998, he and Dr. Hal Robins of the Church of the Subgenius created a project called "The Wizard of Ass". Supplicants would approach Rinaldi (or Chicken, as he was by then widely known) at the top of a yellow path to ask "The Mighty Ass" a question, whereupon Robins would answer from behind a 40-foot tall newspaper-and-duct tape sculpture of human buttocks. On concluding his remarks, a blowtorch would "fart" fire from between the cheeks. This performance led to a weekly salon in San Francisco, which evolved into the long-running Ask Dr. Hal Show. The show's regular format features Chicken reading questions submitted by the audience, Hal answering them in erudite fashion (sometimes in poetry), KrOB DJing unusual music selections, and David Capurro projecting humorous imagery related to the question.

In 2002 Rinaldi organized the first Bakersfield-to-Fresno handsaw-powered vehicle rally.

Television
In 2000, Rinaldi was hired as the in-store host of Planet Hollywood's Planet TV, which played in all Planet Hollywood restaurant locations and occasionally as paid advertising on cable.

He also hosted four 1-hour episodes of Powertool Drag Races on The Discovery Channel in 2002. Radio personality John Hell and co-founder of the Church of the Subgenius Dr. Hal Robins were his co-hosts.

Gasification
In 2007, Rinaldi together with Berkeley artist and engineer Jim Mason converted his 1975 GMC pickup truck to run on hydrogen recovered from gasifying pelletized biomass, such as coffee grounds or walnut shells. This vehicle came to be known by the tongue-in-cheek name Café Racer, which originally referred to a type of small motorcycle used in Italy to travel between coffee shops. Although gasification was invented in the 19th century, at the time it was built the Café Racer was 1 of only 3 functioning vehicles in the US that had a gasifier system.

Ironically, the next year Rinaldi received a letter from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District offering him $650 in exchange for scrapping the vehicle, giving the reasoning that "older vehicles have less efficient emission control equipment and therefore produce much more air pollution than newer vehicles." Gasification, while arguably not carbon neutral, is far more environmentally friendly than fossil fuel.

Boating
In the summer of 2006, Rinaldi was recruited by noted street artist Swoon to build the propulsion system for a raft made of salvaged scrap that was to travel down the Mississippi River for Swoon's project Miss Rockaway Armada. Rinaldi had previously conceived a design using car engines on a gimbal, with a 'long-tail' drive shaft terminating in a propeller for propulsion. Having seen them used in Thailand, he would spend years experimenting to improve the design. Two diesel engines salvaged from old Volkswagen Golf cars were converted to run on waste vegetable oil. They departed from Minneapolis Minnesota and got as far as Andalusia, Illinois. The crew would come back the next year and get as far as Cementland, in northern St. Louis, Missouri.

In 2008, Rinaldi was invited back as chief engineer when the same crew built three junk boats in Troy, New York for the Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea project and traveled down the Hudson River to New York Estuary.

In 2009, Rinaldi and members of the Swimming Cities project traveled to Kooper, Slovenia, and took 3 similarly scrap-built boats across the Adriatic Sea to Venice, Italy and crashed the Venice Biennale under the name Swimming Cities of Serenissima. The boats in Europe were built from diesel engines out of Mercedes cars, with the same long-tail design. The Harbormaster of Venice forbade the garbage rafts from navigating the waters of Venice's Grand Canal, but allowed them through the harbor to dock at Certosa Island, as the boats were stages and sets for a performance component of the project. The boats did navigate down some canals of Venice, anyway.

The Seasteading Institute contacted Rinaldi in 2008 to create water-themed events to promote its message of sovereignty at sea. This led to both Camp Tipsy and Ephemerisle, which continue annually.

Rinaldi's latest boat The Relentless is a 40'x12' cedar barge originally constructed in 1948. Billed as "an Artstead", it was refurbished with a grant from the Seasteading Institute together with a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter. The Relentless is currently moored at Bethel Island along with its assistance craft, Simply Persistent.

Burning Man
Rinaldi and Jim Mason created the BORG2 organization in 2004 as a result of a bet with Larry Harvey, executive director of Burning Man's official organization Black Rock City LLC. They asserted that a democratic process of funding and curating would produce higher-quality artwork than the LLC's more restrictive grant process. Over the next year, the BORG2 organization garnered funds through donations and held elections to determine which art projects would receive grants. Notoriously, a grant was given consisting of "a bunch of pennies and other misshapen but still legal US tender." The pennies themselves have since been put to artistic use. Eight art projects received funding, including Mark Perez's Life-Size Mousetrap, but the organization fell far short of its goal of $250,000 — raising little more than $25,000. As a result, Chicken John sat on the dunk tank for the Burning Man Decompression party in 2005. Rinaldi continues to be an outspoken critic of Burning Man's management.

East Village, New York City
In 1988, Rinaldi was one of the organizers of a protest against a new curfew that then-Mayor Ed Koch put on Tompkins Square Park in New York's East Village, where he lived at the time. The protest was poorly handled by police and erupted into a riot. There was wide media coverage and the city received more than 100 complaints of police brutality. As a result, several officers were removed from their posts either permanently or temporarily.

City Tow Scandal
In 2002, Rinaldi galvanized a lawsuit against San Francisco's towing contractor City Tow for unfair billing practices.

The company ran a scam wherein unclaimed vehicles would quickly accrue high storage charges (higher than state law would allow). It then offered vehicle owners a chance to waive towing and storage fees if the company could auction off the vehicle. By manipulating its auctions, frequently selling to itself or to its employees, and for less than the highest bid, the vehicles often sold for very little. The company would then attempt to collect on the former owner for the cost difference. Rinaldi and many of his friends were billed in this way. In response, they bought a full-page ad in two local newspapers, created the website WeWillNotPay.org, and gathered the minimum 700 individuals required for city attorney Dennis Herrera to pursue a class-action lawsuit.

The case was decided in only 7 minutes. More than 72,000 claimed debts were deemed invalid, 33,000 collections bills were refunded, and City Tow eventually settled with the city and state for $5.7 million.

American Apparel
In 2009, Rinaldi organized against an American Apparel outlet being permitted to open on Valencia Street in the Mission District. Several years before, the city approved a voter initiative requiring a public hearing for such "formula retail" stores to open in certain commercial corridors. Apparently certain of the store's approval, and without notifying the neighborhood, American Apparel's website listed the address of their Mission location as early as November 2008. Due to the get-out-the-word efforts of Rinaldi and many others a huge number spoke in opposition to the proposed store at a city hearing, and the San Francisco Planning Department unanimously rejected the permit.

Dolores Park Food Vendors
In 2010 and 2011 Chicken John helped organize opposition to food vendors inside the city's popular Dolores Park. A few organizations were created just to oppose such development, including the group Take Back Our Parks, Dolore Park Works, and the Facebook group Citizens Against the Commercialization of Dolores Park. Among the issues raised were flawed permitting procedures, poor communication from SF's Recreation and Parks Department (especially a lack of public notice), and plans to use gas-powered generators.

It was widely reported in local media that Chicken threatened to organize people to spit on employees. Chicken made three statements that could be construed this way (emphasis added):

"Smarmy would be a good word to describe the commissioners and the directors attitude. It ended with shouting. Spitting. Crying. It was terribly exciting."

"People are spitting mad. If it is true that they didn't see this comming, which I find impossible, then if I were them I'd run. There are going to be a thousand people there spitting on them on their opening day."

"They are about to have thousands upon thousands of people spitting on the ground after saying their name."

Chicken claimed a few days later in another unverified blog comment "I'm sorry that you think I threatened anyone. I did no such thing."

Six months later, on the day food trailers were to arrive in the park, he organized a "Puke-In," directly stating "we will fill Dolores Park with vomit and watch the trailers float away on a river of puke." This was even more widely reported, and Chicken claims 57 stories appeared online and in the papers. Before the scheduled day, Chicken revealed the protest would include $750 of novelty vomit and a cardboard food trailer replica, saying "Did anyone really think I could puke on another human being... someone who I didn’t know... just because we had different opinions on the location of a taco truck?"

In a last-minute agreement, San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener and the remaining vendor La Cocina settled on moving the trailer onto the street, just outside the park boundary. Arrangements were made and the trailer was successfully moved out of the park in October 2011.

San Francisco Mayoral Race
Rinaldi announced his candidacy for mayor of San Francisco on July 9, 2007, ostensibly challenging incumbent Gavin Newsom. The motto of his campaign was "Nuisance '07", and its stated goal was to elect him for second place, inspired by San Francisco's new system of instant-runoff voting. He championed San Francisco as "the city of art and innovation." Among other issues, he wished to publicize those facing San Francisco artists and promote ecologically-friendly fuel alternatives for municipal vehicles. Gavin Newsom was considered to have high popularity, raising over $1.5 million in private campaign donations, and Rinaldi never expected to win the election.

Campaign Financing
After submitting the required official declaration of candidacy on August 8, 2007, Rinaldi claimed to have raised $25,000 in campaign donations from San Francisco residents by August 28, thus qualifying him for public matching funds. However, on September 13 he was denied public financing by the San Francisco Ethics Commission on the basis that around $20,000 was donated through e-commerce site Paypal. As it was PayPal's official policy to provide only a shipping address, while keeping billing information confidential, the commission ruled such donations were insufficient proof of residency. In 2003 another San Francisco mayoral candidate, Matt Gonzalez, had similar problems providing PayPal donor information and eventually paid a $3,300 settlement.

The Chicken For Mayor campaign contacted Paypal and obtained special internal verification that the addresses did indeed match, which was submitted September 19. By October 2 the commission had approved many more contributions, accepted 272 residents for the required 250, but their qualified total of $20,500 still fell short. Contributions were said to be disqualified if they were less than $10, in the name of a business (even a San Francisco business), or from an individual whose driver's license did not match their billing address. The following day the campaign's lawyer submitted a request asking the commission to clarify which donations were ineligible, and for which reason, and a date by which to appeal them. Executive Director John St. Croix responded with the pessimistic assertion that simply by requesting an appeal the campaign had lost its right to do so. Twelve days later, on October 15, a meeting of the full commission unanimously overturned this decision. The campaign continued to seek some validation concerning public matching funds even after the election was concluded, and it is still unclear whether it ever should have qualified.

Members of the Ethics Commission made comments that John Rinaldi's campaign could be seen as a test case, and admitted they themselves weren't very familiar with the city's public funding regulations.

Outcome
As expected, Chicken John did not win the San Francisco mayoral election on November 6. He did garner 2508 first-choice votes, 4042 second-choice votes, and 5362 third-choice votes, or 11,912 votes in total. About 8% of the electorate voted for him as one of their choices. During the "Loser's Ball" election-night party thrown by the Chicken For Mayor campaign, the last $1500 of campaign money was dropped on attendees in the form of $1 bills.

Author
In 2011, Rinaldi self-published his first book, The Book of the IS: Fail... To WIN!, Essays in engineered disperfection.

His second book is currently in production, titled Book the UN: Friends of Smiley, Dissertations in Dystopia.