TODAY’S WEATHER

Bizarro World

Sun 		Jotunheim

Snow 		Kandor

Adam McGovern

Lies, Damn Lies and Autobiography, Part 6: Productopia

Nov 252012
 

It takes a global village to raise a 21st century manchild, and it’s time to look back on the Madison Avenue where I really grew up. The TV was on more than the windows were open, and we learned our living skills well from it, my dad in his downtime always brainstorming for slogans we could use on viral-hit posters of our cat, my mom speaking in spontaneous ad-copy (once, upon thanking her for a particularly tasty brand of bread she’d fed me, she assented, “There’s no rye like it!”).

It was a good place to eat and breathe media; having come from New Jersey, the state where the most celebrities are born and don’t admit it, I mostly grew up one state over, in Pennsylvania, an endless shipwrecked shore of ephemeral goods in protective attics and neglected shop-shelves, where you can still walk into an antique paper show in some cavernous agricultural building and find 1970s monster-movie mags that probably didn’t exist the first time.

The East was treated as a promised land of popular commodities; my mom’s California relatives, having visited once or twice, would need to be sent cross-continental care packages of Tastykakes, then only available in the Philly area, like relief supplies to a ravaged coastline, or spongy golden apples stolen from some Olympian field which, once glimpsed, could never really be turned away from.

We had a talent for homing in on our own consumer Brigadoons. One summer when driving across the country to see those California relatives, we broke down in Zanesville, Ohio — a shadowy ghost-town when I last saw it in 2008, but in 1978 a lovely sunny Rockwell/Bradbury mainstreet spliced from some sentimental Twilight Zone episode. The record stores — okay, first thing, there were record stores :-)  — still had little personal booths with individual vinyl turntables for private listening before you bought, which seemed antique to me though it was really a futuristic foretaste of the digital-kiosk era. The whole town had that feel of a merry Bermuda Triangle of marketing, repository of everything that could or had existed; in the local grocery store diet sodas with cyclamates, an artificial sweetener banned around the time I was born, were still on the shelves, near to great pyramids of snack-cakes and soft-drinks that I wouldn’t see again for years, or ever; a buyable oasis where strawberry sugar-water bubbled from the ground. Everyone was preternaturally nice, as if this apparent test-marketing mecca had its very townsfolk assigned as customer representatives to put you in the best mood to register a recordable reaction.

My favorite Charlie Brown special, uncharacteristically tied to no holiday except perhaps the endless American commercial summer and, like many of the material revelations of my childhood, never shown again, was one where the Peanuts gang goes on a school field-trip and gets accidentally split off so they end up in a bountiful modern supermarket that they mistake for a natural history museum. Long before my childbearing friends would have entire rooms of their house sacrificed to plastic playthings that make it look like someone distracted a waiter and hastily heisted a Chuck E. Cheese, such shrines to what the bazaar of American manufacturing had to offer — in goods and lifestyles and actual individuals — would present themselves as stations all along the road of my upbringing.

These consumer temples were even more the province of counterculture than they were of Mad Men-ish geometric living-rooms assembled from a picture in a Sears catalogue — the teen bedroom of one of my late-1960s West Coast cousins was like an unmarked blacklite-bomb sent by the Yippies and giftwrapped on the inside, covered floor-to-ceiling-and-back-down-the-opposite-wall in dayglo psychedelic posters, with a showroom’s-full of flashing and flickering novelty fixtures, displaying not unlike 2001-movie astronaut Keir Dullea’s interdimensional bad trip. Though my favorite older-teengirl-cousin accouterment was, again, back East: a relatively spare attic bedroom in which the cuz had a poster of then-boy-superstar Bobby Sherman pasted over the TV screen, so you just had to look at the only thing worth watching ever, Bobby Sherman.

Still, that TV’s population could pour forth without notice, or we could fall in like Alice in slumberland, or some kid star of our own age whose career would never grow up, in a similarly drug-inspired Sid & Marty Krofft fantasia. We’d see all our favorite costume characters face-to-face — talking-animal cartoon-show hosts The Banana Splits opening a toy store, living-fruit snack-cake mascot The Big Fig working a local mall in a manic kids’ cabaret act — as if Disneys -land and -world had finally just stormed the country from each end. Thinking back, my mature delusions of media success were grounded in a personal childhood history of concrete coincidence. The Don Ho Moment — like when the Brady Bunch go on a family trip and every celebrity you’d free-associate with whatever locale they’re in just happens to approach them — recurred with strange frequency and we didn’t even have to travel far, or at all for it.

We ran into and talked long with beloved TV-cowboy patriarch, trusted dogfood spokesman and Original Galacsta Lorne Green in that same mall, where he was campaigning for Hubert H. Humphrey’s next failed presidential run; on a New York City sidestreet my dad made the real Keir Dullea and an unidentified date stand there for like half an hour in the hope that my mom would emerge from a parking-deck bathroom to be dazzled (but eventually even this most gentlemanly of heartthrobs had to get on with his evening, leaving him, to my mom, merely another media mirage and post-Kennedy-era myth of what might just have been — though prior to this my parents had, between them, bumped into everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Henry Fonda to Harry F-ing Truman in restaurants and parking lots).

And that’s not even counting the celebrities my dad paid to hang out with us, like non-movie astronaut Gordon Cooper, signed on as a spokesman for one of our household’s own products, an early green-economy device to conserve untouched H2O your toilet-flush could waste called “Water Wizard” (I know). In a perfect moment of life imitating artifact, Cooper, already well on his way to vodka liftoff at like 11am, stood in a Florida hotel room and patiently critiqued my space-alien toys, explaining, for instance, that Colossus Rex, “The Man From Jupiter,” had a bulky physique more suited to the atmospheric pressure of Venus. This was right before, having been begged to relinquish his car keys (itself an almost science-fictional demand in those pre-MADD days), he said Go and crash-landed into a Miami palmtree, which seemed to feel more pain than he did — though that’s another flashback.

This was still when the giants could leave their own big screen for a while, but not without going through the audience first; and before we could dive in after them day or night through a small screen of our own. Now we don’t have to wait around for marketers’ or revolutionaries’ surprise packages, and whatever’s outside that giftbox, we can just keep tearing paper and it opens without end.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 7

The Once and Future Cake

Nov 212012
 

Twinkies could famously last forever, but they evolved with the times. Who can forget the candy-enrobed version, the 1970s “Chocodile,” and who can ever stop thinking about the deep-fried variety popular at local fairs in the Paula Deen era? And the heavenly Hostess was abundance without end -- I remember eating an entire box each of two strange, late-1960s variants on the chocolate roll-up Yodels and the classic one-layer devil’s-food Ring Dings, each instead with yellowcake (geopolitical pun intended) and white-chocolate coating, called “Snowdles” and “Snow-Dings” (the second name didn’t make much sense, but I was already in a sugar catalepsy by then) -- my mom and an aunt thought this was a great idea, and at 5 years old I puked like a teenage binge-drinker, and learned my lesson well: that there’s always more. And there still is, even as Hostess and Drake’s and Dolly Madison ended for me a long time ago in my 20-plus years as a vegan but various artisanal green-hedonist outliers publish book after book with nondairy cream-filled cupcake recipes. For everyone else, though, the kitchen is closed and the store-shelves are cleared anxiously, as Hostess’ workers go out in the cold and its salary-fattening bosses prepare to deep-fry in a Dantean lake of grease.

But corporations are people that never have to die, and a brand, active or dormant, is a consumer’s friend for life. Toward the end of the 20th century scientists noted with what seemed like unconcealed glee that bodies were decomposing slower due to all the preservatives we’ve consumed in indulgences like Twinkies. And the cakes themselves will rise again, in the eternity of supply-and-demand, like a silver-age superhero or the latest James Bond actor, unkillable icons of America’s midcentury prime. But when Twinkies do return to the aisles, it will be as an obvious artifact of dietary dark ages, the semisolid counterpart of Pabst beer, a mainstream-hipster guilty pleasure in the thrift-store of our souls, the heyday officially over. So I’ll light a spongy yellow mourning candle, and place perfect-rounded chocolate rocks on the tomb. The colorful boxes will stand in memory as monuments to an era of booming prosperity and assembly-line optimism. You were a good hostess, Hostess -- we didn’t know (or want to) what your meals were made of, but you made us what we are. Ring-a-ding-ding!

Citizen Flip-Flop

Nov 052012
 

There’s a lot of talk, in these last campaign days, of Romney’s “vision” and what Obama “represents” — it would be nice if we were wrestling over realities, which is what the rest of us have to live out. And a little-considered truth is that diminished expectations cut both ways — if Obama couldn’t be as good as imagined, Romney is not likely to be as bad as feared.

But I expect that he would be bad enough, and recent reality (like the disaster that refocused American’s attention and eclipsed him on the news) has been no kinder to him than the facts he tends to reject. Romney’s a pawn, but, as his pledges and behavior have demonstrated more each day, he’s likely to be as much a pawn of the extreme right as president in tea-party America as he was a partner of the moderate left (to constructive ends) as governor in Kennedy-defined Massachusetts. We barely survived the four-year Prime Ministership of Newt Gingrich in 1994-98, and that was with Bill Clinton more-or-less fighting him; Romney won’t fight Boehner at all.

Neither of the paths that each candidate is on will benefit the country’s long-term future, but here in the United States of Emergency, where today and the day-after-tomorrow are becoming all we can worry about, our current president and our next one (Chris Christie) convinced me that what we need is to keep what we have — saving my home state as electoral politics lifted and the superstorm touched down.

I saw them act like grownups, look like leaders, and get together like we all did to make something better happen than any bad thing that can happen to us. We can rise above a lot, and we can stand up to any decision that turns out to have been not the ideal one, and we can step up to the realities of what it takes to fight another day. That’s why I’ll finally knock on doors with confidence, and pull a lever with certainty, for President Barack Obama. And we can deal with the future if we make it there.

The Tenacity of Hope

Oct 252012
 

Performance rapper Darian Dauchan’s oration/song-cycle with sound-system and video-montage Obamatry: A Spoken Word Remix on the 44th President of the United States is titled too modestly. It’s not a portrait, it’s a landscape; the composite of an era sifted from the signals and noise of four years’ raw feeding frenzy and scanned in the mind’s eye of an uncommonly discerning social journalist.

Dauchan understands that historical periods can be defined by single individuals without being “about” them at all, and Obama is known to each observer by what he references, a screen that reflects back everyone’s projections of hope and fear.

This tells us who we are, in racial progress, in social balance, not who he is, though this map of America’s political mind has a cast of 300 million, as Dauchan’s repertoire of verbal characters and vocal styles processes the multiple perspectives that swirl around the era’s central figure, and traces the space that’s left between people and the distance from our dreams to our destinies.

It’s a freestyle oracle vision, an audio political cartoon, a shaken-up box-set of the last term’s greatest soundbites. It’s despairing, it hilarious, it’s resourceful, it’s charged. For all Dauchan’s considerable gifts at rhyming and song and body language and live sound- and image-manipulation, what Obama is to public speech Dauchan is to public listening -- the humanity of a deified and demonized figure, seemingly not entitled to the contradictions of all his predecessors, is revealed, and every citizen’s view gets exposure.

These opinions, like those contradictions of a pluralistic nation’s leader, are unresolvable, and Obamatry steps to the side of the paradox. A summation, from an inevitably individual point of view but casting the widest focus, considers the value of Obama not in himself but in the possibilities his story embodied, the doors it opened for others to walk through.

Some can be disappointed in him now, and some hate him like they always did, but what in our history should make us think this step forward was the last one left to take, or that there were already none more needed?

If this show or America were about any single person, then the story of our democracy would be at an end. But Obamatry’s main case is made for the reasons why our future can’t depend on one person less than all of us. It made up my mind, though I won’t say in what direction. The genius of America, and the essence of life, is in the ability to find excuses to believe.

Approving the Negative

Oct 012012
 

I remember a moment, tromping up some hilly Pennsylvania sidestreet in the middle of anywhere as twilight draped down, knocking on doors in the last weekend of the Obama campaign, when I knew that it was going to be enough — that people everywhere want their lives to find balance, and that things had tipped so far in one direction that the sanity of the side that had been sent away would prevail. At that moment I didn’t realize that, by the my very reasoning, enough would be enough — that most people would want a leader to restore stability, not resume the risk of dreaming. The last regime had given dreams a bad name, and the walk back to the center of the seesaw was a delicate one. I missed the message of Obama’s promise of transformation; we were not, to borrow a phrase far out of context from Glen Gold, going to change, but change back. Which is sad, because there was really no normal left to get back to, and the true standard of American existence is a concentration on what’s next, even though it had long and lately been corrupted into merely what’s more.

So, a verbal rejection of torture but no formal reversal of unitary executive power, and money poured into steadying the commercial ship we do all depend on but no opposition to the ultra-rich tax breaks which helped crash the country to begin with, except at election time when it’s not up for a vote. And one of the most recognizable restorations of the familiar: electing someone based on how much worse it could be. I voted for Kerry because it was imperative to get rid of Bush, and I’ll probably vote for Obama again because of how much more unfit Romney proclaims himself by the day and the hour. Many, who hoped with Obama four years ago and are scared with him now, will take his patchwork of reforms in a tapestry of status-quo corporate-military rule as proof of a negative, in the way which has guided voters at least since 2004 — there were no more big terrorist attacks and thus Bush stopped them, there wasn’t a double-dip Depression and thus Obama saved us, and there will be even fewer checks on the 1 Percent if they have all *three* branches of government, so let’s keep a nominal Democrat leaning back against the levee for four more years.

I can’t discourage anyone who wants to help Obama, though I still don’t know if I can bring myself to encourage *him* even with my non-third-party vote let alone my fraying sneaker-soles this time. And even I, fearfully, admit that that’s because I’ve long felt his re-election inevitable; the status quo has that clear mark of longevity. And that will be better for the country in the next four years — though no more nourishing for its future. I’ll wake up November 7th with no additional despair or added hope. And wonder when we move from the inevitable to the imaginable.

Epic Succeed

Sep 132012
 

Epics #1

Physical release September 15, 2012
(Amazon page here; Publisher page here)

Digital release September 26, 2012 (will appear at comiXology here)

It’s fitting that the brisk and engrossing new anthology series Epics is created by several art educators, since it schools us in the form of comics that dominated much of the medium’s first heyday, and the span of history that nurtured some of the archetypes pop most depends on.

Comics began as collections of short stories like the four found in Epics’ first issue, and stayed that way through the period of their greatest popularity; the time between America’s World War Two victory and the 1960s’ cultural revolution was the cradle of the kind of youth culture that has sustained comics and games and serial literature and blockbuster popcorn franchises ever since.

Set in 1959, the four stories, by staffers of the Kubert School of cartooning, are a fifth-dimensional attic of pulp Americana, immersing the reader vividly in the stark noir and garish grindhouse landscapes of Cold War tension and shadowy subcultural danger zones.

Anthony Marques’ Katyusha is blood-and-guts Soviet/Yankee rivalry at its looniest, with a hot war playing out against mythic skyscraper massifs in a presentiment of widescreen mayhem to come.

Fernando Ruiz’s The Iron Ghost is a colossus of clever storytelling bestriding humor and horror, as a cavalier scientist gets caught in his own prototype robot body while both the pathos of a mechanizing society and the pompous foolishness of his pseudoscientific assumptions and patriarchal workplace play out.

Fabio Redivo’s Drake is gleaming, gloomy hardboiled-P.I. classicism, the grimy foundation and underground to Katyusha’s grand towers.

The meta-masterwork of the batch is Bob Hardin’s A Racy Story, in which hotrod culture is embodied in an iconic -- and iconoclastic -- bad-girl ruler of the road doing battle with the ultimate reckless driver, a surreal Mr. Tomato-head Rat Fink variant she has to face down like an Old West gunfighter on the mythic toxin-snorting steel horses of the American endless-highway dreamworld.

Epics is the product of a triumphant Kickstarter campaign and has a digital edition, but befitting its century-spanning scope will timewarp to the age of print with a paper version in partnership with the adventurous A Wave Blue World imprint, known for its thought-provoking thrillers Adrenaline and American Terrorist. Katyusha and The Iron Ghost will also spin out into full-length ongoings (just to show the way we used to do it in the present), while Epics continues with a new theme each issue, launching who knows how many new old favorites with the challenges each legendary setting needs classic characters to rise to.

Let’s Stay Together

Sep 102012
 

Since last Thursday night, “City of Blinding Lights” by U2 has been in my head, though I have to strain to remember much of Obama’s speech. It seemed a strange choice to intro him with — a hymn to fallibility and trying better. But it’s also about someone who really loves their spouse, and that seemed to be the strongest claim being made for either party’s nominee over the past month.

Ann Romney set the tone by emphasizing that she’d be talking not about the economy or the environment but “Love,” and most discussion of the conventions centered on the testimonials from the candidates’ wives.

This isn’t actually an attempt to have you creepily transfer these feelings onto the candidate, but, I think, to keep your mind on whoever it is you do care about. Who gives you comfort in a scary world and a sinking culture. We’re clinging to each other as our options narrow and our focus is forced to contract from civilization, even community, to our family, or ourself.

The two main contenders are, by each other’s repeated assurances, good fathers and loving husbands. But as the aspiring standard-bearers of our democracy face a growing gulf of opportunity and a steady decline in resources and an increasingly tenuous balance of survivable ecology and equitable social order here and across the world, they are turning away, inward, because they are, it seems, lovers, not fighters. And they wish the same for you. Because we’re all in this apart.

The Departed

Aug 272012
 

“Block-head!” No…”Squaring the circle!” Um… (Overman and Moretto try to think back inside the box)

Repression, Release, & World Travel
Gemini CollisionWorks’ 15th-year season, at the Brick Theater

Designed and directed by Ian W. Hill, assisted by Berit Johnson

Removal written by Ian W. Hill
Invincible City written by David Finkelstein & Ian W. Hill
BLVD DE PARIS written by Richard Foreman

Final performances, August 25, 2012

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

Parker Simon, private-eye alter ego of the not uncoincidentally named literary lion Simon Greatman, is traveling the world on a search for an ineffable something he thinks he left behind, and it’s clear that the missing person the jaded novelist is looking for is himself — though presuming to write for the world, he’s never, ahem, been to him (though his long-suffering wife might say it’s the only place he’s ever taken her).

Playwright Ian W. Hill is a lot more reflective than Greatman, and Removal is a meditation on toxic artistic ego that resembles some unmade Woody Allen movie in which for once he’s the villain of his own story.

Ingeniously staged like a clockwork ballet of concentric life-phases and layers of narrative and reality, and with many textural diversions (like a brilliant palette of expression from Stephanie Willing as one of Greatman’s muses and the projected spirit of his mischief, essentially a classic silent-movie performance since that’s the only way she can get a word in; and artisanal shtick from Ivanna Cullinan in a dual role as grandly unamused housekeeper and vaudevillian Eastern Bloc assassin stereotype), Removal actually tracks the reduction of the artist’s existential clutter back to his youthful motivation.

His sudden, Scrooge-like conversion from disillusioned dickishness back to daredevil embrace of life’s uncertainty has more than a hint of deus ex machine from the playwright, pulling Greatman’s strings just like Greatman pulls the P.I.’s. But we can use some more generous gods.

The group travelers of Invincible City think they’ve seen it all, but they’re all tell and no show, jumping from one strange metaphorical metropolis to another baffled or troubled by what they meet and resorting to odd interpretations delivered in something between semiotic improv and nervous incantation, as if rushing to a guidebook or bible to make sense of anything (especially a hilariously flappable Alyssa Simon as the most self-narrating tourist, with some agitprop counterpoint from a by-turns supersonically hysterical and deeply humane Rasheed Hinds, as an actual local swept up for the ride). In flight across the globe ahead of an advancing apocalypse (in wholly coincidental echo and enactment of the more elemental real-life storm savaging the non-resort tropics as I saw this show), the cast are more swarm than tour, literal consumers of experience who leave behind nothing more for anyone else to live.

And life’s too short, but not as short as the Pavlovian cues of BLVD DE PARIS, Richard Foreman’s 1977 play told in blackouts of no more than a minute or two each. Famous painter Rhoda (Cara Moretto) is stuck in a groove (audibly doubled by Hill’s inspired traffic-jam-master skip-and-reverse sound design of looping and pratfalling background music).

Nothing much happens to her, and keeps not happening again, so existence is like a series of slides played on her life, with the story told largely on the actors’ faces like a swatchbook of attitude (most memorably Moretto’s own master canvas of chagrin, her exasperated best friend Eleanor (Amy Overman)’s elegant fury, and her patron Max (Rasheed Hinds again)’s epicurean pomposity — with an avant-buffoonish Stephen Heskett as a kind of animated wedding-cake groom trying to yank the company into material concerns with physical, rather than facial comedy).

The characters are placed on a train for much of the time, going places we can’t see or thus much tell apart. In the era of the play’s fist appearance much could be heard about “Spaceship Earth,” but Foreman remembers that the Earth moves on a track, which goes in circles, only advancing in the manner of the clock.

As if life had a plot, at start and finish we’re told that this story “begins with the theft of a painting” — and “taking” a picture can be an act of theft, the flow of life frozen and an interpretation scraped off of the continuous surface of experience. Or not. The characters of BLVD DE PARIS eventually vacate the scene they were stuck in, but they don’t get carried away.

Part of Me

Jul 262012
 

 

The Fickle Mistress

July 25, 2012
Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie Street, New York, NY 10002

Written by Trav S.D., Directed by Elyse Singer
With Jan Leslie Harding, Everett Quinton, Tim Cusack, Chuck Montgomery, Natalie Paul, Karl O’Brian Williams, and Molly Pope as Adah Isaacs Menken

(Illustration by Carolyn Raship)

It’s hard for me to think of Trav S.D.’s The Fickle Mistress as a workshop production — though it’s just the trial run of one half of a play to take its full form in 2014 — since it’s the playwright’s most fully realized presentation of so vastly ambitious a work since 2009’s Willy Nilly. That play was an apocryphal musical on what we think we know about the grisly reign of the Manson Family; Fickle Mistress is an insightful farce on what we can piece together about the real-life Adah Isaacs Menken, a scandalous stage performer of the mid-1800s and the prototypical American tabloid superstar.

Trav is an impresario of modern vaudeville and a prolific producer of his own social and stylistic satire in several centuries’ worth of idioms, so the raucous lost world of provincial American media is brought to life with improbable, exciting fidelity and the show is relentlessly entertaining, performed at the volume and velocity of the broad and louder-than-life diversions Menken would have starred in.

We have more documents of the ethnic shtick and ephemeral revues and melodramas of this era than we do first-person testaments of the dispossessed, and we are more familiar with the canon of invective against independent and individualistic women than we are with the way they made their lives, so Menken’s serious story swims upstream through the weave of frivolous set pieces and takes shape in the space between caricatures of her by vengeful males, even though, as a born entertainer and natural survivor, she muddies the waters gleefully with all shades of voluntary mythology and seizes life’s scenes at every turn, self-possessed and self-parodying as any uncontrolled woman of the time has to be and as most wise iconoclasts of any circumstance still are.

Molly Pope is magnetic as the star of the story she’s making up as she goes along, and caroms off an A-list cast of sophisticated clowns playing Menken’s worldwide entourage of rubes, scoundrels and implicated bystanders. An appreciative rabble packed the hall and almost brought it down on the one-night-only I saw this, boding well for the full production. It may be a gesamtkunstwerk-in-progress, but God was never through with Menken either, and yet I’m sure She liked what She saw.