Weepers into the Whimpering

Let's talk about some more odd 90s comics.

Seekers Into the Mystery was a short-lived Celestine Prophecy-esque item from Vertigo Comics, an imprint of DC that remains best known for the literary fantasy comic Sandman. Various other Vertigo comics followed Sandman's clever writer/rotating artists/contemporary fantasy recipe. Grant Morrison's The Invisibles was my favorite, but we're gonna look at Seekers.

I know what you're thinking-"That's the kind of pulse-pounding action I want from my comic books!" To be fair, this low-key literary approach was pretty common in Vertigo titles. The guy on the left is a guru known as The Magician who's presented as being more or less God in human form. I alway though he was modeled on Yanni, but apparently there's a real life guru, Meher Baba, who's the model, although Baba, to his credit, didn't go by The Magician. Writer J. M. DeMatteis probably meant no disrespect to the little person community by his use of the term "midget," and artist Jon J. Muth probably meant to offset any such offense by depicting the character as roughly 5-6 feet tall.

Anyway, the comic centers on a wayward writer's quest for the mystical insights The Magician seems to offer. Things come to a bad pass when he visits an ex-girlfriend who has the temerity to argue with his newfound beliefs:

Nothing says "disrespect" like dropping someone's photo in the wastebasket. Especially if you've snatched the photo out of an admirer's hands, then hoisted it like you're gonna toss it across the room... only to primly deposit it, with your EVIL CLAWS appearing in shadow. And then little devils come popping out of the wastebasket. Artist Jill Thompson (the comic had a rotating team of artists) is really quite good, (see her work on The Invisibles, which we'll talk about in a moment, or her own Scary Godmother series) but here her talents are perhaps strained from misuse. It wouldn't take a lot of revising to make this comic suitable for Jack Chick.

Let the record show that I basically agree with everything she's saying here.

Again, insensitivity aside, I think she's right. The writer presumably thinks her argument has some persuasive force, or he wouldn't have his protagonist swooning like an overwrought damsel (although to be fair I've wept at women's feet a couple of times. Builds character).


But fear not, folks, the Pantied Skeptic is about to get what she deserves. What's that, you ask? A robust rebuttal?

Nope.

More like a KNIFE IN THE FACE.

This comic's low-key naturalism had its limits.

 Dramaturgically speaking, I can understand why Dematteis doesn't want to turn his comic into Oxford-style debate, but anytime your counterargument is "You need a good knifing!"... well, I'm gonna say you lost the argument by default. This comic is a tacit admission that astral projection, recovered memory, and other mystical experiences are probably glitches in our neurological operating system rather than deeper truths. Now, I'm confident that there are strong rebuttals to this philosophically materialist line of thought, but Dematteis can't or won't mount them. He is, perhaps, a philosophical materialist in spite of himself.

Grant Morrison's Vertigo comic The Invisibles, which was in some ways a model for Seekers, also pushed a mystical worldview, but was captious (and postmodern) enough to incorporate counterarguments as threads in a shimmeringly ambiguous dialogic tapestry, rather than mere problems to polish off (with a knife). Invisibles remains in print. I've probably reprinted more of the late run of Seekers in this post than DC ever will (all takedown requests will of course be cheerfully complied with).

Now let's look at an independently published (ergo black and white) comic called Starchild by James A. Owen. I dipped into Issue #12 without reading any prior issues. What's that like? It's like this:

I enjoy this inscrutable, decontextualized worldbuilding, probably for the same reasons I enjoy John Ashbury.

Full size for detail enjoyment.

True aficionados of peculiar 90s comics will detect the influence of Cerebus, which was one of the most remarkable and influential independent comics, right up until auteur Dave Sim decided to use his comic as a bully pulpit for all his deep insights, like that women are terrible. Other cartoonists stopped imitating Cerebus's lush backgrounds, vertiginous panels,  and wide-margined word balloons once they realized Sim wasn't kidding.

I love the atmospheric top panel on this page; the sense of depth and shadow, and hair. I suppose the hairy guy was trying to say "Greetings, Starchild" when he got punched, but I like the idea of a fantasy comic with a hero named Starchi. That punch is the only rough-and-tumble in the comic; mostly it's very quiet and genteel, like this:

Much of the comic consists of bushy male faces pressed close together, whispering cryptically. Like Wind in the Willows, it's a fantasy that pushes the homosocial towards the homoerotic. The only female character appears in a prose-with-illustrations section safely cordoned off from the delicately masculine main narrative. All she does is

• Not wear any clothing
• Step out of the wood like a newborn faun
• Let raindrops trickle through her fingers into a brook.

Starchi & Hairhead Double Digest. Ask for it by name!

 The above page is from Eddie Campbell's autobiographical Alec stories, serialized in Eddie Campbell's Bacchus comics, and it gives  a nice sense of the comics-as-jazz-poetry vibe that is Campbell's signature. I was perplexed by his work in the actual 90s, yet felt compelled to keep buying it, saving his work up for a day when I would be grown enough to understand. Today, it's probably the indy comic of the period that affords me the most pleasure.

Manga became a thing in the US in the 90s. One of the most important publishers of domesticated manga was Tokyopop, which went out of business as suddenly as it appeared. I'm not sure why...

But I'm pretty sure that hiring bored English majors to write plot synopses, and hiring non-graphic designers to do the typeface, didn't help.

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!

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.

Hands on Shoulders

As I approach my 40th birthday and my fourth anniversary, I recall something a friend told me on graduation day in 1996.  At 22, I was utterly out of ideas about how to make my way in the world, and I told her so.

"We'll have it figured out by the time we're 35," she said.

Over the years I clung to that like a talisman.  And at the age of 35, I began dating the woman who is now my wife.  Good stuff.

***

New topic: we saw a couple episodes of True Blood recently.  It's a soap about extravagant, camp vampires.  In the first of the episodes in question (Season 5, episode 3) we learn in flashback how two vampires, Eric and Pam, met; how Pam persuaded Eric to make her a vampire; why she wanted to be a vampire at all; and how they became a couple.  It's no spoiler to say that it involves some outlandish behavior, grandiloquent gestures, ultimatums, and lots of blood.

In the next episode we see how Eric and Pam formally sever their relationship.  It involves hands on shoulders; sensitive, quiet conversation; and a little tearing up.  Talk about a dropoff.

I'm an Eric Rohmer fan, so it's not like I'm averse to restrained, dialogue-driven relationship stories, but I can get hands on shoulders and restrained tears from a hundred lesser shows.  The writer or someone misunderstood what we come to this show for.

I suppose you could spin it as a demonstration of how the characters have matured over the years, but anyone who's watched the show this far know the characters have done anything but mature.  They're vicious, deadly hotheads.  That's why they're fun.

True Blood is produced by the creator of Six Feet Under, a more realistic soap that is special to me, and it had its fair share of hands on shoulders moments, but the show was calibrated that way.  For a while I was frustrated that True Blood wasn't Bride of Six Feet Under, but now I've learned to appreciate the depths that can be plumbed within the Pop Kabuki format of this show.

Food Building

In the late 90s I worked for a carpet cleaning company.  We would occasionally get sent to a town called Bessemer, which was generally the only time I ever went to Bessemer.  It was unfamiliar terrain to me, and I got lost a lot.

One day my partner and I were trying to find a house that was lost down one of the squirrelly little roads that capillary their way off the main streets through the town, and it wasn't going well.  Understand that GPS was not on the map, so to speak.  All we had was a big dusty map book, and Bessemer was shell-gaming us, sneaking that little road past us at each turn.

Eventually we'd stop at a gas station, buy some Corn Nuts (my staple diet at the time) and beg for directions.

"Just go on up that way till you pass the Piggly Wiggly..."

"All you gotta do is hang left when you see the Piggly Wiggly..."

"When you see the Piggly Wiggly, take a right..."

 Everybody's directions (And we asked a representative sampling of Bessemer residents) hinged on the Piggly Wiggly.

After about an hour of this we finally accepted that the big not-Piggly Wiggly grocery we kept passing as we zigzagged along the grain of peoples' directions must have once been a Piggly Wiggly before leaving the franchise and renaming itself Food Building or We Got Groceries or whatever.  Everyone's directions made perfect sense from there and we found the client's house instantly.  At this time Bessemer was not a flourishing economic center, and I find myself wondering if that stagnation was cause or effect of the locked-in folkways that prevented the Good People of Bessemer from informing us of the "Piggly Wiggly's" binary identity.

A few months later I was in Bessemer again.  This time I was alone, tooling around the back roads, searching for an even more obscure address.  It was night.  I got lost in the woods, and something went awry.  What was it?  Did I just veer off the road into a ditch?  Or was there a more robust mechanical failure?  You tell me.  Those vans broke down all the time; the cleaning gear was in fine shape, but the vehicles were old and strained, and at least one got towed to the repair shop every day.  Anyway, I try to remember the details of what went wrong and it's a smear.

But the van was in a syrupy ditch, and the wheels would cut no traction into that mess.  The road was virtually dirt.  It was dark outside my headlights.  Surrounded by woods, with little desperate dwellings here and there.

We had CBs that we used to communicate with base, but in that dead zone I couldn't get a signal through.  I had, as it were, no bars.  My only option was to walk till I found a phone.  I'd passed a little gas station some ways back, so I hoofed it.

At one point I passed a little watering hole.  Rough customers stood outside talking loud, then went silent as I passed.  There was a pay phone out front, but the scowls of the locals inspired me to press on.

I got to the (well lit) gas station and placed my call.  Home base told me to go back to the van and wait for the tow truck.  A handsome young man was waiting by the phone.  "Don't go back there," he told me.  "This is a BAD neighborhood at night.  I'm waiting on some friends to get me out of here.  You tell them to come here and pick you up."  (Let me point out that he was of the same race as the locals, and I was not).

Why didn't I take his advice?  Or why didn't I beg him to get his friends to drive me to my truck?  Look, if I'd been a problem solver, I wouldn't have been working where I was.  Marry a problem solver like I did (a decade later), folks, so you can learn like I have.

So the guy's friends arrived and took him away, leaving me alone outside a closed gas station.  His uneasy company had been some comfort, but the florescent light was bleak now.

A dutiful dope of a drudge, I walked back, through the dark, skirting around the watering hole.  Then I sat in the van, worried and frustrated.  Like a schmuck, I ran the engine, grinding it, the tires shrilling and spewing mud; loud, loud, worthless effort.

A tense-looking middle-aged man came out a door, glowered at me in silence for several minutes.  It was pretty late.  I prayed he'd offer me some help, but he just stood in the porch light like an icon of justifiably angry poverty.  Then he went back inside and the light went out.

Somehow I got the truck on the road.  Did I push it?  Did I rock it?  I dunno.    Was the trip complicated by a flat tire, a wobbly wheel, a twist of some snarled mechanism or other?  I got no clue.  I was frantic.  I got to a different gas station, an open one near the highway.  I contacted base (with the CB this time) and they rerouted the tow guy, who fussed at me for not staying put.

Next week I did something I'd been yearning to do for the entire year I'd worked there.  I quit.

You know why I worked there as long as I did?  Because at my interview they laid a guilt trip on me about how they didn't want to hire people only to have them quit after a month.  They expected me to work there at least a year or two.  That's why I stayed.

Suffice it to say I don't sell my own happiness so short now.

Homemade Yogurt, Water Engines, My Childhood, and Some Movies

Wicker Man.  A camp treat.  The first hour is basically an upright, uptight police officer sleuthing around a island-bound Pagan commune, and having a succession of tantrums about how not-Christian everybody is.  It’s spiced up with loads of bawdiness, Thistle and Psych-Rock music, and all the fruits of the filmmakers’ research into pagan bric-a-brac roughening the texture of a straightforward mystery plot. 

It reminds me of a family vacation way back when, touring around the coast of Maine, and we spent an afternoon at some Unitarian island retreat.  Everyone was very friendly, but I poked around the bookshop (as I was wont to do) and found a book of party games for consenting adults, or maybe it was supposed to be about spiritual/emotional growth, who remembers.  One of the activities involved openly, honestly, unhesitatingly telling everyone in the group which of them you wanted to have sex with.  Then and now, this struck me as a really dim idea, and I was relieved, years later, to find that Birmingham-style Unitarianism doesn’t involve such games (or if it did, I wasn’t invited.)

So watching this devout Christian fellow stomp around a lovely, sunny island and treat a bunch of sweetly smiling pagans like war criminals was deeply satisfying to my inner prig, just because that’s what I would’ve loved to do on Unitarian Sex Camp Island all those years ago.  Take that, nice people who make your own yogurt! 

Of course the movie ends with the Pagans turning out to be dangerous because horror movies always gotta take things to the bottom of the slippery slope.  Exorcist can’t just let the girl go through a sleazy, angry adolescent phase and then calm down, which is what usually happens in real life.  Texas Chainsaw has to turn its white trash creeps into cannibals, instead of just beer guzzlers who cling to guns and religion (in fact the Sawyer family doesn’t seem to have guns or religion, though they have weapons, totems and mummification.)  And the pagans, of course, of course, have to do human sacrifice, instead of just having psychic faires and selling homemade candles.  Such is horror.

Also enjoyed an item called Safety Not Guaranteed, which has been criticized for being yet another underweight quirky-cutesy comedy, but it stays with me for a couple of reasons.  For one, it understands that time travel is really about memory and history, and puts regret and relationships at the center of the narrative.  Some of the B plot romantic stuff seems weakly integrated into the film at first, but the end thematically unifies everything.  Second, the film’s tense, obsessive protagonist reminds me of a guy who did the tech for a theatre venue I used to perform in.  He was acerbic, scowly, and had a diagram of an engine that runs on water posted on the door of his office, with some notes on how They are suppressing this technology for their own greedy gain.  I went to his house one night with a group of theatre nerds, and he showed us his enormous collection of unopened Star Wars toys.  After that I tried to be warm to him, in my ungainly way, to show that I appreciated that he’d opened this part of himself to me, but he seemed even colder than before.  I felt I’d failed a test.  This movie is about a woman who passes the test.  

Finally, watched the first half of something called Modern Girls, a truly lousy film from the early 80s.  It’s well worth a look, though, if you’re interested in the more outrageous elements of 80s style.  New Romantic duds galore, chunky plastic jewelry, hair chandeliers, neon pink and blue on black, it’s all here.  As far as plot, thematics, character work, dialogue, all that stuff, it’s hard to imagine how it could be worse, but oh, it’s fun to goggle at.  I was a boy in the early 80s, and all that stuff was on the cultural periphery of my life.  Now it makes me feel like a kid again.  Maybe it felt similar to the people who dressed like that.  God bless ‘em.

Outside the Cage, Outside the Stage

I used to get The Actor's Nightmare all the time, as I've posted about before.  Then I quit acting, and I started to get a variant: I'd dream that I was in a theatrical production, and I wanted to get out.  I'd be desperate, not to remember my lines, but to quit the show without getting into some ill-defined trouble.

So why did I quit?  Not in the dream, but in real life?

There's many answers to that question, as there are many facets of the problem.

Recently, though, I read something that gave me a fresh perspective on the matter.  I finally bought a copy of Genesis's album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and I was eager to learn anything I could about the backstory of the album's creation.

Sidenote:  My official position is that, post-college, I'd rather listen to Coltrane go to the toilet than waste time on english art-school boys of the 70s as they churn out maximum arpeggios per square inch and lyrics that play like Tennyson freestyling; but it's all a lie, a horrible lie.  I heart Progressive Rock.  Readers may remember Genesis for Invisible Touch, but long before they crafted slick pop songs with Phil Collins on vocals, they crafted ornate fantasy ballads with Peter Gabriel on vocals and Phil on drums.

I'd resisted getting Lamb even though it's reputed to be their finest hour (or 80 minutes) since I already own a few albums by the band, and one's pretty much interchangeable with the other for a non-fanatic. This one, though, really was different.  It starts in a gritty-ish urban setting, and while it eventually gets around to the usual fantasy material, the band manages some tasty atonal free-jazz, along with some stripped-down revisions of their prior lush sound.  It reminds me more than a bit of Abacab, a later album on which they made a clean break with Ye Olde Genesis and surfed a New Wave.  And while the Puerto Rican street tough who figures as their protagonist probably wouldn't listen to the synth-heavy Anglo plunkings of this band, that's not necessarily a fault.  Pynchon's characters mostly wouldn't read Pynchon's books.

Oh yeah but anyway, when they played this stuff live Gabriel put on a big theatrical show, with costume changes and stuff.  So poking around for info on this stuff, I found this website.  It's got a quote from Gabriel's wife at the time, pilfered from an authorized bio of Peter by one Spence Bright.  Take it a way, Peter Gabriel's ex-wife!

"He was angry, and it was a very powerful performance. He totally opened himself and put himself on the line to the world, but he wasn't in his relationship with me. I would say to him, 'Why can't you be like that for me?' I remember sitting in the audience and feeling completely turned on by this guy who I was married to. But he was not able to be that person outside the stage. And that is what has slowly broken down over the years, being able to take that part of himself into his everyday life."

So.  Back in 2000 or so, I was in a play which included a bit of flirting between my character and another.  The stage manager mentioned to me that I became a different person in that scene; "Your whole demeanor is different," she said, and she was right.  I became utterly free and open and flirtatious, in a way that was barred to me in offstage life.  The stage was a safe place to play at such experimental things as "flirting".  It would be years before I decided to take that onstage demeanor into my real life.

I few years ago I concluded that I couldn't sustain that energy, that power, in real life while bringing it onstage at the same time.  In performance situations (including auditions) I became enervated, lacking the will to give my first fruits to the 25-year-old white boys who handle the casting-call scut work in most regional theatres.  I had somewhere better to put my energy, my openness, my Eros.  I put it into my marriage.

Not long ago I dreamt of attending the theatre.  I was a cheerful audience member, enjoying a mysterious pageant upon the stage.  The actor's nightmare has been replaced by the audience member's sweet dream.

*  *  *

And speaking of sweet dreams, here's an old Yes song (more prog rock, I know) featuring Peter Banks on guitar.  Peter was the first of many people to leave/get fired from Yes, and is now the first former Yes member to die.  His death is more melancholy than the death of many other Yes people will be, because he never got to taste much success.  I've read a few interviews with him, and he seemed painfully aware of the missed opportunities in his career.  He made some interesting recordings, though.  Sweet Dreams.

Fat and burned, bloody and cursed

The last play I did in Birmingham was an outdoor production of Macbeth.

The director made it clear that we would be saying “Macbeth” freely throughout the production, defying the moldy old superstition that to do so brings a curse down upon any show that dares utter the dread name in rehearsal.  This cheered me, because I knew that if I went through the rehearsal period without saying Macbeth, I’d be unable to say it when the performance day arrived.

The costumer was a young woman who put all the Thanes (aka warriors) in topless outfits.  Her concept sketches revealed a fantasy of bare-chested beefcake barbarians.  Perhaps she had not noticed the doughy Alabama bodies of the men she was actually dressing.  Some of the younger guys were trim, sure, but many of us, including Your Correspondent, were too tubby and wobbly to inspire much fear on the battlefield.  Pasty saggy man-nipples melting over fuzzy guts; the evidence of our sedentary lifestyles certainly counteracted any Braveheart/300 fantasy our overseers might have had in mind.  And isn’t that comic gap between intent and onstage reality part of the joy of community theatre? 

Instead of shirts we got body makeup.  Intriguing swirly faux-tats, black and beautiful, sprayed on (no showering till after we close!).  Did I mention that we were doing this outside?  In the sun?

The day of the performance the costume designer had us Thanes pose for a few pictures.  Before each snap she urged us to roar like warriors.  We did our level best, and after she took the last of many pix, she sighed, “I love it.  So manly.”  This left me feeling a bit cheap, but that’s probably a small karmic down payment on any number of things I’ve done that’ve left others feeling the same way.

The show ended with a dope swordfight between Macbeth and MacDuff, and our Macbeth got a nasty hit on the forehead.  When I (and many others) detained him after the show to tell him how great he was, we (or at least I) assumed the blood streaming down his forehead was stage blood.  Nope.  He had to rush off to the emergency room, but was gracious enough to stand there and smile while we twittered at him.  He’s a preacher, so maybe that gives him a sense of self-sacrifice, I dunno.  Anyway, one cast member who had warned of dread results should we utter the cursed Name in rehearsal felt himself vidicated.

The show has marked me as well; standing in the sun with my bare shoulders covered in crusty black makeup gave me a memorable burn that remains as a peculiar constellation of freckly glyphs.  A fitting souvenir of my final Birmingham show. 

Do Not Mistake the Pointing Finger For the Moon; or, From Mediated Life to Life.

In the late 90s I was enraptured by an anime miniseries called Please Save My Earth.  Never mind the story; the people who made the show certainly didn't.  It was adapted from a long-running comic book series (that screaming you hear is nerds yelling "It's not a comic book; it's MANGA!") that had way too much made-up-as-she-went-along plot to fit smoothly into the adaptation, added to which the story in the comic wasn't yet finished when the anime was made.  The first episode of the six-episode show had a leisurely pace, but as it went on the tempo picked up, with incident trampling over incident until, at the end, we got a montage of unaddressed plot threads that felt like a "Next time on Please Save My Earth" trailer and an effort at poetic, rather than narrative, resolution.  This failure/refusal/confounding of linear narrative resolution, no matter how clumsy, prepared me for literary modernism in a way my literature classes hadn't.  The ending burst like a seedpod, flinging unresolved plot threads and dimly glimpsed story points all over, and I found it more entrancing than any tidy conclusion could have been.

So I was really into this show.  At one point in it there's a shot of a tree with its leaves wafting in the breeze; it had no narrative significance, but it was pretty to look at while the heroine narrated at us, and perhaps it suggested a context to her affairs that a more conventional picture of her face wouldn't provide.  For some reason this animated image of a tree resonated with me, perhaps because I lived in a neighborhood full of trees.

Every night I would come home from my second-shift job and walk the dog in the dark.  One of our neighbors had placed a light under a tall tree; the light shone up the shaft of the tree, illuminating its entire length up to the canopy of leaves.  I think I would have overlooked it if I hadn't had that animated image of a tree awakening me to the way trees exist on their own beside our lives; the numinousness of trees suddenly mattered to me after a life of living around them, and that illuminated tree became a nightly touchstone for me.

So.  I've progressed from cartoon trees (that in retrospect looked more like wobbling green bubble gum blobs than foliage) to trees with dramatic lighting, to just liking trees in general.  I regard this as progress: from the mediated experience to the thing itself.

Alma Matters

When I arrived at my alma mater, the student newspaper wasn't anything to call your Mom about.  People routinely carped about the puff pieces, the weak efforts at humor, the amateurish layout (And yes, I know I'm being awfully snarky for someone who uses a prefab Blogger website, but I make no pretense to this being other than a vanity blog, while a student paper ought to sit up straight and comb its hair).  One time in my freshperson year, the paper grasped for greatness, at least of a comic nature, with a proto-Onion article about a fraternity getting a bug zapper;  this inspired some real amusement.  Its knowing lack of substance was no less nutritious than the rest of the paper's offerings, though, so the joke reflected poorly on the whole journalistic enterprise.

Over the years of my time there, more ambitious up-and-comers changed things.  By my senior year, some future editors of professional papers were testing their skills at the rag.  I recall sitting at the cafeteria table with freshman K--- W------- as he leafed through the school year's first issue and dissected its failings with an anger that suggested he would soon be pressing for changes.  He would indeed, along with G----- B---- and G---- P-----.  By the end of the year the failings K---- had detected were gone, baby, gone.  Soon the paper boasted an improved layout, a lively editorial page, and even a humor column that, lo and behold, was amusing.  The only thing missing was that staple of college papers, vulgar cartoons.  Dunno why.

The paper even indulged in some investigative journalism, proving that the administration's claims that the the campus food services were being run on a nonprofit basis were false.  Not that there's anything wrong with trying to make a buck per se, but all students were required to buy into the meal plan, and there were no refunds for unspent meal plan moneys, so trying to make a profit off a captive customer base (with no competition for those moneys) wasn't exactly playing by Adam Smith's playbook.  Nothing changed, but at least we knew where we stood.

After I graduated I still came crawling back to campus and scooped up the paper.  It continued to grow in might.  The humor writers got funnier and more pointed, and the editorial page initiated two regular columns, one by a fightin' liberal (who largely focused on local social justice issues) and one by a peacemaking conservative (who extended the hand of come-let-us-reason-together bipartisanship to lefties in a manner I found irresistible.  I need to find out what happened to that guy.)  And although I wasn't a sports fan, I'm told the sports page was exceptional.

Then one year the bottom fell out.  Suddenly most of the student-written content vanished, to be replaced by syndicated national news stuff, so if you wanted to know what Bill Clinton had done the previous week, the school paper was your rag.  Heaven help anyone who gets their national news from a college newspaper.  The humor columnists and the lefty guy remained, but the conservative guy had graduated and his replacement lacked his ability to draw illuminating connections.  She just typed up that week's values voter talking points and called it a day.

I was friendly with the lefty guy, and still consider him a friend (despite his cold snubbing of my facebook friend request last year) so I asked him (this is shortly after the paper's downturn) what happened.  As he explained it, K--- W------- and G---- B---- had been grooming the sports page editor to take over, but the Student Council had the final say in the matter, and they chose Miss Affability instead of Mr. Black Guy With A Track Record.  (For the record, two of the three editors who made the paper great were in fact editrixes, and the better of the humor columnists was female, lest anyone think I'm implying that the gender of the new editor (or righty editorialist) was a problem.)  It seems the new sheriff in town just wasn't up to scratch.

The climax came a few months later, when the paper carried a huge advertisement, a half-pager or so.  As I later heard from an English Prof (who accepted my facebook friend request, bless her) someone called the ad editor and placed a big order.  The ad editor said "yes I said yes I will yes" without adding "Oh, sorry but I have to ask: the ad doesn't say the Holocaust is a myth, does it?"  And so the ad went straight to the printer without anyone from the paper checking to make sure it didn't say the Holocaust was a myth.  And so my alma mater's school paper found itself one day besmirched with a tiny-type explanation of how Them Thar Juden are skeered to honestly debate the reality of the Holocaust.  I assume I was not the only person to send the editor an email explaining that she was perhaps a bit of a fool.  Apparently everyone with on-campus emails got an apology/explaination, while those with email accounts ending in ranma.com didn't, which explains why I didn't.  ( I also found that ranma.com email accounts only had enough memory for about two messages, which may explain why it did not last and ranma.com is a rather enigmatic website today.  It was the 90s, people.)

About a decade later the paper got some national notoriety because, as part of its hallowed tradition of reporters interviewing their friends and fobbing it off as journalism, the paper ran an interview with a pair of students who went on to burn down a bunch of churches.  This interview got a lot of play in what-were-they-thinking articles.  (Another thing about those guys: I was almost in a lo-budget comedy movie with them.  I auditioned, got offered a small part in which I woulda been interacting with the arsonists themselves.  I thought the script was unpromising, and took a pass.  The production was scuttled by the boys' arrests.  The filmmaker planned to salvage to footage with a documentary, but he didn't seem like the sensitive insight type, so I doubt it panned out.  On the other hand, his awesome loft apartment/audition space was decorated with Kandinsky and Klee prints.  Kandinsky and Klee are My Favorites, so maybe I'm underrating his potential.)

Recently I went looking for online versions/archives of the alma mater paper, like grown-up college papers have.  I found a couple of listless, abandoned efforts at online versions scattered about the place, but for archives you gotta go to my alma mater's library.  Have fun.

If this article reads oddly (or even poorly), that's what comes of mixing foreign beer with American microbrews.

Teenager From Inner Space

Daddy Tired.

I'm in Gradjulate Skuwl so I don't have as much time/energy/focus for this blog as I did when I had an office job and posted during lulls in work.  Heck, I barely have time to make the eight espressos a day I swill down just to keep the pace brisk.  Plus we have a new cat we're trying to teach not to shred the flesh off of everyone who comes near.  

Of course when a Man/Child gets this much responsibility, he starts to remember more innocent times.  Times when he took games like Teenagers from Outer Space really seriously.

When I was in high school, this game (abbreviated TFOS) seemed to offer a way to reframe the whole experience, make it less frustrating and more fun.  A few years later I discovered anime, and yet I didn't make the connection between Rumiko Takahashi, a manga artist whose work Teenagers From Outer Space openly cannibalized, and TFOS itself, even though I was obsessed with Rumiko Takahashi's work (because it seemed to offer a way to reframe my whole post-college experience, make it less etc.)  Only now, as I take a fresh look at TFOS, do I see that I was playing in Rumiko's world before I ever fell in love with Rumiko's work.

What's more, I have two supplements to the game, one from R. Talsorian, the company that released the game, and another from a third-party startup.  

The first is called Field Trip.  It's a module (for non-dorks: a role-playing module is essentially a ready-made story for gamers to use, absolving the referee of the responsibility of creating the story, instead socking the ref with the responsibility to learn the story) that I haven't really read.  The plot hinges on a School Vice Principal organizing a booby-trapped field trip.  The idea of an utterly hostile Vice Principal doesn't square with even my most persecution-complexy school memories, and strikes me as a nonclever variation on what I wanted from TFOS: a recasting of school experience to make it more fun.  Yeah, I liked satirizing the faculty in these games, but I knew they didn't HATE us.  They just hated the cruddier things we did.  Early in the module the Vice Principal hijacks the school bus and reveals himself to be a terrorist sleeper agent, at which point I ran out of patience, not due to post-9/11 sensitivity, but out of exasperation.  These dumb jokes don't resonate with my school experience.

Then there's a more recent thing called The Landing.  It's devoted to describing a shopping mall for the TFOS characters to enjoy.  The writing is a mess.  The original TFOS writing style has a competent-standup-comic verve; the jokes may be hit or miss, but there's a sense of humor and an offer to enjoy yourself.  The Landing's style isn't reminiscent of standup; it's reminiscent of a science project report, droned aloud by a dull, serious student.  It's full of poorly thought out ideas for jazzing up your fantasy mall, but the most irksome element is the new races.

TFOS has 4 races your characters can be: human, near human, not-very-near-human and Real Weirdie.  Not so much races as categories, right?  It's a terrific way to encourage the right loosy-goosy spirit, because you can play pretty much anything under these rules.

So why do you need new races?

The new races turn out to be various categories of Furry.  One humanoid fox race, TWO humanoid cat races (one anthropomorphic cat, the other human-with-cat-ears-and-tail, an oddly popular image in Japanese cartoons) and grumpy-old-man goldfish.  Okay, the goldfish are cool.

(Sidenote: In my view there's a substantial difference between traditional funny animals (Uncle Scrooge etc.) and the whole furry thing.  Uncle Scrooge is really a human disguised as a duck for a practical cartooning reason: cartooning is in part about abstraction, and by giving Scrooge a duck bill and a ducklike stance he's abstracted far away from any human appearance.  So you can't judge him by his looks.  You have to evaluate his deeds and words.  So it is with most funny animals; they're just people whom we must judge by their behavior, since their appearances don't reveal much about them.

With furry art, though, the duck bill or the squirrel tail is the whole point.  These characteristics are fetishistic, not always in a sexual sense, but certainly in a broader meaning of the word "fetish."  And people have a right to their fetishes, even if they ick me out (and furry icks me out to an illogical extent). but I love cartoon animals while disliking anything forthrightly furverted. )

I don't mind a'tall that some people take their TFOS with a side of Furry.  To thine own self be true; I always used this kind of game to address my heart's yearnings, so why shouldn't furries?  But I'm a little irked by the way furry stuff permeates The Landing, not because I don't like furry stuff, but because I don't like the attempt to encroach on the freedom of the original game's premises.  The nature of TFOS is to allow for any kind of character, but the nature of The Landing is to mandate specific kinds of character: the kinds The Landing's creators enjoy.  In this sense TFOS is small-l liberal and/or libertarian, while The Landing is small-c conservative.  The former gives unfettered permission to Do Your Thing, while the latter wants you to Do The Author's Thing; it tries to corral you into a rigidly defined set of values and fetishes (and fetishes are usually rigorous in their rigid definition.)

Anyway, I'm going to grad school as part of my ongoing (in part successful) efforts to have good life experience directly instead of mediating life through entertainment.

My Fondest High School Memories and My Gloomiest High School Memories are The Exact Same Memories.

Somehow my high school graduating class (Red Bank High, Chattanooga TN Class of '92) chose "Imagine" by John Lennon as its class song. My Latin teacher (a kind, enthusiastic, Christian woman) expressed her approval. "I love that song!" The original recording got broadcast over the speaker system or something one day while I was in her class, and she smiled happily. In all likelihood I mentioned to someone that the drummer on it, Alan White, would later join Yes. In further all likelihood, no one cared.

Anyway, just before our actual graduation ceremony there were a few other official celebratory gatherings, and at one of them a folk-singin' student got up and sang the song; just his voice and his fascist-killin' acoustic guitar. I was seated in sight of our Latin teacher, and I watched her with interest. I seemed she was hearing the lyrics for the first time, and her smile turned sour; without that pretty piano bit the words came through, and everyone who didn't already know realized that "Imagine" is basically an advertising jingle for militant atheism. I'm guessing a lot of kids who voted for the song had buyers' remorse.

Immediately after the performance a preacher got up and delivered a short message that ended with the hope that "Some day we can realize John Lennon's dream, and live as one." Nice try, dude. Very Hegelian.

#

My main extracurricular activity in high school was Forensics. Dead bodies didn't enter into it; the term "forensics" means gathering evidence in order to reach an informed conclusion. Or something like that. You might want to do some forensics of your own to check up on my hazy memories. Effectively Forensics just meant the debate team plus a gaggle of nominally related competitive performance activities like poetry reading. I was more into the poetry-reading end of things, cuz unlike debate you didn't have to be a sharp, quick thinker. Effective memorization (which I had with enough lead time, like all summer) and a willingness to speak in public (which, let's face it, is little more than a sublimated version of dropping one's pants in public (at least it is with me)) will suffice.

The average forensics tourney consisted of students in business attire going from classroom to classroom (or hotel room to hotel room) and running through their shticks for each other and the crack team of highly qualified parents who got suckered into judging these events. In between rounds, lots of hanging around gossiping/flirting/joking/stealing pizzas from some other team that bought pizzas/etc.

Three rounds, usually, followed by suspenseful waiting as finalist lists were posted, the final round in each competitive category went down, then more hanging out complaining/stealing cold pizza/wandering into places one wasn't supposed to go/etc. until the award ceremony, where cheap trophies made hearts soar.

A few memorable moments:

One mousy girl in a prose-reading competition read an excerpt of "Interview With a Vampire" which I've never read, but I saw the appeal after her performance. She transformed into an erotic madwoman; we practically saw the blood dripping from her fangs, and everyone in the room was flushed and sweaty by the end of the show. Suddenly she was way more appealing than other girls with clearer skin and higher cheekbones. I got to see this demonstration three times; I would gladly have watched it every hour on the hour for the rest of my adolescence. Where were girls like that in my school?

Coming in second place in the Gatlinberg Tournament Prose Reading competition. I lost to a friendly, smooth guy who confessed to me that he disliked the Christian element of his story, but went with it out of cynical judge pandering. When he won I felt like challenging the win on grounds of hypocrisy. I was sincere in my love for my story ("The Golem" by Avram Davidson) and felt that should count in my favor. I kept quiet and took my second place trophy.

BTW the Gatlinberg tourney always had an enormous turnout, because Gatlinberg is the Branson of the South. Forensics team ranks swelled when this thing rolled around; kids who hadn't bothered to show up for boring old local tournaments grabbed the first poem the Norton anthology fell open to and declared themselves contestants. Most of the competition was unabashedly going through the motions in order to hang out in Gatlinberg; I recall one girl who prefaced her performance with "I really suck, ya'll, so just take a nap or something until I'm through". This is why my generation has failed, is failing, and will continue to fail the world: we're so mush-headed we want to hang out in purgatorial bootleg T-shirt outlets like Gatlinberg. Anyway, bear the tragedy of the commons in mind while evaluating the prestige factor of my second place win. Out of a hundred or so contestants in the prose category, mebbe a half-dozen were serious about the art and craft.

The nose thing. A girl from another school told me she had a trick called "The Nose Thing." She offered to do it for me. I asked what it was. She refused to disclose. All her friends gathered around. She instructed me to lean back and close my eyes. I done it. She wrapped her lips around my nose and blew forcefully into my nostrils, making the caverns of my skull buzz. Afterwards her friends all treated me as if I had been selected for something. I couldn't understand why my parents were so upset when I told them about this.

Related to the preceding: girls flirting with me and my not realizing it until after the fact. The actual debate team kids probably picked up on flirting right away, owing to the mental alacrity you need on the debate team and don't need on the prose-reading team.

My slow ascent up the ladder of pretension. As a freshman I did Douglas Adams. A few years later I was doing Kafka and T. S. Eliot, which is a good way to get third-place trophies, the most grudging recognition possible.

Selecting material was a dicey endeavor; for example, kids who read Stephen King always got roses from some judges and the Black Spot from others. It didn't matter how the performance was; all that mattered was how the judge felt about King.

The ongoing Order Debate, the only debate the Debate Team didn't care about. Forensics kids were forever trying to suss out which was the pole position in any given round. Each round consisted of five or six competitors per room. Was it best to be first, last, somewhere in between? The borderline-theological debates over this ate up hundreds of dork-hours.

Every year I triumphed in regional finals, then went to State Finals where legends are born, and promptly got smeared on the wall in the first round by kids from the mysterious and inscrutable land of West Tennessee. My senior year I finally crapped out in the regionals (wassamatter, you don't like Kafka's journal notes?) and I ended my forensics career in a sparsely attended local tournament that had no official competitive reason for taking place. I decided to go out with proper teenage obnoxiousness and chose a new prose passage: the bit from Lolita where Humbert picks Lo up from camp, kisses her in the car, and almost gets busted by a highway patrolman.

The judges in the early rounds liked it okay, and I made it to finals (although the judges would have really needed to hate me to keep me out, such was attendance). In final rounds there are three judges. One I don't remember, but one had brought his infant daughter (who happily ignored all the performances in favor of quietly playing with a toy); this guy stared at me with a face caricatured by theatrical shock.

The third judge went to my church. She had a twelve-year-old daughter whom I had once given a piggyback ride. The girl never spoke to me again, probably under strict orders. It finally dawned on me that some people will take you seriously when you're only playing.

Can't Stop Won't Stop

I just unwrapped a twice-baked chocolate croissant, and a silverfish fled from the wrapping. I destroyed the insect, then considered throwing the pastry, which I'd been anticipating for two days, away, for fear the bug had contaminated it somehow. I'm no expert in silverfish; all I know is that they must be destroyed on sight.

I ate the pastry. I figure if you're willing to put a twice-baked chocolate croissant in your mouth, you're long past the point of worrying about the negative health effects of what you eat.

If I Can't See You, You Can't See Me

One bad habit of shy bespectacled people: keeping their frames between you and their pupils. Speaking as one such shy glasses-wearing person, I didn't realize I was doing this until I was rehearsing a play and thinking about the importance of eye contact with my scene partner. I realized I was lining up the curve of my opaque frames with the eyes of the other actor, using the thin plastic to shield me from the full force-or full commitment- of eye contact. I could still see the person, and the person could still see my eyes, allowing us to maintain the fiction that I was ocularly engaged, but I was censoring our pupils from our gazes, using an instrument of vision to block vision. And I realized I did this all the time. It was time to stop, so I did. I catch other people doing it to me, though.

Now We Are Sick

My Wife is recovering. I am in the thick of it. I seem incapable of doing anything rigorous, like synopsizing cartoons I mildly enjoyed six years ago.

However I have written a story I'm proud of. I'm trying to get feedback on it prior to shopping it around, but this is oddly difficult. Most people I know are too busy or perhaps too shy about dropping criticism on my work. I found a message board devoted to connecting aspiring writers with other aspiring writers for mutual criticism, but I haven't connected with any fellow New Weird stylists; I'm playing bop, while most of them want techno or metal or something. Not that I object to them liking whatever they like; just that I'm not finding many fellow travelers.

So if you'd like to read and respond to a fantasy short story, drop me a line in the comments and I'll send it to you. I'm particularly concerned with making sure it make sense, given that it's a fantasy.

Prog Slog

I've been too busy vomiting on airplanes to keep up this blog or call people on their birthdays (Four barf bags and two garbage bags. Really. I used to be able to take a plane. Wuhoppen?) But fear not, I'm going to get back to that Rahxephon recap you've all been waiting for. First I have to talk about MC Hammer's "Can't Touch This" video.





I don't think I ever actually watched this back when the song was unavoidable, but for some reason Laurie showed it to me last week and I've been pondering it, probably more than whoever directed it did. Now that I've watched the thing it's obvious to me that MC Hammer wasn't a rapper so much as a dancer with a hip-hop inflected patter. Apparently it was that silly baggy-pants dance that caught Laurie's eye back when she was fond of wacky entertainments like this:






But as fun as that is, let's stay focused on Hammer. Notice that the "Can't Touch This" video's full of beautiful dancing women of various ethnicities. At several points Hammer does a little gag about watching the women and not being able to decide between them. Then in the final shot he starts dancing with the whit

est looking girl we've seen in the video, a blond in some kind of schoolgirl outfit. I think interracial relationships just might save humanity; by extension I certainly have zero problem with a black man dancing with a white woman, and if the shot were in the middle of the video somewhere I wouldn't have anything to say about it. But placing this essentially modular shot at the end of the video suggests a narrative Hammer probably never intended; faced with a bunch of tantalizing black and Latin women, he chooses a blond honky schoolgirl. What kind of message does that send? White girls are the most desirable women? No wonder White America elected him White America's Favorite Rapper, a position held in tandem with Vanilla Ice.

Anyway, I tried to extend the old school rap video watching party with one of my favorites, Egyptian Lover:







Laurie was unimpressed. I love that shot of his Dad making time with mature, plus-sized women. Inspiring. And terrible mummies make everything better.

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So today I listened to a really long podcast (Rogue's Gallery) devoted to prog-rock, the kind of thing that used to be called Art Rock by fans and Pomp Rock by foes. I call it The Stuff I Listened To In High School.

Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator... say what you will about them, but at their best they didn't sound like anyone else. No one listened to Yes and thought "Yet another band that combines symphonic song structures, Easter Sunday organ solos, and Les Paul-inflected guitar stylings." Nobody listened to Emerson, Lake and Palmer and said "Of all the militantly atheistic bands that play Bartok-flavored synthesizer flatulence noises, which one am I listening to?" King Crimson not only sounded like no one else, it didn't even sound like itself; founder Robert Fripp continually replenished the band through the magic of firing everybody.

Modern bands that position themselves as carriers of the Prog torch, though, seem to start with the question: "Which familiar band should we sound exactly like: Styx, Kansas or Whitesnake?" None of which fit my definition of Prog, although Kansas's fancy-pants boogie and portentious lyrics make them ringers. Styx also has a Prog-influenced emphasis on fancy interplay, high harmony vocals, virtuosity and SF/Fantasy concepts, but they are disqualified for sucking. If Prog bands must be derivative, why don't they at least copy actual Prog bands? I feel like I ordered baklava and got a baggie full of crumbling Oreos.

Another question modern Prog bands seem to ask: "Should we get 12-year-old Goth girls to write our lyrics, or 12-year-old Goth boys? Hmm, decisions decisions." Not to slur 12-year-old Goths; just that their poetic stylings shouldn't be coming out of grown-up mouths. If I had cash enough and time I'd buy a few Norton anthologies and lob them at Prog bandleaders. Please, guys and girls, write lyrics that couldn't have been whipped up by Instant Lyric Generators.

In the Seventies, it seems, Prog and Heavy Metal were seen as diametrically opposed. (I'm going on hearsay with this: my age was in the single digits at the time.) Prog was by and for Eloi, while Metal was by and for Morlocks. Then Punk came along and revealed just how closely related Prog and Metal were. They shared a fussiness and conceptual goofiness that Punk could only jeer. So current Metal and Prog seem to cling to one another for support. They blend the bombastic in-your-face heaviness of Metal with the maximum-arpeggios-per-square-inch fretboard knitting and precision ADD drumming of Prog.

From a quick online not-paying-any-money survey of the situation, there are some rewarding post-Seventies Prog acts out there. I'm indebted to the book Rocking the Classics by Edward Macan for tipping me to most of these.

(Something goes wonky with the formatting past this point. I'm learning not to care.)

• There's a Swedish or something band called Anglagard that, from the online samples I've investigated, made instrumental music that sounded exactly like Yes during its early Seventies peak. They were doing this in the early Nineties, when I was yearning for Yes to make that kind of music; at the time Yes could only make music that sounded like a bunch of guys who hated each other and were only back together for the money. If only I'd known about Anglagard.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Apparent fan favorite Marillion is supposedly a Prog band, but I don't hear it. They sound like a really good adult pop act, though. I wonder why they aren't VH1 faves. Does VH1 still exist? Anyway, the first stuff I heard from them sounded like Mandy Patinkin's Nyquil-fueled tribute to Elton John, but deeper listening showed some kind of real adult sensibility, with life experience and earned wisdom, seems to be encased within this prettiness; if this isn't Prog, it's probably better.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Ozric Tentacles. Jam band flirts with House. Fortunately they seemed to have recorded about five hundred albums: look for the corny Shroom art. That's how you'll know.
  
  
  

• Edhels. French. The 17 year old Aaron within thinks this is pretty fab. A dulcet, delicate quality that defines what I loved about Yes's best efforts.
  
  

• Djam Karat. Another smart (D)jam band. Forty years earlier they would have called themselves Carrot Jam. Lead guitarist looks like he knows what 3D20 means. Racially integrated, which matters more than it maybe should to this guilty white liberal. Anyway, really fun nerd-testosterone stuff.
  
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    Hermetic Science, the band of Edward Macan himself. He was too modest to mention it in his book. This video quality matches the professionalism of the Yes concert video I had on videotape in high school. I dunno why a band that favors vibraphones over electric guitars is relegated to performing in what looks to be a hotel room.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
  
  
  After mentioning instant lyric generators I decided to see if there were any. Yes. I composed the following wonderfuless with it. The lousy formatting is the Generator's, not mine, and It, not me, swiped from Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb. Please note that Verse 2 is structured more like a chorus than the first verse.
  
  
  
  Public Restroom
  
  Verse One:
  Smells bad
  And the whole world is driving you mad
  my leg
  But you may feel a little sick.Can you stand up?
  
  Chorus:
  public restroom
  There was lightning in your arms and then the
  vomiting in a garbage bag
  Me and some guys from school
  
  Verse Two:
  public restroom
  Is there anybody in there?
  where's my money
  Is there anybody in there?
  
  Chorus Two:
  public restroom
  Is there anybody in there?
  vomiting in a garbage bag
  Bound to win a prize
  
  Chorus to Fade
  
  Eat it, Leonard Cohen, there's a new boy in town.

A Life in the Sinny-Maw, Poot the First

I have appeared, I believe, in 6 efforts at a film or video. I’ll try to recount them in chronological order, but I don’t know that I’ll remember chronological order.

In my mid-twenties I joined a gathering of film-besotted Birmingham locals who aspired to generate content, then slap it on public access. A man and a woman who seemed to be in good with the local video scene (let’s call them Mate and Kate) set up some kind of theoretical organization, got an alleged former producer of The Waltons to drop by meetings, and solicited short spec scripts from aspiring screenwriters. Kate said, with an I-dare-you-to-laugh stone face, “My ambition is to have a Top Ten hit show on the air in a year.” I was impressed; these people were thinking big; Alabama public access was clearly just a stepping stone.

I was besotted by Donald Barthelme and Neon Genesis Evangelion; I wrote a now-lost sketch that reflected these influences (and not much else beyond a sense of humor more informed by Monty Python than Barthelme.) It was well received, and they asked for a series. I wrote a truckload more (also long lost) and they weren’t so well received; too naively obscurantist. I got my old Theatre professor to write a rave review of this stuff, then gave it to the (ahem) Heads of Production in the belief that this would sway them. Wrong.

Happily another guy had been cranking out scripts; a sitcom series that I regarded as hopelessly out of touch with either real human behavior or professional quality laffs. I couldn’t have improved them if I’d been asked to rewrite, though, which I wasn’t. A director (from B’ham’s hyperactive community theatre scene) signed on to actually direct something; he decided that of the two series on offer both were garbage, but at least one was comprehensible. And so the pilot for the other guy’s series became a low-budget video reality.

It debuted with a block of locally produced shorts at the Sidewalk Film Festival, at the same time as American Astronaut. Everyone who attended came out raving about its brilliance, the musical might of the film-affiliated band that performed at the screening, the informative yet hilarious Q and A session; it has since gone on to be a cult fave. I’m talking about American Astronaut, here. I missed it to see the short I was in.

An amateurish, forgettable thing. I was onscreen for a split second, looking like a fat fifteen-year-old.

That was the first and last production to emerge from this crew. Mate and Kate had an acrimonious split, and the contracts we signed (oh, did I mention we signed contracts?) gave Nate the rights to everything we submitted or filmed while he was involved, for a year or so out. Kate led me to believe that Mate was actively holding up production, so I used that newfangled “E Mail” to write Mate and ask what my options for getting the stuff produced were. He responded:

“Produce away. Just remember that any resulting product or profits are mine THASS RITE BI-ZITCHES MINE ALL MINE $$$$$$$$”

or something to that effect. As Kate later reexplained, Mate was no longer actively involved in any way, and Kate refused to do any work that might benefit the guy, so a halt was called while Kate ran down the clock. By whatever time the contracts were void, so was my interest.

Then I was an extra in a professional film with real live movie stars titled World Traveller, which filmed mostly in Birmingham due to its resemblence to all the world’s finest cities, plus cheapness. I was an extra in one scene, talking on a pay phone in the background of an airport. They asked me to wear a suit and carry a suitcase; I wore a musty suit I’d outgrown (horizontally) and brought a nice fabric-lined hardshell suitcase I’d swiped from my Dad years before. I’d forgotten there was a vat of Vaseline in the suitcase (for my chapped lips, wise guys) and it melted in the hot sun and/or movie lights, ruining the fabric lining. This was representative of how I was fumbling through life at the time.

I missed the film’s local premiere; I think I was rehearsing a play, maybe? I heard it was a lot of fun; even though no one had anything good to say about the film as such, apparently there were cheers throughout the screening whenever anyone recognized themselves, their friends, or familiar landmarks. There’s no business like it.

More to come… honest…