Singular Sensation

The Chorus Girl Show
By Carolyn Raship

Dixon Place, NYC through March 31

The sepia backdrops of Carolyn Raship’s Chorus Girl cycle are like the skin canvas of a tattoo, and the stylized works would lend themselves well to that chic vintage medium, but these images endeavor to portray more of what’s on the inside of lives we know mostly from the surface.

Time tends to paint over personalities that don’t fit the picture, and Raship is fascinated by early-last-century women who came from obscurity and attained either prominence or notoriety in their lifetime, but tend to be forgotten or only sketched in today. She picks a pantheon of figures who started in the once-disreputable occupation of the show’s title, and emerged from the crowd-scene as famous names, breaking the mold of cultural prohibitions (Native American entertainer Princess White Deer), rising to serious artistic renown (screen icon Louise Brooks) and either coming to early ends or being too close to others’ (unwilling objects of scandal Evelyn Nesbit and Olive Thomas).

In some compositions Raship orders these life stories in the three-ring, Sistine Chapel-style montage known from Harper’s layouts of the time in the golden age of ornate paste-up, posing her subjects like figures of myth as if we’re seeing the blueprints of the carved monuments these heroines never got; in other pieces we seem to be seeing multiple chapters of the same woman’s life overlapping and interacting, an epic compression of incident that could be called personal-history painting.

A whimsy lifts these spirits back out of the unknown and an occasional Gorey-esque grimness conveys a festive yet thoughtful psychic underpainting to the pictures’ mood, like Day of the Dead feasts for personas enjoying one more day of being larger than life.

These works are worth as many words as you can find on Raship’s inspirations, portraits of women meant to be seen who also will be heard. No few of these pop goddesses were material for mass-culture illustrators and photographers of their day, but not ones who were interested in revealing identity and painting in the rest of the record like Raship (a playwright as well as an artist) can do.

The images are up at a legendary New York performance space through March 31, in a show that’s been extended twice already, a fitting symbol of what’s here to stay.

What Comes Around (5)

The Top 5 things I didn’t get to in 2013

New Year’s is a time for reflection and aspiration, but these are fueled by fruitful regret! Over the next week or so (okay, by now it’s been more like months), we’ll be looking back longingly at art, comics, books and music I should have paid more public attention to in the 12 months just past — and pledging to make all our cultural appreciation immediate and immortal!

Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to YouTube by Trav S.D.

BearManor Media

Early in this family history of physical comedy, humorist, performer and variety-entertainment impresario Trav S.D. recalls how books alone brought to life a lost world of silent-movie comedy for him as a youth in the 1980s, noting the obstacles inherent in this activity as being like imagining the taste of gourmet dishes solely from food reviews. But Trav himself lays out a banquet of reminiscence, demonstrating how much of entertainment and edification occurs in the imagination, which is his most essential and assured medium. Like Wynton Marsalis, who was unjustly criticized in some quarters for acting, as frequent narrator of Ken Burns’ Jazz series, disingenuously “as if he had been there,” Trav wipes that concern away by making me feel like I was there. Also early in the book he proposes that Charles Chaplin held onto silent moviemaking so much longer than any of his contemporaries because he realized that the basics of storytelling do not require sound; Trav has a sense of the primal connections we make among events and with a work of art. That’s why his lively prose, itself dependent on words, paints pictures and conjures pratfalls — and historical turning points — that don’t just lead us to the source material but open a wide, clear window on it.

It’s a common stumble of arts criticism itself that the act of analysis makes authors feel constrained to convey a seriousness in their phrasing that disserves the pleasurable values of what they’re describing to begin with — for pop to be honored, it doesn’t have to become respectable, and shouldn’t be. Trav’s prose is as energized and witty and open to the unpredictable and unforeseen as the high and low masterworks he considers; like all the best criticism it can’t compete with its subject but does complement it.

Trav’s cultural archeology is flawless, like he’s listening for the echoes of ancient laughter and feeding it new lines. He starts by explaining that some of the earliest clowns (performers preceding written-down theatre) were the mimes of ancient Greece (“mime” in this case for “mimesis” or imitation, placing them among the first memes); interestingly, this profession was so disreputable that it was strictly kept separate from the rites for the drunken god Dionysus, though it is hard to say now who has had the more enduring and fruitful Hangover.

Trav continues on through the Medieval-and-later European tradition of traveling pantomime and other entertainment, likening its temporary open-air stages to “the back of a pick-up truck” in the first of a book-full of phrasings in which he invokes historic practices by renewing them in the context of contemporary understanding. The conceptual continuum of Trav’s thinking is dazzling, as when he takes us through the centuries of suppression of European entertainment by the church, and the implicit origins of short-subject film comedy in brief scenarios played around or between more legitimate long-form culture (operas, ballets), as well as the disrepute that performers sustained across all these centuries, blowing through their material and your town fast. Life is short and feels long, so the jokes have to be even quicker.

Like a master career comedian (which he is), Trav retells stories that are old to him in ways that make them brand new, with both period patois and fresh turns of phrase. As important as it is to convey a thrice-told tale with its punchline intact, Trav also delves into not just the comic but the serious business of interpretations that have not been extracted before. His identification of early silent-comedy farce as a kind of proto-countercultural modeling of an anarchic spirit, and his perception of the greater role of blockbuster-scale disaster played for laughs (falling buildings, big explosions) as a diminishing of the individual’s scale by the very technology that’s also making these SFX advances possible, are all about what story is being told unconsciously by the jokes we tell on the surface.

Trav has a gift for cross-referential metaphor, as when he describes Chaplin’s improvisation of his films as being like using “the whole apparatus of the film studio [as] his pipe organ to compose on”; this talent serves Trav well in divining the symbolism that connected certain performers to the strivings of their viewers, forming more than just a bond of stage-and-audience call-and-response, as with Chaplin the recent immigrant embodying America’s possibilities for self-re-creation and Harold Lloyd (whose hilarity ensued while he was trying to play by the rules rather than flout them like Chaplin’s character) embodying the consolidation of comfort and following of social standards felt necessary by more long-established Americans.

To make these links Trav carries an encyclopedic, yet discerning, knowledge of every era’s context, sketching what was going on around a given comedian’s defining traits (like the acrobatic Douglas Fairbanks — known as a comic actor long before he was an early action hero — being surrounded by the first superstar body-builders, the popularization of vigorous outdoor activity by iconic president Teddy Roosevelt, etc.).

Trav’s populist scholarship acknowledges the need to connect with listeners in the way that all successful theatrics and effective educational transmission require, as when his historical lens takes in both the true phenomenon of a suis-generis genius like Buster Keaton, whose instincts and inventiveness were innate, and the context in which this supposedly (and avowedly) untutored humorist had to be influenced by cultural advances in ideas that (as often happens) we view as rare and recent but in fact were enjoying a first surge of discovery at an earlier time before the lid came down again (in Keaton’s case, the models of surrealism to be found mass-market in L. Frank Baum stories, Winsor McCay cartoons, and outlandish amusement park design as well as art galleries and literary journals). “No one comes from nowhere,” Trav remarks; we are always learning, even and maybe especially when we are being entertained.

The book brings to life personalities that even in their day were known to us mostly as their press-managed projected shadows, but reading those outlines Trav comes up with inspired psychological profiles (as with the fatalism of Keaton’s Midwestern, abused-child-star upbringing translating into an existential stoicism in his roiling comedy and impassive persona).

In the same way that modern vernacular and references refresh and clarify his content, Trav remains adaptable to where the results of individual artists’ experiments lead; for instance, affirming that some kind of emotional relation is needed to follow a comedic character through a whole feature rather that the shorts that once dominated Hollywood, while also acknowledging that, for the right type of completely absurd personality (Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers), conventional story can be a constraint which ruins the new territory that visionary jesters can take themselves and us to. Form-follows-function can also point the way to shapeless silliness when that’s what does the job (and when it is in fact just defining a new geometry we had to traverse the whole contours of to see).

However, Trav has a connoisseur’s eye for what should be left out of the frame. He persuasively argues that the prevalence of radio as the precursor to TV refocused film audiences to the verbal from the physical in a way that impaired comedy when films went from silent to “talkie,” a case of technological advances actually representing a narrowing of options in the way we can fixate on them at first.

The book is a continual valued tutorial; I hadn’t known that pioneering comedy mogul Mack Sennet is partially responsible for the Miss America Pageant as well, or that Jacksonville, Florida was once a movie-making mecca. And throughout you get an idea of the kind of master-class Trav could run on how to get to the heart of what’s funny by acquainting yourself with that heart of your own (while also training your mind to understand what subjects stick with the audience as an odyssey into how they make sense of the world, and not just a diversion from it they’ll quickly forget). “The bird doesn’t know it’s singing,” he says, “it just does it” — artistry is intuitive, and can be an intention of the soul even if the artist is unaware and the consciousness of this only comes in those who are there to hear the song.

The book’s handful of flaws warrant much fewer than a thousand words: The scarcity of pictures is something you miss once you have read these stories, though you don’t find yourself wishing for them while making your way through Trav’s illuminating prose. In a discussion of the limited opportunities for African-American actors in the silent era, a footnote mentions Charles Lane’s much-later cult favorite Sidewalk Stories from 1988 and then never brings it up again, a bit maddeningly. And an over-apology for Chaplin’s (silly, irresponsible) celeb-statesman defense of the Soviet Union, in the face of the tyrannical McCarthyism that got him kicked out of the U.S. for it and is deemphasized by Trav, seems the one time when his grasp of historical context and proportion eludes him.

He can be allowed to miss one or two things since he is typically projecting magic moments and whole centuries of movement we otherwise couldn’t witness, or showing 20-20 vision for things no one saw at the time. His paralleling of the gruesome proto-torture-porn of the Three Stooges to the golden era of monster movies happening at the same time (the classic Frankenstein, Dracula and other franchises) is inspired, and causes a compact comic masterpiece in a brisk paragraph pointing up Larry, Moe, Curly and Shemp’s comparisons to slasher-movie/house-of-horrors psychos (fixating, or instance, on their neglectful, chopped or absent hair styles, which he likens to demented mad subgeniuses, head-hacking serial killers and patients shaved for brain surgery. Now that’s funny!)

Trav needs to be as good an anthropologist as archaeologist in later chapters; silence can be right in the midst of modern commotion, but we don’t always stop to consider it that way. Harpo Marx was of course a lonely last-man-standing for pantomime in the center of hyper-verbal farces. Otherwise, Trav looks for flare-ups of the physical in our joke-obsessed current comedy canon.

Slapstick itself relies on the eyes, and the kinesthetic sense, and space, not words or explanations, though it does tell a story, like the dance that probably preceded spoken language among our ancient forebears. In this understanding Trav both tracks the persistence of precision slapstick — which mostly emigrated to TV after the 1940s, through veteran clowns like Red Skelton — and defines the debased variety (mere mayhem at the hands, feet and power-tools of the Stooges; mugging and contortions unconnected to the advancement of any story or delineation of any character by Jerry Lewis). He brings up the resurgence of formal clowning schools and popularity of theatrical clowning festivals throughout the 21^st century world, and notes Sacha Baron Cohen as a standard-bearer (trained in this discipline and certainly a full-body comic in addition to his modern vaudevillian multicultural shtick).

Jim Carrey is conspicuous by his absence, perhaps lying unnoticed somewhere at the bottom of the Jerry Lewis file-folder, though I’d be interested to know what Trav makes of Carrey’s commute between pure farce and his Chaplinesque attempts (and occasional success) at art-house gravitas (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Keatonesque darkness (The Cable Guy, I Love You Philip Morris). Trav does identify present-day makers of entirely silent movie comedies, and the success of his way of thinking is to get me noticing examples he doesn’t mention of surviving strains of visual comedy in venues where it feels so natural that I at first don’t realize that a revolution is being reborn — Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill’s drug-stupored flounderings in The Wolf of Wall Street; Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer’s Sisyphus-like struggles with fire-escape ladders and too-narrow doorways on Broad City; the improvised soundless side-stage café/cocktail-party business by the ensemble, especially dance-trained Stephanie Willing, in Ian W. Hill and Berit Johnson’s play The Strategist.

In short, and long, the show goes on, and while I didn’t want this book to end, Trav demonstrates that there is in truth no final act. Talk is cheap and laughs are gold, and in Chain of Fools Trav S.D. retells a grand story and epic punchline in your head, with a full and shining silence.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

No, Seriously, Stairs to Korea

Indoctrinating myself with this disk (well, file) all month…the dead-Beach Boy angel-chorus and Miami-sound-machinery of “Paid Position,” the haunted player-piano and Eno hotwiring of “Josiah’s a Writer Now” (and the way it sounds like singer Will Vaughan is saying either “sigh” or “sire”); the lonesome drunk trumpet of “After You Die” and the interstitial muzak and the trapeze-ballet of intertwining backup vocals he does with himself and the way the whole set sounds like it starts on a triangle tinkle and ends on a bardic harp, and “Hey Roundheads” sounds like his best anti-American song yet, and I hope we can get him over here in not too long to do some more research. In 2013 David Bowie had the comeback of the decade, and Will Vaughan had the go-forward.

http://tapealarm.bandcamp.com/album/human-gain

What Comes Around (4)

The Top 5 things I didn’t get to in 2013

New Year’s is a time for reflection and aspiration, but these are fueled by fruitful regret! Over the next week or so, we’ll be looking back longingly at art, comics, books and music I should have paid more public attention to in the 12 months just past — and pledging to make all our cultural appreciation immediate and immortal!

Human Gain by Stairs to Korea

Do not maladjust your set, Human Gain will seize your satellite playlist and make you feel as good about life as possible while convincing you that you can be better. Like a renegade self-aware social-network server that opens into the parts of your life you leave unposted, this album uploads your foibles for all to see and your joys for you to remember. “All of Your Friends” is the epitaph-update for self-conscious hipsters who might like to outlive the moment, and “Rabbit Years” is a headlong wedding-vow from people too preoccupied enjoying life to record it. But Stairs to Korea have registered it all, in glittery tones of icy electronics that come in multiple candy-syrup flavors; the sound-palette is like a careening ghost-taxi high-speed-haunting the radio and deck of every car it astrally crashes through, from bouncy Liverpudlian pop to Prince-like big-band gymnastics. Songwriter Will Vaughn’s wit is unsparing and generous at the same time, one of many paradoxes that dynamic harmonies hum between. The self-doubters of “She’s a Waste of Time” and the all-access haters of “Guy Fawkes” jostle past each other and try to avoid that taxi, but the hits keep on coming in the most fatally infectious parade of pop confectionary and Wilde-ian wise/assery of 2013 or any year this century. The vibrant cultural tangle and infectious ease of post-imperial Britain texture and illuminate this tuneful, attuned work, from the crazy unafraid tone and tempo shifts of “Paid Position” to the moody sinewave tide of “Rome Beware,” both of them delivering messages that make you think twice or at least once, and the latter mocking its own synthesized grandeur while ascending on the updraft of its well-earned ambition. When humans gain, that doesn’t leave any of us out, and if when music hits you feel no pain, Stairs to Korea’s truth can never hurt.

[Revolution on sale: http://tapealarm.bandcamp.com/album/human-gain]

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5

What Comes Around (3)

The Top 5 things I didn’t get to in 2013

New Year’s is a time for reflection and aspiration, but these are fueled by fruitful regret! Over the next week or so, we’ll be looking back longingly at art, comics, books and music I should have paid more public attention to in the 12 months just past — and pledging to make all our cultural appreciation immediate and immortal!

The Power of Glamour by Virginia Postrel

Time had a good run for four billion years or so, but it’s been replaced in our priorities with space — our understanding of dimension, in the theoretical-physics sense of parallel realities and not just geographic expansion, has overtaken our nostalgia for an idealized past or optimism for a perfected future; we could have the better life, the cleaner environment, the fairer society now, if we could make the right choices we know every moment’s particle pivots on and just bring the perfect world into focus with the space we occupy, like two projected film frames being synced up.

Virginal Postrel maps this perception of possibility in her fascinating study, out last December, The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion (Simon & Schuster).

Her subject is the allure of what we don’t have and feel we are in line for, be it social utopia or personal wealth or fulfillment in romance and creative expression. She shows how popular figures, widespread symbols, sought-after objects incarnate or refer to these desires, and how, by the nature of their personal significance, these icons are subjective, and subject to shifts in context of era and culture — how, for instance, the impoverished Depression era could glamorize sleek luxury (without taking account of industrialization’s costs in pollution and drudgery) while the comparatively materially satisfied current generation of Americans elevate the rural and organic (editing out the agrarian life’s difficulties and disease). 

This is not a book about style (Postrel has done one of those too); the author is examining not intrinsic worth or beauty, but an appeal that is ascribed to things. The icons of glamour — wind turbines, sporstcars, Marilyn Monroe — are not the Platonic “forms”; not the ideal, but the echo, the symbol that plays the superlative on television (or movies, or political conventions or sports arenas or shop-cases) and projects it on our dreams…or is the screen for them.

Postrel excavates with diligence and insight many things you recognize but realize you don’t know — the Rosetta Stones and commercial scripture of our current era, e.g., who actually held the first fashion show, and when the open theater of billboards and store windows first collected around a community whose aspirations they both spurred and articulated. In images we can see as icons of the old-fashioned, like the proper and put-together Gibson Girl (a late-1880s magazine- and print-illustration archetype), Postrel illuminates the roots of a later empowerment that this affluent and leisurely yet often solitary and always self-possessed figure, a significant departure for its time, set in motion and marked the progress toward.

The book takes care to be true to the sensory enjoyment or spiritual attachment under discussion, with phrasing and interpretations as artful as its subject matter, and an observant interplay between the text and images which specifically illustrate or thematically resonate with it, from art-deco murals to the Shanghai skyline to one particular valedictory photo that echoes back to the book’s first page in a way that shows Postrel’s encompassing vantage point and persistent attention.

She makes novel connections and certifies unpopular but incisive outlooks — as with the reasoning that early automation, with its fear of (then mostly male) workers being replaced, helped bring on the glamour and fantasy of cars (a machine you control) and self-reliant hyper-masculine movie gangsters and superheroes; and the realization that rappers’ supposedly crass bling obsession is not garish consumption but conspicuous positive visualization, from a class to whom economic and household-technology advances that the majority considers basic are not at all evenly distributed.

Too many sociologists deny the inexactness of their science, but Postrel understands that the observer must admit, embrace, their participation to report with any authenticity on how cultural influences work on the human mind; to this end her fluency in pop culture, her accounting for a range of its sources from 1600s Japan to modern hip-hop, and her consideration of the most seemingly ephemeral or widely dismissed expressions of it — comics, Star Trek fandom — are all the more persuasive.

As a scholar who partakes of as well as reflects upon the phenomenon, Postrel’s reasoning respects the public’s ability to discern the effect of glamour on them, as a connection we “know to be false but feel to be true,” as with superheroes, a symbol cited as clearly aspirational because the popular audience knows it is purely unattainable. Postrel builds a good case for why those aspirations (of the powerful being, the beautiful princess, the esteemed writer or accomplished adventurer) can be beneficial — not just in mentally escaping misery but successfully striving to leave it behind, or in envisioning the not-yet-possible to create needed inventions, etc. — as well as the dazzle of glamour’s more common critical identification as a spur to admire tyranny and terrorism or see life as one long disappointment.

The flaws are barely notable in the book’s captivating whole, though scrutiny of the type Postrel herself practices directs our attention beyond the surface. A faint market bias seems to poke through in passages like the one where Postrel catalogues the (very real) drawbacks of wind power in detail while only alluding to the illusions of nuclear by pondering if wind will go the way of “electricity too cheap to meter,” which only readers of a certain age or wonkiness will recognize as the Peaceful Atom’s old slogan. Editorial adjectives are reserved for counterparts Postrel has an apparent personal hostility toward — the “crabbed” and “desiccated” John Berger is a lot more fun to read that those who haven’t would surmise from the way he’s portrayed here, though Postrel has good points about the limitations of his inquiry.

And at some points she seems to overrule her own arguments to back away from even mildly dissident conclusions — in a spotlight on the visual archetype of The Striding Woman, she marshals many quotes from across history and from men, women, political individuals and commercial institutions alike to confirm the encouragement or exploitation of a feminist impulse in this image, then at the end says it conveys “a more universal allure.” But as rightfully universal as this vision is as a symbol of freedom and assurance, it always draws its appeal from an implication of what women couldn’t do before — and that can be a symbol to men who want to expand their possibilities too (like fashion photographer Richard Avedon, who is quoted as being inspired by the photos of Martin Munkacsi, an auteur of the confident, striding professional/fashionable woman image in the 1930s), but it is always keying to a specifically gendered sense of restraint and liberation (even the unconventional male identity reflected in Avedon’s interests and form of expression); sometimes a symbol isn’t “more” than it seems because what it seems is everything.

Nonetheless, Postrel’s omnidirectional frame of reference rejects checklists. Any concern a reader of a given ideology can raise finds the book revolving around to a full and considered context (as when, apropos of the above, the chapter on contemporary glamour takes account of the action-heroine as icon of what viewers feel persistently missing in their life and society). Postrel processes events and adjusts the shape and breadth and texture of her observation to the profusion and evolution of its subjects in ways that diverge from the distance and retrospect of much social criticism and study; avoiding either political agendas or prior intellectual conclusions, her ability to assume the perspective and engage the vocabulary of many contexts and tastes, to navigate among multiple cultures (both historically established and spontaneously synthesized), makes Postrel one of the most indispensible intellects and credible observers in our perpetually morphing and exponentially diversifying social fabric.

Postrel’s eye takes in and evaluates with attentiveness and originality a panorama of human condition, period and place, and all its fine details and ephemeral shades of feeling and impression. The Power of Glamour is the almanac of the space we occupy as ever-differing people in the shifting world we collect around ourselves, a history-in-progress of the destiny we make up as we go along.

http://vpostrel.com/

Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5

What Comes Around (2)

The Top 5 things I didn’t get to in 2013

New Year’s is a time for reflection and aspiration, but these are fueled by fruitful regret! Over the next week or so, we’ll be looking back longingly at art, comics, books and music I should have paid more public attention to in the 12 months just past — and pledging to make all our cultural appreciation immediate and immortal!

Matteo Scalera

Europe is America’s alternate dimension, the Old World we base the euphoric and treacherous arcadia of elvin fantasy on, the future that never arrived for us in stylish 1960s sci-fi and romance movies, the contemporary land where we’re always appreciated more than our culture accepts itself.

Italy especially assumes this mantle of mass myth-marketing, an artistic mecca that has seismically radiated styles and sensibilities since the Renaissance and draws the world’s attention while stirring in all its creative fruits. The best Westerns were shot by Sergio Leone (in the Spanish desert) in the 1960s; the vocabulary of vampires and superheroes and fashion icons is most fluent in this cultural cosmos.

One of its most insistent emissaries in 2013 was comic artist Matteo Scalera, his spattered, serrated style the essence of bravura midcentury art-gesture while being the definition of graphic eloquence.

Scalera’s frame traveled centuries and continents and dimensions; Black Science (Image Comics) was about such explorers themselves, caught in a kind of cosmic iPod shuffle after a reality-crossing experiment mishap; but Scalera was in the nosecone and supremely confident of each crash-landing. Writer Rick Remender has mapped an odyssey across every landscape we know better than the lives we escape from, dropping his characters with vivid believability not into the most reflexive worlds of wish-fulfillment but through all the most garish of pulp and B-movie terrain, from evil laboratory to treacherous swamp to wicked castle to high-tech, primitive battlefield, all with parallel-world roulette spins (deranged regal frog-kings, a united archaic Europe beset by space-age Indigenous colonizers, etc.) and Scalera visualizes an atlas of what never was, in careening widescreen canvasses of sanity-straining surreal sensation.

Plummeting from an American-pulp concept of the future and stars to America’s founding myth of frontier courage, Scalera staged an eternal drama of desert survival struggle, with inhuman criminals and vengeful lawmen playing out the primal conflicts of classic Westerns in the trappings of our more recent legend, the 1970s gangster saga, for Dead Body Road — his Tarrantino-esque graphics conjuring the sun-blasted blank slate of the endless highway and the angular edges of old-school muscle cars puncturing the elegant swirls of Black Science’s hallucinatory surfaces. Scalera choreographed a ballet of wreckage, both emotional and mechanical, and the unblinking brutality from writer Justin Jordan was matched to a very clear-eyed morality, for the most horrifyingly mesmerizing and meaningful comic crime drama since Darwyn Cooke’s Parker graphic novels.

Scalera always benefits from the blessings of strong and visionary colorists; the baking hues and dank shadows of Moreno Dinisio in Dead Body Road animate Scalera’s savage stark linework and black edges, while the otherworldly surfaces and substance of Dean White’s painting in Black Science push Scalera to a reality-breaching sense of possibility (as the alien illuminations and slashing clarity of Val Staples complement Scalera’s grinding, muscular composition on Indestructible Hulk over at company-owned Marvel).

Scalera speaks our own mythology back to us, in ways that always take us farther than we knew possible, and keep the real world safe for imaginative grace.

http://matteoscalera.blogspot.com/

Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

What Comes Around (1)

The Top 5 things I didn’t get to in 2013

New Year’s is a time for reflection and aspiration, but these are fueled by fruitful regret! Over the next week or so, we’ll be looking back longingly at art, comics, books and music I should have paid more public attention to in the 12 months just past — and pledging to make all our cultural appreciation immediate and immortal!

Jen Ferguson

I admired this artist’s murals from across the ocean of the internet, between my desk and the edge of the Earth at Red Hook, Brooklyn. Never made it out there but these images are personal wherever you are. Like snapshots of punchinello paparazzi or a merry Hieronymus Bosch, the whimsical grotesques are in the good mood that drink shields you with, a visual tonic at the back of Sandy-hit and still-standing Sunny’s Bar on the historic New York waterfront. The apparitions start without you in this parade of skyscraper-headed humanoids teetering next to impish devils breathing foggily on a warming Earth and badass Santas driving several-child open sleighs — along with festive colossal squids under Howard Finster-esque floating musicians and rodeo-riding chefs on mutant lobsters, bucking like one of the capitalist Four Horsemen of Waylande Gregory fountain sculptures repeated as cartoon. This was a funhouse mirror that flattered and reassured while neither masking nor magnifying the perils it satirized. It all goes down better with art, the creation whose canvas flaps against ecological catastrophe and rough historic seasons, and Ferguson’s unsinkable wit is a life worth imitating.

[After hours: http://www.artinchaos.com/ ]

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Wild, Wild Northeast

Iron Bound by Brendan Leach
Secret Acres

In our current sophisticate/traditionalist coastal/heartland divide we don’t stop to think much of the outlands around New York as a cradle of America’s guiding myths and founding tragedies. But one look at midcentury morality psychodramas like the Hoboken, New Jersey-based film classic On the Waterfront reminds us of the hold the cement frontier once had on our national imagination. This, of course, was the edge of America, the boundary line between here and the harsher worlds so many had come from, and it was a cliff to either climb or hang from.

Brendan Leach reanimates this distant-feeling time like the collective yesterday it is in the masterful graphic novel Iron Bound. That’s close to the name (“the Ironbound”) of a largely Portuguese-immigrant, traditionally working-class neighborhood of Newark; New Jersey’s biggest and one of its most troubled cities (though one haunted by the overlain ghost-town of a glorious past, like the even more desperate Camden at the opposite end of the state). The real Ironbound is more on its feet than much of Newark today, but Leach’s tale and title catch it at a time when a name which might once have conveyed muscular industrial vitality, instead sounds like some sort of shackle.

Iron Bound takes place in what many remember as still being a golden age for the city, before white flight and the riots of the late 1960s turned this chic metropolis and economic powerhouse into an axiomatic urban husk and a kind of punitive social-service desert for populations of color who dared to demand better lives.

The characters in this graphic novel, though, have no idea of the city’s future and little awareness of its heritage, circling in a perpetual present of petty crime and political corruption in the shadows of the city’s prosperity. Leach’s focus, as in so much pop culture about New Jersey and, there’s no denying, so much of New Jersey itself, is trivial graft and territorial conflict, which takes on monumental importance in its characters’ lives. But the book looks down on no one; this is immediate, involved drama reported and lived from the level of its characters’ point of view.

Uncompromising honesty leaves no room for superiority, and the lack of comfort but tenacious lyricism of perspective is plain from the moment we see the cover itself, with the book’s name seemingly painted in red over a vista of the city like some celestial supertitle slammed down on the harsh movie of real life, one of the book’s street thugs placed close and in the center of that street, but with his back to us, like some ill-omened Old West gunfighter.

The plot revolves around two rival low-level mobsters in Newark and Asbury Park (a shore town shown in its own heyday here, though many gloomy decades awaited it too), as well as the young, underemployed legbreakers (and worse) that they make use of, the thugs’ conflicted girlfriends, and cops on the take triangulating between them. Everyone is compromised in this social order, and Leach orchestrates an elegant clockwork of present-day and flashback events that fill in the players’ stories, take us through their wrong turns and make us understand their motivations (if stay scared and sad about their choices). Little by little we learn what wrongs they have concealed and memories suppressed, all revolving back around like the tumblers of a jail-cell door.

The city is a permeating presence, and Leach superbly captures its atmosphere and architecture, sometimes with agitated detail and sometimes with minimal essence, the highrises’ windows seen only as dabs of light in dark skies, like predatory eyes peeking out from primeval shadows, above the neighborhoods closer to the ground.

Iron Bound’s characters bully each other a lot, but they themselves are bullied, passed by, swallowed by the city, which Leach with virtuoso instinct knows when to pull out for panoramas of, to show how the setting surrounds and supersedes the passing inhabitants of the life shown in the book, or any life.

Leach is putting us in a vanished world, and the senses are crucial to this. We feel the grit and dinginess of the urban environments, the bygone grandeur of Newark’s ambitious avenues, the sunny wonderland of the shore; we see shorthand motion masterfully choreographed, and abbreviated faces indelibly imagined; most of all we hear every moment of the narrative — the clicks of footsteps, the screeches and skids of cars, every door-jingle and blow of a fist is superbly diagrammed with sound-effects that form a sporadic backbeat to the action, a heart’s rhythm and manic ticking clock timing out the characters’ drift or rush to their fates.

There is wonderful, terrible animation in the harsh fight scenes; a Hitchcock-worthy pursuit pulling in combatants and innocents at a skating rink. The book’s epigram and epitaph may come at a point early on, when one of the story’s thugs comes to talk with a criminal contact and tells the man’s lieutenant outside his office, “Don’t get up Fred,” and Fred replies to himself after the thug has already passed, “Get up for what?” — these characters aren’t going anywhere, and the least sad ones have no plan to.

When one gang of hoods goes looking for some cannon-fodder of a rival boss, the boss, washing his hands of the nuisance, says “Newark’s not too big you can’t run into them…” and in Leach’s well-strung pattern all lives intersect and collide — but remain trapped in the circle they were made in. His frame sometimes zooms out to full-page size, but lets in a narrow image of existence, a parking lot, a dumpster, to show a universe cropped down to these characters’ grudges and defeats.

He also shows their lives often looping into a local movie-palace, and the tightly-packed throngs Leach portrays are a perceptive profile of the desire for escape. In the same year the book is set (1961) the film of West Side Story came out (though it’s not shown here); that movie couldn’t help but glamorize the strife it showed to some extent, but there’s no redeeming style to the squalor and tension of Iron Bound’s story, and no elevating message of racial acceptance; the book’s ethnic breakdown is similar to the musical’s, but there’s no particular cultural distinction to the rivals’ turf wars; it’s all Darwinian hostility at the twilight of America’s boom times, with no recognizable lesson to be learned however long its players live (though we get the feeling that most of the characters are acting out choices that have been made for them before they were even born).

We get very attached to the cast and forget we’re reading a story, and I won’t say too much about what relationships form and how their participants end up. Suffice it to say that Leach is that rare storyteller who keeps a clear eye on where human decisions lead while focusing a master’s imagination on how they might intersect and where they turn unexpectedly — and that, as it fades out on Newark’s forgotten world for good, Iron Bound stands as a brutal, beautiful reminder that history does indeed march forward — just, often, not with you.

They Win

The Collisionworks 2013 at the Brick Theater
Presented by Gemini CollisionWorks

Purchase written by Ian W. Hill

The Strategist, or:
The Woman of Some Virtue, or:
Before You Ever Heard of It by Ian W. Hill & Berit Johnson

Final performances, November 23, 2013

The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, USA

It’s a special pathology of human thought that we believe that the younger, since they haven’t seen what we’ve seen, can’t envision the future like we do — though this is really because they have already been born into our future, and it’s not what we can recognize.

The generational chasm is accentuated in Purchase, which leaps us into an eventual future America and thus displaces every viewer from their best hopes to their worst expectations.

We’re at a fashionable home in a volatile neighborhood in a high-tech Dirty War-style United States extrapolated from the surveillance culture and rule of martial law set in motion by our own time’s current and previous presidents. Aristocrat, concert pianist and longtime liberal activist Lady Stefanie Anderssen, played by Alyssa Simon, is visited by young junta operative Colonel Simonette Allyson, played by Anna Stefanic, in what seems at first to be an intimidating interrogation. The mirroring and exchange of names, of course, signals us not to rely on any of our assumptions, and Hill’s script and the masterful tension and caution of each actor’s performance puts us unnervingly and inescapably in a social habitat in which every word is watched and every meaning is weighed, always with well-being and life in the balance.

Lady Stefanie has funded “approved” nonprofits that oppose the government, though Colonel Simonette suspects the money has gone astray to insurgents, with or without Stefanie’s knowledge. But in their psychological fencing it comes out that the Colonel may want to know so that she can enlist the Lady’s aide for a rebel faction of the military itself. In a society where any neighbor can be a secret enemy, we can all hope that an enemy might be a secret friend. There is no centering certainty, only shifting perceptual ground, which is the true triumph of any totalitarian system, more than any direct imposed authority.

It’s also the essence of small, undetectable but collectively inevitable steps to tyranny, and Hill envisions an ingeniously, chillingly plausible end result. He also extrapolates a speech-pattern, mostly employed by the Colonel, that is instantly disorienting yet sharply recognizable from current tendencies in popular address; she corners Stefanie with an abbreviated nextspeak somewhere between texting shorthand and phone-menu technobabble, which throws its listeners off while also being both starkly direct and, in its austerity, spurring a proliferation of meanings like poetry or the coded patois of many historical undergrounds.

The women have no absolute way of knowing if they can trust each other, and what becomes their mutual interrogation — and at times unlikely bonding — reveals in Hill the uncommon understanding that atrocity is not grand, it’s intimate; oppressed and oppressor, and the disappeared and the spared, are linked much more closely, in antagonism, in guilt, than most of us are comfortable exploring.

Simon shows an astounding palette of emotional reserve and submerged terror and strategic response and tenuous tenderness and smoldering arrogance as the aggrieved refugee from a time in history we think we know, and Stefanic creates in the Colonel a devastating portrait of the disciplined, conflicted, disillusioned, dutiful product of the future we think we fear, very aware of her limited options but in touch with unsuppressibly noble instincts; a performance, and a role, of towering empathetic imagination from Stefanic and Hill.

As the revolution both women seem to want begins, the Colonel despairs at the breakdown of order in the way it flares up while the humanist Lady seems to exult in the bloody uprising; they represent different strains within the forces of change, and there are irreconcilable contradictions between Stefanie’s desire for abrupt overthrow and Simonette’s desire for a transfer of authority to occur within a corrupt system — the latter an unsettling echo of the Egyptian military’s centrality to the ouster of that country’s last dictator and its aggravation of authoritarianism before and since.

What’s missing is the common people we never see in this play — the masses who made Egypt’s revolution inevitable were cut out of the process by those who made it possible, and Purchase’s elliptical structure — with several repeated scenes and alternate outcomes from the same event — locks us in a circle. The soldier and the aristocrat, classically the two types of people who form nations, never leave the one room we see them in; we hear great numbers of people fighting and dying outside.

That locked room’s dread is painted masterfully by Hill’s light and sound design, a sequence of blackouts and generator-spotlights and envelopes of music and noise that form tangible barriers with ephemeral substance. In a striking, eerie device, each of the two women alternatingly appears in a mirror that the other is sitting before, to accentuate the two sides of one thought they represent. But the play’s scariest enclosure is that very psychic echo-chamber. In furtive and all-too-realistic references to its edicts and abuses the tyrannical State is a terrifying presence here, but ironically is not in the room; it is a single “side”’s ideological warfare and unbridgeable frames of reference we are witnessing in the two rebels’ doubtful alliance, to a conclusion as imperfect (and in the play, left as open-ended) as any of the blind spots and unfinished business of the revolutions we know in real life.

But the multiple courses that the story cycles through are not really about closed circuits, but open choices — and the possibilities of actual consensus rather than isolated plotting. The play ends on an image of movements consuming themselves, with one character’s apparent murder and another’s possible suicide, suspended between the moment she might complete or reconsider it. By the time the world of Purchase has come about, it’s down to two people, and just “leaders,” and one choice; returning us to our own time, the play leaves us with impressions of the steps left to all of us before we get there from here.

A cultural, rather than political, passage of generations is portrayed in The Strategist, a much lighter (though somewhat longer) play by Hill and Berit Johnson. There’s a history-painting’s worth of characters in this comedy of manners: several waves of colonists in venerable, trendy Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In a mecca with an ever-transient population, life-support is the elusive commodity that links them all, from working-class oldtimers to neocon-ish real estate entrepreneurs to ex-hippie indie capitalists and youthful internet junkies of indeterminate occupation and income.

The title strategist is Maxwell Kraft (in an athletically overwhelmed characterization by George Bronos), a youngish man who has a gift for putting disparate dreamers and social-frontier types together for lucrative new trends but has established nothing gainful of his own. It’s a mystifying profession straight out of a William Gibson novel and right into contemporary Brooklyn’s world of new cultural models and post-collapse America’s financial ecosystem of phantom commerce. But Maxwell’s life too is headed for a crash, as his own phantom funders — his moneyed mom and grandfather — arrive for a visit and demand to see something, anything, he has to show for their investment.

Definitions are elusive, though concrete expressions of people’s lifestyle and enterprise are an obsession of the characters: running jokes track the connoisseurship of typefaces in a dominatrix’s business card or a website’s landing page, and the world revolves around the aphorisms of celebrity tweeter Onan Fapwank. The players’ names are like news-crawls of their inner character (from Fapwank’s self-regard to Maxwell’s crafted personality). Two coffee-barflies serve as a vintage chorus (in the best pop pentameter I’ve heard since Prospero’s pages in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier graphic novel), and the dominatrix specializes in verbal abuse, a funny metaphor for the tortured language many of the other characters use to obscure whatever it is exactly that they do to survive.

Hill excels as a provider of fresh content for classic frameworks (see also his live sci-fi “movie serial,” Spacemen From Space), and with first-time writing collaborator Johnson this screwball Restoration comedy is no exception. The play’s own structure is a dizzying clockwork of mismade connections and comic misfortune, as Maxwell gets beholden to the dominatrix to use his apartment for a promo video shoot on the same day his family are coming and at the same time he forgot he invited a local vegan activist he’s wooing (while a lamb cooks for the family and he tries to maintain the lie that he’s meat-free, along with the ones that he’s employed, has the rent ready for his landlord, etc.).

The 18-person ensemble (with several multiple roles as well) navigates this machinery with vigor, especially Bronos, and Linus Gelber in an eye- and “R”-rolling tour de force as Fapwank; Bob Laine as Maxwell’s serenely abused roommate; Rokia L. Shearin in a charismatic powderkeg performance as the dom; Ivanna Cullinan as the terminally chagrined mother and an airborne internet tastemaker; Matthew Napoli in an understatedly uproarious turn as a Wall Street heavyweight and secret masochist; and Amanda LaPergola serving gourmet shtick as a café regular and urban Revolutionary War reenactor.

Hill and Johnson provide an x-ray view on an intricate edifice of concealment — the sources of support people would rather not discuss, the inner lives no one’s asked about, etc. — and bring everyone together in an unexpected, true community as the walls all fall and the plot’s gears click magisterially. Maxwell’s frenemies advise him of “the new privacy” catching on amongst reformed obsessive status-updaters, and a number of joke payoffs and plot-thread tie-ups suggest a “new resolution,” which the writers and ensemble make wholly believable. The play ends with the full cast delivering a valedictory poem removing the fourth wall too, to dedicate the story from its creators to the immigrants and laborers and artists who have in their turn kept the lifeblood of this New York frontier flowing for many eras, hopefully in continuing kinship. Everything comes together at the end, and for once it feels like the thin air some good fortune seems to come from is a big sky we can all live under.

Politics of Representation

The 50^th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death is occasion to reflect on his parallel history, the speculative perfection that tends to be ascribed to martyrs whose life doesn’t linger to disprove the theories.

In a cogent new essay analyzing the free-floating surface that hovers between our conception of JFK and the reality he lived (and was headed for had he lived longer), Virginia Postrel details the perpetually suspended state of utopia that a “Camelot” fantasy involves. This is a matter of glamour, the watchword of her newest book and of course, in knights-and-dragons folklore, the word for a spell that projects some illusory nature over a more complex concept.

Postrel notes that the most glamorous figure to emerge in U.S. politics since JFK was Obama, but that Obama is now living out the second-act disillusionment that awaits most two-term presidents seemingly inevitably. But some spells are stronger than others.

Kennedy’s clung through a tenure which started with an elective military fiasco (the Bay of Pigs invasion) and the magic stuck with his brother Ted through a long career in which Ted’s profound questions of character were also well-publicized from the start; Obama’s spell began to wear off soon after he took office, but may have found new ways to survive.

Postrel notes the magical-thinking by which “different people projected different, often contradictory ideals onto” Obama (in the same way that both hawks and doves claim JFK’s tough talk and international outreach), and it’s interesting to remember that the other recent political figure this most applies to was the earlier model of Obama’s first national opponent, John McCain — no one’s idea of glamorous, yet the object of intense optimism and assumed agreement projected by conservatives, libertarians and liberals alike when he ran in 2000.

The essence of politicians like Ronald Reagan and FDR (despite or because of the volatile moments they emerge at) is to offer reassurance, while the essence of ones like JFK, and Obama in 2008, and McCain in 2000 (all relatively stagnant moments), is to promise risk. Each of the latter three did so at a time when the national mood felt ready for it. Still, JFK (for all his unfinished business and instinctual caution) remains the most recent of them to actually try to deliver. McCain morphed into an establishment candidate in his attempt to overcome Obama, who won and then swiftly backtracked on every transformation from his predecessor that had been promised. And indeed well exceeded that predecessor’s policies, with a vast and unaccountable apparatus of indiscriminate surveillance and a foreign policy of automated, mass assassination. He then won reelection, with most of this already plain to see (in kind if not in scope), because his opponent signified the type of step back that seemed more profound to most Americans.

Mitt Romney was disliked by his own base but committed to their main interests, which is what conservative voters fall back on; Obama ran against his own base but symbolized their visions for an engaged central government and a culturally inclusive national family, which is what liberal voters cling to. In short, Romney’s voters stuck with him because of their sense of who he truly represented, while Obama’s stayed with him because of what they feel he represents.

Postrel points out the would-have-been factor in popular history’s less kind memory of Lyndon Johnson, who was the one to actually accomplish what JFK is credited with setting in motion (like the Civil Rights Act). Surely, it’s thought, JFK would have brought about more utopian reforms, in a less strife-torn country. Johnson may have been the least risk-averse American president since Lincoln, and his “unglamorous”ness, as Postrel rightly describes it, may owe as much to the unattractive realities that risk runs into as it does to his lack of Kennedy’s glossy aura. Johnson gambled on equality and the nation won; he gambled on Vietnam and not much of anyone feels grateful for it, which spelled both his political career’s and his posterity’s doom.

Risk, in the popular affection, is not rewarded. The allure of Camelot, as wisely diagramed in Postrel’s piece, is that it is a golden age forever set apart from daily life and thus imagined to be reachable because of its very remoteness. And it could be that we prefer it to stay remote. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the long arc of history bending toward justice, but we’re a generation that fetishizes the journey. Politicians who risk and live are rejected like LBJ; those who risk and die too soon are deified like Lincoln and JFK; Obama is the beneficiary of a new conceptual phenomenon of the infinite-journey society: still in office, imperviously set for a long life, he is indefinitely elevated in his supporters’ eyes not by a vision of what would have been but a remembrance of what could have been.

Obama embodies a promise kept perpetual by its deferment; he ritualistically campaigns to supportive crowds while staying removed from a reckoning with day-to-day (unglamorous) political exchange, and is indulged due to the immobile stance of his opponents, but also indulges it himself. It’s almost as if a contemporary politician can be rewarded with loyalty for exactly as long as the intimidating uncertainties of actual change are held off. By that measure, Obama keeps the dream alive. And meanwhile, in the personal sphere we believe we have control over as opposed to the political arena we feel we can’t affect, Obama still represents an alternative to the constraining paternal monocultural model that Romney scared enough people with — a triumph of lifestyle, in the several senses our consumer democracy offers, over actual political life.

It’s easy to become pure style when your material form and its potential failings are past. But even concurrently with present political icons’ falls from grace, style can stay alive and well.