Actually if you read the thing

I was at the Mint Museum the other day, enjoying their photo exhibit Women of Vision, centered around a lineup of great female documentary photographers, when a group of high school students came through.

The teacher, a gnomic woman old enough to be their grandmother, led them to a picture of two teenage girls in a piercing parlor who had just gotten tongue studs and were considering their new ornaments in the mirror.

"These girls just got their tongues pierced," the teacher thundered.  "Do they look happy?  Why would they do something like that to themselves?"

"Maybe it was for art, an art thing," a gentle voice said.

"What's artistic about getting your tongue pierced?" the teacher retorted.

They moved to a picture of a toddler pageant contestant, an infant with heavy makeup and big Loretta Lynn hair.

"Look at this girl.  This girl is two years old and she's dressed this way to be 'beautiful.'  Is that beautiful?  She's standing there wearing a wig..."

"Actually if you read the thing, it says that's her real hair," spoke a shy voice.

On to the next picture: a man in heavy winter clothing stands by a pair of severed reindeer heads.

"Here is a man who's hunting reindeer," the teacher said.

"Actually if you read the thing it says he found them, they had gotten their antlers locked in a fight and starved in the cold.  He cut them apart after he found their bodies."

I got the impression this was part of an ongoing conflict.  The girls had learned to respond to the hectoring sermonettes with close reading, fact-checking, and gentle counter-narratives.  Throughout, the teacher sounded like a brat on the edge of a tantrum, and the students sounded like endlessly patient caregivers.  Gives me hope for the future.  No boys involved in the struggle.  They probably respond by carving insults in desktops.

(I should mention that I'm sympathetic to the teacher's skepticism regarding "Beauty," but there were other photos in the exhibit that showed other sides of beauty.  Costumed revelers at Venetian Carnival, barely-costumed revelers at the beach, cheerful women meeting at the hair parlor... positive social functions exist for beauty.  I can't blame Teach for wanting to police the borders of her young charges' behavior and presentation, but her hasty generalizations and sloppy confabulating probably don't help her cause.)

How We Ruined Everything Down in New Orleans

It was the 90s, and this is a story about my 20-something self.  He didn't much care for working hard and being responsible.  I do, so if you're a potential employer reading this, c'mon, gimme a break.  That said:

A friend (let's call him Tim) from New Orleans invited another friend (call him Glen) and myself to stay with him and attend a Nerd Convention there, where we would play live-action Vampire: The Masquerade (whatever that was) and hopefully meet girls girls girls.  Glen and I signed on to work as volunteers at the Con, in exchange for which we'd get discounts on our admission fees.

The event took place in a conference center, and the first day Glen and I went to mission control for our volunteering orders.  Boss Lady, a foxy, busty, stern young woman, assigned us to guard the door at a movie screening room, keeping out anyone who wasn't a paid-for Con attendee.  The guy running the screening room told us that, legally, we couldn't keep anyone out, though, because of the legalities of playing commercial videotapes in a hotel screening room.  Did we go back to mission control for a new assignment?  Nope.  We sat back and watched Das Boot, which someone had decided was a suitably vampiric film (well, Nazis, close enough).

That night (first of two, I believe) we started playing the Vampire game, which involved each of us wearing badges and running around the conference center, pretending to be vampires from different clans, because vampires have clans, it seems.  Each player's badge had a symbol on the front (my symbol, a cryptic glyph which I can't recall, meant nada to me) and on the back, a brief biographical note (I was playing a thief named Stinky with no clan and no friends).

I wandered around the halls a bit, and not much happened for me.  Most players were finding their clans and doing stuff together; they also seemed way more comfortable and familiar with this masquerade than I was.  Tim was all dressed up in his The Crow regalia (remember The Crow?  It was the 90s) and he was off with his clan, Glen was off with some other clan, I was on my own, my social skills were about the same as they'd been in the cradle, and I had no idea how to play this game.   Mapping the diegetic reality of the game onto the halls of this conference center took a facility, or at least a familiarity, with these Vampire games that I didn't have.  At one point I was strolling through the crowd when this one guy spotted my glyph, and his eyes went wide.  He begged me to come find him in Room such and such at a specified time.  Nowadays, well, nowadays I wouldn't be playing the game, but nowadays I'd do as he requested.  At 23, though, I really needed for this request to come from a girl, and it wasn't, so sorry, dude.  I went to the dancing room instead, because the Con had a dancing room.  I took off my badge, which officially signified that I was pausing my involvement in the game, and danced to 90s techno for the rest of the night.

The next day Glen and I did some actual legal volunteer work (in my case, watching the door of the merchants' room to make sure no one swiped anything) and then shifted to more work that mission control didn't realize was illegal (keeping people out of the screening room again, although this time we actually performed a public service, chasing children out during Fritz the Cat and Heavy Metal).

That night I don't think I bothered putting my badge on; I just didn't care about vampire games.  I cared about dancin'!  The dance floor got nice and friendly; in particular, my boy Glen was slow dancing with Boss Lady.   She'd been assigning us work during the day, but was getting quite cozy with the help by night.  Glen and Boss Lady were shooting off sparks, no question.  Meanwhile I told a woman I was dancing with about the (awful) screenplay I was writing, and she told me she was on the board of the New Orleans Film Festival.  I should have gotten her digits.  I didn't, because I was in a monogamous relationship with Akane Tendo.

Well, the next morning it turned out no one won the game because it had been designed such that Stinky was The Chosen One and whichever clan got him on their side would win, or something.  Too bad Stinky was out of commission.  I like to imagine he went to Nashville and became a professional dancer, avoiding the responsibilities of Chosen Oneship.

Also, Glen, who had been warned before about his tendency to speak without thinking, made the mistake of confessing to Boss Lady that we'd gamed the system and avoided doing real work, and she shot off some sparks of a decidedly non-romantic kind, and didn't give us our refunds, and I was glad because we didn't deserve them.  I went home and told my Goth friends that I'd played Vampire: The Masquerade in New Orleans, letting them think I'd been slinking around on Bourbon Street just a'reveling in the Anne Riceyness of it all.  They spit with envy.  Haw haw.

I apologize to New Orleans for screwing up the game, but maybe you should blame the designers who evidentially didn't provide multiple paths to success, because in reality There Is Always Another Way To Succeed!   Glen and Tim and I are all happily married to other Boss Ladies, so we all Won The Game, even without refunds, so Happy Endings all around!

The Studio Albums of Yes, Part 3

Going For the One, 1977.  Some bracing pop/rock, but mostly this one is like a counterfeit Faberge egg, dripping with pancake syrup.  It's so ornamental and sugary sweet,  one expects a few Disney Princesses to pirouette through.  The 16 minute closer, Awaken, is Tales From Topographic Oceans 2.0 with an energy and concision missing from 1.0.  Some fans, including the lead singer, regard Awaken as a high water mark for the band.  I prefer the shapeless, blissed-out expansiveness of TfTO.  If Going For the One had come out in the 90s it would be their best album of that decade.  In the 70s, it's a downturn.  Snappy cover art, though.




Tormato, 1978.  Some entertaining showbiz here, but half the time it sounds like they spun the radio dial and imitated whatever they heard.  for some fans, the chance to hear Yes take a package tour through pop trends of the late 70s is a selling point.  When Yes tries to make the music only Yes can make, though, it sounds like someone else's vicious parody of Yes.  It's the kind of thing that demonstrates the necessity of Punk.

Drama, 1980.  A Hail Mary pass, as they say in American Football.  Without the distinctive voice of Jon Anderson or the pseudo-classical kitsch of keyboardist Rick Wakeman, this represents the first of several times the band might have done well to continue as a trio.  Instead they hired a pair of clever younger guys from The Buggles (of Video Killed the Radio Star fame).  Cannier songs than the previous outing, and they mix in a soupçon of new musical ideas ("new wave," synth pop, and heavy metal) with greater integration than the pastiche of Tormato.  The band Styx would have great commercial success with a similar blend, but it seems Yes's fans were underwhelmed (judging from bootlegs, Horn couldn't hit the high notes in concert), so this lineup marked the end of Yes.  At least for a while...

Seeing the Diamond Beneath the Paste

Latest viewing experience: D.E.B.S.



The trailer is a bit of a bait and switch; what we really have here is a cheerful lesbian coming-of-age story. The superspy stuff is an overlay. The two lovers are, respectively, a superspy and a supercriminal who are supposed to be thwarting one another, not sneaking around and dating, and the tale of treachery and betrayal serves as an objective correlative for the socially imposed tensions of the love that still dare not speak its name in many quarters. It's a nifty idea, this stitching together of different misbehaviors to illuminate the unnecessary dangers of same-sex love, but what makes sense in theory fails in practice because the superspy genre elements mostly just lie there. Lots of candy colors and outsized props strive for cartoonish low camp but just look stagy, and the writer-director doesn't generate any thrilling thriller tension. Cat-and-mouse sequences are carpeted with techno music that's clearly meant to drive the energy, but someone chose chill house music instead of edgy tracks, so the chases are way too relaxing. In one scene there's an extensive establishing shot of a fancy restaurant that mimics the upward tracking shot of the opera house in Citizen Kane, showing us just how immense and fancy this restaurant is, but then the scene that plays out is a conventional restaurant scene that makes no use of all that fanciness. Then there's a long sequence in which the protagonists navigate a road-to-the-batcave route to a secret exclusive dangerous nightclub... that just seems like any old nightclub. People dancing, hanging, having fun. Lots of mohawks and spikes, but it still seems as safe as an after-church reception. 

 So why am I hammering on this mediocre movie? I watched it because the writer-director, one Angela Robinson, wrote (several years after making D.E.B.S.) some of the best episodes of True Blood. Her scripts blended and interconnected comedy, action, drama and suspense with acrobatic alacrity. She earned her money and how. Her scripts were jim dandy. Alan Ball (The auteur of True Blood) and company saw and nurtured something in Robinson that, on the basis of D.E.B.S., most of us would never have guessed was there. How does one spot the potential lurking behind a failure? Clearly the producers of a campy vampire soap opera know something about talent spotting that eludes most of us.

The Studio Albums of Yes, Part 2

Fragile, 1971.  If you can't imagine any Yes album being essential, this one just might change your mind.  Band tracks are interspersed with short solo pieces, and while the solos are hit and miss, they demonstrate what each member brings to the mix.  Lead singer Jon Anderson's tape-loop-heavy concoction demonstrates, probably, a fondness for Revolution #9, but maybe also Steve Reich; Anderson's pseudo-koan lyrics are front and center. on those tape loops.  Bassist Chris Squire's spot may be more notable for the work ethic involved in multitracking a zillion bass lines than for anything else.  Keyboardist Rick Wakeman tries to do a Wendy Carlos thing with some Brahms, demonstrating that he should probably create, in Brian Eno's phrase, frames for other peoples' pictures, (as he did with his delightful piano work on David Bowie's album Hunky Dory) rather than pictures of his own (bear this in mind before buying any of Wakeman's showoffy solo albums).  Guitarist Steve Howe does a lovely tribute to Jose Feliciano.  One of the things I find most invigorating about Howe is that he crafted a rock guitar sound that was rooted in everything BUT the blues.  Drummer Bill Bruford's brief burst of rhythmic danger is titled "Five Percent For Nothing" in honor of a former manager with a contractually obligated cut of the band's take, but it could be titled "Audition For King Crimson," the edgier band for which Bruford would soon leave Yes.

But the group efforts are what make the album.  Roundabout is the signature song, but South Side of the Sky, which could have coasted all the way on its rollicking riffs, includes a lyrical (but lyricless) piano-and-voice interlude and some thoughtful lyrics about death that I still find reassuring.  Long Distance Runaround could almost pass for a Thelonius Monk composition.





Close to the Edge, 1972.  When I discovered this album I spent a lot of time around high leafy trees, craggy cliffs, organs, choirs, sailboats, yellowing fantasy paperbacks, bibles and Beatles albums, sunbeams and moonmist.  This album seemed to pack it all together in 40 minutes of Stravinsky-loving symphonic rock.  The cheerful obscurantist lyrics bring a bit of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons to the mix, and some lines wouldn't seem out of place in John Ashbury.  If you only buy one Yes album, this is the one.

Tales From Topographic Oceans, 1973.  An Anglo attempt at a Bitch's Brew that seems to go down smoother with stoners than it does with the rest of us, this blend of english folk and Epcot multiethnic jazzless jazzing around is 2 LPs long, but doesn't have 2 LPs worth of inspiration; merely 2 LPs worth of ambition (and rawk star ego).  I can relate.  Its repetitions have grown on me over the decades; by turns simpleminded and convoluted, struggling for expansiveness yet bound up in indulgence, it mirrors my own mind.

Relayer, 1974.  This album cast a spell on me once, and I came to regard it as the last Great Yes Album.  Now I see the seeds of everything I don't like about Yes sending up shoots here.  The lyrics are plainspoken but banal (We go sailing down the calming stream/Drifting endlessly by the bridge... did they hire Thomas Kinkaide as a consultant?) and the straightforward ideology (war is bad, mystical illumination is good) doesn't enrich the music the way the bewildering lyrics of prior recordings did.  Perhaps the irritable public reaction to Topographic Oceans put them off modernist verse.  Much of one song is just a syke-a-delick guitar solo, skillfully done but not an interesting solution to an interesting problem.  There's a lot to love, though.  The music is lush yet jarring, Telecaster instead of Les Paul, jazz touches instead of classical flourishes.  It's producer Eddie Offord's last full album with them, and he weaves a rich tapestry of layered sounds.  The closing sung passage has incomprehensible lyrics (by which I don't mean I defy anyone to explain them, but that I can't make out the words) that weren't documented on the lyrics sheet; a welcome final burst of inscrutability.

The Studio Albums of Yes, Part 1

I'm going to comment on each of Yes's studio albums.  It's my blog, and my life, and this is what I choose to do with it.


Yes, 1969.  I've read multiple testimonies that the original lineup of Yes could delight crowds, but this album doesn't reflect such power.  In an interview (Source: something I read somewhere) guitarist Peter Banks said that neither the producer nor the editor assigned to work on the album was accustomed to working with rock bands, and kept telling them to turn it down.  They refused to believe that if you're playing rock loud, you're doing it right.  Perhaps this blunted the results.  There is something this uneven but charming post-Beatles recording does demonstrate, though: one of Yes's big breaks came when Sly and the Family Stone couldn't make a show, and Yes filled in.  Even though Sly Stone has more funk in his earwax than Yes has in its entire discography, the two bands had more in common than is obvious.  Sly's band was integrated along racial and gender lines, while Yes was all white guys, but both bands integrated an array of popular musical modes into ambitious, multifaceted songs without seeming like dilettantes.  

Time and a Word, 1970.  Guitarist Peter Banks told interviewers that he had a quarrel with the producer of this album; being a young man Peter did the only honorable thing and threw a guitar at the guy.  It's no surprise that large chunks of Peter's guitar work got replaced with orchestration on the finished album. and that Peter was fired.  According to Wikipedia, his last band was named Consolation in Isolation, which was also the title of an instrumental he recorded a couple decades before his death.  We can surmise he had a tougher life than he might have had if he hadn't thrown the guitar.

The Yes Album, 1970.  New guitarist, new producer, new success.  I used to assume this was the first really successful Yes album because of guitarist Steve Howe, but now I think the arrival of producer Eddie Offord was the exponential upgrade.  Offord midwifed their best work.  This time out, Yes expanded their ambitious suite song structures and crafted some of their concert chestnuts, like Starship Trooper, which ends on a riff that can be expanded, inflated, and fiddled with all night.  One can measure Yes's artistic decline by how long and bombastic Starship Trooper became in concert.  My favorite ditty from this album is Perpetual Change, which mixes its musical themes, tempos and moods with aplomb, and includes some of the most cogent, tough-minded lyrics they'd ever write.  Tough-minded lyrics were not to be a Yes mainstay, but they did it once.

Casual Maxx Squad: Some leftovers from a misspent decade.

 
That's from a comic book titled The Maxx, issue #10. It's the first issue I bought; the first comic I bought in my college career. That image tells you why. Lushly pretty, dense, narrative art with a cartoony base. It suggested ways of blending traditional comics and fine art in ways I'd never seen before. Further, the story, despite walk-on appearances by a boo-hiss supervillian and a superhero (drawn in a hybrid of 90s superhero muscle-mass and early-comics bigfoot comedy), focused on a normal girl's childhood trauma, and the way it shaped her as a grownup. This blend of nerd-friendly tropes and Bergmanesque thematic concerns instantly turned me into a Maxx fan. I returned to the comics shop to buy issues # 1-9. Had I been better educated in recent comics nerd material I would have known that the lovely page there was not exactly unprecedented; a fellow named Bill Sienkiewicz had set the example for this kind of cartooning with his Klimt-goes-Pomo art for comics miniseries such as Electra:Assassin and Stray Toasters.  But knowing that wouldn't have blunted my appetite for more Maxx.

So what does that pretty page and that nice daddy have to do with the story?  Not much.  Daddy's of dubious dramaturgical importance to the story:  It's a pretty basic childhood trauma narrative.  Girl rescues crippled bunny, tries to nurse it but it's too far gone, Mommy kills the bunny, and the girl's traumatized for life.

So here's a page from the first issue.  That ridiculously dressed woman is Julie, the adult version of the traumatized little girl in issue #10.  Now, this comic was written by two men: Sam Keith (the artist) and William Messner-Loebs (who's credited with the dialogue).  I don't know what their collaborative process was, but I'm guessing it was "Marvel-style," meaning they talked the story over, the artist drew some pictures, and the writer tried to come up with dialogue that matched/made sense of/made up for the art.  On this page we're confronted with a social worker who, unlike actual social workers I've known, doesn't believe in minimizing sexual cues.  This leaves Messner-Loebs with an interesting challenge; this character clearly dresses the way she does because the artist likes drawing women like this, but if you're trying to create something like a characterization, how do you make sense of this?  By making her nasty, apparently, and not in a Janet Jackson sense.  That blanket crack at the end suggests, if her wardrobe doesn't, that social work may not be the career path for her.  Issue #10, then, is what comics calls an "Origin story," the explanation of how she got this way.  She's afraid of the painful consequences of caring, so covers it up with a bitter attitude. I only have a few issues of The Maxx left in my collection.  I gave most of them away.  Notice that I haven't shown you The Maxx himself yet.  The Maxx is a pseudo-superhero who ocillates between being Julie's Spirit Animal (turns out he's a bunny beneath his mask) or the deluded homeless guy she can't help nurturing (in which case he's a human beneath the mask).  This slippage accompanies Maxx and Julie's vacillation between two worlds: the real one, and the Outback, Julie's fantasy world.  I'll not delve much deeper into that, partly because I don't remember it all, but mostly because Keith and Messner-Leobs were clearly making it up as they went and it ended up a tangle.

Eventually they ended (not resolved) the story, and the comic continued as a succession of minimally connected tales, now written in full by the artist, Sam Keith.  Let's see what he came up with!

Well alrighty.   15 years later it looks less transgressive, since every free weekly in America features Dan Savage helping people figure out diaper fetishes and related kinks, but imagery like this is still a bit much to take on an empty stomach.  Like the undigested erotic/psychological elements in the first issue, this makes me wonder what the thought process was that produced this, although in this case there's only Sam Keith to credit or blame, since Messner-Leobs had left the title by now.  Sam's put a lot of work into things like page layout; I like the way bodies are juxtaposed and intermingled in threatening/sexual tableaus, but it's unclear how positive or negative we're supposed to be about weird fetishes.  Horror, kink, and bootleg psychiatry in the EST/Dianetics mold come together in a story with none of the comic's original characters at all.  I don't have the next issue, in which this story presumably ends with an induced epiphany on the part of the kidnapped characters, or just an escape from bondage, but either way I doubt it's able to top (or bottom) that page for sheer queasy sleaze that plays on the ambiguous pleasure and terror of BDSM.  So let's skip to the last issue I have, which is The Last Issue.

Got all that?  Sheesh, look at that type.  Compare and contrast to the hand-lettering in the first couple pages I posted.  Although I wasn't aware of it at the time, I think the main reason I lost my enthusiasm for The Maxx wasn't because the lumbering improvisation of the narrative kept stumbling (Keith wound up explaining a lot of plot points in the letters pages instead of in the comic proper) or because Keith decided to take over the textual end of writing, or because the main characters disappeared for months at a time.  It was because the letterer quit and got replaced by a font, along with too much text, resulting in big indigestible chunks of wordwordswords.  Kind of like this blog...  That purple guy's The Maxx, btw.  Sometimes Keith drew him big and imposing, sometimes Keith drew him like this.  Maxx is tonally flexible in a way most costumed heroes aren't.

Anyway, the schmaltz of panel 3 is probably indicative of Keith's shortcomings as a crafter of Deep Human Narratives.  Portraying creepy horror/erotica?  He brings it.  Portraying simple happiness?  He falls back on greeting-card hand-me-downs.  This reminds me of the show Lost, which tried to turn its tricksy elements into the backdrop for O. Henry tales of human folly and growth, but lacked enough human insight to pull it off.  Lost's attempts at character-centered drama often left me wondering if the writers had ever actually met a human.

But in a panel here, a page there, Keith's outpouring of lush doodles helped me enjoy the 90s a bit more than I might have otherwise, and Messner-Loebs wrote one passage of dialogue (no longer in my collection, I'm afraid) that still matters, even if paraphrased from memory.  Maxx comforts a teenager (Sara, the brunette in the page above) with the insight that growing up is, in large measure, a matter of learning to manage pain.  That idea helped me through a lot of sorrows and frustrations.

Let's switch to a different oddball 90s comic now:

Oz Squad!  Two guys who aspire to pick up where John. R. Neill and Ruth Plumly Thompson left off, (or perhaps March Laumer was more the idea) draw upon X-Men/Teen Titans methodology to plug the gaps in their own youthful artistic problem solving toolkits, and behold the zap-kblam results.  Don't worry, Toto there's a repairable robot dog.  And all ends well, as the following panels make clear:

Hanging out at the mall, with big-headed Mulder and Scully (so 90s!) and... some other characters.  What happier ending could there be?

Yeah, suck it, McDonalds!  We're not gonna tolerate some crass corporate entity moving in on our shopping mall.  Oz Mall!  I hate to admit it, but the idea of Oz as a mall probably would have gone down pretty smooth with L. Frank Baum if he'd still been around.

Look at that lion's eyes, particularly in the second-to-last panel.  If I were sitting by a lion, I'd want it to be sedated, but that lion is BAKED.  Just another stoner at the mall.

And in closing, a quick glimpse of Casual Heroes!  As far as I can tell, only one issue ever got published.  And while it's not likely to make any nostalgia-monger's top 100 list, it's one of my personal talismans of 90s-ness.

Kirby swipes.  Bold colors.  Ripped stockings and cutoffs.  This utterly derivative title tries to goose typical superhero schtick with slacker banter, and when I close my eyes and think "90s," this is how it looks, only less aggro and no sausage lips.  In the letters page (yes, first issues had letters pages, thanks to friends of the artists) the guy behind this comic talks about swipes (the fine art of copying other artists, like oh say Jack Kirby) the way DJs talk about sampling.  It's a kind of comics bricolage, or could be if it got past this Colorforms level.

I turn 40 in a few days, and this is still what I spend my mental energy on.  Bye now.