Category: ultracultural

My 15 Seconds of Exposure

Now that the Tivo is up and running, I’m able to catch all those back episodes of Sessions at West 54th Street that I attended, but never got to see when they were broadcast. Right now I’m watching the Cesaria Evora episode, in which I can periodically see the back of my head bobbing around. (I was always amazed how still people were during the tapings. If you ever see the second David Byrne episode, you can clearly see Mark and I bobbing and smiling uncontrollably throughout the whole performance. It’s music, ya know?)

I was completely charmed by Cesaria Evora, and couldn’t help noticing how Natalie Merchant, seated a few feet away from me, never mustered up too much enthusiasm, even during the standing ovation at the end. (Well, not that a standing ovation is anything other than obligatory these days, but that’s a rant for another time…) I remember thinking that someone could have been a little less jaded and taken a few pointers on performance techniques.

Junk Drawer

I’ve been menaing to write more about the many exciting or at least mildly amusing things going on lately, but it’s been hard to gather the will to sit and concentrate on the blogging thing. Here are a bunch of quick links that I’ve been meaning to pepper throughout a series of scintillating posts…

The Junk Drawer

  • Art Chantry, Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 is an incredible restrospective of the work of my all-time favorite designer, now showing at P.S. 1. I can’t rave about this enough. The work is fun enough to look at in reproduction, but he does so much with materials and printing tricks that seeing the stuff in person is about a million times cooler. (And they’re using the same title for the exhibit as I did for a fictional exhibit years ago. but I’m not bitter.)
  • Speaking of P.S. 1, I’d like to point out that it’s not the same place as P.S. 122 in the East Village. You really ought to check out what’s going on at P.S. 122, because they put on tons of great theater and dance and performance and such, and it’s their ticket prices are great for what you get. More on this later, because I’m starting to work on a number of projects with them.
  • And speaking of great stuff at P.S. 122, Heather Woodbury is kicking off their new season in September with her one-woman, eight-installment, 100+-character show, What Ever. You really ought to check out her web site, where you can listen to streaming audio of entire acts of the show, so go and whet your appetite.
  • Flaming Fire were one of the guest acts in the Devo Tribute Show I saw last week. They were pretty exciting, and the lead singer was pretty hot, but you must check out their site to see the progress they’re making on their project to have artists illustrate every single verse of the Bible (1079 illustrations complete; 35586 remaining).
  • The Grand List of Comic Book Cliches is funny because it’s true.
  • Typophile: The Smaller Picture is a project that’s building a typeface via collaborative effort over the internet one pixel at a time. (Thanks, Mike!)
  • Gilles Barbier is the artist of a fantastic, witty sculptural installation called L’Hospice that depicts elderly superheroes loafing around in a nursing home. (Better pictures halfway down this page.)

Devolution

I saw one of the best show’s I’ve caught in ages last Friday night: the Loser’s Lounge tribute to Devo. Brilliant, on all levels. Not only did it really capture the flavor and the impact of the material performed, but did so in a way that was totally fresh and original, rather than just a sycophantic rehashing of someone else’s work. I bought their bootleg CDs of their Bowie and Elvis Costello shows, and am more convinced than ever that the Devo show wasn’t a fluke: these guys (and it’s a core band with dozens of guest singers, so it’s not like a regular band) are not only supremely talented, but they’re more interested in really immersing themselves into the music they play to get to the heart of it, rather than just trot out some old pop hits as a gimmick. (Which is what I was expecting them to do when I bought the tickets. I love being wrong when the end result is so much better.)

The show was typical of what I love about entertainment in New York (I say “in New York” because it’s something I’ve never been able to come across anywhere else): rather than being just a rock show, or just a theatrical performance, or just one thing or another, the event itself crossed all these boundaries. They played heartfelt covers of New Wave songs, but also incorporated country, punk, and experimental electronic music. They played homemade synthesizers and traditional instruments. They featured a variety of singers and performers. They wore costumes. They immersed themselves in a kind of simulacrum of the music to which they paid tribute. MInd you this was all just for a $15 concert ticket, not an exorbitant theater seat.

And I seem to find genre-bending stuff like this all the time here: Kiki & Herb, The Three Terrors, the Qwe’re Music Fest, and on and on and on. I’ve gotten too hooked on these blends of pop, rock, drag, performance art, burlesque, and cabaret to get much out of a band just playing its songs, or some drag queen just miming along to a record, or someone just standing up on stage doing some schtick. There are simply too many alternatives out there that are more ambitious and more affecting.

Flotsam and Jetsam from the Weekend

I’m still trying to digest the entire Atlantic City experience. We brought Hugh down there for his bachelor party yesterday, and the whole place was so much more than I ever expected. More trash? More kitsch? More kitsch? More guidos? More people aging gracelessly? Yes, but also more, in a ways I can’t quite put my finger on. It should be experienced, but I thik the less time spent there the better. Maybe. I’m too sleep-deprived and still too overwhelmed to decide.

More elaborate stories and pictures to come. For now, a grab bag of links and random things we found amusing:

  • Since it came up in conversation: the Bullet Time Ping-Pong Game.
  • If you buy a round trip bus ticket to Atlantic City, it costs 27 bucks and comes with a voucher for a 14-dollar refund. There’s no catch, in case you think it’s just a scam: get off the bus at a casino, trade the voucher for a slip form that casino, and a quick detour to the casino floor is all you have to do to trade that in for 14 bucks cash money. A friendly travel tip from your pal Sparky.
  • Smokers should note that you can still smoke indoors in Jersey, and especially in Atlantic City.
  • At one point, we were trying to imagine what it would sound like if Ladysmith Black Mambazo did a version of “Three Is a Magic Number“.
  • I haven’t given much of a thought to the recent popularity of guidoism (there’s no novelty to it I grew up in the thick of it), but it’s hard not to ponder the whole phenomenon in a big Jersey destination spot.
  • Sometimes it’s much safer when straight guys are straight guys.

Fuzzy Elf

And another news brief from the Department of Stupid Ways to Invalidate Stupid Plot Developements in Comic Books:

NightcrawlerNightcrawler never went to the seminary and got ordained as a priest. He only THOUGHT he went to the seminary and got ordained as a priest. It seems as if his mind was being tampered with by some crackpot anti-mutant religious organization. And since it apparently never REALLY came up in conversation ever with anyone, they all just found out and said, “Duh, you were never a priest, blue dude.”

On a similar note, I the only thing I really minded about X2 (which for the most oart I thought was lots of fun, with plenty of nods thrown in to the nerds of us out there who care about whether or not the government is after Franklin Richards) was Nightcrawler. The teleportation effects were great, but the character had nothing of what I always like about Nightcrawler the wiry, wise-cracking swashbuckler with the mischievous smile and furry skin, the one who always seemed curiously sexy. The movie’s nervous, Jesus-freaky version with the goony pants and the brandings instead of the fuzz just left me cold, when not cringing in dismay.

Top Ten Treats

I’m a sucker for work that slyly works in the pop culture heritage that I’ve absorbed throughout my life. There’s a lot of heavy-handed, ironic name-dropping of old TV shows and such out there, but that shit’s just weak. What I’m talking about is stuff that has its own story to tell, its own point to make, but shows a certain amount of playful reverence for its direct or indirect source material.

Writer Alan Moore has always been a particular favorite of mine for just this reason. When I first read The Watchmen years ago, it was like a boot to the head to encounter this mature look at the culture of superheroes that drew on the conceits of the genre I knew and examined them in a new light. It was critical and thoughtful and even playful, but most of all it showed a deep love of comics and comic-book culture.

Years later, his series Top Ten gave me another wallop. It wasn’t trying to reinvent the medium in quite the same way, but instead it created another world altogether, one based on the idea of a city where generations of costumed crimefighters lived and bred and thrived and crowded the place. It was a fun idea, and a fun story, and I loved it. It was a slower read than most comics, though, because Moore and the series’ co-creator Gene Ha packed every panel with so much detail of life in the city of Neopolis that every scene had to be analyzed. They populated the place with new characters, generic supertypes, and all matter of characters from decades worth of comics, movies, and TV, often recolored or recombined in any manner of subtle in-jokes for the nerd crowd. Bliss.

I loved it, but I’d forgotten about what a fun read it was until I grabbed the second volume yesterday and found myself giggling uncontrollably as I digested the artwork again. Here are a few blown-up details. How many characters can you identify?

Top Ten #1 Top Ten #2
Top Ten #3 Top Ten #4
Top Ten #5 Top Ten #6

I’m Mad as Hell

Once again, I’ve managed to see a time-honored classic to which I hadn’t paid much attention, and I was thunderstruck to realize why it has been so highly regarded. As a bonus, I discovered that it perfectly articulated by wielding deadly weapons of satire and cynical foreshadowing a great many ideas that have been oin my mind lately, ones I’d been struggling to force into coherent sentences here. So forget about what it was was going to say, just make sure you get off your buuts and watch (or watch again, if it’s been a while) Network:

Mr. Jensen (a shadowy corporate warlord): You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians! There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems; one vast, interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of dollars!

You’ll find the whole movie chillingly relevant.

Qwe’re Boys

I turned 32 yesterday, but instead of spending the day celebrating my birthday, I spent it celebrating New York City’s expanded Human Rights Law at the Qwe’re Music Fest with a couple hundred festive liberals from all over the gender spectrum. I didn’t know much more about the show when I went over other than that a few of my favorite acts from around town were playing short sets, but soon after I got there I realized it was whole big tranny-fest that restored my faith in New York as the most spectacular place on earth.

The audience was the standard mix of queer and pro-queer Williamsburg/East Village/Losaida hip kids, but without the jaded cynicism that usually brings. Everyone was totally festive and totally cheering on all the drag queens and trannies and assorted folk who took to the stages on both floors of the Fez. I swear, this blew all my expectations out of the water. The acts rocked and ranted and rapped and sang and pranced. Whether you were looking at the audience or the stage, you got better theater than I’ve seen in a while. Better still because it was just a bunch of gutsy folk doing their thang.

The whole thing was all about gender and the many ways to blur the lines between male and female. Granted, all the pro-gender-freedom rhetoric was preaching to the choir, but there was still plenty on display to make one think. There was a definite political slant to the whole show, despite the splashiness of the performances, and a lot of angry rants about ongoing violence against people in the transgender community.

Winding Up

A quote I stumbled across that talks about the leap of faith in my desires that I’ve been trying to make lately:

Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Guts have to go for the long haul. Curiosity’s like a fun friend you can’t really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own — with whatever guts you can muster.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

What I mean by “leap of faith’ is that I’m admitting to myself that I’ve tried a lot before — leather, wrestling, sex clubs, boyfriends, groups, fast and anonymous fucks, casual hook-ups, topping, bottoming — out of curiosity that encouraged me to see what I liked, but I haven’t always had the guts afterward to go after what I really did like if it meant breaking too far out of the character of myself I’d always played. Not that I’d given up on what I liked, but that I’d file things away as a sort of secret life that I kept separate from my day-to-day activity. Well, what the hell’s wrong with going after what you like and being honest about it? You’re sure not going to increase the odds of finding like minds without having the guts to let them find you.

The Last Thursday Ever

Ah, another exhausting ride on the Kiki & Herb express train to madness. Brilliant as ever, last night’s one-night show at Knitting Factory (also featuring the hot and fun and sassy Scissor Sisters) was a little more off-the-cuff than their twice-yearly productions, but a performance of theirs never degenerates into a simple drag-based covers show. No, a night with Kiki & Herb will always leave you shaky and spent, twitching from laughter and horror and emotional shock.

Last night’s show loosely followed a theme of escaping from the endless grind and put-downs of life. (Very timely, to say the least, and I’m not just talking about this season of Buffy again.) Kiki made a lot of bleak jokes about this being our last weekend ever (“Thank you for spending your last Thursday night ever with Herb and I…What a Memorial Day this is gonna be!”) and they earnestly and ferociously launched into a set pulling together songs and medleys of songs that railed against the ongoing pain and misery of life, and pondering the various ways to escape it: “No More Drama,” “Heroin,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Creep,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Get and Stay Famous,” and an incredible reading of “Howl.” (And keep in mind, this is all incredibly funny at the same time it’s making you want to slit your own throat in a fit of existential anguish.)

Kiki & Herb are not just a drag act, or a cabaret covers act, or a novelty. They’re fun as all hell, campy and cutting and sloppy, but they’re also musical geniuses, and powerful performers. Every time I’ve seen them there’s something — some element of madness or pain or remorse — thay they suddenly suck you into, just when you’re laughing your hardest, and they manage to remind you that the world is a big, hard, messy place with no easy answers and a lot of confused attempts to find some. But at the same time, you can’t leave unhappy when they come on with an excore medley of Mary J. Blige, Wu Tang Clan, and Destiny’s Child, with some Kate Bush tossed on at the end for a note of weary hope.